The pictures from the art book show such a wonderful, grand vision for the game… but I think EA canceling the game twice and the tumultuous development process hindered a lot of its potential.
I hope one day we’ll see a Dragon Age game live up to all it can be
Having been following development, and from little bits and pieces I've picked up through the game developmer grapevine, I'm fairly certain that EA was looking to kill the entire series.
One of the tidbits I picked up is that they took the very very unusual course of counting ALL development costs towards Veilguard, even those from Dreadwolf and the other canceled version of 4, which is highly irregular in the game industry. Once you cancel a game, the assets left over might be recycled into something new (see: Project Titan and Overwatch) but you generally won't count all of the previous costs of development against the new title. You take your tax rebate from losses and start over with a fresh slate and new investment capital.
Doing it this way is something you only do if you want to kill an entire franchise by saddling it with a cost of production it could never POSSIBLY overcome.
Other hints:
- The refusal to include anything from the previous games
- The fact they said outright they have no plans for DLC
- The frankly incredibly aggressive (if otherwise normal) developer backed attacks on folks who had anything bad to say about the game (normally you leave that to the publisher and you still give out copies to folks who had SOMETHING good to say).
- The way that they had an obviously outdated from a previous game advertisement as one of their major announcement trailers
All of this screams to me a development team that knew they were engaging in a swan song project and just wanted to get out as good a product as they could and keep their jobs at the end despite the fact they were going to be saddled with an unavoidable commercial failure because someone higher up with an axe to grind put math-magic curses on them.
One of the rumors is that development cost 300 million USD, and I just... I don't see how? Not unless they were counting the massive costs of dreadwolf's server dropped infrastructure against them too among other things.
There's several possible reasons.
- (only able to be told depending on if we get the same signals from Mass Effect) they're looking to break up Bioware for parts entirely and thus are giving them no possible advantage. Bioware in turn is putting all hope into Mass Effect 5 in the hope that it will save their company because Mass Effect has always been wildly more popular than Dragon Age.
- Whoever is juggling the numbers was the guy who Bioware managed to out argue to even higher up people that Dreadwolf/4 being a live service game like Fortnight would be an absolutely terrible idea after the godawful showing that was Anthem.
- EA's bean counters and market prognosticators have declared that 'fantasy is out, wrap this up so we have something to show for it and then we will never speak of it again'
- The 2 abortive starts and the failures of inquisition just generally have convinced EA execs that the franchise has reached the end of it's life span for the time being, and said they wouldn't approve any more in it unless Bioware starts making them fat stacks of cash again (completely ignoring the reason they failed to do so is that EA has consistently fucked them over in development by mandating certain things like the Frostbite engine).
My money is -actually- on a combination of 1 and 4 btw. It might not be bioware as a company on the chopping block, but as Dragon Age 2 proved, when Bioware is put into a spot where they HAVE to pick between dedicating resources between Mass Effect and Dragon Age, Dragon Age loses. That's why when EA declared the whole 'all studios must release 1 game every single year' fiasco that DA2 was rushed out the door, to buy more time for Mass Effect 2.