The big Dragon Age: The Veilguard post-release interview: "It was never going to match the Dragon Age 4 in people's minds"

There’s a line at the beginning of the Dragon Age: The Veilguard art book, in an introduction by art director Matt Rhodes, where he says there was more artwork created for The Veilguard than all other Dragon Age games combined – and possibly more than the Mass Effect trilogy combined as well. Extraordinary! But then, the fourth Dragon Age game project has been extraordinary for BioWare in many ways.

It’s been in development one way or another for roughly a decade, far longer than any other game BioWare has worked on. The entire Mass Effect trilogy was released in half that time, and BioWare made a whole persistent online world for Star Wars: The Old Republic in half that time. Dragon Age 4 is a project that’s had three major revisions, surviving a foray into live-service multiplayer at one point. That it should eventually emerge as a single-player role-playing game at the end of it feels like a minor miracle. And now here, finally, the game is.

But a month after a release, there’s uncertainty around the game and series. Sales have been only okay – “solid” to use EA’s term – and while some people have celebrated it as a return to form for BioWare, others have been critical of the direction the series has been taken in. It’s as though there’s a faultline dividing opinion on the game, and you’re either on one side or the other of it. I don’t know that I’ve seen the reaction to a BioWare game be as divided.

So where does Dragon Age go from here, and how does BioWare feel about it? As the dust settles, I sit down with two people at the heart of the project – game director Corinne Busche, and series creative director John Epler – for a chat. We talk about the reaction to the game, the making of it, and what, if anything, comes next. Note that there’s one major spoiler in here as pertains to the character Varric, and you may consider some other points of conversation slightly spoilery too.

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Eurogamer: We’re roughly a month after launch now so some of the dust and nerves have settled. How did you find the launch period as people’s opinions and reviews were rolling in?

Corinne Busche: The biggest thing I was feeling was a sense of curiosity. We get so close to the work – we’re focused on the day-to-day of it – and of course we’re playing and we’re mindful of the overall experience. We know what we’ve got. But there’s something, even when you go through preview events, or you have smaller hands-on demos – there’s nothing quite like players getting it in their hands, or reviewers playing through the game for the first time. You’re always curious, right. Of course, we’ve poured a lot of ourselves into the game, but I find, for myself, a sense of trying to let go of the personal investment and just step back and absorb what everyone else then has to say about the game experience. So for me it’s curiosity.