David Gaider, the creator of the Dragon Age franchise, has stated during an interview with PCGamer that he firmly believes the franchise is dead after the commercial failure Dragon Age: The Veilguard back in 2024.
While he feels it’s “unlikely” a new Dagon Age would see the light of day while it remains under BioWare, which itself is owned by Electronic Arts, if there was chance it would return he’d be interested in taking it in a “dark and dangerous” direction.
We were always one breath away from the [current] project being shelved. The thing that happened is that we kept releasing games, and it would sell much better than they thought it should, and it kept surprising them.
If you’d asked me that in the past. I would have said absolutely not. That I’d done my time. I left the Dragon Age team before I left BioWare. After Inquisition came out, I went to Mike Laidlaw and I said, ‘I’ve told all the stories with mages and dragons… that I have in me. And I could keep going, but if I keep working on this, it’s going to become rote, and I think that would be a disservice to the team. So I should step aside, let fresher voices rise’. I don’t know if that was the right decision, but it felt right at the time.
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 that’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.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard launched for PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S in October 2024, and you can read our full review here. In January 2025, EA revealed that the fantasy-RPG “underperformed” financially, that same month a number of Dragon Age team members revealed that had been laid off following restructuring at BioWare.
Gaider was a veteran member of BioWare for 17 at the time of his departure from the company in January 2016. Speaking in a post on BlueSky in April last year that, Gaider stated that the teams behind Dragon Age and Mass Effect didn’t get on, stating they were “run differently, very different cultures, may as well have been two separate studios. And they didn’t get along.”
[Source – PCGamer]