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Dragon Age: The Veilguard
David Gaider recently claimed that while he worked at BioWare, the Dragon Age and Mass Effect teams did not get along, and «may as well have been two separate studios». This decades-long rivalry reportedly continued after he left in 2016, bleeding into the already rocky development of The Veilguard.
BioWare joked that the Dragon Age team was a pirate ship, veering off course but always reaching its destination, while the Mass Effect team was the USS Enterprise: laser-precise.
BioWare was given just over a year to retool The Veilguard from a multiplayer live-service game into a traditional single-player RPG, considerably limiting what the team was able to do. While there would eventually be numerous delays, the studio initially worked under the assumption that the game’s release was right around the corner, so a lot of those early decisions were made with that deadline in mind, leaving no room to make drastic alterations even with more time piled on top. Unfortunately, that meant development became a series of desperate attempts to salvage the game in response to lukewarm playtests, as BioWare was unable to uproot the foundations.
As reported by Bloomberg, in 2023, EA tried to course correct by bringing a second team on board, those working on the next Mass Effect. However, given their history, it was an unsurprisingly bitter pairing, as Mass Effect directors took control and «scoffed» at the «shoddy job» the Dragon Age team had done, excluding The Veilguard’s lead devs from key meetings. The Mass Effect team would then overhaul key parts of the game, including the finale, and even add new scenes, which only stirred up further resentment between the two teams as Dragon Age leaders were told they didn’t have the budget for such changes.
The Snarky Tone Was Controversial Even In Development
One of the key complaints raised by playtesters and the Mass Effect team, which would later be echoed by fans, was the snarky tone. BioWare took this feedback on board and ordered major rewrites of the dialogue to make it sound more serious, hoping to avoid comparisons to other games like Forspoken, which was infamously ridiculed for its writing. But low morale from layoffs combined with the voice actor strike made this impossible to accomplish so late in development.
The end result would be an inconsistent tone that was, in itself, a major point of critique. The Veilguard sporadically swings from MCU-style quips to emotional crescendos, never finding a balance. Though it was hardly the only last-minute change that BioWare would make, as major story decisions — like which city to save — were similarly shoehorned into the game towards the end of development. These segments also drew backlash for how shallow they felt, as there was simply no time to make these choices have lasting and meaningful impacts on the narrative.
The Veilguard underwent an incredibly difficult development, to say the least, snapping back and forth between multiplayer and single-player as EA chased live-service trends. And while the Mass Effect team may have helped to strengthen core parts of the story, such as the emotional finale, it clearly did little to assuade the long-standing rivalry at BioWare, and appears to have led to an even more inconsistent overall experience.
