Summerfall Studios co-founder and former Dragon Age writer David Gaider has been reflecting, not for the first time, on his career at BioWare under EA. In a brisk recap of a decade-and-change of sequels, changes of direction, and mid-project reboots, he sums up EA’s difficulty with Dragon Age as basically one of having no real faith in the wide appeal of role-playing games.
“In many ways, Dragon Age was, I think, not a good match for EA,” Gaider explained, in a new interview with PCGamesN. “They never really knew what to make of it, or what to do with it. The expectation was always that it wouldn’t do well, and when it did do well, it took people by surprise.”
EA were far more convinced by sci-fi stablemate Mass Effect, Gaider went on, despite Mass Effect sporadically falling short of expectations. “By comparison, Mass Effect was slick and it was action-driven and very much up EA’s alley, so they always expected that it should do better, and every time it didn’t, it got excuses like ‘oh they released in the wrong timeframe, or X, Y, and Z.’
“The idea was that the potential for Mass Effect was more – it could get the action audience as well as the RPG audience,” he said. “It wasn’t until Mass Effect 3 that they started to realize that ‘no, there’s an action RPG audience, like a crossover,’ but you don’t just get both audiences together.”
Last year’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard certainly suggests a level of hesitancy about the value of Dragon Age as a ‘pure’ role-playing game. Its development was, by most accounts, hellish: originally pitched as another narrative-led RPG, The Veilguard was re-envisaged as a live service multiplayer offering, as was the style at the time, then rebooted as a single player action-RPG in light of Anthem’s commercial failure.
Gaider – who left BioWare after working on Dragon Age: Inquisition, my beloved – has yet to play The Veilguard, having poured so much of himself into Dragon Age that he feels uneasy about it evolving without him. He’s also wary of judging its creators, many of whom have been laid off or relocated after EA declared The Veilguard a disappointment. But he does regard the game as symptomatic of EA’s on-going mistrust toward Dragon Age and role-playing.
“Even though Dragon Age only catered to the RPG audience – at least initially – [EA] kept wanting it to move into the action space as well – and maybe by Veilguard it has,” he went on. “I think their idea was that the ‘cap’ on the RPG audience was only so big. Then Baldur’s Gate 3 comes along and proves no, it’s possible that if you lean into what a genre does really well, you can grow the audience, as it turns out.”
Gaider would have liked EA and BioWare to similarly “double down on the choice-driven narrative, double down on the production value, like the presentation of the characters and the cinematics and dialogs, and just take it to the extent where quality is the watchword.” But as he concludes, it’s hard to imagine a publicly traded company like EA doing what Larian did with BG3, because the two “live on two different planets”.
It’s not clear what the future holds for Dragon Age. Or indeed BioWare, who have been stripped down to a core team currently working on Mass Effect 5.