Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Size Means The Next Mass Effect Could Get Its Lion’s Share

Dragon Age: The Veilguard has had a very long development cycle that hasn’t been smooth sailing all the way. Marked by several reboots, changes in direction, a shift from live service to single-player, and a sudden name change just months before its release, Dragon Age‘s fans haven’t had an easy time waiting for the next chapter in the fantasy series. Dragon Age: The Veilguard‘s casting director recently shined some light on why the development cycle has been so long beyond the issues that BioWare encountered, with Dragon Age: The Veilguard featuring 140,000 lines to record across 700 characters.

This is good news for Mass Effect fans, as Dragon Age: The Veilguard‘s focus on a streamlined world with fewer but deeper characters with more lines means a larger and richer game in terms of roleplaying and storytelling. Both Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda featured massive worlds to create an open-world experience, but Dragon Age: The Veilguard move to pivot back to the Mass Effect Trilogy‘s original mission-based design, while still expanding on the depth in the story, could be taken as a positive sign for the next Mass Effect game.

Predicting Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Size

Recording 140,000 lines takes a long time, and the Dragon Age team has reportedly spent the past five years capturing the lines and performances of Dragon Age: The Veilguard‘s actors. The number of lines is significant when compared to previous BioWare games. Mass Effect: Andromeda had just 65,000 lines stretched across 1,200 characters, whereas Dragon Age: The Veilguard has moved in the opposite direction with fewer characters but more lines. Past BioWare games had the following amount of lines:

• Dragon Age: Inquisition: 88,000 lines
• Mass Effect: Andromeda: 65,000 lines
• Mass Effect 3: 40,000 lines
• Mass Effect 2: 20,000 lines

This is especially impressive when considering that Dragon Age: The Veilguard only has seven companions compared to Dragon Age: Inquisition‘s nine and Mass Effect 2‘s ten, and that Dragon Age: The Veilguard is not an open-world game. Despite not being open-world, Dragon Age: The Veilguard should be the biggest BioWare game yet based on its line count.

The Possible Size of the Next Mass Effect

If Dragon Age: The Veilguard is successful, this new approach should be good news to fans of Mass Effect as it will likely be applied to the development of the next Mass Effect game. Mass Effect: Andromeda was released in 2017 and, because of its reception, the future of Mass Effect was uncertain for a time until the announcement that another Mass Effect game was in development. It’s already been several years since that announcement and, aside from a few teasers, there has been very little news of its development, indicating that its release could be some years away.

The gap between Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dragon Age: The Veilguard‘s release has been ten years, and it’s beginning to look as if Mass Effect fans could be in for a similar wait. If the development team for the next Mass Effect game intends to make it just as in-depth with as many or more lines as Dragon Age: The Veilguard, with possibly even four different voice options and accents to choose from, the wait could be one that’s worthwhile to create a Mass Effect game that captures the spirit of the series, but also embodies the kind of Mass Effect game that BioWare has always envisioned.