Dragon Age The Veilguard Criticism Thread (formerly Skepticism Thread) [Spoilers]

Dragon Age: The Veilguard appears to mark the critical return of developer BioWare, but its commercial impact remains harder to parse almost two weeks after launch. At least in the UK (the seventh-largest individual market for games globally), The Veilguard reportedly performed comparably to contemporary single-player, AAA RPGs, faring "almost exactly the same as Dragon's Dogma 2 and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth".

Almost two weeks from launch, we can reasonably assume that The Veilguard has not set the sales world on fire, given that EA hasn't trumpeted those big, lovely numbers in the way that publishers like to. Still, the reliable GamesIndustry.biz boss, Christoper Dring, offered something more substantive than the anonymous hearsay from haters oddly invested in the game's downfall.

As Dring points out, the key missing ingredient here (aside from hard numbers) is EA's expectations for The Veilguard; a budget would also be nice to work with. This is because success means different things for different publishers, a nuance often lost when making hard and fast comparisons. At over 3 million copies sold (2.5 million in the first week), Dragon's Dogma 2 is considered a major success for Capcom, resulting in bonuses and raises for the developers. On the opposite end of that spectrum, Square Enix trotted out its favourite phrase for Final Fantasy XVI and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, saying that both games had "failed to meet expectations" and refusing to release sales numbers.

So, where does that leave Dragon Age: The Veilguard? Our guess is somewhere between Square Enix's visceral disappointment with modern Final Fantasy and Dragon's Dogma 2's 3+ million sales. Our gut says that if sales were over a million, EA would have said so, but we'll just have to wait and see.