EA is predictably learning the wrong lessons from Dragon Age: The Veilguard's failure

[Windows Central]

EA blames the failures of Dragon Age on a lack of shared-world experiences.

EA is predictably learning the wrong lessons from Dragon Age: The Veilguard's failure : Read more

 

[K Shan]

If they want reason for failures maybe look at their decision to remove importing saves. I'm sure that saved them money, but to me the entire thing felt like someone went through and chopped up the story to save money. Hey, if we say Morrigan fused with someone else off camera we don't have to pay the voice actor to do lines 4 different ways like we did in Inquisition and stuff like that.

Same with the choices. I actually like the old telltale games and their fake choices. It can work. But veil guard feels like they had actual choices and then cut them. How many times does it seem like a should you kill this guy or show mercy turn into, should you be say a nice or mean thing before they are arrested ir something like that. And don't get ne started on playing a dwarf and there is just the occasional one line about it and then go right back to someone asking for advice about dreams or explaining something.

Which is sad because there was good here. I liked the combat. And I liked the early game. I actually really liked that people didn't blame you for which city you save. And the characters were all interesting. But it was clearly chopped up and rearranged from a spreed sheet.

 

[fjtorres5591]

Making a successful single player game that stands out in the sea of content we live in is hard; making a successful live action game that engages and holds on to its gamers is way harder.

Single player games can get away with one and done narratives, and many do.

Building single player games that offer endless replayability ala DRAGON AGE ORIGINS or the first MASS EFFECT is very hard and that those games managed it is the reason their brands alone got VEILGUARD and ANDROMEDA their limited success. If it weren't for the Dragon Age name, Veilguard would have quickly been exposed as a one and done action game pretending to be an RPG, and not a particularly good one, combat system aside.

Now add to that challenge the need to retain gamers' interest over years and years and you increase the difficulty exponentially over time. First, you need an engaging setting that allows regular plug in challenges. Second, you need to engage gamer preferences and allow them to express them inside the game world, and finally, as a online multiplayer project it needs to engage the players themselves and foster communities of like-minded players, which is to say it needs a social component, be it guilds, clans or just friends lists.

Miss on any of the three and you're done.

Most live service wannabes fail at the first hurdle, typically launching with a limited playground with a single game type in mind. Which brings in the second challenge, be it PvP or PvE or whatever, gamers will do what gamers want to do, not what developers think they will do.

(Fallout 76 being a classic example; the developers delivered on the first hurdle but failed to consider that the Fallout brand was for games built on narrative, exploration, and experimentation. Instead of a PvP slugfest, it quickly turned into a limited exploration slog peppered with griefers. To their credit, they addressed gamer expectations with NPCs, more narratives, and pacifist mode to neuter griefers, eventually turning the game into a decent sustainable success.)

Now EA has a variety of studios that understand live service, so if their intent is to give them more resources to create more such games, they might be right.

However, if they intend to graft online components on what is by nature a single player experience (MASS EFECT 3) trouble lies that way. Do one or do the other. Hybrids rarely survive because those are two very different audiences.

A final caution: the live service sector is getting crowded.
The bar for success is getting higher and higher and the risks getting bigger with free-to-play lowering the barrier to entry.

Modern games are expensive and take time to assemble but success in live service not only delivers big player counts, it NEEDS them. And it needs them EARLY. Unlike single player, local games, which can bring in revenue over time (FALLOUT 4 is still selling significantly, years later.) live service games are expensive to maintain if the audience numbers fail to materialize.

Taking it all together, EA is still in a better position to pursue live service than, say SONY or SEGA, but they need to be careful how they go about it.

Given how badly VEILGUARD damaged the DRAGON AGE brand, it might actually make sense to take a page out of BETHESDA'S ESO or AMAZON'S NEW WORLD and pivot to a different era of the THEDAS timeline for a purely live service game, even if that fantasy trope is well mined already. They might bring something new to the field. Maybe.

MASS EFFECT still has some brand value in the single player space (pun intended) but again, they have to choose single player or live service. Either should succeed if done right forcing online to the single player is going to hurt.

Another failure is not going to cripple EA (they're in better shape than UBISOFT) but it might limit the derivative revenue potential of MASS EFFECT. There's good video money at risk there.