Dragon Age™: The Veilguard is a Return To Form

[rusty_shackleford]

a lot of people in the game dev industry are there because it's the best paying job they can get. Writers especially so, it's the only way to get a steady paycheck for a writer.

[psychic_dream]

So what do you take away from his speech, other than that he’s mad the customer base rejected the abomination that is Dragon Age: The Failguard?

https://fandompulse.substack.com/p/form ... iter-warns

[logincrash]

So what do you take away from his speech, other than that he’s mad the customer base rejected the abomination that is Dragon Age: The Failguard?

https://fandompulse.substack.com/p/form ... iter-warns

More like fagstack, amirite?

[rusty_shackleford]

So what do you take away from his speech, other than that he’s mad the customer base rejected the abomination that is Dragon Age: The Failguard?

https://fandompulse.substack.com/p/form ... iter-warns

He's a ******

[ArcaneLurker]

Journalists are untermensch, so it goes over their head that the developers are actually the ones wanting games to fail, to ruin the IP, to send a message to fans-- why? Because their main priority is using video games as a vehicle for social engineering, indoctrinating new generations into their insane worldview and promoting their favourite political policies, and they will continue to do that to the extreme, even if that means pissing off millions of people, because they're incredibly narcissistic. If the IP fails because it's being used for their purposes & agendas, that's better than the IP being used for 'heteronormative oppression', 'fascism' & 'whiteness,' at least they can still humiliate fans they despise.
It's the same with other mediums, like with LotR or Starwars.

[Vergil]

Are they making any obligatory DLC for this

[Oyster Sauce]

Are they making any obligatory DLC for this

Wisely, no

[Vergil]

Are they making any obligatory DLC for this

Wisely, no

Horrible news during pride month

[Roguey]

The Schreier tell-all https://archive.ph/n9vwU

Big Copin':

After an excruciating development cycle, they had finally released their latest game, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and the early reception was largely positive. The role-playing game was topping sales charts on Steam, and solid, if not spectacular, reviews were rolling in.
But in the weeks that followed, the early buzz cooled as players delved deeper into the fantasy world, and some BioWare employees grew anxious. For months, everyone at the subsidiary of the video-game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. had been under intense pressure. The studio’s previous two games, Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, had flopped, and there were rumors that if Dragon Age underperformed, BioWare might become another of EA’s many casualties.

According to interviews with nearly two dozen people who worked on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, there were several reasons behind its failure, including marketing misfires, poor word of mouth and a 10-year gap since the previous title. Above all, sources point to the rebooting of the product from a single-player game to a multiplayer one — and then back again — a switcheroo that muddled development and inflated the title’s budget, they say, ultimately setting the stage for EA’s potentially unrealistic sales expectations. A spokesperson for EA declined to comment.

In theory, the reversion back to Dragon Age’s tried-and-true, single-player format should have been welcome news inside BioWare. But there was a catch. Typically, this kind of pivot would be coupled with a reset and a period of pre-production allowing the designers to formulate a new vision for the game. Instead, the team was asked to change the game’s fundamental structure and recast the entire story on the fly, according to people familiar with the new marching orders. They were given a year and a half to finish and told to aim for as wide a market as possible.
This strict deadline became a recurring problem. The development team would make decisions believing that they had less than a year to release the game, which severely limited the stories they could tell and the world they could build. Then the title would inevitably be delayed a few months, at which point they’d be stuck with those old decisions with no chance to stop and reevaluate what was working.

Envy:

In 2023, to help finish Dragon Age, BioWare brought in a second, internal team, which was working on the next Mass Effect game. For decades there’d been tension between the two well-established camps, known for their starkly divergent ways of doing things. BioWare developers like to joke that the Dragon Age crew was like a pirate ship, meandering and sometimes traveling off course but eventually reaching the port. In contrast, the Mass Effect group was called the USS Enterprise, after the Star Trek ship, because commands were issued straight down from the top and executed zealously.
As the Mass Effect directors took control, they scoffed that the Dragon Age squad had been doing a shoddy job and began excluding their leaders from pivotal meetings, according to people familiar with the internal friction. Over time, the Mass Effect team went on to overhaul parts of the game and design a number of additional scenes, including a rich, emotional finale that players loved. But even changes that appeared to improve the game stoked the simmering rancor inside BioWare, infuriating Dragon Age leaders who had been told they didn’t have the budget for such big, ambitious swings.
“It always seemed that, when the Mass Effect team made its demands in meetings with EA regarding the resources it needed, it got its way,” said David Gaider, a former lead writer on the Dragon Age franchise who left before development of the new game started. “But Dragon Age always had to fight against headwinds.”

The writing could have been even worse:

Early testers and Mass Effect leads complained about the game’s snarky tone — a style of video-game storytelling, once ascendant, that was quickly falling out of fashion in pop culture but had been part of Goldman’s vision for the multiplayer game. Worried that Dragon Age could face the same outcome as Forspoken — a recent title that had been hammered over its impertinent banter — BioWare leaders ordered a belated rewrite of the game’s dialogue to make it sound more serious. (In the end, the resulting tonal inconsistencies would only add to the game’s poor reception with fans.)

Mass Effect was always the more masculine series (e.g. the infamous Miranda *** shot), too bad those guys didn't come in earlier to do a more thorough job of fixing the writing.


Dead studio walking:

After three high-profile failures in a row, questions linger about EA’s commitment to the studio. In May, the company relabeled its Edmonton headquarters from a BioWare office to a hub for all EA staff in the area.
Historically, BioWare has never been the most important studio at EA, which generates more than $7 billion in annual revenue largely from its sports games and shooters. Depending on the timing of its launches, BioWare typically accounts for just 5% of EA’s annual bookings, according to estimates by Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co.
Even so, there may be strategic reasons for EA to keep supporting BioWare. Single-player role-playing games are expensive to make but can lead to huge windfalls when successful, as demonstrated by recent hits like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3. In order to grow, EA needs more than just sports franchises, said TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz. Trying to fix its fantasy-focused studio may be easier than starting something new.
“That said, if they shuttered the doors tomorrow I wouldn’t be totally surprised,” Creutz added. “It has been over a decade since they produced a hit.”

[logincrash]

The writing could have been even worse:

Early testers and Mass Effect leads complained about the game’s snarky tone — a style of video-game storytelling, once ascendant, that was quickly falling out of fashion in pop culture but had been part of Goldman’s vision for the multiplayer game. Worried that Dragon Age could face the same outcome as Forspoken — a recent title that had been hammered over its impertinent banter — BioWare leaders ordered a belated rewrite of the game’s dialogue to make it sound more serious. (In the end, the resulting tonal inconsistencies would only add to the game’s poor reception with fans.)

Mass Effect was always the more masculine series (e.g. the infamous Miranda *** shot), too bad those guys didn't come in earlier to do a more thorough job of fixing the writing.

Insane.
It's genuinely hard to imagine how it could be any worse that what we've got.

[rusty_shackleford]

According to interviews with nearly two dozen people who worked on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, there were several reasons behind its failure, including marketing misfires, poor word of mouth and a 10-year gap since the previous title.

copium overdose

[Bertram_Tung]

According to interviews with nearly two dozen people who worked on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, there were several reasons behind its failure, including marketing misfires, poor word of mouth and a 10-year gap since the previous title.

copium overdose

It's the exact same cope the democrats do. "It's not that our ideas are god awful, we just need to signal better to men"!

"It's not that our game is visibly terrible on first glance and filled with ***** ****, we just need better marketing!"

[J1M]

When was snarky ever ascendant Jason? You list no examples.

[sheet]

When was snarky ever ascendant Jason? You list no examples.

Joss Whedon was the only person to do it "right". Then they burned down their entire multi-billion dollar empire by metoo'ing him over nothing and thinking they could replicate it. It truly is fantastical how fantastically a system can fail.

[Bertram_Tung]

The Schreier tell-all https://archive.ph/n9vwU

Big Copin':

After an excruciating development cycle, they had finally released their latest game, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and the early reception was largely positive. The role-playing game was topping sales charts on Steam, and solid, if not spectacular, reviews were rolling in.
But in the weeks that followed, the early buzz cooled as players delved deeper into the fantasy world, and some BioWare employees grew anxious. For months, everyone at the subsidiary of the video-game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. had been under intense pressure. The studio’s previous two games, Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, had flopped, and there were rumors that if Dragon Age underperformed, BioWare might become another of EA’s many casualties.

According to interviews with nearly two dozen people who worked on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, there were several reasons behind its failure, including marketing misfires, poor word of mouth and a 10-year gap since the previous title. Above all, sources point to the rebooting of the product from a single-player game to a multiplayer one — and then back again — a switcheroo that muddled development and inflated the title’s budget, they say, ultimately setting the stage for EA’s potentially unrealistic sales expectations. A spokesperson for EA declined to comment.

In theory, the reversion back to Dragon Age’s tried-and-true, single-player format should have been welcome news inside BioWare. But there was a catch. Typically, this kind of pivot would be coupled with a reset and a period of pre-production allowing the designers to formulate a new vision for the game. Instead, the team was asked to change the game’s fundamental structure and recast the entire story on the fly, according to people familiar with the new marching orders. They were given a year and a half to finish and told to aim for as wide a market as possible.
This strict deadline became a recurring problem. The development team would make decisions believing that they had less than a year to release the game, which severely limited the stories they could tell and the world they could build. Then the title would inevitably be delayed a few months, at which point they’d be stuck with those old decisions with no chance to stop and reevaluate what was working.

Envy:

In 2023, to help finish Dragon Age, BioWare brought in a second, internal team, which was working on the next Mass Effect game. For decades there’d been tension between the two well-established camps, known for their starkly divergent ways of doing things. BioWare developers like to joke that the Dragon Age crew was like a pirate ship, meandering and sometimes traveling off course but eventually reaching the port. In contrast, the Mass Effect group was called the USS Enterprise, after the Star Trek ship, because commands were issued straight down from the top and executed zealously.
As the Mass Effect directors took control, they scoffed that the Dragon Age squad had been doing a shoddy job and began excluding their leaders from pivotal meetings, according to people familiar with the internal friction. Over time, the Mass Effect team went on to overhaul parts of the game and design a number of additional scenes, including a rich, emotional finale that players loved. But even changes that appeared to improve the game stoked the simmering rancor inside BioWare, infuriating Dragon Age leaders who had been told they didn’t have the budget for such big, ambitious swings.
“It always seemed that, when the Mass Effect team made its demands in meetings with EA regarding the resources it needed, it got its way,” said David Gaider, a former lead writer on the Dragon Age franchise who left before development of the new game started. “But Dragon Age always had to fight against headwinds.”

The writing could have been even worse:

Early testers and Mass Effect leads complained about the game’s snarky tone — a style of video-game storytelling, once ascendant, that was quickly falling out of fashion in pop culture but had been part of Goldman’s vision for the multiplayer game. Worried that Dragon Age could face the same outcome as Forspoken — a recent title that had been hammered over its impertinent banter — BioWare leaders ordered a belated rewrite of the game’s dialogue to make it sound more serious. (In the end, the resulting tonal inconsistencies would only add to the game’s poor reception with fans.)

Mass Effect was always the more masculine series (e.g. the infamous Miranda *** shot), too bad those guys didn't come in earlier to do a more thorough job of fixing the writing.


Dead studio walking:

After three high-profile failures in a row, questions linger about EA’s commitment to the studio. In May, the company relabeled its Edmonton headquarters from a BioWare office to a hub for all EA staff in the area.
Historically, BioWare has never been the most important studio at EA, which generates more than $7 billion in annual revenue largely from its sports games and shooters. Depending on the timing of its launches, BioWare typically accounts for just 5% of EA’s annual bookings, according to estimates by Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co.
Even so, there may be strategic reasons for EA to keep supporting BioWare. Single-player role-playing games are expensive to make but can lead to huge windfalls when successful, as demonstrated by recent hits like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3. In order to grow, EA needs more than just sports franchises, said TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz. Trying to fix its fantasy-focused studio may be easier than starting something new.
“That said, if they shuttered the doors tomorrow I wouldn’t be totally surprised,” Creutz added. “It has been over a decade since they produced a hit.”

[J1M]

When was snarky ever ascendant Jason? You list no examples.

Joss Whedon was the only person to do it "right". Then they burned down their entire multi-billion dollar empire by metoo'ing him over nothing and thinking they could replicate it. It truly is fantastical how fantastically a system can fail.

Joss Whedon isn't a video game.

[Irenaeus]

When was snarky ever ascendant Jason? You list no examples.

mid 2000s

► Show Spoiler

[J1M]

When was snarky ever ascendant Jason? You list no examples.

mid 2000s

► Show Spoiler

Also not a video game.

[Xenich]

What's going on with all of the peg-legged Indian women lately? One is going to be the protagonist of the new Avatar cartoon.

Leftards have a disability fetish.

The worst part is that it's not even a badass cyborg augmentation like Nero's robo-arm in Devil May Cry V, it's just a plain and "realistic" peg so that real-life cripples can feel seen or whatever.

No cripple I know would want this **** in a game. The ones I know would be ******* ****** at this pandering. This is yet another example of a crowd that is more interested in virtual signaling than they are about their efforts actually serving any real interest of those it proclaims to serve. It is much like the environmentalists and animal rights people. ******* clueless idiots who have no understanding of the topics they represent and often more times than not are the biggest offenders of them.

[Bertram_Tung]

Cripples RISE UP... Oh wait.. sorry

[Norfleet]

A peg-leg doesn't make a cripple, it makes you a PIRATE! YARR!

[PixiGreen]

Here is a good summary of the events leading to the creation of that abomination of a game:

[gerey]

BioWare was under immense pressure to succeed after the failure of Anthem and Andromeda with The Veilguard to stay afloat

Imagine the future of your company riding on the success of your next game and you decide to make Veilguard.

I like how the greasy jurno **** lays the blame on literally everything but the fact Veilguard looked like it was specifically made to alienate as many demographics as humanly possible.

They could have done a proper "return to form" and tried to shift back to the tone of Origins and trying to appeal to the heterosexual male demographic, but no.

Analysts say EA may continue supporting BioWare due to the potential payoff of hit RPGs.

lmao

WTF? When was the last time BioWare had a success on their hands worth anything? Mass Effect 3?

[gastovski]

dragon age inquisition was their last successfull game

[rusty_shackleford]

BioWare was under immense pressure to succeed after the failure of Anthem and Andromeda with The Veilguard to stay afloat

Imagine the future of your company riding on the success of your next game and you decide to make Veilguard.

I like how the greasy jurno **** lays the blame on literally everything but the fact Veilguard looked like it was specifically made to alienate as many demographics as humanly possible.

They could have done a proper "return to form" and tried to shift back to the tone of Origins and trying to appeal to the heterosexual male demographic, but no.

Analysts say EA may continue supporting BioWare due to the potential payoff of hit RPGs.

lmao

WTF? When was the last time BioWare had a success on their hands worth anything? Mass Effect 3?

They'll keep supporting BioWare because Canada pays them to do it*

[gerey]

They'll keep supporting BioWare because Canada pays them to do it*

Is the government gibsmedat they get really worth all the hassle though?

They should just have BioWare make mobile slop instead of consistently setting them up for failure by ordering them to make big budget "cRPGs".

[sheet]

They'll keep supporting BioWare because Canada pays them to do it*

Is the government gibsmedat they get really worth all the hassle though?

They should just have BioWare make mobile slop instead of consistently setting them up for failure by ordering them to make big budget "cRPGs".

Ahh, the Westwood treatment. Brutal.

[psychic_dream]

They’re still trying to shift all the blame onto EA instead of confronting the people who actually made this game and telling them they made a **** product that appealed to no one.
https://www.thegamer.com/dragon-age-the ... -ea-fault/

[rusty_shackleford]

They’re still trying to shift all the blame onto EA instead of confronting the people who actually made this game and telling them they made a **** product that appealed to no one.
https://www.thegamer.com/dragon-age-the ... -ea-fault/

all journalists are pinko scum unless proven otherwise

[psychic_dream]

Sell me on Origins. What makes it so good?

Was it the tactical combat, the writing, or both? Because unlike other big modern releases, Veilguard seems to have disappointed users here the most, even though some say the series was already going downhill since DAII or Inquisition.

Has anyone here played DA2 or Inquisition at launch? Were you disappointed with how they turned out? Which one was the worst offender to you?