Dragon Age: The Veilguard's commercial underperformance has had a substantial impact on BioWare, a studio which saw much of its staff laid off or permanently relocated in the wake of The Veilguard's release.
Electronic Arts rather infamously forced the Dragon Age team to make the next instalment of Dragon Age into a live-service title. This project was codenamed Morrison. However, the high-profile failure of Anthem softened EA's resolve, and the publisher allowed BioWare to pivot back to a single-player title: the game that would eventually become Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
However, the team was only given a year and a half to complete the project, meaning they would be forced to re-use a lot of the work that had been invested in the multiplayer iteration of Dragon Age.
The result was an RPG with very limited decision-making, as the core of the game was designed around replaying the same missions with the same characters, rather than progressing the story in any meaningful way.
According to a report from Bloomberg, this resulted in a haphazard end product where the game's major choices were shoehorned in at the last minute to make the game feel more BioWare-y....
