EA could never really understand Dragon Age or why people would even want to buy games in the fantasy series, according to a former BioWare producer, which probably explains the years of reported corporate intervention that led to Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
Ex-BioWare producer Mark Darrah – who had a hand in everything from the original Baldur's Gate games, almost the entire Dragon Age series, and Anthem – recently spoke about the beloved but troubled franchise in an interview with FRVR. And, as you might have been able to guess, EA was always a little confused by Mass Effect's fantasy cousin.
"I think you see it in the way that EA interacted with the two franchises," Darrah says. "I think that if you are not a person who plays CRPGs, it's very hard to look at a game like Dragon Age or a game like Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 and understand why anyone would want to play this nerdy piece of garbage. Whereas they look at something like Mass Effect and go, 'OK, it's a Star Wars game.' Like, I get it, even that might be too nerdy for me, but I get it."
2008's Dragon Age: Origins was in development before the publisher eventually scooped up BioWare, but past that point, EA supposedly saw the series as "too niche, too backwards, too old-school."
Mass Effect was an action game with cover-based shooting – from afar, it looked close enough to Gears of War or other shooters that were popular from that era, but Dragon Age was a different story. A high fantasy world full of complicated politics and a game that mixed real-time action with CRPG tactics was apparently less palatable to EA execs.
"You can blame some of the things where Dragon Age has always seemed to be in this perpetual state of flux, a lot of that coming from pressure from EA because people don't understand why people would want to buy this hardcore, tactical thing," Darrah explains.
While Dragon Age: The Veilguard came out after Mark Darrah's tenure at the studio, EA's misunderstanding of the franchise seemingly affected that game's production as well. The story goes, Dragon Age 4 reportedly started life as a smaller scale, more focused RPG that was eventually put on pause, before restarting development as a live-service multiplayer game. It was again rebooted one last time into what we now recognize as The Veilguard, a game that didn't meet the publisher's sales expectations. Layoffs at the storied studio followed shortly after its launch.
