Following the layoffs that weren’t called layoffs by EA and BioWare in the company’s announcement of downsizing at the studio which recently released Dragon Age: The Veilguard, one of the game’s writers has shared a message for fans concerned about the series’ future.
Sheryl Chee was one of the ex-BioWare staff moved over the Motive Studio as part of the changes BioWare general manager Gary McKay wrote are designed to create “a more agile, focused studio that produces unforgettable RPGs” – which is definitely words – as it shifts to working on Mass Effect 5.
Posting on BlueSky (thanks, GamesRadar), they’ve addressed DA fans who’re understandably feeling really downbeat about the possibility of getting more of the series going forwards, given huge swaths of the folks who worked on Veilguard and multiple earilrer entries in the case of some are now no longer working at BioWare.
“So a cool French woman dropped a cool quote from Camus on me today: ‘In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.’ (I mean, who does resistance like the French, right?),” Chee wrote in a thread responding to a fan who’d posted: “Dragon Age dying at the same time as my country rockets to fascism doesn’t feel like a coincidence.”
But DA isn’t dead. There’s fic. There’s art. There’s the connections we made through the games and because of the games. Technically EA/BioWare owns the IP but you can’t own an idea, no matter how much they want to.
DA isn’t dead because it’s yours now.— that other writer (@thatotherwriter.bsky.social) 30 January 2025 at 02:44
“We’re going through it right now. It’s a lot, everywhere,” the writer continued, “but DA isn’t dead. There’s fic. There’s art. There’s the connections we made through the games and because of the games. Technically EA/BioWare owns the IP but you can’t own an idea, no matter how much they want to. DA isn’t dead because it’s yours now.”
“Someone just reposted my thing saying they’ll write a giant AU and that’s what I’m talking about,” they added, “If DA has inspired you to do something, if it sparks that invincible summer, then it’s done it’s job, and it has been my greatest honour to have been a part of that.”
It’s a lovely sentiment, especially in an industry whose corporate types are seemigly more willing – or happy – than it’s ever before to throw everything and everyone into the sun in the name of profits if every game isn’t the kind of rare runaway success that would make doing so unpalatble even to the soulless investor types corportate types generally answer to.
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