Dragon Age creator thinks the series is probably dead — but he'd take it somewhere dark if given the chance

Dragon Age creator David Gaider believes the series is most likely finished after The Veilguard's poor commercial performance in 2024, but says he'd be open to reviving it if the opportunity ever came his way — and he'd take it somewhere "dark and dangerous".

Speaking to PC Gamer, Gaider said it was "unlikely" another Dragon Age would happen while the franchise remains under EA's control. He reflected on BioWare's precarious position during his tenure there, noting the studio was "always one breath away from the current project being shelved" — and that the series survived only because each release kept outselling EA's expectations. The Veilguard broke that streak badly, falling well short of EA's sales targets when it launched in 2024. EA's leadership publicly suggested the game might have performed better as a live-service title, a claim that rings hollow given the catastrophic failure of BioWare's own live-service game Anthem. Gaider left BioWare in 2016, and had already stepped away from the Dragon Age team before that — after Inquisition shipped, he told creative director Mike Laidlaw he'd told every mage-and-dragon story he had in him and wanted to let fresher voices take over.

BioWare is one of the most storied RPG studios in the industry, responsible for Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. The Veilguard had an extremely long and troubled development — it was originally announced as Dragon Age 4 and went through significant creative overhauls before finally releasing in its current form. Its underperformance, combined with EA's apparent preference for games with ongoing monetisation, has left the franchise's future genuinely uncertain.

Gaider now says his thinking has shifted. If someone handed the Dragon Age franchise back to him, he'd want to do "things that will make people upset" and push it somewhere it hasn't gone before. It's a hypothetical — he's no longer at BioWare and there's no indication EA is looking to hand the IP to anyone — but it's a telling sign that even the series' creator sees its current home as a dead end.