Dragon Age Veilguard's director has left EA. The real problem with the game: It wasn't for anyone.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard's director is leaving EA.

Obviously the discourse around the game has been ugly, with a lot of it focused around the anti-woke movement screeching with anger because it's not a game about straight white guys, for straight white guys, by straight white guys, as they think all games should be.

Obviously I don't buy into the anti-woke narrative, but there is an actual critique of the game that I think feels related but really isn't. And that's that they made a game with no natural audience.

At first blush Veilguard doesn't seem like a bad idea for a game. It's an action RPG with a fun, lighter, tone and colorful characters. That's not a formula that's led to a ton of hits from Western developers in the past (in many ways Veilguard seems like a Western take on modern action JRPGs) but it fuses elements of the popular hero shooter genre into the action RPG genre and there's no reason why that shouldn't work. The game has a Metacritic rating of 82, which is not amazing but is not far below Inquisition's 85, and that game sold many times more copies than Veilguard has so far (despite already seeing deep discounts.) The game was not a creative disaster like so many doomed recent projects, but it shares problematic elements with at least one of them. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

In the case of both Veilguard and Suicide Squad we saw teams taking a popular and well-regarded series and going in a different direction both tonally and gameplay-wise from prior entries. Suicide Squad was more extreme, setting the next game in the Arkham universe in a colorful Metropolis and making it a wacky live service co-op shooter, but Veilguard similarly lightened the tone and changed the mechanics. In both cases this was a return to the universe after almost a decade between main-line sequels.

I'd argue that this is just too much to change while remaining part of a series.

Suicide Squad at least had the advantage of not relying too heavily on Arkham series lore, being more of a general DC world game, but because Dragon Age is a video game property first and doesn't have the kind of breadth of tone and subject matter that DC properties do, its potential audience as a Dragon Age sequel was much more limited in their interests. Dragon Age fans like a certain type of game and a certain tone, and while each Dragon Age game has had mechanical and tonal differences, Veilguard represented a departure from what was seen as the core of the series.

Meanwhile people without experience in the series were turned off by the weight of it being an entry in a long running franchise. People think that sequels always do better than the first game or movie but that's frequently not the case because a lot of people don't want to start in the middle of the story. Even moreso today when lore is seen as more important than ever, onboarding new fans can be difficult. It's not impossible, but making sequels that appeal to fans new and old can be very difficult. This is especially true when it's the first game in a series after a long break, where the fanbase has high expectations.

As someone who wasn't fully done with prior Dragon Age games before Veilguard came out it did not seem like a great jumping on point for me, so I passed despite the fact that I think I would enjoy the game and may eventually play it, while simultaneously many old fans did not feel well served by it and accused it of retconning lore and "not being Dragon Age."

When a game is not for current fans and also doesn't feel approachable by new fans it's DOA, and that's what seems to have happened to Veilguard.

This has nothing to do with the objective content of the game. If this had been a new IP with exactly the same tone and type of content, I think it might have done better. Or at least done the same without the expectations that came from the Dragon Age IP.

This is not a problem unique to Veilguard. This has happened before with games like Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, where a game that could have been well received ended up as a flop because the game they made did not match the franchise's audience. Metal Gear Survive could be another example, though by all accounts that game just wasn't good. There have been some successful transformations, like Dynasty Warriors going from a fighting game to Musou, or Assassin's Creed becoming a full on RPG, but those retained the tone and some of the ideas of the prior games. Veilguard just changed too much on an already fragile franchise.

I wish we could have these kinds of conversations without getting the "anti-woke" crowd crowing about how a game failed because it had gay people or women in it. That's obviously not true, and plenty of games with "woke" content have done extremely well in recent years. I don't expect the switch to a female protagonist for Ghost of Yotei to cause that franchise any harm. But there is something to be said for giving fans what they want, or, if you're going to try something new admitting that's what you're doing and not trying to shoehorn it into a pre-existing narrative. Not every IP needs to last forever and not every game needs to attach to a pre-existing property. Sometimes by trying to play it safe you end up with a square peg in a round hole, and it just doesn't fit.