Dragon Age: The Veilguard launch a 'huge milestone' for Edmonton-based BioWare

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After a 10-year wait, fans of Edmonton-based video game developer BioWare can rejoice as the studio launched its newest game in the Dragon Age franchise.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which launched Thursday for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, is the fourth entry in the long-running franchise, and the first mainline Dragon Age game since 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition. The action-adventure fantasy epic returns players to the realm of Thedas, where they’ll embark on an urgent and dangerous quest to stop evil Elven gods from corrupting and dominating the world.

For creative director and studio veteran John Epler, The Veilguard represents a long-awaited exhale for the studio, which kept the details of the game tightly guarded until they were unveiled at a preview event in September.

“It definitely feels like a huge milestone for us,” Epler said. “We’ve gone through a lot of tough challenges over the last few years, especially during the pandemic, and we’re all both really excited and nervous to get the game into player’s hands and bring them back to Thedas.”

The blessing and curse of ‘BioWare magic’

For BioWare, Dragon Age: The Veilguard isn’t just a new game but an opportunity for the studio to buff a somewhat tarnished reputation. The studio was once considered an industry leader in crafting ambitious and genre-defining roleplaying games, including Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect.

All that changed after the launch of Anthem. It was the studio’s second consecutive critical and commercial flop, the first being Mass Effect: Andromeda, which was criticized for its technical issues, visual glitches, outdated character models, and shallow characterization and world-building.

The dual setbacks led many to wonder what happened to the once standard-setting studio and the notion of their “BioWare Magic,” a term that BioWare developers coined to describe how a game’s development challenges would magically come together in its final hours.

That question was answered in a YouTube video in 2022 from Mark Darrah, former executive director of Dragon Age, who revealed the term was used internally to justify periods of intense “crunch,” where studios force employees to work overtime hours, seven days a week, during the final weeks or even months of a game’s development.

“That’s not how I do things,” said Gary McKay, general manager at BioWare. McKay has been with the studio for five years and was not present during the “BioWare Magic” period, but he says the studio has completely changed its process to avoid crunch.

“That kind of crunch happens when you don’t have a clear vision, or don’t communicate it well to your team. I like to have a completely playable version of a game, from start to end, as early as possible, so we all know we’re working on the same vision, going in the same direction.”

Epler says that, while there is a lot of pressure for the game to succeed, his team has done a great job of staying focused on proving that BioWare is still the gold standard when it comes to building game worlds and characters that people want to engage with.

“We’ve worked hard to put the focus back onto what BioWare does best, what our fans have always loved which is making games with really diverse, detailed worlds and in-depth characters,” Epler said.

“We want to remind people about the magic of BioWare as a studio.”

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is out now on PS5, Xbox series X/S, and PC.

rostad@postmedia.com

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