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So, BioWare probably isn’t going to be making a new Dragon Age game any time soon—maybe ever, depending on how things go. After Dragon Age: The Veilguard underperformed, much of its team (including senior members who had been making Dragon Age games for a while) were shuffled around or laid off.
This isn’t necessarily out of nowhere. As quite accurately called by consultant and former BioWare vet Mark Darrah, almost prophetically, this marks the first time the studio’s only had one major project to focus on. He rather optimistically stated that these devs would find their way to other EA studios, and that the challenge would be involved in trying to get them back. Turns out, he was partly right: A lot of them are just gone entirely.
Regardless of my thoughts on the game’s writing, plenty of the staff now departing have made good stuff in the past. Trick Weekes, for instance, wrote freaking Mordin in Mass Effect 2 and 3—as well as Iron Bull and Solas in Inquisition, two other characters I like very much. The foibles of Veilguard haven’t left me irate so much as a little despondent, confused, and wondering whether just scrapping decades of talent in a purge is the right move at all.
That’s a despondency shared by Michael Douse, publishing director of Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios, who took to X in a series of posts this week that more or less tore into EA for letting go of so much institutional talent. He writes:
“It is possible not to lay off large parts of your development teams between or after projects. Critically, retaining that institutional knowledge is key for the next [game]. It’s often used as an excuse to ‘trim fat’ and to an extent I understand that under financial pressure, but doesn’t that just highlight how needless the aggressive efficiency of giant corporations is?”
Douse isn’t necessarily throwing stones from a glass house, here. Larian is a big old studio, true, but it’s something of an anomaly in the games industry: Tencent has a minority, non-voting stake in the company, but it’s otherwise completely independent and free of shareholders. Baldur’s Gate 3 very much seems like a product of a studio free from those expectations, being able to take its damn time.
“I’d understand it if they were pumping out hit after hit—perhaps you could argue it’s working—but clearly the aggressive streamlining (layoffs) aren’t. It’s nothing but cost cutting in the most brutal sense. It’s always people lower down the food chain that suffer, when it’s clearly strategy higher up the food chain that’s causing the problem.”
Douse caps off the post with, “On a pirate ship, they’d toss the captain overboard.” In a second, clarifying post, he adds: “To make it absolutely clear, what I hate about the way layoffs are carried out is that they are done before decision makers know what to do with a studio, and not as a result of figuring out a direction.
“This is consistently true. It is a short term cost saving measure at a huge human expense that doesn’t solve a long term problem. (A lack of a viable strategic direction defined at an executive level). You can probably figure it out if you trust your developers instead of firing them. On a positive note, I’m seeing a slight shift in this direction. In the low-stakes arena of remasters and remakes, but they are the foundation of something bigger.”
There is an argument, one that Douse seems to agree with in a separate reply, that Veilguard isn’t the first instance of this happening, but a longstanding habit from EA. David Gaider, who created the Dragon Age series whole cloth, left the company and would later share that it had a “quiet resentment” for its writers.
It reminds me a whole lot of the tech problem of “enshittification”, also called platform decay, which comes about when a platform, site, or service sees success and then promptly bloody ruins everything because it has to grow and appease shareholders. Studios can follow this same gradient, too—as Douse says, these layoffs seem incredibly short-term in their thinking. We don’t know what went on at BioWare, only its developers know that—but the amount of waste here of developers and writers who, again, have done good work before? It’s enough to make me wish those devs were able to fly the black flag years ago.
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Kurt Indovina
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