After taking 10 years to arrive, Dragon Age: The Veilguard didn't quite manage to live up to everyone's expectations. Although the 2024 action-RPG played well, the writing and tone felt off to many, coming across scattered and not as deep or compelling as Inquisition. A new report shines some light on what happened behind the scenes, and it turns out Square Enix's Forspoken may have caused some panic internally.
According to a report from Bloomberg, the at best middling reaction to the chatter in Forspoken contributed to BioWare higher-ups initiating a top-down rewrite of The Veilguard's dialogue. Due to time constraints and other problems, this wound up exacerbating problems by creating tonal gaps between characters and plotlines.
Testers and devs on other internal teams apparently thought the quippy tone was overdone and annoying in an early build of the game. Anticipating this sentiment carrying onto the general public, change was considered necessary.
A real storm of terrible conditions ensued, Bloomberg adds, between mandated overtime, layoffs, and the voice actor strike, which limited how much recording time BioWare had. The atmosphere sounds dour, contributing to what we ultimately ended up getting.
Forspoken did indeed take a hammering for its writing. The humor doesn't work, and although complex themes are presented, they're not explored with any real depth. It's a shame because, like with Dragon Age, there were characters who showed potential.
As can be seen here, though, reacting when you're working on a distinctly different series with an established team under an iconic studio may just strain the whole process and fray ends. We can only imagine how The Veilguard could've turned out if things were different, but this feels like one situation where the problems were spread around rather than fixed.
