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In a new episode of FRVR’s podcast, BioWare veteran Mark Darrah says that Dragon Age is likely dead. 2024’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard was a commercial failure, currently sitting at a measly 67% positive on Steam. Dragon Age: Absolution, the somewhat middling Netflix anime, hasn’t been renewed, and it was released four years ago. For all intents and purposes, Darrah’s sentiments seem to be correct: a shadow has fallen over Thedas.
Darrah places the blame firmly on EA. Describing the company as “a hedge fund with a videogame hobby that it wished it didn’t spend so much money on,” he notes that he has “no concept of who could, would, possibly pitch [a new Dragon Age game] at EA. If you go and decide you’re going to make a [game based on an IP]… the instant you’re about to start, suddenly 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.”
Damning words, but ones that echo fellow Dragon Age veteran, David Gaider’s. The series was never “a good match for EA,” he told me post-Veilguard. “They never really knew what to make of it, or what to do with it,” he says, noting that “the expectation was always that it wouldn’t do well.”
In some ways, then, that’s why the idea of EA sunsetting Dragon Age doesn’t feel like a bad thing to me. Is it something I’d like? No. Is it something that I think would be for the betterment of the franchise? Yes.
The hard truth is that, post-Dragon Age: Origins, it feels like the developers haven’t quite known what to do with the series. While its stellar world-building and characterization has done a lot of heavy lifting across all of its games, Dragon Age 2 became a tighter, more action-focused experience, while Inquisition felt more in line with an MMO. The former quickly became a blur of reused assets and endless, oftentimes meaningless combat, while the latter feels too grindy for an RPG. The genre inconsistencies alone prove that EA – and perhaps even BioWare – hasn’t quite found the cheat code to what made Origins so magical.
Veilguard, in contrast to both of those, attempted to return to more strategic combat (albeit not to my taste), but didn’t have the solid narrative or deep companionship of previous games to prop it up. It lost the grit and grime that made Dragon Age so special; Veilguard could have been any random fantasy game in any random universe. Having played over 20 hours of it, it’s boring, uninspired and soulless – in many ways that’s more criminal than the constantly-switching genres.
All of this means that, along the way, Dragon Age has slowly lost its identity. From a gritty, Dungeons & Dragons-inspired virtual TTRPG to a colorful action game that was built for everyone yet serves noone; I genuinely don’t know what Dragon Age is anymore. Is it a slightly more convoluted dating sim? Is it a sparkly, high fantasy romp with your pals? If so, then that’s not the game I signed up for, nor is it the one that I want.
On that same token, however, I wonder if there’s a place for a new Origins-style game in 2026. Baldur’s Gate 3 certainly proved that 200-hour RPGs are still very much in fashion, but with the caveat that they have to be done well. I’m not sure that EA – a company that’s hardly synonymous with sprawling, open-world strategy games – would be willing to give a big, RTS-heavy Dragon Age game the time and breathing room that it would need. Every developer and their dog wants to mimic the ‘Larian effect,’ but when you’re a triple-A company that, according to Darrah, has a “complicated relationship to shipping games,” you’re never going to emulate Larian’s free-flowing, creative vision, and BG3’s by proxy. And, let’s be real, money can’t buy soul.
It’s why, in many ways, I’m okay with letting Dragon Age go. Veilguard proved that EA doesn’t understand what made the franchise great, and the indecision around what Dragon Age is means that, currently, we’ll never get a game that’s fully reflective of that core Origins identity. Don’t get me wrong; it sucks how it’s turned out. As a longtime fan, I’d give anything to see it return to those glory days. I’m just not sure that it can – at least, not right now.
I’ll caveat all of the above by stressing that all of this comes from a place of love. I’ve got no interest in being tangled up in the political feuding around Veilguard and its commercial failure. Instead, I’m just a fan who wanted to see one of her favorite franchises return in a blaze of glory; I wanted to watch it redefine itself and stamp itself into the history books in the same way that Baldur’s Gate 3 did. Sadly, that’s not what happened.
In many ways, I see Dragon Age somewhat of a TV show moment; sometimes it’s okay to let something go, we don’t need 20 seasons. For now, at least, I think it’s okay to put Dragon Age to bed. Or, sell off BioWare and let it do its own thing; that works, too.
