The Veilguard Wins a Surprising Award

Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s official podcast “Vows & Vengeance” has recently won the Best Audio/Podcast Award from Tribeca Festival. This is a big win for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, but a bittersweet one, as the game failed to connect with most players and was considered a failure by Electronic Arts.

Originally released last year after almost a decade of development, Dragon Age: The Veilguard generally received positive reviews. With an average score of 80 on OpenCritic, Dragon Age: The Veilguard was generally praised as an enjoyable action RPG. However, many gamers and critics had some harsh criticism about segments of its story.

Now, the “Dragon Age: Vows & Vengeance” podcast has recently gained the Best Audio/Podcast Award at the Tribeca Festival. The official Dragon Age: The Veilguard podcast, which had eight episodes in total, introduced gamers to the members of the Veilguard before the game was released. While Vows & Vengeance was not created by BioWare’s main writers, it was overseen by John Epler, who worked as the creative director for the game before leaving BioWare to work on another EA-owned company called Full Circle Studio.

Dragon Age: Vows & Vengeance Podcast Gets an Award

Unfortunately, this award comes a bit too late for Dragon Age: The Veilguard to help in the game’s success. Earlier this year, EA revealed that Dragon Age: The Veilguard underperformed expectations. According to Electronic Arts, the title only reached around 1.5 million players at the time, missing the publisher’s expectations by around 50%, so it was largely deemed a failure.

Soon after the tragic performance of the game was revealed, some developers of Dragon Age: The Veilguard were laid off from BioWare. The team that worked on the game was essentially disbanded, with some other developers being sent to work on other projects like the upcoming Mass Effect or other EA projects.

Fans are still not 100% sure about all the reasons for the problems during the development of The Veilguard, and it’s likely that multiple developers will still talk about it for time to come. Last week, Jason Schreier reported on Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s flop, citing sources who indicated that the game had a troubled development with two reboots and substantial internal friction between the Dragon Age and the Mass Effect teams. It remains to be seen what will happen in BioWare’s future, as the next Mass Effect is already in development, but it still does not have an official release date.