The context behind how games are made is often ignored. And maybe it should be. I remember whenSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice Leaguecrashed and burned earlier this year, a fair few people were quick to point out that the developers had, at least, tried.
BeingRocksteadyseemed to earn them the benefit of the doubt. I argued, like Charles Bukowski’s gravestone, thattrying did not matter. I still feel that way. But the context aroundDragon Age: The Veilguardis a force for good too powerful to ignore.
The thing with Suicide Squad was that people desperately wanted the team to get a do-over, and I get it.Studios should not be closed or face mass layoffs after every game. Suicide Squad seemed doomed from the start because it was far too late for the live-service trend, and arrived unprepared for the post-launch work required to stick around, while also serving up a lacklustre campaign. Being the catalyst for theSweet Baby Inc./GamerGate 2.0 culture war could not have been foreseen- the rest of the issues could. How do I know?Dragon Agesaw them.
Dragon Age Came Back From The Live-Service Brink
A defining element of 2024 in gaming has been high profile live-service failures. Suicide Squad is an obvious example, but that fared far better thanConcord.MultiVersusfinally returned to aonce-eager fanbase that quickly turned on it, andThe Day Beforesuffered a highly public embarrassment as the rug was pulled from under it. Dragon Age: The Veilguard could have been on this list.
Dragon Age 4 (whether it would have retained the original Dreadwolf subtitle or a different one entirely) was originally envisioned as a multiplayer game. Everyone is quick to point toAnthem, the first major failure of the live-service era, but I can understand whyBioWarefelt it had one more in it.Mass Effect 3’smultiplayer was excellent, and evenInquisition’shad charm.Andromedacan go on the Anthem heap, but even those two had solid gameplay ideas. They just had a poor gameplay loop, repeated bugs, and dull grinding.
The Veilguard is not a perfect game, but it is a solid one. Some find it good, some find it great. Some are disappointed by it, but it has a far better hit rate than Suicide Squad or Concord ever did. It is proof that you can come back from the brink. Live-service games often seemed destined to fail, but the solution might be missing the forest for the trees - the answer is ‘don’t be a live-service game’.
Suicide Squad’s issues are not skin deep, but a complete revamp much earlier in the development cycle that made the most of the killer premise without the rushed story bundled into repetitive live-shooter trappings could have saved it. If Rocksteady had seen the proof in The Veilguard’s pudding, it might have.
There are still traces of The Veilguard’s multiplayer structure in the finished game. The action power wheel, the more linear maps, the self-contained combat arenas and tiered loot system. We can link a lot of the existing characters to the concept art forInquisition’smultiplayer (though, unfortunately, no Anders), and can even suggest the reason these characters feel like shallow tropes in the beginning is because they are. They didn’t need complex backstories that invited side quests because they were supposed to offer digestible, hero-shooter codex entries, not hours-long quests. Even the fact we only visit some locations once speaks to a ‘well, we have most of this map made’ retrofitting around the game’s convoluted development.
Has The Live-Service Bubble Finally Burst?
Many onlookers could see that live-service was the path to failure for a long time. Audiences knew it. Journalists knew it. Many developers knew it. But executives knew something different. They knew that if it succeeded, if just one of the ten that the studio was working on became aFortnite-sized hit, it covered the others. Who cares if hundreds of people had to be laid off - eventually, a golden goose would be found.
Finally, executives seem to have realised that there is no golden goose, and all that awaits are goose entrails all over your hands. Sony and Warner Bros., the architects of Concord and Suicide Squad (andthe cancelled The Last of Us game, and thecancelled London Studio game, and MultiVersus, and many more),have bothpubliclystepped back from live-service titles. For Warner Bros., this comes just a few months after doubling down on them, so we’ll see how long it lasts.
But with Dragon Age: The Veilguard proving it is possible to make a viable video game from the bones of a live-service flop without being held back, we may see more studios that otherwise felt it was too late to pivot finally pull the trigger. There are games being made now that are already out of date, and everyone working on them knows it. But what can you do when you’re this far along? The Veilguard may be the excuse teams need to finally change lanes. If it does, that is a powerful legacy that outweighs anything else The Veilguard may be remembered for.
