Corinne Busche, director of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, departs BioWare
Corinne Busche, director of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, departs BioWare
UPDATE 4pm UK: Dragon Age game director Corinne Busche has now confirmed her departure from BioWare and EA in a stateme…
It's tough to express how much of a bummer this whole mess has been. Veilguard is such an embarrassingly lazy, shallow experience.
Placing all of the blame on Busche isn't fair, as she was brought in at the end of the development process, but it was her leadership that prevented the game from getting the extra time it needed.
The creative and design aspects of the game's failure falls primarily on John Epler's lap.
BioWare was so special for such a long time. Watching them fumble the ball directly into the deepest part of the toilet three times in a row feels completely insane.
Fuck EA forever, man.
Bioware has been circling the drain for years, and it's clear the people who made it special have long since left. If I worked there, I would have already been looking for employment elsewhere because this isn't going to last.
A huge part of my youth was spent in BioWare worlds. They're robbing me through pure nostalgia at this point.
Is it a big commercial failure? I noped out of the series after seeing the direction they went with Inquisition, but I haven't really seen any negative press about it. Kinda seems like the article's just trying to stir up some shit
If the discourse I'm seeing on dev/gaming twitter/bluesky is anything to go off of, It hasn't made anywhere near the hoped-for sales target. I think a lot of that has to do with the blowback to its initial appearance as a glorified hero shooter, coupled with the lack of a strong franchise identity, then further compounded by the saturation of disappointing (if not outright disastrous) big-budget drops like Redfall, Forspoken, and Concord creating a wave of fatigue
If the discourse I’m seeing on dev/gaming twitter/bluesky is anything to go off of
It's probably not. Everyone I know that has actually played has found it to be quite fun. It's not perfect, but highly enjoyable 7/10. Most of the negative reviews I have seen are 1 of 3 things:
- It'S tOo WoKe And
- It not a CRPG like Origins
- The writing is not up the same standards as previous Dragon Ages
So the first one can be thrown out. 2 is true, but doesn't make it a bad game. 3 is true for the tutorial portion for sure, but after that things open up. The story isn't amazing, but it suits the gameplay well.
EA hasn't released any sales numbers, so hard to say on that part, but probably not in the multiple millions. From what I can find it is probably selling fine. Not amazing, not bad, but fine. That also could be due to a variety of factors like marketing clarity or using an IP in a way that fans of the IP did not want. It does not necessarily mean the game is a bad game
I quite love the game, but it just doesn't feel like a DA game. Feels like it was crunch-timed to death with people trying hard to save it.
Let's start with the word "blame": Veilguard isn't bad on the whole. It's possibly good, even. I think a lot of the problem with how it's been received is that it's not "Bioware good", which can be a disappontment even for a good game, especially after coming down from Baldur's fucking Gate 3, a once in a generation game.
So maybe if we said "credit" instead, and I think we can say yeah she sort of can take credit for the game. They offered her game director and she took it, and she put her name to it. I know it's a shit position to be in, but if you look at Whedon and the Justice League, he passed the "credit" onto Snyder. Busche could have done the same if she chose, but she chose to put her name to it.
Getting a game which is going off the rails back onto the rails is really tough. Kudos to her.
Bioware has been replaced a person at a time ship of theseus style with lesser quality staff, the magic has long departed and it's just another mediocre studio now trading on a name.