Following the poor commercial performance of 2024’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Dragon Age creator David Gaider has said he believes developer BioWare’s beloved fantasy RPG series is likely dead. But if some twist of fate ever meant he had the opportunity to work on a new one – despite no longer being at BioWare – he’d be interested in taking it in a “dark and dangerous” direction, and do with it “things that will make people upset”.
Gaider shared his thoughts on Dragon Age’s future in an interview with PC Gamer, saying he believed it was “unlikely” the world would see another instalment of the series while it remained under BioWare owner EA’s control. As he explained it, during his time at the studio (Gaider departed in 2016), “we were always one breath away from the [current] project being shelved. The thing that happened is that we kept releasing games, and it would sell much better than they thought it should, and it kept surprising them.”
But Dragon Age: The Veilguard, of course, fell well short of EA’s sales expectations when it released in 2024 – something the company’s top brass appeared to blame on the game’s lack of live-service features last year, despite the similar fate of BioWare’s live-servicey Anthem – suggesting the series’ long stay-of-execution might finally be at an end. Particularly given Veilguard’s extremely long and troubled development.
Gaider’s pessimism around the future of Dragon Age is understandable then, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be willing to revisit the franchise he had some a large hand in if the opportunity – as unlikely as it may be – ever arose.
“If you’d asked me that in the past,” he revealed, “I would have said absolutely not. That I’d done my time. I left the Dragon Age team before I left BioWare. After Inquisition came out, I went to [Dragon Age’s creative director] Mike Laidlaw and I said, ‘I’ve told all the stories with mages and dragons… that I have in me. And I could keep going, but if I keep working on this, it’s going to become rote, and I think that would be a disservice to the team. So I should step aside, let fresher voices rise’. I don’t know if that was the right decision, but it felt right at the time.”
But over a decade later, it seems Gaider might have a few new ideas for the series after all. “So if, out of some weird alignment of the stars,” he continued, “somebody handed the Dragon Age franchise back to me and said, ‘Breathe the life back into this baby’, that’d be a tough one, but I think that’d be an interesting thing to do. To go back to the basics of what made Dragon Age appeal to so many people in the first place. And go somewhere dark and dangerous, and do things that will make people upset. I think that’s what I would want to do with it.”
As for BioWare, it’s currently working on Mass Effect 5 – a game first teased in 2021, but which we’ve heard little about since then. Last year, the studio confirmed “many” of its employees had been moved elsewhere in EA following Dragon Age: The Veilguard release, leaving a small team to focus on Mass Effect 5. Mass Effect franchise boss Mike Gamble explained the continued silence around the project earlier this year, attributing it to the fact the team was “Just busy workin'”. But it remains to be seen if Dragon Age’s sister series will prove any more resilient, particularly as EA looks toward easier bets amid the company’s $55bn private acquisition by investors including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
