REACTION - Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s arrival marks a new dawn for BioWare
Steaming success.
By Jonathan Garrett
01/11/24
When risk averse publishers are looking to latch on to the current live service trend, and with the added pressure of two widely accepted misfires, it seemed like an uphill climb for BioWare to successfully cultivate a winning strategy for their next big release. But the odds have been defied. Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s critical and commercial response has validated a return to what they do best.
The promise of an open linear, 30 - 50 hour RPG (depending on how many roses you smell) would seem to be exactly what the Gaming Doctor (?) pre-ordered. A lot of the positive sentiment seems to be around developing relationships with your squad, which plays to strengths of the Mass Effect series by making interactions the centre of the experience.
It’s great to see the Steam numbers breaking records for an EA single player title, and after the Dead Space remake and the success of Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, this will hopefully give the House of Apex all the data it needs to continue greenlighting these types of narrative adventures. Even though BioWare’s focus has likely shifted to Mass Effect’s next endeavour, we very much hope this marks a new era for Dragon Age.
TARPS?
At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.
