'Veilguard is 4 games stitched together', says ex-BioWare lead Mark Darrah, and it might've been better to 'shut the project down completely' around 2017

Mark Darrah's tell-all with YouTuber MrMattyPlays has been doing the rounds—including on the good site PC Gamer—and for great reason. The former BioWare producer seems to've hit a point where he's happy to simply divulge exactly what (he believes) went wrong with BioWare, the dozen little disasters that led to the, at the moment, death of Dragon Age.

In the video below (starting at around 39 minutes), Darrah says he believes Veilguard was "four games stitched together, and you can really see the stitching," a shot before the absolute chaster that is: "assuming that EA was gonna prioritise Anthem over Dragon Age … the one single act that could've made a massive difference to Veilguard would've been to shut the project down completely when I moved on to Anthem."

For context, Darrah moved on to Anthem proper in 2017 when he took over as executive producer, roughly two years after The Veilguard, then called Dreadwolf, entered development.

It's not a statement made with malice—rather, Darrah pins its confused identity on its false-start origins. The Veilguard was initially conceived as a live service game. "It's carrying a lot of the weight of being that live-service game, running without an executive producer, [and] it's just picked up a lot of stuff that's still in there … in part because it was always a year and a half away from [being shipped]."

Veilguard, which he later dubs a "zombie" project, was "always in this constant state of being too close to its ship-date to completely retool."

This basically tracks with what Darrah says earlier in the interview—that EA's games tend to get better when a studio is making those games, and only those games. He admits that this strategy could've spelt the doom of the series earlier, but it'd have been a risk worth taking.

"Now there's a non-zero chance that Anthem ships, and we go to try to start the Dragon Age up from a cold start, and EA goes 'no, we don't want it anymore'. Maybe you don't get a Dragon Age 4 at all in that world."

However, if EA did bite post-Anthem, then "you're not carrying that baggage in that case … A lot of that is multiplayer, live-service stuff—and it was worked away, it was worked on—but that was the base."

Darrah also has a lot to say about The Veilguard's long, downright tortured development—using the Thor movies (The Dark World, Ragnarok, and Love and Thunder) as prime examples: "Dark World came out right around Inquisition, and people were like 'ugh'. And Ragnarok came out early in Dragon Age 4's development—so that was like, the height of the love with this brighter, quippier tonal landscape from traditionally very dark IPs."

Just to pin up some more points on this timeline, Thor: Ragnarok came out in 2017, two years after The Veilguard started development.

"But we had a lot of years to go, and if you continue down Thor, Love and Thunder comes out before Veilguard ships, as well … We can pretty much use Thor as the 'we love this [comedic tone]' to 'we hate this with a burning passion'." In case you missed Love and Thunder—well, you didn't really miss much. It is considered thoroughly mid.

Darrah concludes: "The game was in development for so long, it's out of its place and time in terms of its tone."

He then goes on to absolutely vindicate our own Fraser Brown, who called this very same shot back when the game arrived: "It wasn't Marvel on purpose, but it was drawing from that zeitgeist. It was very Marvel-y, and it also was living with the consequences of people not really wanting that anymore."

Or, in other words, the trailer was "a better trailer in 2020 than it was in 2024."