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After 10 years of waiting, fans of Edmonton-based video game developer BioWare can rejoice as the studio has released its newest game in the Dragon Age franchise.

Dragon Age: The Veilkeeper, which launched on Thursday for PS5, Xbox Series adventure takes players back to the kingdom of Thedas, where they will embark on an urgent and dangerous quest to stop evil elven gods from corrupting and dominating the world.

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For creative director and studio veteran John Epler, The Veilguard represents a long-awaited break for the studio, which kept details of the game closely guarded until they were revealed at a preview event in September.

“This is definitely a milestone for us,” Epler said. “We have gone through many difficult challenges over the past few years, especially during the pandemic, and we are all both very excited and nervous about getting the game back into the hands of players and bringing them back to Thedas .”

The Blessing and Curse of “BioWare Magic”

For BioWare, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is not only a new game but an opportunity for the studio to restore a somewhat tarnished reputation. The studio was once considered an industry leader in creating ambitious, genre-defining role-playing games, including Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect.

All this changed after the launch of Anthem. It was the studio’s second consecutive critical and commercial failure, the first being Mass Effect: Andromeda, which was criticized for its technical issues, visual issues, outdated character models, shallow characterization, and world-building.

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This double setback has led many people to wonder what happened to the once benchmark studio and the notion of “BioWare Magic”. a term that developers at BioWare coined to describe how a game’s development challenges would magically come together in its final hours.

This question was answered in a YouTube video in 2022 by Mark Darrahformer executive director of Dragon Age, who revealed that the term was used internally to justify periods of intense “crisis”, where studios force employees to work overtime, seven days a week, during the final weeks or even the last few months of game development.

“That’s not how I do things,” said Garry McKay, BioWare’s chief executive. McKay has been with the studio for five years and wasn’t around during the “BioWare Magic” period, but he says the studio has completely changed its process to avoid crises.

“This kind of problem happens when you don’t have a clear vision or communicate it well to your team. I like to have a fully playable version of a game, start to finish, as soon as possible, so that we all know that we are working on the same vision, that we are going in the same direction.

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Epler says that while there’s a lot of pressure for the game to succeed, his team has done a great job staying focused on proving that BioWare is still the gold standard for creating game worlds and characters that people want to be involved. with.

“We’ve been working hard to put the focus back on what BioWare does best, what our fans have always loved, which is creating games with highly diverse, detailed worlds and deep characters,” he said. Epler said.

“We want to remind people of the magic of BioWare as a studio.”

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is now available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.

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