I'm haunted by the decline and fall of Dragon Age, and can't help but wonder how it came to this
A once-legendary RPG world now plunged into shadow
As the news came in that
Dragon Age: The Veilguard missed its sales projections by nearly 50%, with publisher EA saying that it
'underperformed our expectations', I wasn't the only one on the PC Gamer team who suddenly felt
we may have seen the last entry in a once-legendary fantasy RPG series.
Then, as yesterday brought the news that
BioWare was restructuring purely around Mass Effect 5, with staff from all other projects redistributed
or let go, and that The Veilguard had almost certainly received its
last ever update with no DLCs planned, it felt like the final nail in the Dragon Age series' coffin being banged into place. Like a lot of other gamers, I felt I'd seen this coming.
Ever since our official
Dragon Age: The Veilguard review dropped, confirming its near total conversion into a Marvel-i-fied action-RPG that shed much of the series' original identity, I've felt like we are all quietly, undramatically, watching the death of the Dragon Age series (certainly as a AAA fantasy RPG) play out in slow motion. Regardless of how much you personally did or didn't like The Veilguard, the game's underperformance in the eyes of its own publisher and BioWare's total restructuring around the next Mass Effect means we are very probably not going to see another big-budget Dragon Age for a hell of a long time: If at all.
Veilguard's
troubled development, rife with
project reboots and
key staff leaving the company, ended with the development team being totally disbanded. I just don't see how EA and BioWare double down and, once again, invest in what would most likely be around half-a-decade's worth of development to make another Dragon Age game, and certainly not a traditional, full-fat RPG like the original release. They've moved so far away from that I just can't see it, and the developer's
new one-game focus strategy basically confirms it. If Mass Effect 5 is a success, then I expect BioWare to just continue making Mass Effect games. If Mass Effect 5 flops, is BioWare then going to go back to a series that, last time out, underperformed by almost 50 per cent? Can it even survive that?
For me personally, though, what has been most dispiriting about these developments has been watching my worst fears for the Dragon Age series come to pass. That The Veilguard would be the final act in the fantasy RPG series, and the full stop on some of my gaming life's most golden memories. Fans like me who'd been blown away by Dragon Age: Origins' mature, complex and challenging gaming experience always held onto the foolish hope that this long-awaited instalment would not only correct some of the wrongs of Dragon Age II and Dragon Age: Inquisition but, like a returning king, show the way forward for not only the series but the RPG genre. The reality has been far from that and, looking back now, it seems inevitable.
I'd been worried about The Veilguard in the run up to its launch,
writing that the thing that scared me most about its impending release was "it could very well be a deflating send-off for a series that started with such immense promise and that, in my mind, has never fully had that promise brought to fruition. The promise that it might have been a series that could have been as impactful and cemented in PC gaming culture and legend as Baldur's Gate has been."
And now I think most would agree that, regardless of how you view The Veilguard itself, Dragon Age has never achieved the greatness it once seemed destined for after the game-changing, genre-topping original. Ever since Dragon Age: Origins the series moved increasingly away from the identity that made it a fantasy RPG phenomenon until, at the end, there was hardly anything left, either tonally or mechanically.
(Image credit: BioWare)
The passing of an age
When trying to distill my feelings towards the Dragon Age series recently I've not been able to shake the speech delivered by King Théoden of Rohan in J.R.R. Tokien's The Lord of the Rings, who when faced with the formerly great race of men's impending, seemingly inevitable doom, laments that:
"To whatever end. Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed like rain on the mountains. Like wind in the meadow. The days have gone down in the west. Behind the hills, into shadow. How did it come to this?"
The quote captures my own sadness and inability to comprehend how something that was once so brilliant and beloved in the gaming industry, something that was not just another RPG but the shining exemplar of the whole genre, could end up being turned into something so removed from that. I'm not even talking about quality, but identity. Thinking of series that have gone downhill after a groundbreaking original game is easy, but I can't think of many that so completely shed their own identity in the process. Who made these decisions? Who sat down following each Dragon Age game and decided to move further away from the celebrated original experience that
outsold the original Mass Effect? It's baffling.
And this change hits especially hard in the light of
Baldur's Gate 3's triumphant, genre-pushing release, one that continues to shine monumentally brightly. Here was a game that, far from shedding the full-fat, complex and mature RPG identity that made Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn two of the very finest fantasy RPGs ever made, embraced it fully, while also adding in plenty of evolving newness, too. And it did so after a huge gap in game releases as well.
In retrospect, it was the game I think I'd always wanted the next Dragon Age to be, another Dragon Age: Origins moment where the fantasy RPG genre was shown the way forward with a release of immense quality and foresight. But it was Larian Studios who heeded the call, gloriously, while BioWare and EA fumbled in the darkness.
Théoden's lines capture the inevitability around Dragon Age coming to an end, even if we don't know that for sure yet. The glory is faded, the exploits and memorable tales consigned to a different gaming era and forever locked away in the past. Time has passed. Players are over a decade and a half older than we were when Dragon Age: Origins first graced our screens, which only adds an extra level of despondency to this whole affair. I've lived through the age of Dragon Age and, as I write in 2025 about a future where I might never play another new Dragon Age game again, I find myself melancholy and surrounded by nothing but the whispers: The 'if only' and 'what ifs' of the paths not taken, the worlds unexplored, and the adventures we never knew.
