Former ‘Dragon Age’ Game Director Looks to Rebound After Canceled Games
Yellow Brick’s first game will be ‘Eternal Strands,’ a stylized action game with big enemies
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Going smaller
Mike Laidlaw, a veteran writer and designer for video games, spent years working on hit roleplaying franchises such as Mass Effect and Dragon Age. He was on a great run — until his last two projects got canceled.Since the 2014 release of his most recent game, the critically acclaimed Dragon Age: Inquisition, Laidlaw has left jobs at Electronic Arts Inc.’s BioWare, then Ubisoft. At both companies, he was the creative director of a game that never saw the light of day.
You accept it as part of the realities of games,” Laidlaw told me during an interview this week. “They’re not all going to ship…That is something you sort of make your peace with.”
In 2020, Laidlaw partnered with three other ex-Ubisoft developers to start a new outfit called Yellow Brick Games. Now he has a chance to end the cold streak with their first game, Eternal Strands, which was announced this week.
Eternal Strands is a stylized action game with big enemies inspired by titles such as Monster Hunter and Dragon’s Dogma, and it is planned for release next year. A recent preview on IGN described a high-octane encounter with a massive boss reminiscent of the classic action game Shadow of the Colossus.
Last week, Yellow Brick announced that it had parted ways with its publisher, Take-Two Interactive Inc.’s Private Division and will now self-publish the project. Laidlaw said that despite the shakeup and any potential trepidation stemming from his previous two projects, he’s “confident the game will get out the door.”
If all remains on track, it will be Laidlaw’s first shipped game in more than a decade.
Laidlaw’s video-game industry career started at BioWare, where he spent nearly 15 years, working his way up to a director role before leaving in 2017 following the cancellation of an early version of Dragon Age 4. He then went to Ubisoft, where he worked on a project called Avalon, as Bloomberg previously reported. That game was canceled before it got too far. (Elements of Avalon appear to have been salvaged for Eternal Strands, although Laidlaw dismissed any direct comparisons.)
After departing Ubisoft in 2020, Laidlaw began talking to Thomas Giroux, another ex-Ubisoft employee who had pursued other disciplines but was looking to return to game development. They brought in two other partners — also ex-Ubisoft staff — and started the company that year.
For Laidlaw, however, shipping a product that wins Game of the Year awards or is played by millions of people is no longer a top priority after his many years in development — keeping his employees happy is.
“The real success of Eternal Strands,” he said, “will be that the majority of people who worked on it would like to work on the next thing, and that we can afford to pay them well in order to do that.”
