Dragon Age maestro says EA always spoke about a hypothetical ‘nerd cave’ full of diehard RPG fans who would “always show up,” so you “didn’t have to try and appeal to them”

A veteran of Dragon Age mentions that EA used to talk about a “cave” where RPG enthusiasts, who could be relied upon to purchase anything the genre offered, resided.

In a conversation with GamesRadar+, BioWare veteran David Gaider articulated that prior to his departure from BioWare, his preferences had become somewhat “traditional” in the eyes of EA. “I was quite outspoken on the Dragon Age team,” he states. “I was consistently striving to push it towards our classic mechanics. And that wasn’t particularly welcomed in the EA environment.”

He notes that EA viewed those mechanics—the type that influenced titles like Dragon Age: Origins—as “slow and unwieldy,” instead of the “dynamic and polished” style that the studio was being encouraged to pursue. This meant that Gaider’s opinions “were often not very embraced” despite his longstanding service at the studio and his involvement in many of its most acclaimed RPGs.

This is partly because, he asserts, EA did not believe that the conventional RPG audience was one worth pursuing. He claims that the supervisors referred to those mechanics as being “‘in the cave’.” The cave, he elaborates, “was where the enthusiasts went. The enthusiasts were in the cave. You developed an RPG and the enthusiasts in the cave would invariably show up for an RPG because it was an RPG.”

That commitment to their preferred genre, in EA’s perspective, meant that “you didn’t need to be concerned” about the enthusiasts. “You didn’t have to attempt to cater to them. You needed to focus on the individuals who weren’t in the cave, which was the audience we genuinely desired, which was significantly larger.”

To clarify, Gaider emphasizes that was the audience that EA sought, and it essentially achieved its goals. Unfortunately for the publisher, the culmination of that philosophy resulted in Anthem, a live-service initiative that completely failed at launch and was entirely discarded within two years.

The upside of this was that BioWare was able to reorient around its single-player RPGs, culminating in last year’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard and the eventual debut of Mass Effect 5—although with that title still in pre-production as of this year, it may take a while before we are able to experience it.

Regardless of whether you inhabit the cave or not, here are the finest RPGs you can enjoy.

I’m the Managing Editor for news at GamesRadar, shaping the news strategy across the team. I began my journalistic journey while pursuing my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games