Dragon Age: The Veilguard key art showing all of the companions fending off monsters in front of a purple background Dragon Age: The Veilguard has launched to overall positive reviews, which is a huge sigh of relief for BioWare. The once beloved studio was on a downward spiral after the negative reception of Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem. The studio really needed a win, and The Veilguard has delivered it from a critical perspective at least.

While we’ll soon learn the overall player sentiment at launch tomorrow, it seems everyone at the studio and parent company EA are happy with the reception. According to the big bosses, the reason that Dragon Age: The Veilguard has been received so well is because BioWare has gone back to what it does best.

Making BioWare Great Again

EA CEO Andrew Wilson has said that the critical success of the game is thanks to BioWare doing what it’s known for, rather than experimenting, like it did with Anthem (thanks PC Gamer). On a recent investor call, Wilson said that Anthem didn’t quite work out because BioWare was trying a lot of new things. However, Dragon Age: The Veilguards is “really returning to BioWare type games, really returning to BioWare’s strength.”

Bellara surrounded by fire with her bow in Dragon Age The Veilguard

“What’s happened subsequently since Anthem is the BioWare team has really rallied around what made BioWare a fan favorite studio and a fan favorite brand, and the types of games they make: incredibly rich worlds, incredibly nuanced characters, really powerful and compelling stories with camaraderie and friendship and relationships and decisions that matter in the context of gameplay,” explained Wilson.

“I think it’s really been that return to what made BioWare great, and giving the studio time to really deliver against what makes BioWare great in the context of the Dragon Age world, is what amounts to a game like Dragon Age: The Veilguard.”

While the combat in The Veilguard is drastically different from previous titles, the other RPG mechanics, party systems, and character development is reminiscent of the earlier Dragon Age and Mass Effect titles that made us fall in love with the studio. Even if the combat gets tiring after a while, these elements will make up for it.

After The Veilguard’s success, you can be sure that fans of the studio’s sci-fi title are hopeful. Mass Effect project director Michael Gamble received a number of questions about the next game, including if it will go for an art style like that of Dragon Age: Veilguard. He said that both are very different genres that require “different kinds of love,” and that “Mass Effect is photorealistic and will be as long as [he’s] running it.”