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Dragon Age appears to have reached the end of the road, at least for now. Despite the largely positive reception, sales of Dragon Age: The Veilguard didn’t meet C-suite expectations, the game’s most recent update appears to be its last, and developers at BioWare have been scattered to the four winds as the studio focuses exclusively on early work on the next Mass Effect game. But former BioWare senior writer Sheryl Chee recently took to Bluesky to reassure fans that Dragon Age isn’t really dead, “because it’s yours now.”
“A cool French woman dropped a cool quote from Camus on me today: ‘In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. (I mean, who does resistance like the French, right?),” Chee, whose writing credits on Dragon Age go all the way back to Origins, wrote on Bluesky in response to a user mourning the death of Dragon Age. “We’re going through it right now. It’s a lot, everywhere.
“But DA isn’t dead. There’s fic. There’s art. There’s the connections we made through the games and because of the games. Technically EA/BioWare owns the IP but you can’t own an idea, no matter how much they want to. DA isn’t dead because it’s yours now.”
In a subsequent post, Chee wrote, “So someone just reposted my thing saying they’ll write a giant AU [alternate universe] and that’s what I’m talking about. If DA has inspired you to do something, if it sparks that Invincible summer, then it’s done its job, and it has been my greatest honor to have been a part of that.”
Chee’s words are heartening, but they come amidst a time of real turmoil at BioWare, which saw a significant portion of its staff moved to other EA studios—Chee herself is now at EA Motive—or laid off outright. EA seems to have lost faith in Dragon Age as a moneymaker of suitable scale, and while fanfiction is always on the table, it’s really not a replacement for the work of veteran RPG developers backed by a well-funded studio. Which I don’t say to cast an even greater pall over things, but just to reflect the reality: Deeply committed fans of the Dragon Age universe can continue to run with it as they see fit, but people who just want to play Dragon Age videogames have less to look forward to.
The immediate future of Dragon Age is definitely gloomy but EA has made no formal pronouncements of its demise at this point, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard wasn’t a flop. It was met with good reviews, holds a “mostly positive” rating on Steam—not spectacular, but far from catastrophic—and “engaged” roughly 1.5 million players. Its main failing seems to be that it didn’t meet an arbitrary sales number put up by EA executives.
That’s not great, particularly given that the previous game in the series, Dragon Age: Inquisition, “quickly became the most successful launch in BioWare history” when it came out in 2015, and I don’t expect we’ll be hearing news about big plans for the future of Dragon Age anytime soon. But I think Dragon Age fans can take heart from the knowledge that videogames are very much like superheroes: They change, they fall out of sight sometimes, but they never really die.
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Kurt Indovina
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