I like Dragon Age. Clarifying statement… I like the Dragon Age setting. Dark fantasy is rather uncommon in the gaming space, and wasn’t really present outside of The Dark Crystal until Game of Thrones took off. I get that D&D had this locked down before, but I am specifically talking about dark fantasy at large. Where there are no real good guys.

Dragon Age as a gaming platform I have not enjoyed, excepting Origins. That game had a new story twist atop older mechanics which provided compensation for the misses. DA2 I tried for about an hour, and moved on – mechanically it was not for me and felt like a step back. DA:I had all the failures of an MMO framework, without the people. It had a few interesting characters, but still very frustrating to get through the mud in order to touch diamonds. I won’t bother talking about the tangent games…they were more like precursors to the main line versions.

Dragon Age Veilguard came at an interesting time. Bioware had lot the majority of its brain trust due to multiple missteps, including Anthem. Before Anthem, I would have bought the game without much though. After, I am not a fanboy to justify that and wanted to see where the cards lay. Reviews were ok and then it went on sale in the first month, both less than positive signs. To be clear again, this isn’t bad news it’s just not glowing.

EA CEO Andrew Wilson was kind enough to pipe in. DA:V ‘sold’ 1.5m copies, half of the target of 3m. Given the investment in promoting DA:V (I saw it everywhere), I can see how this would not have a terribly good ROI. DA:I may have sold like 12m copies. I would think than anything coming out of EA that took years to build would be seen as a failure when those numbers are shared.

Sidebar: Kingdom Come 2 sold 1m copies in a day. Manor Lords sold 2m copies in 3 weeks.

To point, Mr. Wilson mentioned that the core audience was in fact a success, but that the broader audience was not (akin to the magic 4 quadrants in movie media). To hit that other group of gamers, they should have applied live service components, which is where EA makes 75% of their money. I can’t see how a lockbox / gambling approach would have helped here, but I guess maybe cosmetics? Should DA have been a multiplayer game, which is functionally the only way live service games can work? I don’t see how the hero’s journey aspect of DA would have translated to that model.

And now that EA has fired (note: a minority have been moved) everyone who had any DA knowledge, the brand is all bud dead outside of fanfic. So I guess this is it. Hats off to those who did their best, unfortunately not enough for the $$$ overlords.

Which gets me into the next piece – Mass Effect 5. I honestly had to think about 4 for a while, then remembered Andromeda. BioWare is all hands on deck for the next instance, and it begs the question as to what goals they are trying to achieve here. If EA only wants live service games… well that’s certainly possible in the ME ecosystem. You could argue that pretty much every battle royale or competitive shooter could be reskinned to Mass Effect pretty easily. There are plenty of battles in those games… and bio powers are cool I guess. If they want to make an actual RPG, then I am not quite sure how you monetize that long-term. I’d guess that BioWare isn’t quite sure how to square that round peg either.

So here we are at the end of a long journey. Such a strange road. Far from the end of epic RPGs (BG3 is clear evidence, among others), but a cautionary tale of knowing what your clients want, as well as your bosses.