Dragon Age maestro says EA always spoke about a hypothetical 'nerd cave' full of diehard RPG fans who would "always show up," so you "didn't have to try and appeal to them"

A Dragon Age veteran says EA liked to refer to a "cave" where RPG fans who could be trusted to buy anything the genre threw at them would dwell.

Speaking to GamesRadar+, BioWare veteran David Gaider explained that before he left BioWare, his tastes had become somewhat "old-fashioned" in EA's eyes. "I was very vocal on the Dragon Age team," he says. "I was always trying to push it to our traditional mechanics. And that wasn't very welcome in the EA sphere."

He says that EA considered those mechanics - the kind that shaped games like Dragon Age: Origins - to be "slow and cumbersome," rather than the "action-y and slick" presentation that the studio was being pushed toward. That meant that Gaider's views "were often not very welcome" despite his long tenure at the studio and work on many of its most famous RPGs.

That's partly because, he says, EA didn't think the traditional RPG audience was one that was worth focusing on. He claims that the overseers referred to those mechanics as being "'in the cave'". The cave, he explains, "was where nerds went. The nerds were in the cave. You made an RPG and the nerds in the cave would always show up for an RPG, because it was an RPG."

That devotion to their chosen genre, in EA's eyes, meant that "you didn't have to worry" about the nerds. "You didn't have to try and appeal to them. You had to worry about the people who weren't in the cave, which was the audience we actually wanted, which was much larger."

Really, Gaider clarifies, that was the audience that EA wanted, and it basically got what it wanted. Unfortunately for the publisher, the endpoint of that philosophy was Anthem, a live-service effort that flopped entirely at launch and was entirely abandoned within two years.

The benefit of that was that BioWare was able to refocus somewhat around its single-player RPGs, with last year's Dragon Age: The Veilguard and the eventual release of Mass Effect 5 - although with that game still in pre-production as of this year, it might be some time before we get to see it.

Whether you belong to the cave or not, here are the best RPGs you can play.