David Gaider Explains How BioWare Could Salvage Dragon Age After Veilguard Mishap
Dragon Age: The Veilguard landed as a miss, and the reasoning behind it is grimly familiar: senior leadership pushed for a live-service direction, then shifted course partway through development and asked BioWare to salvage a single-player RPG out of what had become a misguided MMO-style project. The fallout was severe—BioWare was effectively stripped for parts, with its remaining effort redirected toward the next Mass Effect. In plain terms, Dragon Age got put down.
Even so, there’s been ongoing chatter that Richard Garriott could end up with the copyright for Ultima, along with other older BioWare franchises—such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur’s Gate—finding new homes. That led PC Gamer to put a pointed scenario to series creator David Gaider: what happens if the rights come back?
Gaider didn’t dodge the question. “If you’d asked me that in the past, I would have said absolutely not. That I’d done my time,” he said. “But I do like a challenge. So if, out of some weird alignment of the stars, somebody handed the Dragon Age franchise back to me and said, ‘Breathe the life back into this baby’? That’d be a tough one, but I think it’d be an interesting thing to do. To go back to the basics of what made Dragon Age appeal to so many people in the first place. And go somewhere dark and dangerous, and do things that will make people upset. I think that’s what I would want to do with it.”
He also argued that the strongest takeaway from Dragon Age: Origins wasn’t just its story—it was how deeply and concretely it made characters feel. Gaider believes future entries should lean into that, rather than attempting to craft a “broadly acceptable” follow-up aimed at maximum mainstream comfort. His frustration was aimed at the idea of designing for a diluted audience: “If you’re not making a game for the audience that loves those games, you’re trying to make this game acceptable to some action gamer who, what, doesn’t like difficulty? Who is that?”
On the other hand…
It’s hard not to imagine how thrilling it would be to see David Gaider return with a Dragon Age that mirrors the tougher, darker fantasy tone many players associate with Origins—especially after wrestling through The Veilguard’s brand of humor that leans toward a smoother, less abrasive vibe. Still, the situation isn’t as straightforward as “bring it back and it’s fixed.”
Gaider previously stated that the franchise doesn’t feel like a good fit for EA.
In the same discussion, he voiced disappointment with how the industry operates. As he put it, “nobody wants to actually commit to a project unless they think it’s a sure thing,” and that mindset tends to funnel investment toward safe bets—existing IPs, sequels, and similar proven concepts. New concepts, he said, struggle to get funded. He pointed to his own heist RPG as an example, explaining that the team has had to expand it in hopes that a publisher would take notice. So while returning to Dragon Age and rebooting it with a more grounded, Origins-style approach sounds like exactly what the franchise needs, Gaider’s perspective suggests it also collides directly with what’s wrong with the current industry.
Even so, there’s a counterexample. Larian Studios demonstrated that reviving a legacy property—when paired with meaningful creative freedom—can energize the market. Baldur’s Gate 3 raised expectations for RPGs in a way that’s unlikely to be matched soon. Yet based on the interview’s tone, Gaider’s personal creative focus points elsewhere. “Oh, what I wouldn’t give to work on Owlcat’s The Expanse game,” he said. “The Expanse is right in there with my core interests. I’ve watched the show a few times, I’ve read the books. That’d be great. If I could find something that lit a fire under me, that’d be the ideal.”
