Say what you want about the development of Dragon Age 4, but you can’t say it was smooth sailing…

By 2020, the game had been in development for several years, but by then it was in a pretty dire situation. It was first planned as a single player title, and from there the concept was reworked to be a live service model with strong multiplayer elements (which was what Anthem was, and why the studio called the new Dragon Age Anthem with Dragons), but everything changed in 2020 when Gary McKay came on board.

He was determined not to make the same mistakes. He started meeting with BioWare and Electronic Arts executives and decided that the game should use a single-player model. Anthem had failed and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order had succeeded, so Electronic Arts finally relented. A lot of things fell into place, McKay says, but the pandemic was a huge obstacle. Remote working created cultural challenges.

Then, over the summer, 50 people were laid off from BioWare, and McKay explains why: “The game industry at that time was all about focus. When you have a really big team, you’re always forced to keep everybody busy. When you have a smaller team, you have the right people in the right roles at the right time, and you get incredible momentum.

On Steam, Dragon Age: The Veilguard had more than 70,000 concurrent players on launch day, surpassing BioWare’s previous launch: 59.8 thousand players in May 2021, when Mass Effect Legendary Edition (a remaster of the first three episodes) launched. But for years, Electronic Arts had no presence on Steam (Origin, then EA App, was preferred). It also beat Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (67.8k), although The Sims 4 (96.3k) did better, but it’s a free-to-play title.

So it might have benefited from the reboots. What if it had been a live service title?

Source: WCCFTech,