Electronic Arts boss Andrew Wilson praises the success and quality of Dragon Age: The Veilguard at an investor conference. This is a return to BioWare’s old form. At the same time, he uses the opportunity to point out the weaknesses of the SF-MMO Anthem, which was released in 2019 and flopped.
This is what Wilson says about Dragon Age: The Veilguard: On October 29th, Electronic Arts had its quarterly call with investors and presented quarterly figures for the second quarter of 2025. Wilson praised the quality of Dragon Age to investors. The Veilguard to:
For BioWare, Dragon Age is a return to the things that made the studio great.
The role-playing game represents a decisive turning point: BioWare has now returned to developing “typical BioWare” games and has found its way back to BioWare’s old strength.
The new game would show that BioWare has come back together around what made BioWare a studio that fans love, with a brand that fans love.
Wilson resorts to superlatives: It is an “incredibly rich world, with incredibly nuanced characters, a truly powerful narrative about camaraderie, friendship and relationships, with decisions that influence gameplay.”
Dragon Age: The Veilguard unleashes the dragon in the official launch trailer
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Anthem was a puzzle whose pieces never came together
What does he say about Anthem? Wilson only speaks about the MMO shooter Anthem, which was so hyped by EA in 2019 and then dropped, as a negative example of how it doesn’t work.
Anthem was the game that people remember when they think of games that didn’t really live up to what a BioWare game should be.
Bioware did something with Anthem that was “very, very different” than what people normally imagine a BioWare game to be.
The shooter really used different mechanics and modalities, which then took place in a BioWare world. But “the pieces of the puzzle would never have quite come together, at least not in the way BioWare had hoped.”
Anthem was first hyped and then dropped by EA
Why does this seem strange? Anthem was hyped by EA before release and described as a game for 10 years. But then Anthem was quickly dropped and left out of financial reports while new darlings like Apex Legends were praised.
Ultimately, fans of the game, of which there were many, had hoped that EA would give the SF MMO a second chance and let the team at BioWare in Austin, Texas develop an “Anthem 2.0”. But EA decided in February 2021 to abandon these revival attempts after a year, effectively abandoning the “game for 10 years” after just a few months.
Other studios, such as Bethesda with The Elder Scrolls Online, Square Enix with Final Fantasy XIV or Ubisoft with Ghost Recon, were willing to invest a lot of resources in live service games that had a difficult start. These games got significantly better over the years. EA failed to do this with Anthem and deliberately focused its resources on other games such as FIFA, The Sims, Apex Legends or Dragon Age. The fact that now, 5 years after disappointing the fans so much, Anthem has to suffer again after being treated so neglectfully by EA is unfair: Anthem is dead – the short life and long death of EA’s “next big thing”