Dragon Age: The Veilguard's Most Controversial Change Is Actually a Good Thing
Hard, but necessary.
BioWare has built its identity on complex RPGs that revolve around the player, forcing you to make agonizing choices that shape the world. Few developers have been as influential for the idea of “player choice,” from the beloved larger-than-life Commander Shepard to the streets of Baldur’s Gate. Considering that legacy, fans have been disappointed to learn that Dragon Age: The Veilguard will only let you carry over three decisions from Inquisition, dropping dozens of other choices across the trilogy. While that disappointment is understandable, a decade after Inquisition it’s a necessary decision that can allow Dragon Age to keep growing and flourishing.
As detailed in an IGN First article, the decisions that Veilguard lets you carry over is who the Inquisitor romanced, whether the Inquisition stayed together or disbanded, and whether you decided to save Solas or stop him.
That obviously pales in comparison to the amount of choices Inquisition let players carry over back in 2014. At that time, EA used a system called Dragon Age Keep, where players could go to a website and input all of their choices from Origins, Awakening, and Dragon Age 2. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that most of these choices resulted in small Easter eggs or details during quests, like an advisor quest that sees Sebastian Vale, a party member in DA2, invade Kirkwall. Of course, some of the decisions have more weight to the story, like if Alistair is the king of Ferelden or not.
Inquisition was a finale for the trilogy, which is why so many choices mattered, and why it makes sense those tied-up choices wouldn’t carry to Veilguard.
But ten years is a long time, especially when fans have had to wait for a follow-up on the emotional roller coaster of the Inquisition’s Trespasser DLC, where players learned the shocking revelation that Solas is an ancient elven god named The Dread Wolf.
In that decade, Veilguard, originally called Dread Wolf, has undergone quite a few changes, including dropping multiplayer elements. It’s abundantly clear that BioWare want this game to be something of a “fresh start” for the franchise, and to do that, it needs a clean slate.
Fans that have been with Dragon Age since the beginning are obviously always going to be important, but Veilguard needs to attract new players as well — by redefining what it means to be a Dragon Age game. Veilguard transforms the franchise into an action RPG and a more focused experience that drops Inquisition’s open world, and that’s no small task.
“Our philosophy when it comes to integrating past player choices and world states is wherever possible we want to avoid contradicting what has happened before. We never want to invalidate your choices,” creative director John Epler told IGN, “For Dragon Age: The Veilguard, among many reasons why we moved to Northern Thedas is it becomes a little bit more of a clean slate for us. There's not as many decisions you have made up to this point that have an impact on what's happening in Northern Thedas. And we don't have to speak directly to things like ‘who is the Divine?’ Because again, that's happening in the South.”
Rook is a brand new protagonist for Dragon Age, unconnected to everything in the past. A blank slate for BioWare to build on.
In Inverse’s preview of Veilguard, we noted the most exciting thing about Veilguard is that it feels like it has a vision, feels like it wants to do something BioWare hasn’t done before. To that end, getting bogged down in the minutiae of all these choices could potentially detract from Veilguard striking out in a new story and direction. Integrating choices in a meaningful way is a hard, time-consuming process — ensuring all of those choices flow together well with the overall narrative, and that nothing is contradicting.
One of the worries I’ve seen pop up is that Veilguard could lack the little details and Easter Eggs that made Inquisition feel special, like a living world built off of the first two games. Only carrying over a few choices doesn’t mean Easter Eggs won’t be present, they just won’t feel personalized to each player, but rather the world as a whole. During the preview, we managed to find a note at the Grey Warden’s fortress of Weisshaupt referencing Kristoff, the Grey Warden possessed by your party member Justice in Dragon Age: Awakening. Lore is cleary still going to play a huge part in Veilguard, it’s just going to be implemented differently, like everything else in the game.
Choice-based stories, especially across multiple entries, can be a dangerously slippery slope — and we’ve already seen that from BioWare. When Mass Effect 3 released in 2012, it drew tons of criticism for its ending, which didn’t integrate the dozens of choices players made across the trilogy and instead boiled things down to three endings. It was a clear example that BioWare’s ambitions with player choice were simply more than it could deliver.
Mass Effect 3 was a hard lesson that laid bare both the potential and danger of embracing player choice.
It’s impossible to satisfy everyone when choices are that meaningful, and the more those decisions start to add up, the more you’re written into a corner. It’s like little straws adding up until you have a massive pile, and suddenly you have to make sure you’ve accounted for all of those. By dropping choices, BioWare can be much more ambitious with Veilguard’s story, striking out in directions that could truly be novel or surprising. Of course, we’ll have to wait for the full game to see if it really pans out like that.
I said it before, but the disappointment in most choices being dropped makes sense. Players have become unbelievably attached to the world of Thedas and the characters that inhabit it. But it’s been five years since BioWare released a new game, and ten since the last Dragon Age. There’s going to be a lot riding on Veilguard, no matter how you slice it. The series needs to change and grow. The best way to do that is learn from past mistakes, like Mass Effect 3, and forge ahead with a new vision. If integrating only a few choices is part of that vision for BioWare, then that’s all that matters.
