New report details Dragon Age: The Veilguard's ugly failure through live service flip-flops, rewrites, and conflicts with Mass Effect

The failure of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and the toll it took on BioWare, has been well documented, but a new report by Jason Schreier at Bloomberg dives deep into what went wrong leading up to the game's release in October 2024—and the short answer is, just about everything.

Initially envisioned as a smaller-scale, conventional RPG, a mandate from EA forced The Veilguard to shift to a live service game in October 2017, marching orders that were apparently delivered the night that former Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw left the studio. But the disaster of Anthem two years later led to shaky nerves and second thoughts, and in 2020, following the surprise departures of veterans Casey Husdon and Mark Darrah, the multiplayer angle was dropped.

Instead of a full reset, though, the development team was told to rework the game on the fly, in a window of just a year and a half. This caused even more headaches, and not just because it wasn't enough time to make meaningful changes: The team would make decisions based on that tight window, then be stuck with them even when the game was pushed back by a few months—something Darrah, the executive producer on the Dragon Age series prior to his departure, alluded to in a YouTube video in March.

The response to an early build of Dragon Age: The Veilguard that went to playtesters in 2022 was not great, according to the report, primarily because the game's multiplayer roots, which demanded replayable missions and characters who couldn't die in order to ensure they were always there for future playthroughs, resulted in a lack of BioWare-style choices and consequences. The release was pushed back so the team could squeeze in a few big decisions for players, but apparently developers struggled to make the pieces fit with what was already in place.

Mass Effect developers were brought on in 2023 to help get The Veilguard finished, but, reflecting comments made in April by former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider, that led to tensions: The Mass Effect team reportedly overhauled some parts of the game, including the finale, but while at least some of those changes proved popular with players, they also pissed off leadership on the Dragon Age team, which had previously been told there was no budget for such things. A late-stage rewrite of the script to make the game less "snarky," on the other hand, largely missed the mark.

PC Gamer's Robin Valentine said the Dragon Age: The Veilguard reveal trailer from June 2024 looked more like something from a hero shooter.

In the end, so did Dragon Age: The Veilguard. The initial reaction was quite positive but it tailed off quickly. EA said the game "engaged approximately 1.5 million players" in its launch quarter (not exactly a sales figure, but as close as we got), which was nearly 50% lower than the company's expectations. It almost immediately pulled the plug on the game, then implemented layoffs, including among senior Dragon Age and Mass Effect veterans, and even seemed to have regrets about cutting The Veilguard's live service components.

A small team—a few dozen employees, according to the Bloomberg report—is still at work on the next Mass Effect game, but as others (including our own Fraser Brown) have previously suggested, the future of that game, and BioWare as a whole, do not seem secure. Industry analyst Doug Creutz told Bloomberg that he "wouldn't be totally surprised" if EA closed down BioWare, noting that it's been more than 10 years since the studio released a hit game.