Dragon Age creator David Gaider won't play The Veilguard — says EA 'set them up to fail'

David Gaider, the writer who created the Dragon Age world of Thedas and served as lead writer on Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Inquisition, says he will never play The Veilguard — and his reasons go well beyond personal attachment.

Gaider, who left BioWare in 2016 after more than 15 years at the studio, describes his reluctance in two parts. First, the emotional: "It was my baby," he says, and he simply doesn't want to see what choices the team made with it, "good or bad." Second, the professional: he says he knows "too much about what went on behind the scenes," calling development an "ordeal" in which EA "handicapped" the team from the start. "Electronic Arts really did a number on them in terms of setting them up to fail, honestly," Gaider says. "It didn't deliver on a creative level. It didn't deliver the sales. If it underperforms, you're essentially dead." He'd spend the whole playthrough wincing, he adds — so he's skipping it entirely.

The Veilguard sold reasonably well and earned mostly positive critic reviews, but it never shook a Mixed user rating on Steam and fell short of EA's sales targets. EA CEO Andrew Wilson's public post-mortem blamed the game's underperformance on it not being a live-service title — a diagnosis that drew widespread ridicule from players and critics alike. Gaider's account adds weight to the argument that the real damage was done much earlier, during a troubled development that EA shaped from the beginning. BioWare, once the gold standard for story-driven RPGs, has seen its reputation erode steadily since Mass Effect: Andromeda, and The Veilguard did little to reverse that trajectory.

Since leaving BioWare, Gaider hasn't had an easy run. He pitched a Planescape: Torment sequel at Beamdog — Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast liked it but wouldn't fund it. His studio Summerfall Studios released the musical RPG Stray Gods, which had the misfortune of launching alongside Baldur's Gate 3. "Whatever chance there was of Stray Gods getting noticed disappeared," he says. He's now working on a heist RPG as creative director at Summerfall, with publishers reportedly interested.