A fresh report has shed a bit more light on Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s famously difficult time in development, offering info on culture clashes between BioWare’s different teams, and revealing that the game was re-written due to concerns about its banter being too snarky.
The report, from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, goes through the whole sordid story of Veilguard’s journey from in-the-works single player game, to in-the-works online thing, back to in-the-works single player thing, parts of which you’re likely familiar with at this point. There’s also a bunch of context as to how wider events across the studio and publisher EA influenced the game that ended up hitting shelves after a decade or so of development.
The new revelations tell how the tone of the game’s dialogue, as well as the choices and consequences, had to be revamped following the switch from multiplayer back to single player in 2020.
Schreier emphasises that this shift didn’t come with a full reset of the project, which meant developers had to work on something with lots of vestigial features intended for an entirely different type of game.
An alpha build at the end of 2022 flagged that testers believed Veilguard didn’t have satisfying or meaty enough choices and consequences to live up to BioWare’s previous works, another problem attributed to the game having been designed for multiplayer, according to the devs Schreier spoke to. Cue extra work to add in more choices, including an important choice between saving two cities, and a struggle to ensure these decisions played into the narrative further down the road.
The report also cites concerns about the reception to the dialogue of Square Enix’s Forspoken as having led to a rewrite for Veilguard’s chatter. This was an attempt to drag it away from the “snarky tone” that’d been pencilled in as part of the multiplayer vision, and instead “make it sound more serious”. Similarly, the game’s June 2024 reveal trailer reportedly raised concerns about EA’s ability to market the game in a way that didn’t feel a bit Fortnitey.
There’s also plenty of detail regarding “internal friction” between Dragon Age tream that were originally working on the game and the Mass Effect team EA drafted in for the project’s final push around 2023, with cultural differences between the two teams adding to what sounds like it was already a pretty unpleasant mix of pressuresand forces at play.
In the aftermath of Veilguard and the layoffs at BioWare that followed its release, a smaller team’s left beavering away on on Mass Effect 5, with plenty of questions still hanging over the RPG studio’s future. It’s a sad state of affairs to put it mildly, especially given that while it definitely isn’t everyone’s cup of tea – I found what I played to be decent fun and you can read Nic’s verdict here – the version of Veilguard we got was far from a complete trainwreck.