Dragon Age: The Weight of Expectations

I've been really excited watching the roll-out of Dragon Age: Veilguard information the past few weeks, but it got me thinking about how this game was initially revealed during Summer Game Fest. Specifically, I've been mulling over how games seem to live in this space where one bad trailer can sour people on a game immediately, instead of granting the studio some grace.

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So, one of the (many) narratives of this year’s video games coverage is: Will Dragon Age: The Veilguard née Dread Wolf actually be good.

BioWare’s games aren’t unique in this treatment (see: Concord), but the combination of time since their last release and that last release being Anthem sets already unrealistic expectations for The Veilguard. Throw that into the current economic situation in the games industry and it’s easy to believe that if The Veilguard isn’t an instant hit, the Mass Effect studio is facing some major consequences.

The thing is though, I can’t think of a single game, film, or product buried under the unbearable weight of expectation that has ever rose to the occasion. Under that pressure, the best The Veilguard could do is not flop. If the stakes were not so high, a CG trailer set to a cover of “We could by Heroes” announcing the game at SGF earlier this year would be greeted by a groan, not lamentations of doom.

Ultimately, this is just a load of hand-wringing about a few trailers, a name change (from Dreadwolf to The Veilguard), and a release date that had been changed internally. Sure, our jaded gamer brains could see these as a studio floundering under expectation, but it could also be how massive creative projects function in 2024.

It’s so easy to see a trailer set to a moody, slow version of popular song and think the game is going to be bad.

Maybe it’s not to your taste, but a quick CG trailer isn’t really the substantive statement about the art you think it is. Especially when we’re talking about Dragon Age.

With very few exceptions, the games major studios make aren’t as static as it may seem. The studio behind lauded multiplayer shooter Titanfall 2 makes Star Wars Souls-lite RPGs now, the makers of Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter: Combat Racing make The Last of Us, and the studio that brought you Killzone is making a post-apocalyptic robot dinosaur game.

As much as marketing wants you to believe that the same people who worked on your favorite game from this franchise are working on this one too, it’s not exactly true.

The BioWare that made Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, and even Mass Effect 2 is not the same. Teams evolve, goals change, and tastes shift. Which is great! Mass Effect 2 would be a worse game if it was just Mass Effect 1 again. It was a bad live service game, but I liked aspects of Anthem. The evolution of a studio’s output makes the next project better, either by addition or subtraction.

Which is why I’m so excited about Dragon Age: One of the biggest strengths of the series is its evolutions. It’s one of the only AAA franchises I can think of that intentionally changes things up from game-to-game, both in story and gameplay. Before the fallout of Mass Effect 3’s ending, the Dragon Age team had already avoided the possible fan outrage of a long-spanning story collapsing under the weight of expectation.

Maybe I’ll eat my words this October, but by having fans invest in the world of Dragon Age—instead of the hero—avoids the inevitable letdown of Mass Effect 3’s ending. Players don’t have a decade plus of choices built into a singular character that will need to be crunched down to good, neutral, evil endings by the weight of needing to end the damn thing.

Instead, The Veilguard will end, Rook will probably disappear, a major conflict will be resolved, and you can bet there’ll be hints to another conflict. It's modern prestige TV writing vs the Star Wars trilogy of Mass Effect.

You can be disappointed by the direction of some trailers, or even not love the look of the new third-person action style of the game, but all this hand wringing about BioWare trying something new is misplaced, in my mind. It’s an unfortunate side effect of big franchises needing to play the hits while being called stale and repetitive. And, it’s the worst part of hype cycles and fan culture: if you deviate from expectations or the years of in-the-open fan theory crafting, your game/movie/book is dead on arrival.

Will Dragon Age: The Veilguard be good? Will it save BioWare? We won’t know until October, but I think that’s the point. Before we judge the work of a whole bunch of creative folks based on what a marketing department decided to show, maybe we should just sit tight and see what happens. I for one am just excited to see how what latest evolution of what Dragon Age is. I hope you are too.

Thanks for watching. See you next time.