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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Turret_Run on 2025-11-01 12:13:45+00:00.
There is nothing like a sequel to an unexpectedly huge game. The sheer pressure, both financially and culturally, makes it impossible for the game to meet everyone’s expectations. The only thing that can exacerbate that is time and a dedicated fanbase, with corporate pressure to really up that pressure. This pressure can make diamonds, but in most cases, this pressure makes Veilguard.
It’s Always Sunny in Thedas
Dragon Age is the awkward twin to Mass Effect. Where ME took off like a bullet, Dragon age struggled to get the same cultural footing. It was fantasy during the rise of sci-fi, needed time to solidify its story, the graphics were kind of off, and the combat was absolutely terrible. However it kept a fanbase by the sheer quality of its writing, intricate lore, willingness to explore deeper stories of race and political tension, and an amazing cast of characters. It also gave a lot of space for personalization, making the player character feel more yours with a real impact on the world around them, but more importantly on the companions you come to care for. You start building out this idea of how your character lives, acts, and feels, creating this incredible storyline that exists for you. It’s one of those games like the Sims that people who don’t play video games get super into, doing multiple playthroughs to witness alternate outcomes and romances. It was Baldur’s Gate 3 before Baldur’s Gate 3, which makes sense because Bioware made Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2.
It wasn’t until Inquisition that Dragon Age stepped out of Commander Shepard’s shadow, with a graphics boost, a strong set of companions, and combat that could finally be called 7/10. It was a huge hit, pulling in over 150 awards, and selling more copies than the entire Mass Effect Trilogy combined, retroactively shooting the trilogy into stardom. A lot of people went back to play the other games because they wanted to experience the entire journey, including myself. It goes to show that even with years between titles, you can keep deep references that’ll satisfy old fans and bring in new ones.
Boy I hope they remember that!
Cracked Eggpectations
Post-inquisition, everything was gold. Fans had a clear idea of the next game and were excited for it: It would be called Dreadwolf, they’d finally enter Tevinter, the brutal mageocracy, where you’d take on former companion Solas who was attempting to radically alter reality, while working under former companion Dorian to fight for a better Tevinter. The Inquisitor (your character from the last game) would likely have a large role, and this game would serve to bring everything to a grand finale. Everything was in place, but it turns out in the Black city of Redwood, California, TevEAnter mages unleashed a plague. A blight… of live service games.
I regret nothing.
In different dork-speak, around 2015 EA realized that there was a lucrative market in games that, rather than being whole at purchase, updated and expanded over time, with players regularly paying for new content and/or playing 24/7 to unlock everything. However, rather than developing new studios to explore this model, EA forced companies they already owned to pivot, either forcing them to shelve original IP’s to make something they could monetize, or demanding they integrate live service aspects into established games. This went terribly. EA would sink massive amounts of money into these, meaning the games would need to be huge hits, but the market could only sustain a handful of games at that caliber. This lead to massive financial failures that caused larger layoffs, further monopolization of intellectual properties, and a flood of microtransactions, battlepasses, whatever the fuck this mess is and a concept I can only call “Destinyfication” where every game is also a looter shooter, both because it makes game design simpler and it allows for plenty of random paywalls ( *cough* Assassins Creed *cough*).
EA was trying its damndest to find a method to shove a shitty multiplayer dragon age 4. When they couldn’t, EA cancelled development, bringing it back a year later with the goal of turning it into an MMO, using their new development Anthem as inspiration. Thankfully Anthem ate shit and the success of Star-wars Jedi Survivor reminded EA some people like games that are complete when you purchase them, and EA let them go back to single player, giving them 18 months to make a finished product. Turning an MMO into an award winning single player game was already a colossal task, but they would also be doing this without most of Dragon Age’s veteran developers. Much of the staff who’d worked on the previous games had left or been laid off after the initial cancellation, including creative director Mike Laidlaw, Mark Kirby, who’s credited as the mind behind Varric and the Quinari, and executive producer Mark Darrah, though he would return during the last year of development. The replacements didn’t have the same connection to the series, seeing it more as a chance to make their mark which has become more and more apparent.
In the year prior to release, Bioware announced the game’s name was changed from Dreadwolf to Veilguard , Dreadwolf being a specific reference to Solas. The details given in interviews emphasized the game was a “soft reboot” and that past characters would be there but they’d be few and take more passive roles to give your new PC Rook space to shine through the new factions they had created or overhauled. . One of the best examples of this new era came from an SDCC video, where veteran devs and two newer VA’s did a smash or pass with various characters. One of them was Zevran, a fan favorite who the newbies don’t seem to recognize. This was particularly weird as he’s the only notable character related to the Antivan Crows, one of the factions they had been hyping up.
The loss of time also meant there was now real competition. Inquisition had been the hunger games of “D&D if you don’t have friends” band of bisexual misfits out to save the world” genre, inspiring a flood of games with the same idea but worked out combat. Where in the 2010s there were only a handful of games that could begin to match Inquisition in depth and scope, the 2020s brought year after year of gamechanging rpg’s, and only half of them were Skyrim remasters. 2024 had Baldur’s gate 3 in the middle of its victory lap, the release of Dragons Dogma 2 and Metaphor: ReFantazio, and Expedition 33 waiting in the wings to make us finally like the French.
Lastly was the culture problem. The 2020s saw the resurrection of the gamergate movement, in the form of alt-right grifters pretending to be longtime fans of games and claiming they were doomed because of things that had been there since the beginning. In reality they don’t really matter, they just screech on twitter hoping to be the next Fucking pronouns guy and claim victory, either because an indie game they consider woke didn’t sell a trillion copies or that in reality, or the game they said was woke 10 minutes ago isn’t actually woke because there’s a woman they feel alright masturbating to. In Dragon Age’s case, they actually were a benefit. When a devlog showed off that you’d have the ability to give your character top surgery scars, they went ballistic. However, while the chuds pretended their lives had any significance, true fans asked a real question: Where the fuck was the world state?
Optional Sidequest: My name is Cullen. Cullen…
One last aside before I get to the meat.
While Solas was the most well known romance of Dragon age Inquisition, it wasn’t actually the most popular, at least if we go by Ao3 fics. That title goes to Cullen Rutherford, a templar military commander and one of your advisors in Inquisition. A perfect example of how people came to love inquisition and then played the other games, Cullen spent the first two games a horny racist who looked like a thumb, then Inquisition Neville’d the shit outta him and his personality. Fans went gaga over him and vicariously his voice actor, Greg Ellis.
This gave Greg an opportunity. He could treat this like any other role and just hope it gives him a resume boost, or he could enter a pantheon of c-z list celebs who worked out how to milk one random role they had to a moderate condo in LA and a retrospective podcast. He chose the latter, dubbing his fans Cullenites (ignoring the fact he also voiced Bi terrorist king Anders), and praying nobody remembered what kind of person Cullen was in the first two games.
The problem is while he was fine taking tumblr women money, he was more of a twitter guy. And I mean modern Twitter. He was an ardent men’s right advocate, brown nosing fa…
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