EA CEO on why DA: The Vailguard failed....
EA CEO Says Dragon Age: The Veilguard Failed to 'Resonate With a Broad Audience,' Gamers Increasingly Want 'Shared-World Features'..... you know what doesn't "resonate" with fans of games you publis...
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I really liked David Gaider's take on this. Gaider, the lead writer on the first three Dragon Age games, posted on Bluesky about Wilson's comments.
If I really dig into my empathy, I can kinda see the thinking here. Like, let's say you don't actually know much about games. You're in a big office with a bunch of other execs who also don't know much about games. What are they all saying? "Live games do big numbers!" "Action games are hot!"
Your natural response? "We should make more action games, and all our games should have live service!" Cha-ching, right? Then some uppity devs spoil your buzz by saying "that doesn't apply equally to all games" or "we have an established IP with an audience that has certain expectations". You frown.
I think there's a lesson here for Sony as well, whose goal was to release 12 live service games in a short span, but then Concord was possibly the biggest video game flop of all-time, and they canceled a whole bunch of them. The problem with live service games is that the people playing them need to be convinced to move over. If you have a million people playing Destiny and you create a game that's kinda like Destiny, you're not conjuring an entirely new set of a million players.
I'm not going to claim to know more about the gaming industry than the people running it, but as a Dragon Age fan, I just want a Dragon Age game that's like the original one. Every Dragon Age sequel has felt very different, which worked in the favor of Inquisition as it's the most successful one, but there's only so many times you can reinvent the wheel before the thing just doesn't spin anymore.
And I'm saying this as someone who really liked The Veilguard, but I definitely see why it didn't attract a larger audience. It was too different and it should have released five years earlier. "Shared world features" wouldn't have made a difference.
Honestly thry changed key lore points and made the whole game feel like the only thing it had going was. " the power of friendship and inclusiveness can rival even gods. Like the whole lore is filled with bigotry and dark plot points. Changing that to sunshines and rainbows plus a terrible attempt at coherent writing killed it. Played it. Saw something. Character says something. Team echoes exact phrase with minor changes. Come on
It was definitely an odd choice to move the game to Tevinter and not focus more on the class inequality and racism, especially with the risen elven gods painting an even bigger target on the elves' backs. There was a mention of it in a conversation with Bellara, but I think it should have been more interwoven in the main story.
Same with the Antivan Crows being a lot more cuddly than you would expect. These guys enslave children and force them to kill people, but they've been reduced to drinking coffee and doing Zorro impressions.
So I definitely agree on the jarring shift in tone.I agree on that too, the longer you played the more you got the feeling that they tried to go around "controversial" and dark plot points.
The success of BG3 and Clair Obscur Expedition 33 shows that this is pretty much the opposite of what RPG players want.I think both dark and lighthearted RPGs can attract a wide audience. With Veilguard I think it's more that they targeted what they believed the target audience would be instead of looking at the audience they already had. That said, Inquisition is the best selling Dragon Age game despite being lighter in tone than Origins and DA2. Maybe they thought they had to commit to that more and took it too far? 🤔
I've personally enjoyed dark and ligher RPGs. I really liked Baldur's Gate 3 and Clair Obscur, but I've also spent hours in Dragon Quest XI and Atelier Ryza. As long as it looks good, I'll play it.
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