Dragon Age And Ultima Should Go Back To Their Creators

It is easy to ask for good things. I can stand on my soapbox and demand game publishers treat their workers with respect, stop crunching them, and stop laying people off, and I am sure someone smarter than me will explain how the best economic system we can come up with would collapse in on itself if they dared do any of those things. Naturally, I bow to their wisdom.

So, when I ask for this thing, which is obviously a good thing, I will try and speak in a language that the big bosses understand: the current way of doing things is not making you money. Spending millions on the development of a game that you then cancel right before it launches is not a very sound idea. You will make no money. You will lose money, in fact!

The same is true for all of those IPs you’re sitting on and not doing anything with. I know we’re all feeling very risk-averse right now, so let me help you out and tell you what you should not do: Nothing.

EA, I am mostly talking to you right now. Xbox, I’ll get you; don’t you worry.

Creatives Are Getting Left Behind

Over the past few weeks, two EA studio veterans – Richard Garriott and David Gaider – have talked about the IPs they used to work on. Ultima creator Richard Garriott is trying to get the rights to his work back, and as per Inside Gaming, he’s doing this through a stipulation in US copyright law that allows creators to reclaim copyrighted work from a publisher 35 years after its creation. The first Ultima game launched in 1981, but EA got the rights to it in 1992. This means that, as of 2027, it would have been 35 years since EA first got its hands on it, potentially giving Garriott the chance to get it back.

Now, it doesn’t seem like EA has any plans to make this easy for Garriott. In fact, new trademarks for Ultima were spotted recently, even though there’s no new release on the horizon – and the last mainline entry was in 1999. It’s just been sitting there, but EA never seems to have offered it back to Garriott, who does have ideas for new games the publisher is likely never, ever going to make.

Staying with EA, this is not the first time it’s sat on a franchise when it could have been doing something productive with it. BioWare is best known for Mass Effect and Dragon Age, and with EA as a publisher, both series succeeded in spite of its influences – and now suffer because of it.

Dragon Age creator David Gaider recently expressed his belief that Dragon Age is “dead”. He does have ideas about how he would approach a new game, but in the gaming industry, that doesn’t matter. No, the direction of the series will be made by suits who never understood it in the first place – not the lead writer who oversaw the first three games to widespread success.

But you see, after releasing one game that was only kinda alright (Dragon Age: The Veilguard), EA responded by sacking all the writers who also wrote the very good games, and put the series on ice. Since then, there’s been no talk about Dragon Age whatsoever, not even the hypothetical remasters of the first three games. Hell, Dragon Age: Origins – one of the best games of all time – is near-impossible to run without mods now, because EA has left it to rot.

Look, okay, I am just an angry writer who doesn’t know how scary business decisions work. But I would argue that when the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition trilogy does well, and you have another beloved RPG series that could do with a fresh lick of paint… Sort of seems like a no-brainer, yeah? That could patch things up after The Veilguard, likely performing better and not costing anywhere near as much to make. Building from that, we could have gotten another sequel – Dragon Age 2 stumbled, so Inquisition could run, after all.

Take A Chance On Smaller, Talented Team

But maybe EA doesn’t want to put the money down on a new game. Understandable, when budgets have ballooned as much as they have. So… why not give it to someone else? Perhaps the original creator, who just so happens to have his own studio? A studio that is currently looking for a publisher to support it? Or one of the other many studios that BioWare vets fled to after years of EA mismanagement?

We have a clear example we can point to on how this can work. As loathed as I am to remotely praise Hasbro, it did – eventually – allow someone to make another Baldur’s Gate game, after it became clear it had no interest in doing it internally. Instead, Larian was given permission to work on the IP. The result, Baldur’s Gate 3, was pretty good, so I hear.

Embracer, you’re up next; what the hell is going on with KOTOR? In this day and age, when games have to sell gangbusters to make back their budgets, why do you sound frustrated when too many people are asking for updates on the KOTOR remake? If you are utterly incapable of getting anything out of the project other than a 56-second teaser trailer, I doubt throwing more money at it and cancelling all your progress to give it to another developer will help matters much. You’re just setting up whatever ill-advised project you’re cooking up for failure when it fails to make its inflated budget back after a week.

Last, but by no means least, we get to Xbox. Now, Xbox does get some points for graciously allowing the studios that it has thrown out into the wild to at least keep their IPs, giving them a shot of pitching a project that other investors might like. But that is where the praise ends, because oh boy, how else can we describe the impact this company has had on the industry other than cultural vandalism?

Perfect Dark’s remake was cancelled with seemingly no plans to revive the IP at all. Id Software still has Doom, but most of the employees who made the 2016 revival – and even one of the last remaining veterans from the 90s era – are no longer at the studio. And now, some of the folks at Obsidian are being permitted to continue working on Avowed 2 under the agreement that it could be cancelled anyway.

Even when Xbox does blow the dust off one of its IPs, it’s not always alongside those who built them up in the first place. Fable looks great, but that doesn’t undo what happened to Lionhead, the developers of the original trilogy, who were unceremoniously shut down in 2015 on the brink of launching a new game.

But that sounded dangerously close to being a concern about the workers. Sorry, back to IP.

Fable will probably be really good. The same goes for KOTOR Remake, when/if that happens, and the new Dragon Age game that will launch in 2036. But perhaps with a pinch of trust and respect for the devs that made these games, we could have gotten some more out the door faster. And maybe, just maybe, that would have made the publishers some more money.

Date Founded

May 27, 1982

CEO

Andrew Wilson

Headquarters

Redwood City, California, United States