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
Aug. 9, 2024“Don’t try to do a bunch of different things you don’t have the expertize to do”
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A veteran of Mass Effect and Dragon Age with 15 yearsBioWareexperience has defended the work the studio did on its biggest flop, but says thatDragon Age: The Veilguardwill return to the company’s RPG roots.
“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 ofSuicide 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. AndArkane Austin- best known for immersive sims - was shuttered after the failure ofRedfall’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 forMass Effect 5, too.
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Dragon Age: The Veilguard won’t let you control your companions because you can’t handle it: “This is a much higher actions-per-minute game.”
I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.
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