Dragon Age: The Veilguard devs talk redesigning the game after BioWare bailed on the whole live service thing in 2021: 'I never personally saw it as a reboot'

Dragon Age: The Veilguard might be good or bad, depending who you ask on the PC Gamer team—we're a little split on it, a downright smorgasbord of varying levels of grumpy and old about the entire thing. While the game unhappily comes saddled with the usual pre-order bonus nonsense, it's still a relief to me that this thing isn't a live service game—because it very well could've been.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard was, initially, supposed to have substantial multiplayer live service components. However, after the catastrophic failures of BioWare's Anthem, EA decided to strip the in-progress sequel of all its multiplayer mechanics, focusing instead on making a single-player RPG.

Which, even not knowing much about the innards of game development myself, sounds like a pretty big operation. Speaking with IGN, studio general manager Gary McKay and director Corinne Busche confirm that, yes, yes it is.

«Of course,» McKay says, «As a multiplayer concept, the battle system at that time was oriented around, ‘What is it like to play with other players?’ And as you can imagine, things like companions weren't nearly as at the forefront as they are now. Your coordination was around other players.»

That's genuinely interesting to hear—in The Veilguard, we've been told that your companions have their own gear, bespoke skill trees, and abilities that are mostly meant to be synergistic with you or each other. Rather than being fully fledged RPG characters under your control, they strike me more as back-up dancers. One has to wonder whether that primer-detonation gameplay is a vestige of the game's multiplayer roots.

However, McKay maintains that the switch wasn't a reboot of the game, since it was all early enough in production to be classified as more of a realignment: «I don't see it as a reboot. No, I don't see it that way at all. I saw it more about making sure that we are laser-focused on leveraging and leaning into the things that we see as success, things we've had success in, and