“At least your load times are great”: Dragon Age The Veilguard director showed the game to EA’s CEO only to immediately “get walloped right off the edge and down into a pit and die”
In some capacity, BioWare has been working on Dragon Age: The Veilguard — the soon-to-be fourth game in the fantasy RPG series — for nearly 10 years. In active production, the developer has spent 200,000 hours playtesting the game’s PC version, dedicated an untold number of hours to recording 140,000 voice lines, and, apparently, allotted a few more hours to an embarrassing meeting with the heads of its publisher, EA.
In a new IGN feature, Veilguard game director Corinne Busche reminisces about a 2023 meeting with EA president Laura Miele and CEO Andrew Wilson.
That meeting was a big deal for BioWare. The developer had just spent the last few years shifting Dragon Age: The Veilguard (formerly known as Dragon Age 4, and then Dragon Age: Dreadwolf) from a multiplayer game to “straight-up single-player story goodness,” as project director Michael Gamble put it. Busche prepared for “hours and hours” before her demo with EA, she tells IGN.
“I knew the content like the back of my hand and everything was going so well,” she continues. “But of course we get to the live demo with Andrew Wilson and Laura Miele in the room, and as soon as I fight a Pride Demon, I get walloped right off the edge and down into a pit and die.”
It’s understandable. The Dragon Age series’ petrifying Pride Demons are some of its toughest enemies, and Veilguard’s reworked, fast-paced combat system might make the game the most difficult and reflex-demanding in the series.
Although Busche herself was unable to keep up with the challenge, it didn’t entirely botch her live demo with EA either. After sadly falling to her doom, she remembers that Wilson “turns and looks at me and goes, ‘Well, at least your load times are great.’” Sounds like a win to me.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard launches on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on October 31.