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.

 

[GraniteStateColin]

I thought the article hit this well -- a good game will be successful. And "good" is independent of whether or not it's a multiplayer game.

@fjtorres5591 described the business side of this perfectly. I'd just add that CDPR is another solid example of successful single player successes in the RPG space (my personal favorite developer these days).

My own preference is purely single player, with some occasional co-op or PvP (typically LAN-based) with my immediate family. My favorite games since 1st person 3D gaming has existed are KOTOR (sort of predates viable 1st person), Elder Scrolls 3-5, the Bioshocks, Fallout 3 & 4, Witcher 3 (in spite of only offering 3rd person, dislike that about it), Cyberpunk 2077, and single-player BG3, but wish it had a first-person view and a free camera -- hate that I can't look up and generally dislike 3rd person. I have zero interest in playing a game with strangers. I know millions of others love the multiplayer experience. I suspect there's a sliding scale of people who prefer one over the other and in the middle are people open to either, provided it's done well.

I did like Dragon Age: Inquisition (the only one of the series I played at length), but it wasn't open-world enough for me, felt a bit too linear compared to the other games I listed. I did like the character development and relationships a lot though. But lack of a first-person view combined with the less-open world was enough to put me off the game eventually.

 

[fjtorres5591]

I thought the article hit this well -- a good game will be successful. And "good" is independent of whether or not it's a multiplayer game.

@fjtorres5591 described the business side of this perfectly. I'd just add that CDPR is another solid example of successful single player successes in the RPG space (my personal favorite developer these days).

My own preference is purely single player, with some occasional co-op or PvP (typically LAN-based) with my immediate family. My favorite games since 1st person 3D gaming has existed are KOTOR (sort of predates viable 1st person), Elder Scrolls 3-5, the Bioshocks, Fallout 3 & 4, Witcher 3 (in spite of only offering 3rd person, dislike that about it), Cyberpunk 2077, and single-player BG3, but wish it had a first-person view and a free camera -- hate that I can't look up and generally dislike 3rd person. I have zero interest in playing a game with strangers. I know millions of others love the multiplayer experience. I suspect there's a sliding scale of people who prefer one over the other and in the middle are people open to either, provided it's done well.

I did like Dragon Age: Inquisition (the only one of the series I played at length), but it wasn't open-world enough for me, felt a bit too linear compared to the other games I listed. I did like the character development and relationships a lot though. But lack of a first-person view combined with the less-open world was enough to put me off the game eventually.

Sounds like you'll like AVOWED: like the BETHESDA RPGs it lets you choose first or third.

I, too prefer first person for the added immersion. But I forgave the Bioware games because of the the solid writing, even though the forced online component of MASS EFFECT 3 really, really ticked me off. ME2 online at least had the decency of being tacked on.

If you must have a live service sideline, do it the way HALO and COD do it, as a separate product, preferably free to play with no impact on campaign

CDPR and WARHORSE clearly understand what EA and Sony don't seem to grasp: live service games demand a different skillset and writing mindset of the developers than single player. Single player requires the writers to figure out everything the player might do within the game whereas live-action requires figuring out what the game and other players might do to the player.

BETHESDA uses an entirely different studio for live service whereas EA and Sony were forcing talented single player teams to work a different paradigm. Not sure about RARE and SEA OF THIEVES but I doubt the folks behind the likes of KAMEO and VIVA PIÑATA are the same people behind SOT.

I get that the staff changes while the studio name remains but there is such a thing as corporate culture and organization memory that defines business unit operations. And EA does not seem to have been terribly open to the Bioware culture left behind by the founders. Sometimes it seems like all they wanted was the brand.

It's never been the same after the founders left.

 

[GraniteStateColin]

Sounds like you'll like AVOWED: like the BETHESDA RPGs it lets you choose first or third.

I, too prefer first person for the added immersion. But I forgave the Bioware games because of the the solid writing, even though the forced online component of MASS EFFECT 3 really, really ticked me off. ME2 online at least had the decency of being tacked on.

If you must have a live service sideline, do it the way HALO and COD do it, as a separate product, preferably free to play with no impact on campaign

CDPR and WARHORSE clearly understand what EA and Sony don't seem to grasp: live service games demand a different skillset and writing mindset of the developers than single player. Single player requires the writers to figure out everything the player might do within the game whereas live-action requires figuring out what the game and other players might do to the player.

BETHESDA uses an entirely different studio for live service whereas EA and Sony were forcing talented single player teams to work a different paradigm. Not sure about RARE and SEA OF THIEVES but I doubt the folks behind the likes of KAMEO and VIVA PIÑATA are the same people behind SOT.

I get that the staff changes while the studio name remains but there is such a thing as corporate culture and organization memory that defines business unit operations. And EA does not seem to have been terribly open to the Bioware culture left behind by the founders. Sometimes it seems like all they wanted was the brand.

It's never been the same after the founders left.

Thanks! I hope I'll like Avowed. I'm not committed to trying it yet for 2 reasons: 1) the developers have said it's not fully open world, but rather open levels, that's sort of what I didn't like about Dragon Age: Inquisition, and 2) they've also said it's a smaller game like Outer Worlds. But if the reviews and feedback are good enough, and I'm not buried in other games, I'll play it.

Currently fairly early in BG3. After that, I need to go back and finish Starfield (I set it aside hoping they'd make improvements). I know I'll be living in The Witcher 4 and Elder Scrolls 6 when those come out, and with limited play time each week and being a completionist, these big games typically take me more than a year to play through.

Both of those 2 negatives on Avowed for me make the game more appealing to other players, so I have zero criticism of the studio for those choices. It's just my personal preference to play in big open world RPG's like Witcher 3, all the mainline Bethesda games, Cyberpunk 2077, etc. I'd probably have RDR2 (and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2) on the list, but I like a little magic or sci-fi in my games (maybe more important, for my family to support my playing them, they need that -- I'm lucky that they like to watch me play games on console, but that also somewhat limits my play to games they want to watch).

 

[fjtorres5591]

Open zone is a BioWare trademark going back to their golden age.
It is also a tradeoff from the graphics engine to get top performance.
Bethesda takes a lot of flack over creation engine but it's what enables the seamless transition from cell to cell to make open world work. Starfield is a good example of what it takes to make open world planets work: mostly empty, procedurally decorated vast surfaces punctuated with a handful of generic/standard points of interest. Until AI gets good enough to generate contextual points of interest those will be the two option for first person RPGs.

Open zone can work with well designed stages so the walls aren't visible.
Islands, mountains, walled cities lend themselves to isolated, rich stages. And by all reports the Avowed stages are both very large and rich in objects as well as visually complex.

I'm on game pass and I've been killing time in Fallout 4 while waiting for Avowed. Hopefully the wait will be worth it. If not... well, I'll find something else. No added cost from testing it.