While many AAA studios have seen rocky releases in recent years, from Star Wars Outlaws to Assassin’s Creed Shadows, one of the hardest to hit players came after 2024’s release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Now, a prominent Dragon Age voice actor has commented on the reception of the title, pushing back against many.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard was released to cautious interest from long-time Dragon Age fans in October of 2024. The game had struggled with a tumultuous development due to turnover and layoffs at BioWare. Name changes, concept shifts, and rewrites left many worried that the game would struggle to match previous entries in the series.
After its launch, the game initially did okay with critics, scoring a cumulative 82 percent on Metacritic. Unfortunately, fans of the series struggled with the title, citing a thin story, empty romance, and a lack of true agency in the narrative’s outcome as the reasons for its 3.9 percent score. Of the 8,287 player scores submitted, 5080 of them were marked as Negative. That is over 61% of the audience.
However, a recent interview with the Inquisitor voice actor, Alix Wilton Regan, calls the player response into question, sharing her own thoughts about the low scores.
Wilton Regan Questions Dragon Age Community
In an interview with IGN, Alix Wilton Regan has shared her own reaction to Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s reception, and has indicated that “bad people on the internet” were part of the problem.
Wilton Regan shared that she was “absolutely devastated for BioWare as a studio that they got such mixed reactions” to The Veilguard, and went on to say that she believed the pushback was from those who “wanted to see it fail”.
In this instance, Wilton Regan might be referring to the pushback the game received from “anti-woke” review bombing that began before Veilguard’s release. However, the overwhelming pushback from players wasn’t just political. One user review on Metacritic stated that the lack of lore, the character writing, and the art style were major factors for their dislike of the title. They also stated that the character Taash “set back the LGBT movement by like 10 years.”
Many others have commented on Taash as a difficult representation for the queer community, or have stayed out of politics entirely, stating that the game felt rushed and empty compared to previous installments.
Related: Dragon Age: The Veilguard Has Divided The Dragon Age Reddit Page
Dragon Age has always included LGBTQA+ characters in its stories and was a pioneer queer romance inclusion in the 2000s and 2010s. This has made the arguments about inclusion weak compared to those truly upset about the game’s overall content. While it is likely the review bombing has a part to play in the game’s overall reception averages, player feedback on the core elements of The Veilguard is still important for BioWare to hear.
Even the more positive reviews, like an 8/10 from one user, have feedback that is a mixed bag for Dragon Age fans, stating, “A good game, as long as you aren’t expecting a sequel to Dragon Age. The series has taught me that the true dragons are corporate executives who think they know best, and the Blight is capitalism.”
Unfortunately, the mixture of responses has had an impact on the success of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Wilton Regan stated that, “We’re really lucky we’ll get more gold from them in the future,” when it comes to new games from BioWare, but that she is unsure of what the future will hold for the beloved franchise.
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