December 4th is Dragon Age Day, the unofficial day fans of BioWare’s fantasy RPG anthology celebrate the series. Last year, the studio earnestly participated. Dragon Age: The Veilguard was only about a month old at the time, so BioWare released the game’s incredible character creator for free and broke down early player choices on social media. This year? There wasn’t a peep from the studio on the matter. Not even a single mention of the franchise that once won “Best Game” at the Game Awards.
If you look at BioWare’s Dragon Age social accounts, the last time the studio used the game’s X account was to repost an ad for The Veilguard on the EA Play subscription service on August 28. The developer’s official blog’s last post was on November 7, celebrating Mass Effect’s equivalent “holiday,” N7 Day, which had a small update on the upcoming fifth game and the Amazon television series. You’ll find no such post about Dragon Age. BioWare has admitted it’s become a one-game studio after massive layoffs back in January, so there is no fifth Dragon Age game in the works, but the silence also casts a shadow on the RPG series’ past.
If you’re only passively paying attention, it might make sense for the studio to not make a big deal about a series without a sequel it’s actively promoting. But for fans and the developers who spent decades working on Dragon Age, it’s another insult to beloved games that seemed to sometimes get the short end of the stick over their troubled development.
In the months since BioWare was gutted of veteran talent and Dragon Age: The Veilguard was thrown under the bus by parent company Electronic Arts, developers have been candid about how the Dragon Age team felt like it wasn’t treated fairly by the broader company. The Veilguard’s messy production saw the game rebooted from a live service no one wanted into a single-player RPG that, miraculously, came out feeling like the character-driven epics BioWare is associated with despite being a decade in the works.
After the game didn’t reach internal projections out of the gate, EA downsized BioWare and has focused the company exclusively on Mass Effect, and implied that The Veilguard may have reached a broader audience if it had stayed a live service game no one asked for.
So perhaps it’s for the best that BioWare didn’t acknowledge Dragon Age this year. If the company had even made a tweet or blog post expressing its love for the world of Thedas and pride in having brought it to life, the messaging would have come across as tone-deaf after the hell its team reportedly went through.
At least this way, the fans and creatives who made these games get the day to themselves, without it being co-opted by a studio and publisher that put it through the development hell it went through. Now, the Dragon Age team gets the final word.