Ten years ago in 2014, Dragon Age: Inquisition racked up dozens of Game of the Year awards, including “the big one” at The Game Awards. Now, in 2024, the next game in the series, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, just endured a near-complete absence of nominations for The Game Awards, landing only a single one for Accessibility, which is not one of the mainstream prizes.
Even as a fan of the game, there’s no way to spin this. This is bad for a BioWare attempting to stage a big comeback with higher quality offerings than the past decade which included the likes of Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem. And this situation is at least a little strange, as the same outlets that are part of the nominating body for The Game Awards scored it pretty well, an 82 on Metacritic, just three points below Inquisition’s 85. Zero major nominations.
No, I don’t think it was reasonable to expect a Game of the Year nomination for Dragon Age. Even taking out Shadow of the Erdtree, there were other games that would have taken that spot. But it is wild to have a new Dragon Age game released after 10 years and not land a nomination in Best RPG, Best Narrative or with any of its voice performances.
Before the nominations were announced, there was this ongoing narrative that the liberal-leaning games press would push Dragon Age to multiple nominations it did not deserve, even GOTY, ignoring more controversial games like Wukong. Instead, Dragon Age only landed the accessibility nomination while Wukong got a GOTY slot. The exact opposite happened.
Sure, you can always make the argument that The Game Awards “don’t matter,” but again, this is BioWare, which between its original Mass Effect and Dragon Age trilogy, it used to rule shows like this. Veilguard getting essentially shutout is very bad for the narrative that yes, BioWare has finally turned things around.
It’s not just these nominations, however. It is very noticeable that the clock is still ticking on EA releasing any sales numbers or playercount totals, almost three weeks after launch. All we have is Steam concurrent data which was a decent 85,000 near launch, but if EA had something to brag about here, they’d be bragging. They are silent.
This is a genuinely strange situation. Not that Dragon Age should have dominated all these categories with nominations, but again, this was a game that was well-received by critics, and still boasts Mostly Positive scores on a platform like Steam and 4/5 star rankings on consoles. But this is now a year where Star Wars Outlaws has more significant nominations than Dragon Age. That is…honestly hard to believe. BioWare needs to hope its new Mass Effect game goes better, as there clearly is just something missing here that has not resonated with a wide enough range of people.
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