Electronic Arts’ big RPG series Dragon Age did not get a happy ending. The most recent game in the series, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, failed to meet sales targets, and EA quickly beat feet in the other direction, putting the torch to BioWare on the way out the door. It’s not often that game franchises are put down forever, but former BioWare stalwart Mark Darrah, the executive producer on Dragon Age: Origins through Inquisition, thinks that in this case, it’s probably gone for good.
Making any game through EA is difficult “because of EA’s complicated relationship to shipping games at all,” Darrah said in a new interview with FRVR. “Someone once described to me EA as a hedge fund with a videogame hobby that it wished it didn’t spend so much money on. And I think that remains true.”
Because of that, and the “frightening number” of dormant properties EA owns, Darrah said he has “no concept of who could, would, possibly pitch [a new Dragon Age game] at EA.”
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“What I’ve heard is if you go and decide you’re going to make a [game based on existing IP]… the instant you’re about to start, suddenly like three different people who think they control it come out of the woodwork and essentially rip you apart and chew you up and spit you out,” Darrah said. So even if someone other than BioWare pitched a new Dragon Age game, “what I expect would happen if they try to do that, is somebody at BioWare would essentially become one of those people jumping under the vents to rip that person apart. I suspect that it wouldn’t happen for a variety of reasons.”
In some way, Darrah’s outlook is optimistic because it presumes both the continued existence of BioWare, and the possibility that EA would let anyone make a new Dragon Age game—neither of which strike me as a sure bet at this point. Not just because The Veilguard “underperformed,” but because EA’s all-but-assured takeover by Saudi Arabia could mean a serious bloodletting as the company takes on billions in debt, putting all but the most essential of EA’s games at risk. A new Mass Effect remains in the works at Bioware.
Former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider suggested in his own recent, less-than-happy assessment of the series’ future that EA executives are likely to deem Dragon Age as non-essential simply because they don’t understand it.”They never knew what to do with it,” Gaider said in June, adding that even when it exceeded expectations, as Inquisition did, it was treated as “a fluke.”
