Dragon Age Day Comes And Goes In Complete Silence Just One Year After Veilguard

DonkeyPunchJr

DonkeyPunchJr

World’s Biggest Weeb
kotaku.com

Dragon Age Day Came And Went Without A Single Word From BioWare

This comes after a ton of internal strife before, during, and after Dragon Age: The Veilguard
kotaku.com kotaku.com

This comes after a ton of internal strife before, during, and after Dragon Age: The Veilguard

December 4th is Dragon Age Day, the unofficial day fans of BioWare's fantasy RPG anthology celebrate the series. Last year, the studio earnestly participated. Dragon Age: The Veilguard was only about a month old at the time, so BioWare released the game's incredible character creator for free and broke down early player choices on social media. This year? There wasn't a peep from the studio on the matter. Not even a single mention of the franchise that once won "Best Game" at the Game Awards.


If you look at BioWare's Dragon Age social accounts, the last time the studio used the game's X account was to repost an ad for The Veilguard on the EA Play subscription service on August 28. The developer's official blog's last post was on November 7, celebrating Mass Effect's equivalent "holiday," N7 Day, which had a small update on the upcoming fifth game and the Amazon television series. You'll find no such post about Dragon Age. BioWare has admitted it's become a one-game studio after massive layoffs back in January, so there is no fifth Dragon Age game in the works, but the silence also casts a shadow on the RPG series' past.


If you're only passively paying attention, it might make sense for the studio to not make a big deal about a series without a sequel it's actively promoting. But for fans and the developers who spent decades working on Dragon Age, it's another insult to beloved games that seemed to sometimes get the short end of the stick over their troubled development.


In the months since BioWare was gutted of veteran talent and Dragon Age: The Veilguard was thrown under the bus by parent company Electronic Arts, developers have been candid about how the Dragon Age team felt like it wasn't treated fairly by the broader company. The Veilguard's messy production saw the game rebooted from a live service no one wanted into a single-player RPG that, miraculously, came out feeling like the character-driven epics BioWare is associated with despite being a decade in the works.


After the game didn't reach internal projections out of the gate, EA downsized BioWare and has focused the company exclusively on Mass Effect, and implied that The Veilguard may have reached a broader audience if it had stayed a live service game no one asked for.


So perhaps it's for the best that BioWare didn't acknowledge Dragon Age this year. If the company had even made a tweet or blog post expressing its love for the world of Thedas and pride in having brought it to life, the messaging would have come across as tone-deaf after the hell its team reportedly went through.

At least this way, the fans and creatives who made these games get the day to themselves, without it being co-opted by a studio and publisher that treated them like second-class citizens. Now, the Dragon Age team gets the final word.
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Happy belated Dragon Age Day to those who celebrate (not BioWare apparently). What are your favorite memories of the series?
 
DonkeyPunchJr said:
What are your favorite memories of the series?
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LKhCV29N5w9L5ct5.gif
 
Dragon Age Origins is a top 5 all time game for me, I think I've played it through over 10 times. Absolutely tragic what happened to the series. Of course I'm also a weird one that really didn't like Inquisition due to the lack of choice, MMO lite style and gating story behind stupid power levels.

Bioware seem to be the masters at making my favourite games of all time then ruining them with the sequels (I also didn't like ME2, and Jade Empire didn't get a sequel).
 
The game was trash but all those memes and laughs were free to play so, all in all, good game? No, of course not.
 
Greatest moment in the series is in dragon age origins with the battle at ostagar. It felt like the opening of fellowship of the ring when the humans and elves team up to fight sauron. It set the tone for the rest of the game and it is one of my favorite experiences in gaming.


 
Conflict NZ said:
Dragon Age Origins is a top 5 all time game for me, I think I've played it through over 10 times. Absolutely tragic what happened to the series. Of course I'm also a weird one that really didn't like Inquisition due to the lack of choice, MMO lite style and gating story behind stupid power levels.

Bioware seem to be the masters at making my favourite games of all time then ruining them with the sequels (I also didn't like ME2, and Jade Empire didn't get a sequel).
Click to expand...
All I want from Bioware before they go the way of the Dodo is a Dragon Age Origins Remaster for consoles...
 
Conflict NZ said:
Dragon Age Origins is a top 5 all time game for me, I think I've played it through over 10 times. Absolutely tragic what happened to the series. Of course I'm also a weird one that really didn't like Inquisition due to the lack of choice, MMO lite style and gating story behind stupid power levels.

Bioware seem to be the masters at making my favourite games of all time then ruining them with the sequels (I also didn't like ME2, and Jade Empire didn't get a sequel).
Click to expand...

*cough*BaldursGate2*cough*
 
DonkeyPunchJr said:
I thought 3 was really good, not sure why that one got so much hate. It sold really well too.
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Way way way too padded, to me at least it felt like a single-player MMO.

That said, it was fun to play. More tactical than 2 at least, and quite pretty to look at specially back then.
 
This article males me angry. Its just factually untrue. The writing was poor, the characters were poor and agenda driven, the art direction was not the greatest… they weren't treated unfairly ffs seriously…

TtKcCujpmcgLdhF3.jpeg
 
Pretty much any battle in Origins when I was a mage or Arcane Warrior, and before later patches it was OP as hell.

Also, the last time I played Inquisition, thinking the series would remain fun. Oh, the folly.
 
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Dragon Age Origins and Inquisition were really awesome especially the DLC of Inquisition with Solas. I hated the second one and Veilguard was decent but not memorable at all. Origins has the best characters, but pretty much generic story, while Inquisition has the best boss fights and atmosphere. Loved fighting dragons in Inquisition.
 
Conflict NZ said:
Dragon Age Origins is a top 5 all time game for me, I think I've played it through over 10 times. Absolutely tragic what happened to the series. Of course I'm also a weird one that really didn't like Inquisition due to the lack of choice, MMO lite style and gating story behind stupid power levels.

Bioware seem to be the masters at making my favourite games of all time then ruining them with the sequels (I also didn't like ME2, and Jade Empire didn't get a sequel).
Click to expand...
Inquisiton should be illegal, its a crime how much the game is designed to waste your time, aboslutely worse than Veilguard. Even Dragon Age 2 was more like a sequel/spinoff/expansion pack. Origins makes the series, end off. King of Choice based gaming.

Same for Mass effect 2, very polished but ultra safe filler game completely missing soul of Mass effect 1 and that magical feeling you get discovering the reapers. Me3 was atleast better than that as it had to answer the question set up in 1.

For me, Mass effect 1 and dragon age origins are peak bioware (hell peak of gaming) but also only exist because I believe those games were already in development when Bioware was bought by EA. Later games were immediately coorpatized and it felt like those games were fighting to be soulful under a corporate model. It later started to show up clearly to the masses who loved ME2.

If EA hadn't bought them and Bioware had survived, I kid you not, this company would have been the absolute king of gaming today. Everybody talks about culture wars on this website when Bioware is brought up now but all I see is a husk of what should have been the Rockstar of Rpgs.
 
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My entry to the series was Inquisition, I played it, rushed main story, forgot about it.

Then like 3 years ago I played my favorite RPG of all time Origins and realized with great sadness what Inquisition was, and then veilguard came out....
 
Edgelord79 said:
This article males me angry. Its just factually untrue. The writing was poor, the characters were poor and agenda driven, the art direction was not the greatest… they weren't treated unfairly ffs seriously…

TtKcCujpmcgLdhF3.jpeg
Click to expand...
yea that's revisionist. EA actually put a lot of resources in marketing DAV and gave them the time to finish the game. They also put modest expectations on the game in terms of sales and it didn't even reach that. But these losers will never take accountability for their own failures.
 
Danny22 said:
Inquisiton should be illegal, its a crime how much the game is designed to waste your time, aboslutely worse than Veilguard. Even Dragon Age 2 was more like a sequel/spinoff/expansion pack. Origins makes the series, end off. King of Choice based gaming.

Same for Mass effect 2, very polished but ultra safe filler game completely missing soul of Mass effect 1 and that magical feeling you get discovering the reapers. Me3 was atleast better than that as it had to answer the question set up in 1.

For me, Mass effect 1 and dragon age origins are peak bioware (hell peak of gaming) but also only exist because I believe those games were already in development when Bioware was bought by EA. Later games were immediately coorpatized and it felt like those games were fighting to be soulful under a corporate model. It later started to show up clearly to the masses who loved ME2.

If EA hadn't bought them and Bioware had survived, I kid you not, this company would have been the absolute king of gaming today. Everybody talks about culture wars on this website when Bioware is brought up now but all I see is a husk of what should have been the Rockstar of Rpgs.
Click to expand...
As if Bioware didn't exist before then.
 
Conflict NZ said:
Dragon Age Origins is a top 5 all time game for me, I think I've played it through over 10 times. Absolutely tragic what happened to the series. Of course I'm also a weird one that really didn't like Inquisition due to the lack of choice, MMO lite style and gating story behind stupid power levels.

Bioware seem to be the masters at making my favourite games of all time then ruining them with the sequels (I also didn't like ME2, and Jade Empire didn't get a sequel).
Click to expand...
I loved Origin and didn't like any of the following games. DA2 was rushed by EA and had huge issues. DA3 like you say above had that MMO Lite feel with shit loot (power levels I bypassed on PC).

The first game was a masterpiece and unfortunately what followed … not so much.

Edit: And I kind of agree about it ME2 above. ME1 was amazing. Yes, it had clunky parts but it was first in the series. And instead of enhancing pain points, BioWare just smoothed the RPG and exploration out of the game.

It was still very good and character building was top notch (fuck the DLC approach though), but it just didn't hit the same as ME1.
 
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Nothing like Ferelden in origins, Todays open world games let you go directly to different locations than there's Ferelden which hosts a bunch of locations but can't even connect them correctly, having to load between cities and houses is a hard pill to swallow but I love it.
 
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