15-year Mass Effect and Dragon Age veteran says people join BioWare “to build a story-focused, single-player RPG” – so we probably won’t see a repeat of Anthem
A veteran of Mass Effect and Dragon Age with 15 years BioWare experience has defended the work the studio did on its biggest flop, but says that Dragon Age: The Veilguard will return to the company’s RPG roots.
Speaking to Edge magazine, The Veilguard creative director John Epler said that BioWare is “a studio that has always been built around digging deep on storytelling and roleplaying.” That’s something that he’s played a major part in across his 15+ years at the studio, having contributed to all three Dragon Age games, as well as Mass Effect 2. But it’s also something he saw BioWare drift away from with its 2019 effort, the short-lived and poorly-received live service game Anthem.
“I’m proud of a lot of things on Anthem,” Epler says. “But at the end of the day we were building a game focused on something we were not necessarily proficient at. For me and the team, the biggest lesson was to know what you’re good at and then double down on it. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Don’t try to do a bunch of different things you don’t have the expertise to do.”
Epler goes on to say that “a lot of the people on this team came [to BioWare] to build a story-focused, single-player RPG.” Thankfully, he says, that’s what the team is returning to with The Veilguard.
“The form The Veilguard has taken is, in a lot of ways, the form that we were always pushing towards. There was that moment where we really settled on ’this is a single-player, story-focused RPG – and that’s all it needs to be’.”
Anthem was something of a canary in the coal mine, and Epler’s comments seem particularly salient when you consider other high-profile of this same type of gamble. Warner Bros is currently dealing with the flop of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, a multiplayer service game being made by Rocksteady, a studio whose work on the single-player Batman: Arkham series won it critical acclaim. And Arkane Austin – best known for immersive sims – was shuttered after the failure of Redfall’s multiplayer loot-shooter efforts.
In that instance, reports suggested a substantial degree of staff turnover, after developers who arrived at Arkane to make games like Dishonored ended up making a very different game instead. BioWare’s emphatic return to its RPG roots is a dramatic bucking of this unfortunate trend – and it’s probably good news for Mass Effect 5, too.