Good news for BioWare, though it's probably too little too late, and honestly it's not just the writers who need to go, basically the entire creative force should be purged leaving only the actual programmers. It's too bad their next project is Mass Effect though, because even if it turns out good it's just not a franchise I'm interested in. I'd rather see a good Dragon Age game or something new.BioWare lays off the entirety of Dragon Age: The Veilguard's writing staff amid major internal restructuring.
Per FictionHorizon, significant changes within BioWare in recent days have led to a whole host of subsequent shifts. Among the most prominent of these is the loss of the entire studio's writing team for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, including lead writer Patrick Weekes, who announced his departure from the company after two decades in a post on social media. Weekes wrote, "It's been a privilege to work with so many amazing devs over my 20 years at BioWare, and I will cherish the memories of the wonderful folks in the community I've met along the way."
The fourth entry in the main series of Dragon Age video games, BioWare's action roleplaying game Dragon Age: The Veilguard released in 2024, serving as a sequel to 2014's Dragon Age: Inquisition. Set ten years after the events of the previous game, Dragon Age: The Veilguard drops players into the shoes of Rook, a heroic adventurer who must stop the elven trickster god Fen'Harel from unleashing the twisted elven gods who have long been sealed away behind the fabled Veil at the heart of the story. Along the way, Rook unwittingly unleashes two of these gods, forcing players to set out across the land in search of the immortal villains.
Upon its release, Dragon Age: The Veilguard was met with near unanimously favorable reviews from critics and audiences alike. Although the title was the subject of review bombing on various websites thanks to "fans" of the series who lambasted its purportedly "woke" characters and themes, Dragon Age: The Veilguard still managed to amass an average review score of over 80% across all platforms on review aggregator Metacritic. The game also fell short of early sales projections throughout its first three months of release, selling just over 1.5 million units compared to an expected 3 million in the same timeframe.
In spite of any unexpected hurdles or sales shortcomings, players have continued to journey back into the world of Dragon Age: The Veilguard in the months since its release. In early January, a player on Reddit managed to accomplish what previously seemed like an impossible task by maxing out Rook's reputation with the Shadow Dragons before the game's first act had even concluded.
As per the Reddit poster in question, the process primarily came down to sinking time into grinding through the game's early areas, which ultimately offered little to no real benefit over going out and exploring further reaches of the map where other items of greater value can be discovered organically.
Oh, and a correction to the article, which either lied to bolster the game's reputation (likely seeing as the article is obviously going to bat for it) or just got the details wrong through incompetence, but it didn't sell 1.5m units, it had 1.5m "engagements". This means they're counting refunded copies, free copies (review/giveaways/etc), and stuff like GamePass where even merely booting it up counts as engagement. The actual sales figure must be abysmal for EA to choose to obfuscate the data that way lol