It's no secret that BioWare's Dragon Age series has seen better days under its corporate overlord, Electronic Arts, with the most recent entry, 2024's The Veilguard, failing to meet sales expectations after a decade of development hell, despite generally positive reviews. But according to David Gaider, longtime Dragon Age writer from Origins to Inquisition, EA's discontent with the series runs a lot deeper than that, telling PC Gamer it was pretty much always on the chopping block during his long tenure at BioWare. In fact, he's seen enough that he's convinced there's no future for Dragon Age at EA, saying it's "unlikely" to get another game unless it gets bought by another owner.
"Throughout the entire time I was there, we were always one breath away from the project being shelved," Gaider says. "The thing that happened is that we kept releasing games, and it would sell much better than they thought it should, and it kept surprising them."
Gaider left the Dragon Age team after Inquisition to work on Anthem, and we all know how that went. He ultimately left BioWare entirely in 2016, but he clearly still harbors some mixed emotions about his time with the studio, describing a leadership environment that gave "excuses" for other series' failures, like Mass Effect, but called successful Dragon Age releases "a fluke."
"The way EA looked at it was that Mass Effect was the slick, modern RPG that had action, and they could sell really easily. Whereas Dragon Age was old-fashioned and focused on story," Gaider says. "Our action, ranging from Dragon Age: Origins, was a little bit on the slow, cumbersome side, and then was too fast. They never knew what to do with it."
It probably won't surprise you, then, that Gaider has no interest in taking the reigns on Dragon Age again... at least, not so long as EA owns the franchise. On the other hand, he says he's warmed up to the idea of making a new Dragon Age game after completely ruling that out in the past. "If you'd asked me that in the past, I would have said absolutely not. That I’d done my time ... I don't know if that was the right decision, but it felt right at the time."
These days, "if, out of some weird alignment of the stars, somebody handed the Dragon Age franchise back to me and said, 'Breathe the life back into this baby,'" Gaider might just reconsider.
"That'd be a tough one, but I think that'd be an interesting thing to do. To go back to the basics of what made Dragon Age appeal to so many people in the first place. And go somewhere dark and dangerous, and do things that will make people upset. I think that’s what I would want to do with it."
Gaider's definitely right to doubt the future of Dragon Age under an intensely profit-driven conglomerate as EA, which moved to effectively gut the Dragon Age team at BioWare quickly after The Veilguard's lackluster commercial reception, and which has been snapped up in a $55 billion buyout expected to result in internal cuts. It's always possible for such a beloved IP to be scooped up by another publisher in the future, but for now, a dedicated team of moders are determined not only to preserve the series, but expand it as well.
