Dragon Age: The Veilguard - Interview

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Eurogamer interviewed game director Corinne Busche, and series creative director John Epler about Dragon Age: The Veilguard:

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

The reaction, the making of, and what comes next.

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.

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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.

John Epler: I'd say for me probably relief was definitely at the top of my list. I've been on the project for a very long time and there were definitely times in development where, especially early on, it felt like this day would never come. So the fact that it came out felt amazing.

I also thought it was interesting reading the reviews to see just the variety of what people were engaging with, what people were bouncing off of, maybe, and pulling some of that feedback early on. Because again, as Corinne says, we're so close to the game, so close to the project that it's hard to take that step back and look at it through that lens. So seeing other people look at it through that lens was really great.

To Corinne's other point: curiosity definitely there too. But for me: relief that it's out, relief that the reviews were coming in fairly well, and excitement for fans to get their hands on it and to start to see how they were going to react to it.

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