In a new interview, the original Dragon Age creator, David Gaider, said that he would never even touch Dragon Age: The Veilguard. This latest entry in the franchise will probably end up being the last after the game garnered a lot more controversy than even EA could handle. Gaider is one of the pioneers of “Old Bioware,” having worked on Baldur’s Gate 2 spin-offs Throne of Baal and Shadows of Amn, as well as Neverwinter Nights and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. He then went on to invent the world of Thedas, the primary setting for the whole of Dragon Age, and he worked as a lead writer on three titles: Origins, 2, and Inquisition. But as he said to PC Gamer, he’ll never touch The Veilguard, because Dragon Age was “his baby” and he could not bear to see what others had done with it, no matter what. The Veilguard was a flop through and through. Image via EA “Whether it was successful or not, it was always going to make different choices than I would have made for it,” Gaider explained. “The team took it, and they did their own version of it, and I don’t really want to see what’s changed. It’s totally selfish. I just don’t want to see what they’ve done with my baby, good or bad.” And I genuinely understand him. Dragon Age went from a classic fantasy tale with heavy moral implications and a detailed, realistic medieval world to… whatever The Veilguard was. The latter was basically a playground for modern political messaging to take stage and make use of a wildly popular franchise to tell its player base what they should think, and not even subtly. There were no moral conundrums, no real stakes, and nothing truly interesting in the game to hook you into the narrative. It was all just really, really bland. But the quality of the game itself doesn’t seem to be one of the primary reasons Gaider avoided it. It largely had to do with EA itself and its apparently handicapping the devs from the get-go. “Electronic Arts really did a number on them in terms of setting them up to fail, honestly. From everything I’ve been told about the game, it seems like that’s exactly what happened,” he said. The game wasn’t a creative success, Gaider added, and it did not meet sales expectations, which he says is the end-all be-all of EA’s business model. If a game fails to reach a fixed, arbitrary number of sales, it is considered a flop, and “you’re essentially dead” in the publisher’s eyes. With that being the case, BioWare is likely on thin ice at the moment. It hasn’t made a hit in well over a decade, and its best release was a remastered collection of its actually best games, so I really hope the studio learned from its past mistakes and ends up proving to us that they’ve still got it. I’m not holding my breath, though. 0The post Dragon Age creator says he’ll never play Veilguard: ‘I just don’t want to see what they’ve done with my baby’ appeared first on Destructoid.