PC Gamer Editor Bashes 'Dragon Age: The Veilguard' And Declares He's Done With BioWare
PC Gamer Online Editor Fraser Brown bashed Dragon Age: The Veilguard and declared he’s done with BioWare moving forward.
In an article titled “After years of holding out hope, 2024 was the year I finally gave up on BioWare,” Brown documented his history with BioWare and Dragon Age.
After spending much of the article explaining his history with the company and the franchise, he then tore into Veilguard declaring, “I really tried to enjoy myself. God, I tried so hard. I attempted to find nuggets of joy within its hamfisted dialogue, one-note companions and the flashy but soulless fights. But I just couldn't do it. Every time there was a glimmer of hope, it was dashed against the rocks of infinite disappointment.”
He continued, “Honestly, I'm amazed I finished it. There was certainly a point where I was starting to feel like I'd rather do anything else than listen to a hot Grey Warden talk about his big dumb bird for the hundredth time, or play therapist to a giant dragon slayer who just wants to moan about how their mum doesn't understand them. These should have been great characters. A veteran knight reclaiming his order's lost legacy, a proud warrior wrestling with their cultural and gender identity—there's so much good stuff to mine here. But nope, they're just plain boring. All of them.”
Nevertheless, after bashing the game, Brown made it clear he was done with BioWare moving forward, “When I got to the final cutscene that teased what we can expect from the next Dragon Age, it really sealed the deal. I'm out. BioWare just isn't telling stories I care about anymore. Instead of moping around, I'm moving on. BioWare had an exceptional run, but that developer is long gone. What's left is just an EA studio that makes middling games I'm not really interested in.”
Interestingly enough, Brown previously panned the game when it released at the end of October, but he was not as harsh in his criticism.
Instead, he compared the game to Marvel’s Avengers, “It is a polished and competent BioWare action-RPG that follows a safe, conventional pattern. The old BioWare magic has been codified and sanitised, and now feels dated—even more so than BioWare's actually pretty old RPGs. It is as broad, predictable and inoffensive as a crowd-pleasing Marvel movie, all flashy, clean and easy to digest; so it has the power to be entertaining, but never in a way that will stick with you. There are no big swings, no risks, no shocks, and while I have enjoyed some of it, for most of my fourth trip across Thedas I've been left pretty bored.”
Brown’s more harsh comments come in the wake of a number of pieces of evidence that indicate the game’s sales are not good. First, the Game Director, a man who pretends to be a woman and uses the name Corinne Busche, shut down a question about the game’s commercial success.
Busche was asked by Eurogamer, “How has the commercial response to the game been? I've seen stories about sales and they seem mixed - inconclusive. The game seems to be doing okay but struggling to keep pace with Inquisition before it. Has it been a success from your point of view - how do you measure that?”
He responded, “There's three axes we can measure this by: what the team was able to do and put together - the pride that they can take in that; every game that is made, especially in the triple-A space where you're talking hundreds of developers, timelines, is a miracle. That they executed at quality: internally we consider that a success.”
“We're very happy with the critical reception to the game. It's not common to have these challenging development cycles and have a team turn around and receive the critical reception that it did,” he continued. “In fact, in a lot of ways, that is the harder path to take. So yeah, we're quite proud of the critical reception.”
Finally, Busche stated, “Unfortunately on the sales side, that's not something we can really discuss, but of course as we know with Inquisition, that was a long burn to get to those total sales numbers.”
Following that interview, Head of Games Industry Christopher Dring revealed on one of the company’s podcasts that Veilguard was only the 68th best selling title for the year in Europe.
He said, “Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which came out at the end of October, that was No. 19 in the best selling new game chart, but was No. 68 overall.”
Dring added, “It was Christmas and in terms of AAA blockbuster, the traditional big blockbuster Christmas games, you had Call of Duty, which did well, and you had Dragon Age, which did not. So that is disappointing in that position.”
“Dragon Age had the market to itself and it couldn’t find an audience,” he continued. “And that’s really scary as we move into the following year.”
Of note, Dring also detailed that games such as Black Myth: Wukong and Palworld were not on the European charts he cited because their digital sales data had not been provided. So, it’s highly likely that Dragon Age: The Veilguard is even lower down the real list.
Finally, Steam released their 100 Top Sellers of 2024 list and Dragon Age: The Veilguard was in the Bronze bucket. That means it was somewhere between 51-100.
It is unclear how far down the list it is given Steam only sorts the titles into buckets and then randomizes the titles within the buckets.
What do you make of PC Gamer bashing Dragon Age: The Veilguard and its editor declaring he’s done with the studio moving forward?
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Everyone should be done with Bioware now. Such a shame. They were one of the best at one point in time.