While former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider won't play The Veilguard, he knows enough to realise that the series ain't looking too hot right now. He's pretty sure it's dead, at least under EA.

When we asked if he saw a future in the series he considers "his baby", he wasn't hopeful.

"From Electronic Arts? Unlikely. Throughout the entire time I was there, we were always one breath away from the project being shelved. The thing that happened is that we kept releasing games, and it would sell much better than they thought it should, and it kept surprising them."

EA never seemed to understand Dragon Age, as evidenced by the Origins trailer that used a Marilyn Manson track and was filled with blood. Instead of a mature fantasy RPG, it was presented as some edgelord nonsense for teen boys. This misunderstanding continues to this very day. EA CEO Andrew Wilson, for instance, blamed The Veilguard's failings on a lack of live service features. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad.

Things were different with Mass Effect, EA's favourite RPG.

"It was funny," says Gaider, "because if Mass Effect releases didn't sell as well, they got excuses, because it was an action-oriented game. They thought it should sell more. It was slicker."

Gaider has nothing bad to say about the sci-fi RPG, and counts Mass Effect 2 as one of the "best RPGs of all time", but the differences in the way Dragon Age and Mass Effect were treated by EA must have stung.

"The way EA looked at it was that Mass Effect was the slick, modern RPG that had action, and they could sell really easily. Whereas Dragon Age was old-fashioned and focused on story. Our action, ranging from Dragon Age: Origins, was a little bit on the slow, cumbersome side, and then was too fast. They never knew what to do with it. So whenever a Dragon Age game sold well, we got excuses on the opposite side. Basically that it was a fluke."

It's worth noting that Dragon Age: Inquisition beat EA's sales expectations and became BioWare's most successful game. But EA has always treated Dragon Age, as Gaider says, like "the redheaded stepchild".

"They gave us a head of marketing at one point who literally talked about having to put lipstick on a pig in order to sell it. When you're on a team and you're hearing this, you're like, ‘Alright, what am I supposed to do with this?’"

Despite all of this, Gaider is interested in working on Dragon Age again—albeit not with EA. Though this is a more recent development.

"If you'd asked me that in the past, I would have said absolutely not. That I’d done my time. I left the Dragon Age team before I left BioWare. After Inquisition came out, I went to Mike Laidlaw and I said, ‘I've told all the stories with mages and dragons and what have you that I have in me. And I could keep going, but if I keep working on this, it's going to become rote, and I think that would be a disservice to the team. So I should step aside, let fresher voices rise’. I don't know if that was the right decision, but it felt right at the time."

If someone gave him the keys to Thedas now, though, he might be up for it.

"I do like a challenge," he says. "So if, out of some weird alignment of the stars, somebody handed the Dragon Age franchise back to me and said, ‘Breathe the life back into this baby’, that'd be a tough one, but I think that'd be an interesting thing to do. To go back to the basics of what made Dragon Age appeal to so many people in the first place. And go somewhere dark and dangerous, and do things that will make people upset. I think that’s what I would want to do with it."

If Richard Garriott can get his hands on Ultima again, who knows? Maybe there's still hope for Dragon Age.

There's a common thread amongst former BioWare developers: They are proud of what they worked on, have a lot of love for their former studio, and they have few good things to say about publisher EA. For understandable reasons.

David Gaider was with BioWare for a long time, joining the studio after the success of Baldur's Gate. He started as a writer on Baldur's Gate 2 and worked his way up to lead writer for Hordes of the Underdark, Neverwinter Nights' best expansion. But he's best known for Dragon Age.

Thedas is Gaider's creation, and he served as lead writer on Origins, Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition, before leaving BioWare in 2016. He also wrote several novels and comics based on Dragon Age. "It was my baby," he tells us.

This is one of the reasons that the chances of him playing The Veilguard were always going to be slim—"no matter what".

"Whether it was successful or not, it was always going to make different choices than I would have made for it. The team took it, and they did their own version of it, and I don't really want to see what's changed. It's totally selfish—I just don't want to see what they've done with my baby, good or bad."

Regardless, it was not successful. At least not in the way, say, Inquisition was. It sold well and had plenty of positive reviews, but it's never been able to escape its Mixed user review rating on Steam, and it didn't meet EA's expectations.

EA's expectations, of course, are part of the problem.

One of the other reasons Gaider hasn't played it is that he knows "too much about what went on behind the scenes," characterising development as an "ordeal" where EA "handicapped" the team right from the beginning.

"Electronic Arts really did a number on them in terms of setting them up to fail, honestly. From everything I've been told about the game, it seems like that's exactly what happened. It didn't deliver on a creative level. It didn't deliver the sales. That's part of what EA likes to do too. They require a certain level of sales, and if you don't match that, it doesn't matter how good the game is. If it underperforms, you're essentially dead."

The Veilguard was not a great Dragon Age game—or at least it failed to capture what I found special and exciting about the series. And a great deal of the blame must be placed on EA's shoulders, as a company that is almost pathologically incapable of understanding what players want.

Take, for example, CEO Andrew Wilson's assessment of The Veilguard's failings. Was it because the quality of the writing took a dip? The shift to action-RPG? The companions who showcased a complete lack of agency? No, says Wilson, it's because it wasn't a live service game.

EA didn't just set up The Veilguard to fail, it also threw BioWare under the bus when the predictable happened, while completely misunderstanding what went wrong in the first place.

Unfortunately, Gaider hasn't had a smooth ride since leaving BioWare. He joined Beamdog and pitched a Planescape: Torment sequel to Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast, which they liked but refused to fund. He's now creative director at Summerfall Studios. Its first game, Stray Gods, unfortunately launched around the same time as Baldur's Gate 3.

"Not to suggest that Stray Gods was in any way competition, but Baldur's Gate 3 came out and was such a huge hit that it was all anybody could talk about," he says. "So whatever chance there was of Stray Gods getting noticed disappeared."

Gaider is now working on a heist RPG, and while publishers have been enthusiastic about the pitch, nobody is funding it yet. Gaider says it's "make or break" for the studio.

We've been digging back through the archives at PCG, and one particular hands-on experience and Q&A reached its icy hand out of the mists of time and grabbed me by the throat: Now-Strategic Director Evan Lahti's preview of Dragon Age: Origins, and an accompanying interview with BioWare cofounders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk in 2009.

Neither of those men have been part of the beloved RPG studio for more than a decade: Zeschuk appears to be something of a restaurateur these days, while Muzyka is quite the poker player. Reading coverage of the studio only partway through its golden age bummed me the hell out.

After a legendary hot streak beginning with the OG Mass Effect in 2007 (or, arguably, the OG Baldur's Gate in 1998), BioWare struggled to find its footing in the 2010s: Longtime staff left or were forced out, it released three disappointments in seven years vs. nearly a dozen bangers in the previous decade. A new Mass Effect is supposedly still coming, but by all accounts the studio is a fraction of its former size following Anthem, The Veilguard, and multiple rounds of layoffs.

But nobody knew all that was coming down the pike in March 2009. Evan sat down for a hands-on of the Dwarf Noble origin sequence, a world's first look at a slice of RPG that many players could reenact from memory at this point. (Not me—I'm a City Elf man.)

In a Q&A with Zeschuk and Muzyka, the founders were optimistic about the series' and company's future, with Dragon Age sequels already in the planning phases.

"It is a franchise," Muzyka said of Dragon Age. "You can be sure that means more than one game and a whole bunch of other cool stuff on the side. It would make sense that players will get to continue to experience or feel like they've been progressing in some way between products in the franchise, too."

He seems to have already been alluding to the save transfer feature Dragon Age would crib from its sister series, Mass Effect, then ultimately pursue to more ambitious ends.

Dragon Age: Inquisition had to keep track of dozens of setting-spanning variables impacting the politics of the world and which characters would even be alive for you to see in the game, with its rarest world states still the stuff of RPG legend.

It was also a funny man-out-of-time moment to remember the different flavor of controversy and backlash BioWare faced at this time. "It's an artform," Muzyka asserted in response to a question about RPG romance and media pressure. "We're not changing how we make our games based on, well…"

"On Fox News?" Zeschuk cheekily interjected. Before there was Mass Effect 3 ending angst or anti-woke rage against gay companions, there was the whole news cycle about the PG-13 implied sex and nudity in Mass Effect 1. If only someone could go back and warn them about Baldur's Gate 3 penis physics.

Here's the full Q&A with the BioWare docs, whose absence is still felt all these years after their exit from making RPGs.

Dragon Age: Origins interview - PC Gamer #198 (UK, March 2009)

More on Dragon Age from the archives

• Looking back on 15 years of Dragon Age reviews—including that Dragon Age 2 score we've never stopped defending
• EA has learned all the wrong lessons from Dragon Age: The Veilguard
• It was nuts that BioWare based Dragon Age: Inquisition's story on a DLC nobody played, but that DLC also proved just how close Dragon Age 2 was to perfection
• Dragon Age: The Veilguard is my third-favorite game of the year, and I don't care who knows
• Looking back at Dragon Age: Inquisition
• Great moments in PC gaming: Choosing your origin in Dragon Age Origins

Dragon Age 2 is a bit of a controversial entrant in the series—we rated it highly when it first game out, perhaps infamously so, but fan opinion bends towards it being more of a cult classic than a straight-up classic like its predecessor.

That's partially because it was made at a blistering speed and had to cut more corners than a pair of scissors trying to make a circle. 16 months was all BioWare had to put it together, which is almost nothing in RPG development time.

In a recent interview with TheGamer, Dragon Age creator David Gaider confirms that the writing process for DA2 was absolutely brutal. Especially given the studio's prior RPG pedigree making some of the longest RPGs imaginable:

"The big problem we faced is that BioWare as a team did not know how to make a small game. We planned for a big game. And when we're told this is a full, full sequel, initially for the first four months of work, we're assuming that it was going to be much bigger."

Then, when that wound up not being the case, Gaider remembers having to operate like a butcher on the cutting room floor:

"I had to go into one writing room. We had all these sticky pads that were breaking up all the quests, like, here are the crit path quests, here are the side quests, and the ones the player could pick up as they go around. I had to take out half of them."

Gaider's only got positive words for how the writing team followed the shift in priority, though, stating that "they were all veterans … I sat down with them near the beginning and said we're going to have very little time to review all this. I'll be lucky if I get to review your stuff, nevermind other people. So I'm going to trust you.

"We're going to measure twice, cut once. Once it's cut, it's done, and we'll have to just accept the result … They knew what was on the line. They all wrote like the wind. There was nobody who wasn't firing on all cylinders."

This, he tells TheGamer, led to a "raw" writing style he believes had its ups and downs: "You start sanding down the edges [on second and third drafts], and that can be a good thing, but you also sand down some of the good edges as well. So, you find a lot of raw storytelling in DA2 that you don't find elsewhere."

That's certainly an opinion shared by our own Fraser Brown, who called Dragon Age 2 the "boldest" of BioWare's RPGs back in 2021—particularly praising Anders, the series premiere trash fire who "causes a lot of problems". It's easy to imagine a less rough-around-the-edges Anders in a Dragon Age 2 that wasn't made in 16 months, so hey—Gaider's probably onto something.

How many Dragon Age games would you say there are? Only four, right? Origins, its sequel, Inquisition and last year's Veilguard. Not many, for a beloved franchise spanning a decade and a half at a major publisher. But then the BioWare team behind the series was often characterised as a pirate ship by colleagues: sailing haphazardly between projects and often drifting off course as it found its way to its next hit.

Certainly, there was never a straightforward follow-up that built directly on the success of Origins. BioWare's pirates were routinely tossed about on the rough seas of EA's whims, following mandates for tight budgets or new engines or live service features. Those internal skirmishes added years to the development of mainline Dragon Age games, and we got fewer of them as a consequence. It's hard not to talk about the series in the past tense, given EA's apparent disdain for a nerdy universe in which nobody carries either a ball or a gun.

Where can one find more Dragon Age, then? In the novels, which are in my experience rather good, written by lead writers of the series like Trick Weekes and David Gaider. In expansions like 2010's Origins: Awakening, well-received yet frequently forgotten. And, buried amid the Flash-based Facebook distractions and long-dead mobile spinoffs, there's a sole survivor on Newgrounds: Dragon Age Journeys. It's a briefly charming turn-based affair set under the earth, amid the dwarves and the darkspawn. But even that was cancelled after its first episode.

In that latter graveyard of browser games lies the saddest loss to the series—Dragon Age: The Last Court. Built by Failbetter, the developer of Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, it was a game of lordship, in which you managed the affairs of an eccentric fiefdom at the edge of Orlais (France for dweebs). You'd choose a bodyguard, a counsellor, a lover. You'd steer your realm through a crucial period of potential relegation, where the ranking of fiefdoms is concerned—tackling bandits and revolutionaries and creepy things in the forest, while uncovering secrets across multiple playthroughs.

"What lies in the Sealed Chantry?", wrote Failbetter narrative director Chris Gardiner. "Who is the Horned Knight? Who is behind Serault's recent troubles?"

Well, I don't think I'll ever know. Because The Last Court existed for a six-year span during a period when I was a lapsed Dragon Age fan. After which, it popped its clogs in the pandemic. Servers never stay on forever, and EA is particularly brutal in this regard: BioWare's second-most-recent game, Anthem, is shutting down early next year.

I have a strong sense of what The Last Court must have been like to play, however, having recently become obsessed with Failbetter's Fallen London. Like that masterpiece of interactive Victoriana, The Last Court was almost entirely text-led, spinning its world from the kind of ambitious prose that's typically consigned to codexes in 3D RPGs. You would draw cards, each representing a visit from a subject or a new event within your borders, and read all about it—choosing how to respond in the process. Some choices would involve a risk, a dice roll that drew on your skill level in something like scholarship or derring-do, and the outcome would influence the overall health of the realm.

Court management, of course, is an activity with its roots in the days of classic BioWare. In Baldur's Gate 2 you could take on the ruling of a stronghold, tax the peasants, and deal with the complaints of bandit-dogged merchants, who claimed you weren't policing your lands effectively enough. As a spiritual successor, Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity revived the stronghold. And Dragon Age: Inquisition's war table riffed on a similar idea—that there were important things going on in the world, beyond the corners of your dialogue box.

Characters in The Last Court came with oblique, Failbettery names like the Acerbic Dowager, the Purveyor of Teas and the Well-Read Pig-Farmer. But I notice that one, named the Scornful Sorceress, had a familiar face. "This is not a childhood I recognise," she would say, watching the courtiers' kids at play. "The games my mother encouraged were less innocent." It's only a proper Dragon Age game if it has Morrigan in it.

I can still quote The Last Court because fans have peppered parts of it liberally throughout the Dragon Age wiki. Once EA announced the game's shutdown, a diligent effort was made to save everything that could be screenshotted. Players coordinated via BioWare's forums and Reddit, exploring as many avenues of The Last Court as possible over the course of the seven real-world days it took to finish any given playthrough.

Their efforts are to be applauded, but in some ways only increase the retroactive FOMO. A wiki is not a game, unless you're playing Neurocracy. Cataloguing The Last Court's additions to the lore is not the same as experiencing it as a choose-your-own-adventure mystery or strategic management sim. And a once-public Google Drive, stuffed with images from the vanished game, has long since expired.

We live in an era where MMOs can be brought back from the dead through sheer fan ingenuity, and even granted official recognition by their original publishers—saving them from the fear of sudden takedown notices. But, while I'd love to be proven wrong, something tells me that this isn't EA's style. And in 2025, BioWare is fighting for its life and its soul—in no fit state to advocate for a project only a hardcore subset of its fanbase remembers.

Instead, I'm finding solace in something that Failbetter has often mined in its stories: the romance of the buried place that you can never quite reach. It is the very unattainability which makes you all the more eager to visit that forgotten city, to catch a glimpse of its crumbling pillars or lost literature. It's the same distance that allows it to live as a gleaming wonder in your mind—freed of the imperfections and mundanities that come from contact with reality. I'll say this for my experience of The Last Court: there is no way to be disappointed by the game you can never play.

In response to a viewer question for a 200k subscriber Q&A on his YouTube channel, former BioWare producer Mark Darrah got into the fine details of what it might actually have looked like for BioWare to release Joplin, its initial pitch for a fourth Dragon Age, and whether he thinks it would have been better received than last year's The Veilguard.

"I do think that Joplin's gonna live as this mythological game in a lot of people's memories," Darrah said. "The ways that a Joplin happens are basically in a world where it ships in 2019, February 2019.

"It takes Anthem's spot. In that world, that is a game developed on a pretty tight timeline. Not from the ship [date] of Inquisition⁠—I suppose it's more than four years, almost five. But still, pretty tight timeline."

Most public knowledge of Joplin comes from an April 2019 Kotaku report from Jason Schreier. Joplin entered preproduction in 2015 after the release of Inquisition's Trespasser expansion.

It was reportedly intended to be a smaller scale, but deeply reactive game centering on spies and heists in the setting's then yet to be explored Tevinter Imperium.

Joplin was paused in 2016 so its staff could assist in the development of Mass Effect: Andromeda, then canceled outright in 2017 so they could help with Anthem.

Development on Dragon Age 4 was rebooted into a live service project codenamed Morrison, which would eventually be retooled back into the singleplayer Veilguard.

It's unclear whether Darrah is saying that Joplin "takes Anthem's spot" in the sense that Anthem is canceled entirely in favor of a new Dragon Age game, or if he's picturing a scenario where resources are split between the teams, allowing a delay on Anthem while the smaller scale Joplin is able to release in that early 2019 window.

The latter seems more realistic, given the head of steam BioWare had on Anthem, but of course it's all academic at this point: Anthem took priority as EA was devaluing singleplayer games and BioWare in particular in the late 2010s.

"It's gonna be a compromised game for sure," said Darrah, but he still thinks it would have been better-received than Veilguard, with a caveat: "We'll never know, and it's very easy to pretend like it definitely would be yes."

In response to a viewer question in a 200k subscriber Q&A for his YouTube channel, former BioWare producer Mark Darrah explained why Mages in Dragon Age: Origins were so feature rich or "complete" when compared to Rogues and Warriors.

"I would say it's more because the design space that Dragon Age: Origins was being built into was heavily influenced by second edition D&D," said Darrah. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, or AD&D, formed the basis of the mini RPG golden age of Infinity Engine games started by Baldur's Gate.

Famously, at the time of its release, Dragon Age was BioWare returning to its roots to make a more tactical, complex RPG like the Forgotten Realms-based duology that put it on the map.

"The reality is: [Fighters] and Rogues, they were thinner classes. They were simpler classes," Darrah explained. "And the Mage was the stronger, more fully implemented, more fully considered class. Much more complicated, in terms of spells and such."

This was something I struggled with coming to Baldur's Gate after later RPGs like Neverwinter Nights: Feats weren't really a thing until third edition D&D, cribbing off Fallout's notes with perks.

Fighters and related combat classes in the OG Baldur's Gates are mostly there to auto attack enemies, the Battlemaster maneuvers and whirlwind attacks of later games just a twinkle in some designer's eye.

Mages, meanwhile, could summon demons, draw on a host of direct damage and crowd control effects, and even engage with an interactive Wish spell with ironic punishments for poorly worded wishes due to a low Wisdom score. You can see Baldur's Gate 2's Throne of Bhaal expansion try to ameliorate this with the addition of "High Level Abilities"—basically feats by another name.

I've always been partial to Rogues in Origins, but you can see who got the most love of the trio: Warriors and Rogues share archery and dual weapon ability trees, with some special dirty tricks and the requisite sneak attacks for Rogues, while Warriors get exclusive access to two-handers and the sword and board setup. Just like in Baldur's Gate, Mages have a smorgasbord of game-changing spell effects.

But there's one more factor Darrah points to as well: Origins' relative realism compared to later entries in the series. "Of all the Dragon Ages, Dragon Age: Origins is the most 'grounded,'" said Darrah. "It's the one that's worrying the most about everything making perfect sense within the overall lore of the game."

"So Warriors and Rogues in Origins basically don't have talents or skills that violate physics, whereas, as we move into Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition and Veilguard, you get a lot more things that are not really possible for someone to physically do."

This is something that always vexed me in Inquisition and Veilguard in particular: Why are Mages so persecuted if basically everyone has godlike magical abilities now? Assassins get flash step shadow clones, Reavers have fire blood dragon claws, Champions in Veilguard can do AoE fire magic spellsword stuff. Everybody's a super hero.

It's certainly fun and feels very cool to do wild Tempest elemental stuff in Inquisition or poison Duelist flurry attacks in Veilguard, but I found it contributed to this flattening effect on the class fantasies. Things might have been unbalanced in Origins, but it made Mages feel special in a fiction where they were supposed to be incredibly powerful.

In a recent interview with MrMattyPlays, former BioWare producer Mark Darrah talked about how player expectations for Dragon Age 2 as a full sequel to Dragon Age: Origins may have damaged the more experimental RPG's reception at launch.

"In terms of the project I was most proud of, in a lot of ways I would say that's probably Dragon Age 2," Darrah said in the interview. "Not because it's the best game I've ever done, but because it was done under such tight constraints, and I'm really proud of what we were able to do in the time we had."

MrMattyPlays followed up by asking Darrah to expand on the mixed (but increasingly more positive) legacy of Dragon Age 2. "I do think that a lot of the problem with Dragon Age 2's reception at launch is: We didn't adequately prepare people for the change," said Darrah. "That's one of the reasons I feel like it's been able to repair its reputation over time.

"When people come and look at it five, 10, 14 years later, they're able to say, 'Ok, I'm going to look at it with fresh eyes and let it stand on its own.' It's just when it came up and we called it 'Dragon Age 2,' and we said 'Compare this directly to Dragon Age: Origins,' and then people look at it and they're like, 'Well this sure isn't Dragon Age: Origins 2,' which it isn't. But we didn't do a good job of preparing people for that fact."

Dragon Age 2 had an infamously clipped development time: No more than 16 months, which is blistering compared to the long gestation of Origins and three-plus year triple-A minimum of today.

This resulted in DA2's extensive reuse of environments⁠—you'll fight evil cultists in the same warehouse at the end of the game that you beat up gangsters in at the start of DA2⁠—and copy-paste, wave-based fights that underserved DA2's actually quite strong character building and real time with pause combat.

But Darrah got at one of my favorite things about Dragon Age 2 here: It felt more like a Dragon Age side story, three seasons of a TV show set in Thedas, than another save the world epic quest like Origins or the later Inquisition and Veilguard.

You get to see the same places and cast of characters change over the course of 10 in-game years, and despite the limited real estate, Kirkwall remains a striking and believable videogame city, while DA2's cast is one of the best BioWare has ever done.

For a studio whose main plots were almost always less interesting than the side stories and characters, making a game that was all side story and characters was a masterstroke. It makes me once again pine for the canceled Joplin, the codenamed first version of "Dragon Age 4" that would have focused on urban heists in the Tevinter Imperium.

Instead, Dragon Age: Inquisition chased after "Dragon Age: Origins 2," while Veilguard ultimately tried for "Dragon Age: Inquisition 2," with neither game quite measuring up. So many globetrotting, world-saving adventures spread the once-enticing world of Thedas too thin, killing the mystery and sense of scope it had with the keyhole views of Origins and DA2.

Elsewhere in the interview, Darrah talked about how Dragon Age wasn't even planned to be a full series at its inception, as well as how Veilguard's insane development cycle left it effectively "four games stitched together."

Mark Darrah's tell-all with YouTuber MrMattyPlays has been doing the rounds—including on the good site PC Gamer—and for great reason. The former BioWare producer seems to've hit a point where he's happy to simply divulge exactly what (he believes) went wrong with BioWare, the dozen little disasters that led to the, at the moment, death of Dragon Age.

In the video below (starting at around 39 minutes), Darrah says he believes Veilguard was "four games stitched together, and you can really see the stitching," a shot before the absolute chaster that is: "assuming that EA was gonna prioritise Anthem over Dragon Age … the one single act that could've made a massive difference to Veilguard would've been to shut the project down completely when I moved on to Anthem."

For context, Darrah moved on to Anthem proper in 2017 when he took over as executive producer, roughly two years after The Veilguard, then called Dreadwolf, entered development.

It's not a statement made with malice—rather, Darrah pins its confused identity on its false-start origins. The Veilguard was initially conceived as a live service game. "It's carrying a lot of the weight of being that live-service game, running without an executive producer, [and] it's just picked up a lot of stuff that's still in there … in part because it was always a year and a half away from [being shipped]."

Veilguard, which he later dubs a "zombie" project, was "always in this constant state of being too close to its ship-date to completely retool."

This basically tracks with what Darrah says earlier in the interview—that EA's games tend to get better when a studio is making those games, and only those games. He admits that this strategy could've spelt the doom of the series earlier, but it'd have been a risk worth taking.

"Now there's a non-zero chance that Anthem ships, and we go to try to start the Dragon Age up from a cold start, and EA goes 'no, we don't want it anymore'. Maybe you don't get a Dragon Age 4 at all in that world."

However, if EA did bite post-Anthem, then "you're not carrying that baggage in that case … A lot of that is multiplayer, live-service stuff—and it was worked away, it was worked on—but that was the base."

Darrah also has a lot to say about The Veilguard's long, downright tortured development—using the Thor movies (The Dark World, Ragnarok, and Love and Thunder) as prime examples: "Dark World came out right around Inquisition, and people were like 'ugh'. And Ragnarok came out early in Dragon Age 4's development—so that was like, the height of the love with this brighter, quippier tonal landscape from traditionally very dark IPs."

Just to pin up some more points on this timeline, Thor: Ragnarok came out in 2017, two years after The Veilguard started development.

"But we had a lot of years to go, and if you continue down Thor, Love and Thunder comes out before Veilguard ships, as well … We can pretty much use Thor as the 'we love this [comedic tone]' to 'we hate this with a burning passion'." In case you missed Love and Thunder—well, you didn't really miss much. It is considered thoroughly mid.

Darrah concludes: "The game was in development for so long, it's out of its place and time in terms of its tone."

He then goes on to absolutely vindicate our own Fraser Brown, who called this very same shot back when the game arrived: "It wasn't Marvel on purpose, but it was drawing from that zeitgeist. It was very Marvel-y, and it also was living with the consequences of people not really wanting that anymore."

Or, in other words, the trailer was "a better trailer in 2020 than it was in 2024."

Dragon Age: Origins took some big swings when it came to letting players, as the future Hero of Ferelden, make such a big mark on the world, changing the fates of individuals and nations. And BioWare felt free to give players this kind of agency, this ability to shape the story, because it didn't expect to make more Dragon Age games.

This is according to former executive producer Mark Darrah, who recently gave a wide-ranging and candid interview to MrMattyPlays. Darrah was at BioWare between 1998 and 2022, so he had a front row seat to all of its dizzying highs and depressing lows.

"Dragon Age: Origins originally was intended as a standalone game," Darrah says. "You can see this, if you play Dragon Age: Origins, knowing that it was intended to stand alone. There's a lot of threads that are cast out that kind of had to be abandoned because there could be werewolves all over the world, there might be a civil war happening underground in Orzammar."

These threads, he says, were "great to put out in a game you never had to come back to," but in a series they were much trickier to wrangle.

A big feature of the Dragon Age games, until Veilguard, was the ability to import your choices from previous games, giving you a more bespoke Thedas to play in. The most ambitious version of this system was Dragon Age Keep, an app that took your existing saves from Origins and Dragon Age 2 and then imported them into Dragon Age: Inquisition. If no saves were found, you could pick pre-defined heroes and then select major decisions, deciding how you wanted them to play out.

The third game in the series sort of united the somewhat disparate journeys of the Hero of Ferelden and Hawke, and Dragon Age Keep helped facilitate that, breaking the previous games down to around 300 choices.

But even with that tool, there was a limit to how much the sequels responded to the choices you made previously. Because BioWare never expected to have to deal with them ever again. But that was before Origins became a hit.

"It's pretty much financial reasons more than anything," says Darrah. "And I think that the franchise has been much more forward looking ever since then."

This assertion is backed up by BioWare's decision to make Dragon Age 2's reactivity more localised. The choices you made in that game still had echoes, but a lot of them were more personal or focused specifically on the game's primary location: the city of Kirkwall.

Dragon Age: Inquisition, though, suggests that BioWare didn't actually learn its lesson. Its world state was the product of all the choices you made in the two previous games, and then it introduced lots of major decisions that had a global impact, giving the team more stuff to untangle than ever before.

Except that it didn't actually do that. Not at all. One of The Veilguard's many letdowns was the disconnect between it and its predecessors. There was no save import feature, no return of Dragon Age Keep. Instead, it took 15 years of agency and player-driven world building and boiled it all down to a trio of decisions, most of which were frankly meaningless. All of them stemmed exclusively from Inquisition, primarily its Trespasser DLC, and had only a minor impact on The Veilguard.

If BioWare had known it was making a series, it might have held back, so I'm pretty glad it came as a surprise. It was more work for the developers, of course, but also produced games where it felt like we were the authors of our journeys. Until The Veilguard, anyway.

A much more notable obstacle, from the sounds of it, was EA. Even though the publisher saw value in the series after Origins' success, it didn't really get it.

"The problem that Dragon Age has had, charitably I guess, is that EA wants mainstream success," says Darrah, "and it's hard, or at least it has historically been hard, for corporate people, people who come from the sports side of the organisation to look at a game like Dragon Age: Origins, which is super nerdy, not very attractive looking, and say 'Oh, this is a mainstream game.' They don't see it."

This echoes what Darrah's former colleague, David Gaider, said earlier in the year. EA just didn't know what to do with Dragon Age.

Darrah describes the series' development as "wobbling back and forth a lot, trying to reach out, and then pulling back when it got ahead of itself". And we saw it again with The Veilguard. The action-based combat, the streamlined choices, the disconnect with the previous games. The whole thing was designed for people who didn't really care about Dragon Age; the broadest possible audience.

The version of BioWare that made Origins didn't know Dragon Age was going to be a whole thing, it wasn't making future plans, and it wasn't trying to support a brand by bringing in players who don't like nerdy CRPGs. And that's how we got one of the best and richest RPGs ever made. The BioWare of today, meanwhile, is more firmly entrenched in EA's corporate culture, encouraged to make simpler people-pleasers. And that's how we ended up with an RPG that feels like the series' death knell.

As reported by TheGamer, BioWare producer Mark Darrah opened up about the history of attempted Dragon Age remasters and remakes at BioWare in a recent interview with MrMattyPlays on YouTube.

The former BioWare dev thinks a remaster of the first three Dragon Age games is the best shot the series has at a future, but notes that such an endeavor would face massive challenges compared to the well-received Mass Effect Legendary Edition.

"I'm not sure who pitches that game within EA, that's what it would come down to," Darrah said when asked about the future of the series. "There would need to be someone at BioWare⁠—or, potentially, someone within EA more broadly⁠—that would be willing to go out on a limb and say: 'I want to pitch another Dragon Age game, here's my vision of it.'

"There are more games to be made there, but I'm not sure how it gets started right now."

When asked what he would do were he still at BioWare, Darrah said he wasn't sure how to continue the series after Veilguard, but he knows what BioWare and EA should do instead: "I honestly think they should do⁠—I don't think they will, but they should⁠—a remaster of the first three."

Darrah explained that BioWare had floated the idea of remastering or remaking Dragon Age in the past, but that it had never risen to the level of a formal "pitch," rather a range of remaster/remake ideas to the tune of "Is there a way to bring Dragon Age: Origins forward?"

Rather than EA nixing these ideas outright, it sounds like a fear of EA's response or the work involved kept BioWare from formally spinning them up. One part of this was the eternal struggle for resources between teams at BioWare (mostly Dragon Age vs. Mass Effect), as well as between BioWare and other studios at EA.

Another issue was what Darrah characterized as a general hostility to remastering games at EA⁠—though that seems to have changed given examples like the Mass Effect Legendary Edition and Command and Conquer Remastered.

In addition to external pressure and skepticism from EA, there's also the issue of Dragon Age's tech base. DA 1 and 2 were made on a proprietary engine, and in November of last year, Veilguard director John Epler said that "maybe 20 people left at BioWare" still have expertise in the Eclipse Engine⁠—and that was before EA gutted the studio. Darrah characterized Dragon Age 1 and 2 remasters as "unknowably hard": You'll only understand the extent of the technical challenge once you dig into it.

At this point, with all the firings and staff departures, I'm not sure any reinterpretation of Dragon Age would result in something I would want. The staff turnover and slow death of BioWare has only exacerbated Dragon Age's series-long identity crisis, with each game significantly different from the last in tone, mechanics, and visuals.

Despite a lot of great art direction hampered by 360-era muddy brown graphics, Dragon Age: Origins is still an excellent, approachable tactical RPG on PC, one I'm not sure needs remastering, much less remaking. Its console versions were notably compromised with truly borked controls, but the PC release still holds up.

Dragon Age 2 is a very dear game to me that would benefit from a lot of TLC. It has a distinctive, striking look, one of the best story/cast combos BioWare's ever done, as well as great combat and character building mechanics⁠—everyone always says it was "actionized," but on PC it's literally the same real time with pause combat BioWare's been doing since Knights of the Old Republic. Stop gaslighting me, reviewers and RPG forum guys.

However, its infamous repeating environments and stultifying wave fights make it a caveated classic: I love going to the same spider cave I was in ten hours ago to fight wave after wave of mechanically identical enemies with ridiculously chunky health bars. But the kind of effort it would take to fix those issues is possibly the least likely thing to happen to the series.

Dragon Age is just dead. At least until a future, Microsoft-acquired EA announces their reboot of the series, Dragon Age: Origins - Origins, some time at the tail end of the 2030s.

Former BioWare writer David Gaider, who worked on the likes of Baldur's Gate 2, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and the first three Dragon Age games (not including Veilguard), recently spoke out about an issue he dubbed "anti-fans" in an interview with GamesRadar.

We've seen it happen time and again: A subset of players and content creators catch wind of some detail they don't like in a project and make it a personal mission to spend the lead up to launch bashing the game as much as humanly possible.

Sometimes they'll claim victory with sales flops like Concord or Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and otherwise pretend like nothing ever happened when a targeted game reviews and sells well, like Assassin's Creed Shadows.

"The difficulty is if, suddenly, you end up with anti-fans. Then they turn from what you want, fans who would go out and spread word of your game and get people interested," said Gaider. "But if you get anti-fans, they sort of do the opposite. They're very determined, suddenly, to see your game fail as sort of a lesson to others who would make games of the same type, right? And that, honestly, these days, there's some element of that present in almost all fandoms, but it's always sort of been there for RPGs in particular."

Gaider went on to explain how he's seen "fandom" culture exacerbate this problem. "More and more fandoms are making the things that they're fans of integral to their identity, and if it's integral to their identity, anything that affects it or insults it, insults them," he said. "So they are so invested in making it what they imagine that, like I said, if they turn into the anti-fan, suddenly it's their personal investment in seeing that fail, or seeing the developers who made that decision be punished."

According to Gaider, this type of hostility is pushing a lot of game developers to minimize their public presence. That can have the adverse effect of making it harder for developers to interact with non-hostile players or find needles of genuine criticism in the hay bale of angry culture war comments.

Unfortunately, the media and cultural environment that produces this behavior doesn't seem likely to change any time soon. We're even already gearing up for our next flashpoint. Alongside genuine concerns about Marathon's genre shift from Destiny and well-earned criticism of Bungie plagiarizing from the artist Antireal, a subset of players appears to have become invested in it failing financially in the mean-spirited way Gaider described.

With the somewhat-middling debut of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, a game I sort of blandly enjoyed for 60 hours but certainly never in a 'this is a great Dragon Age' way, as well as the solemn layoffs following its muted fanfare, I think we can pretty much light a candle for the whole series. As well as the BioWare we knew and loved, mind. As PC Gamer's Fraser Brown puts it "The Veilguard was the very shiny, very pretty nail in the coffin."

It was the last real shot the studio had at convincing anybody it still had the juice after the stumbling of Mass Effect: Andromeda and the trainwreck of Anthem, but some of us were still holding out hope. Mark Darrah, a studio vet who worked there for over 20 years before leaving the studio in 2020, has revealed that the bones of BioWare were actually being Weekend at Bernie's-d for much longer than that.

In a grim tell-all on his YouTube channel, Darrah explains that 2017 was really the year that BioWare was fractured. Following a double-whammy of Dragon Age devs being peeled off to work on Andromeda, then Anthem, the team was then given marching orders to make a live service game. Marching orders that we know were later rescinded.

Didn't stop EA trying to blame the game's underperformance on a lack of 'em anyway, but what can you do.

"I wish that had never happened. I wish that pivot had never occurred—I wish that had never happened," Darrah emphatically states. Still, "EA said, 'make this a live service', we said, 'we don't know how to do that, we should basically start the project over'."

This marked the second age of "leadership discontinuity on Dragon Age," says Darrah—with this all going on while the team's core leadership is tied to Anthem. "This ends up causing massive amounts of changes to the project, to the team makeup, to the culture.

"In this time, Dragon Age is pursuing a goal that ultimately it doesn't want to be pursuing. But it does its best, but in doing its best, it changes the nature of the project in fundamental ways. So as we come to the end of 2017, we are in a state where almost everyone is on Anthem, but Dragon Age [is] running without most of its core leadership."

Darrah damns these changes and leadership decisions without qualification, in a way that's a little heartbreaking. "In the process of this change, EA and BioWare have dramatically damaged their relationship with myself, but also with a lot of other, more senior members of BioWare. Because they've said things are going to happen that didn't happen, they've made assurances that did not come true."

Now, obviously, this is only one person's view on the subject—a reality Darrah makes room later in the video to discuss—but it really does seem like BioWare, in particular its Dragon Age team, was the victim of a slow kind of corporate vampirism that saw it become a husk of its former self.

"As we come out of 2017," Darrah continues, "BioWare is a different thing. It is focused on making a live service in Anthem, it has lost one of its studios in Montreal being taken away," studios that—earlier in the video—Darrah was praying would return to the Dragon Age team, not be merged into the wider EA hivemind after Andromeda's debut, "and now it moves into the future in this new state."

Ultimately, Darrah concludes that: "EA buys studios, and then consumes them, and they start to lose their culture into the overall EA culture. To me, it feels like 2017 is when EA finished digesting BioWare, which they had bought nine years earlier, in 2008."

It's a grim picture to paint—and one to be taken with a grain of salt, given Darrah left in 2020. But it certainly tracks with similarly-damning words from other BioWare veterans about the state of BioWare post-Dragon Age: Inquisition. We kinda held a wake for one of gaming's RPG giants last year, but it turns out its bones might've been picked dry for eight whole years before that.

It sure seems like the sun is setting on Dragon Age—with Veilguard falling short of expectations after years in development, EA seemingly learning exactly the wrong lessons, and sweeping layoffs including senior talent, I'm not holding my breath for the future. In my view, Veilguard was a semi-decent action RPG with a fumbled story, which just wasn't enough.

David Gaider, who authored the series but left Bioware in 2016 after Dragon Age: Inquisition, has revealed two truths. The first, not-so-shocking one, is that EA didn't really know what to do with Dragon Age (something you could glean from context)—the second, more shocking one is that BioWare was completely split down the middle circa 2010-2016, divided into two studios. Studios that, according to him, kinda resented each other.

In a Bluesky post, Gaider explains that after Dragon Age: Inquisition left him feeling exhausted, he "joined the new project that the former Mass Effect team in Edmonton was cooking up—the one that became Anthem … That was a mistake"—not Anthem, but rather, going from a Dragon Age to a Mass Effect team at BioWare.

"The thing you need to know about BioWare is that for a long time it was basically two teams under one roof: the Dragon Age team and the Mass Effect team. Run differently, very different cultures, may as well have been two separate studios. And they didn't get along.

"The company was aware of the friction and attempts to fix it had been ongoing for years, mainly by shuffling staff between the teams more often. Yet this didn't really solve things, and I had no idea until I got to the [Anthem] team," he adds: "The team didn't want me there. At all."

The difference, Gaider explains, seems to me almost high school in nature. Like BioWare had its own coterie of nerds and jocks, Montagues and Capulets, Jets and Sharks—you get the idea. He explains that Anthem had initially been conceptualised as grungy, Aliens-esque science fiction—and that he'd been given marching orders to turn it into a science fantasy romp. This met the existing team like oil on water.

"I don't think anyone told the team this. So they thought this change was MY doing. I kept getting feedback about how it was 'too Dragon Age' and how everything I wrote or planned was 'too Dragon Age' … Yet this was a team where I was required to accept and act on all feedback, so I ended up iterating CONSTANTLY."

He says that "it became clear this was a team that didn't want to make an RPG … yet they wanted me to wave my magic writing wand and create a BioWare quality story without giving me any of the tools I'd need to actually do that."

This illuminates some of Gaider's prior words about BioWare's shifting team culture. Back in 2023, he wrote that the studio had come to "quietly resent" writers. Arriving in a new team only to be forced to "accept and act" on all feedback, be given orders contrary to their vision, and then made to be the fall-guy for those orders? Sure sounds like quiet resentment to me.

Gaider did consider a world where he'd "stick it out and try my best, but only if there was SOMETHING waiting on the other side, where I could have more say as Creative Director. I wanted to move up. I was turned down flat, no hesitation … Even more when I was told that, while I could leave the company if I wanted to, I wouldn't have any success outside of BioWare. But in blunter words." Yikes.

In a quote to a reply, Gaider theorises that this disdain for Dragon Age wasn't just silo'd into the Mass Effect (ME) team, but a general distaste from EA on high: "While I was at BioWare, EA always preferred Mass Effect, straight up. Their Marketing team liked it more. It was modern. It had action. They never quite knew what to do with DA, and whenever DA outperformed ME, ME got the excuses. If you ask me, it was always just shy of the axe since DA Origins."

Now, this is to be taken with a bit of salt. Gaider is a fantastic writer known for authoring one of gaming's best RPG worlds—but he was also severely burned by EA and BioWare, so there's some (understandable) subjectivity surrounding his words here.

However, his description here does pass muster. Namely, if writing teams were made to act on feedback no matter what, in a studio leaning towards Mass Effect and away from its gritty RPG roots? That sure explains why a group of people who have done great work on Dragon Age in the past somehow produced something I actively couldn't stand. It sure explains why Veilguard plays more like a Mass Effect game, too.

EA very much hasn't given me faith that it even understands why things didn't shake out. In the aftermath of Veilguard's lukewarm reception, CEO Andrew WIlson pretty much chalked its failure up to a lack of live service features. Which is so laughably, indescribably far from any of the criticisms I had for Veilguard that it's not even funny. If executives just listened to the people who are responsible for their successes… well, we'd live in a very different world, I suppose. Maybe Larian was right, and we should adopt the pirate model after all.

The voice actor for Solas in the Dragon Age series, Gareth David-Lloyd, recently spoke about his experience working on the series and playing the games: Including his favourite romance option.

It's himself. I mean, you have to respect the honesty.

Talking at York Comic Con, and filmed by streamer LadyCrazyDragon (thanks, The Gamer), it sounds like David-Lloyd did at least try a few other options first. "First time I romanced Josephine [Montilyet]," begins David-Lloyd. "Lovely performance, rubbish romance. And then the second time was Cassandra [Pentaghast]. Yes, that was a good one.

"And the last... the last time I played a female character and romanced myself, which is the best—the best."

David-Lloyd is obviously having a bit of fun with it, but the character's fans think he's just talking sense. "Solas would romance himself," points out Andi in the TikTok comments, while Binabees admires "the conviction" behind how he declares himself "the best" (and clearly agrees). Others are just amused he calls the character "myself" rather than Solas, which is pretty funny.

Anyway: Not bad for a character that could fairly be described as an egg.

At the same event, David-Lloyd talked about being cast in the game, and the weird experience of voice acting a character that the makers won't tell you much about.

"All I knew about the character, because [BioWare is] so cagey about spoilers and giving things away, was that he was an elf and that he was magic," said David-Lloyd.

"Then you go in, and they haven't given you any scripts, and there's a TV screen on the wall and the lines come out with a brief description on how to say the line with a tiny bit of context but not much. It was quite nerve-wracking."

When Inquisition came out, David-Lloyd decided to play it and got hooked, "really, really addicted", playing through multiple times and clocking up 500 hours. When it came time to perform in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, David-Lloyd said the magic elf had become more like an "old friend."

There is definitely an onanistic streak in voice acting, and David-Lloyd is not alone in romancing his virtual self. The Baldur's Gate 3 lot were positively feral about it: Shadowheart actor Jennifer English played with herself, and Lae'zel actor Devora Wilde couldn't stop doing it. And yes, Astarion actor Neil Newbon was at it, too. I mean, of course Astarion is gonna choose Astarion: As Newborn said, "Why would you not?"

Bloomberg reports that, following EA's layoffs and restructuring at BioWare, the studio now has fewer than 100 employees, down from more than 200 during the development of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Meanwhile, at its peak, BioWare consisted of three studios and, conservatively, over 400 employees.

Interestingly, Bloomberg's sources say that the plan to "loan" BioWare developers to other EA studios while the next Mass Effect was in pre-production was put in place shortly after The Veilguard launched, but before its sales failure came to light. Regardless of The Veilguard's ultimate performance, former BioWare producer Mark Darrah's prediction that the studio had become a one game at a time outfit was on the money, and many devs would have had nothing to work on before Mass Effect entered full production.

Those relocations were made permanent following the news of Veilguard missing its sales target by 50%, with an additional 20+ full layoffs on top of that. According to Bloomberg, BioWare's staff is now down to fewer than 100 people. During development of The Veilguard, the studio had over 200 employees. But we can go further back to better understand the full scope of BioWare's decline in the past decade.

• A 2019 Global News report on BioWare's office relocation quoted it as having 320 employees at its original Edmonton location.
• Eurogamer reported "between 80 and 150" developers were working on BioWare Austin's Shadow Realm in 2014⁠—it's unclear how they were distributed between Austin and Edmonton, but a majority would have been at the Texas location.
• Concrete numbers on Bioware Montreal are scarce: The CBC reported it had just 55 people in 2010 shortly after its formation, but 2017's Mass Effect Andromeda credits over 300 people directly on development, with a majority of them presumably at Montreal given its status as lead studio on the project.

These numbers come from three different points in the 2010s and don't fully differentiate who was where and when, but even conservatively, I think we can estimate that peak BioWare was around 400-500 employees strong for much of the last decade. Even with BioWare's reported internal struggles with a slapdash crunch culture and confused development goals on Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, I don't know how to view this as anything other than a totalizing failure on the part of EA.

Over the past 10-years, the once-dominant mega publisher has squandered what was the household name in North American RPG development, the originator of a cinematic RPG form that continues to deliver excellent games, impressive profits, and stable employment at studios like Larian, CD Projekt, and Obsidian. BioWare's EA-mandated pivots to and from live service indicate to me that its parent company never really knew what to do with the studio. A beloved gaming institution and its influential fantasy worlds have been utterly squandered, to say nothing of the lives and talents of those who passed through BioWare's offices.

Dragon Age appears to have reached the end of the road, at least for now. Despite the largely positive reception, sales of Dragon Age: The Veilguard didn't meet C-suite expectations, the game's most recent update appears to be its last, and developers at BioWare have been scattered to the four winds as the studio focuses exclusively on early work on the next Mass Effect game. But former BioWare senior writer Sheryl Chee recently took to Bluesky to reassure fans that Dragon Age isn't really dead, "because it's yours now."

"A cool French woman dropped a cool quote from Camus on me today: 'In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. (I mean, who does resistance like the French, right?)," Chee, whose writing credits on Dragon Age go all the way back to Origins, wrote on Bluesky in response to a user mourning the death of Dragon Age. "We're going through it right now. It's a lot, everywhere.

"But DA isn't dead. There's fic. There's art. There's the connections we made through the games and because of the games. Technically EA/BioWare owns the IP but you can't own an idea, no matter how much they want to. DA isn't dead because it's yours now."

In a subsequent post, Chee wrote, "So someone just reposted my thing saying they'll write a giant AU [alternate universe] and that's what I'm talking about. If DA has inspired you to do something, if it sparks that Invincible summer, then it's done its job, and it has been my greatest honor to have been a part of that."

Chee's words are heartening, but they come amidst a time of real turmoil at BioWare, which saw a significant portion of its staff moved to other EA studios—Chee herself is now at EA Motive—or laid off outright. EA seems to have lost faith in Dragon Age as a moneymaker of suitable scale, and while fanfiction is always on the table, it's really not a replacement for the work of veteran RPG developers backed by a well-funded studio. Which I don't say to cast an even greater pall over things, but just to reflect the reality: Deeply committed fans of the Dragon Age universe can continue to run with it as they see fit, but people who just want to play Dragon Age videogames have less to look forward to.

The immediate future of Dragon Age is definitely gloomy but EA has made no formal pronouncements of its demise at this point, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard wasn't a flop. It was met with good reviews, holds a "mostly positive" rating on Steam—not spectacular, but far from catastrophic—and "engaged" roughly 1.5 million players. Its main failing seems to be that it didn't meet an arbitrary sales number put up by EA executives.

That's not great, particularly given that the previous game in the series, Dragon Age: Inquisition, "quickly became the most successful launch in BioWare history" when it came out in 2015, and I don't expect we'll be hearing news about big plans for the future of Dragon Age anytime soon. But I think Dragon Age fans can take heart from the knowledge that videogames are very much like superheroes: They change, they fall out of sight sometimes, but they never really die.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard did not sell well. At least not well enough for publisher Electronic Arts. Three months out from launch, The Veilguard missed its sales target by "nearly 50%," 1.5 million players versus a projected 3 million. The Veilguard reviewed well (well enough, in our case), but has sold worse than BioWare's notorious live service flop, Anthem. Now the future of a studio that was once synonymous with triple-A RPGs is more in doubt than at any point in its post-Inquisition wilderness era.

I find myself inclined to make excuses for a developer I have a lot of fondness for, one that had to release an embattled, twice-rebooted sequel that had long since gone from "eagerly anticipated" to "annoyingly MIA." Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a good game despite its winding, arduous road to our PCs, but that just hasn't cut it. With EA marking it down as a flop, I'm now wondering if this is it for Dragon Age, and whether the big BioWare comeback we've been hoping for is even possible as it moves onto the next Mass Effect.

3 million players engaged

One of my immediate thoughts was that 3 million sales was somehow an unattainable figure for The Veilguard to hit⁠—the damn suits moving the goalposts on honest artists once again! On Bluesky, industry analyst Mat Piscatela wrote that "sometimes sales targets are adjusted to account for longer or more expensive development than were originally planned for, even if everyone involved in the adjusting know that the resulting target is outlier/unreasonable."

But forget about recent megahits like Cyberpunk, Baldur's Gate, or Elden Ring: Looking at EA and BioWare's history of singleplayer games, The Veilguard's performance strikes me as pretty dire. A particularly damning comparison is Anthem, which undersold a 6 million unit target with 5 million copies moved by the end of its first month and a half after launch. Jedi: Fallen Order, the game that convinced EA to give singleplayer another chance after its dalliance with live service, sold 8 million units in three months. The reason for the season, Dragon Age: Origins, hit 3.2 million in four months back in the day.

The Veilguard underperformed compared to prior Dragon Age games⁠—BioWare's best-selling series, with Inquisition racking up 11 million players according to former studio producer Mark Darrah⁠—as well as EA's other recent big swing singleplayer games, despite positive reviews and being attached to an established, popular series. There are a few factors I think we can point to that really hurt the game.

Low approval

One I'm worried will get overblown in the coming days by both triumphal right-wingers and self-conscious liberal gamers is some kind of tedious "go woke go broke" parable based on The Veilguard's much-publicized trans and nonbinary representation. My personal politics aside, I don't think that's a critical part of this story, YouTube videos titled something like "Dragon Age: The Veilguard: A Woke Nightmare?" clogging my search results when I'm looking for Nightmare-difficulty gameplay videos notwithstanding.

BioWare has always been the socially progressive RPG studio. Mass Effect's Bush-era fashy militarism aside, BioWare has prioritized LGBTQ representation in particular for more than 20 years, with a furtive stab at a lesbian romance in 2003's Knights of the Old Republic quietly vetoed by LucasArts.

I'm old enough to remember people freaking out about Anders hitting on them in Dragon Age 2, which still sold, as well as Inquisition's major trans character and a conversion therapy plotline. The Veilguard struck me as awkward and polemical by comparison, but I think that's more an indictment of its general writing quality than any political agenda. Meanwhile, in terms of identity politics and representation, the ideological Venn diagram of The Veilguard and beloved megahit RPG Baldur's Gate 3 is basically a circle.

The culture war rage is just one facet of an overall inauspicious narrative surrounding the game. The Veilguard was rebooted twice in development, renamed once, saw the departure of multiple big-name developers closely associated with the inception of the franchise, and arrived almost 10 years to the date after the prior entry in the series. The Veilguard needed to be an unambiguous all-timer to transcend BioWare's bruised reputation. It turned out fine⁠ in the critical consensus—pretty good overall, I'd argue⁠—but not a return to the glory days.

Who is this for?

In a lot of ways, The Veilguard feels like a soft reboot for the series: Fewer returning characters than in Dragon Age 2 or Inquisition, minimal choices carried over, and a fresh cast in a new corner of the world. This was a bet on attracting new players, with an assumption that series fans would still be along for the ride.

That's not necessarily a mistake or a failing in a vacuum⁠—Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't harmed by a lack of grounding in the Bhaalspawn Saga or some kind of interoperability with the goddamn Infinity Engine⁠—but Veilguard inhabits a far more awkward middle ground. That didn't hamper prior BioWare games like Inquisition or Mass Effect 3 that were mired in series lore, but Veilguard clearly wasn't able to attract a substantial new audience.

As for Dragon Age faithful, I can only speak anecdotally, but everyone in my life has been circumspect of or outright hostile to The Veilguard: PC Gamer's own Dragon Age likers have been put off by its art style, its combat, its storytelling, and its breaking of the chain of choices between Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Inquisition. My friends and loved ones have similarly expressed that Veilguard felt removed from the games that got them into the series, resolving them to an "I'll get it on sale" attitude.

The Veilguard managed to be the worst of both worlds, failing to bring back series fans while also not capturing any significant new audience with its compromises in approachability. I think there's a huge appetite for RPGs in the BioWare or CD Projekt mold, but the genre's also come a long way in the past ten years. Strong overall reviews failed to overcome a general perception of a cursed development, "sick man" status for BioWare, and a marketing cycle that broke the relative silence of years of tedious, cryptic teasers with a less than inspiring first trailer.

BioWashed?

BioWare was an industry juggernaut, and its run from 2007 to 2014 in particular is insane to look back on: The entirety of the mainline Dragon Age and Mass Effect trilogies, all out in seven years. Oh, and The Old Republic MMO too, just for good measure. We're in a very different industry now, and the studio's internal difficulties with a "BioWare Magic"-touting crunch culture and confused development on Mass Effect: Andromeda are well-documented.

Still, I don't think things had to turn out as bad as they did: I find myself contemplating the cancellation of "Joplin," the original pitch for Dragon Age 4, as a major turning point. It was scrapped in favor of a live service-oriented Dragon Age that would then be retooled into The Veilguard when EA realized that maybe live service-ifying everything wasn't a good idea. Even if Andromeda and Anthem still turned out the same in this timeline, I think the studio would be in a much healthier place now if it had managed to release a singleplayer Dragon Age game boasting more of the series' original talent around 2019 to 2020.

Former BioWare producer Mark Darrah reckons that BioWare is now a one active project at a time studio, meaning that many of the Veilguard's developers may find themselves in an awkward holding pattern until the next Mass Effect enters full production, if it hasn't already. That carries the risk of layoffs given EA's doldrums writ large and the general climate of wanton disregard for the value of experienced developers in the industry right now⁠—Darrah points to a number of BioWare employees who already seem to have been shuffled elsewhere in EA.

In the best case scenario, Mass Effect 5 is three years away at a bare minimum, so any Dragon Age follow-up is a proposition for the 2030s. Where does the series even go at that point? What choices carried over from The Veilguard will be worth accounting for by the time we hit the Mr. Beast presidential administration⁠—first or second term?

What I know for sure is that things look worse than ever for one of my favorite studios, the one that got me into RPGs and PC gaming in the first place. It didn't have to be this way, but very clear, unforced errors in direction and management have left it with one more shot to turn things around⁠—if that.

Original story: Dragon Age: The Veilguard's game director, Corinne Busche, is said to be leaving BioWare after almost two decades at the company, according to multiple sources.

The first confirmation comes from journalist Jeff Grubb, who wrote in a post to X that "Corrine Busche, director of Dragon Age, really is leaving BioWare. But I don't think EA is closing BioWare Edmonton. Was told there is nothing solid about that part of the rumor." Eurogamer later confirmed the departure in a report, stating that "BioWare itself is otherwise unaffected by any other changes, contrary to rumour." I've also reached out to BioWare for comment, and I'll update this article if I receive a response.

Busche's departure comes after 18 years at EA—joining the company in 2006, and transferring to BioWare in 2019. She became a game director at the studio in 2022. Interestingly enough, that puts her as becoming game director of The Veilguard (which had one hell of a troubled development) two years after its proper announcement, and one year after it went ahead and ditched the live service stuff. Not a position I'd envy, personally.

Especially given its reception has been all over the shop—the game enjoyed a solid critical reception, but a more withering one from long-time fans. Our own Lauren Morton gave it a 79 in her Dragon Age: The Veilguard review, putting it a solid eight points below what we gave Dragon Age: Inquisition back in 2014 and, as my fellow PC Gamer writer Robin Valentine so nicely summarised, 15 points below both Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 (we know, we know already).

But as has been pointed out on this site before, it's been divisive even among us writers. Some of us think it's fairly decent, while others think it's "bloodless, perfunctory, and broad". I've certainly got complicated feelings about it myself, and an overall withering perspective on its story, which started out bad, got slightly better, and ultimately completely lost me around 64 hours in—and I've felt no compulsion to go back since. For me, it was a decent bit of action RPG fun with a story that bothered me and a world that felt toothless.

Busche leaving BioWare having anything to do with this reception, though, is conjecture at this stage—especially as Eurogamer writes that it "understands The Veilguard's commercial performance was not a direct factor in Busche's departure". In my opinion, Busche leaves behind a game that spent a full decade in the oven, got jerked around, endured multiple departures, and came out a touch bland but also not a complete disaster—whatever she does next, there are far worse legacies to leave behind.

The Chenango County Sheriff’s Office has arrested Jonathan Rees, also known as Greg Ellis, on multiple charges. A report by WBNG states that Rees turned himself in at the Sheriff's office when asked, before being "processed, arraigned, and released", and will appear in court at a later date to face the charges. Rees is known for his role as Cullen Rutherford in the Dragon Age series, appearing first in Dragon Age: Origins, as well as Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition.

The charges in question pertain to an unnamed woman, cited in court documents as Jane Doe. They allege Rees of "offering a false instrument" (that is, a false document, form and so on) in the first degree, as well as "unlawful surveillance in the second degree". Other charges include making a false written statement, perjury, aggravated harassment, coercion, and "unlawful dissemination or publication of an intimate image".

Doe is said to have been in a relationship with Rees between 2016 and 2022, before breaking up with him and cutting off all contact—the documents accuse Rees of threatening Doe with "references to self-harm and exposing explicit content of Doe to a large audience". The documents also accuse Rees of sending "illicit photos" of Doe to her friends and family.

The report also states that in 2022 Rees "testified in open court and admitted to his attempt to use 'revenge porn' to extort Doe"—in response, a restraining order was put in place. The documents later state that Rees tried to intimidate a third-party witness, and threatened on social media to reveal Doe's identity as retaliation.

Rees has a history of controversy, such as this 2020 video featuring an in-character rant (as Cullen Rutherford) decrying the "intellectual glitterati" and the "#metoo" movement and asking fans to "plant their flag against cancel culture"—before responding (again, as Cullen Rutherford) to posts on social media levelled against Rees. While many of his later tweets aren't accessible anymore, Rees also publicly burnt bridges with Mark Darrah when he left Bioware that same year, calling him "a disloyal, duplicitous corporate fake".

Despite this attempt to—and I'm quoting that video, here—"have me, and my voice actor Greg Ellis tossed into the cancel culture wastelands", Rees has starred in videogame roles as recently as 2023, voicing a handful of roles in Hogwarts Legacy, and has also made appearances on television and animation.

I can't remember a single game that has polarized the PC Gamer team as much as Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Even pre-launch, opinions were mixed, and now that it's been out for some time, we've congealed into three camps: Anti-Veilguardites Robin and Fraser, Radical Veilguard Centrists Harvey and Lauren (who wrote our review), and The People's Revolutionary Council of Revisionist Veilguard-Likers, which consists of Jody and yours truly.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is not my personal game of the year, that's gotta be Shadow of the Erdtree. It's also not my second favorite game of the year⁠—that title belongs to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. But by God, Veilguard is 100% my third favorite game of 2024. While not perfect, I think it's a heartening return to form for BioWare, and one whose finer qualities have been eclipsed by both valid critiques of its storytelling, as well as far less acceptable "antiwoke" bellyaching. I really dug this game, and I want to give it its flowers before the year is through.

Even as BioWare struggled with everything else during its wilderness years of the late 2010s, it's only been getting better at making action-RPGs, and Veilguard is no exception. I love tactical RPGs, but that hasn't been BioWare's bag for a long time, and while I could take or leave some of the ways Veilguard smooths away the last remnants of CRPG-adjacent rough edges from Inquisition, a lot of the team's decisions here were pretty inspired.

I appreciate the way Veilguard curbed loot inflation, as well as Inquisition's tedious and unbalanced item crafting, with a unique, upgrade-centric system that incentivizes finding duplicate copies of the same weapon. The one-two punch of making all player armors usable by all classes while companions get their own bespoke gear erodes some of the distinction of the class fantasies (why's my rogue running around in plate mail!), but it also eliminates finding dud gear you just can't use, and simplifies the process of balancing all that loot.

Veilguard definitely has a reverse difficulty curve, and its fights are starting to feel samey as I approach the 60-hour mark, but that's an issue I've found with all of BioWare's games to date, and the core of Veilguard's combat and character building is fun enough to carry the day for me. I'm always a rogue first in Dragon Age, and here I opted for the classico dual swords edgelord "Duelist" specialization. The "Thousand Cuts" subclass-specific ability feels so good, I don't mind that every fight consists of me building up enough Rogue Pointz™ to just start spamming it⁠—my qunari rogue adopts an "en garde, my liege" stance before launching into a flurry of AOE anime slashes, trailing poison with every strike.

Veilguard's level design, meanwhile, is unambiguously BioWare's most interesting and complex in over 20 years, at least since Neverwinter Nights in 2002. I'd seen Veilguard's levels derisively compared to Overwatch maps, with simple layouts and pretty skyboxes, but that sells Veilguard short, and I think it's in a whole other league compared to the Mass Effect games. Don't get me wrong⁠, I love Mass Effect⁠, but its levels were exclusively linear shooting galleries with maybe a short side path or two to a weapon upgrade if you're lucky, while its non-combat hubs were the tiniest Disneyland suggestions of real places.

The Veilguard's levels are videogamey⁠—they don't immerse me or feel like real places in the same way Elden Ring or Indiana Jones managed⁠—but they are also fun, twisty, and visually striking, with Metroidesque shortcuts and switchbacks, as well as enough hidden loot and secret areas that I felt genuinely rewarded for exploring both in missions and during free roam of the hubs. A word of advice though: I definitely recommend taking Fraser's cue and toning down Veilguard's aggressively handholding objective markers. I went one step further, completely disabling both them and the minimap, and I haven't regretted it once.

Would that you could do the same to Veilguard's little choice explainer pop-ups. Every time something in The Veilguard transpires because of your previous actions, a little tooltip shows up like Microsoft Clippy to remind you why: "Remember when you spat in this guy's soup? He doesn't like you now." There's a genuinely difficult choice early in the game where you have to consign one of two hub zones to a stinky natural disaster, and I loved this moment, but the magic dulled a bit as the game just kept reminding me of it. Veilguard undermines its genuinely impressive reactivity by constantly explaining it to you like you're a toddler.

But that's just an annoyance, while the story being told is genuinely good fun. Thedas is definitely tamer, friendlier, and less politically fraught than it's ever been⁠—I was more amused than annoyed that the infamous Antivan Crows assassin guild from games past is more or less a confederation of plucky, crime-flavored freedom fighters now⁠—but it still feels like Thedas, and I didn't realize how much I missed this setting until I dove back in.

Veilguard has a solid crew of companions to hang with. If Mass Effect Andromeda was a resounding F and Dragon Age Origins has an S-tier crew, then Veilguard's cast gets a B. Neve, Harding, and Taash are sub-replacement level for me⁠—I found them by turns aggravating and boring⁠—but Lucanis kind of won me over. Under that edgy cool guy assassin exterior, he's basically just Carth from KotOR or Kaidan from Mass Effect, and I have a well-documented affection for that archetype.

Plucky archeologist Bellara, Grey Warden hardass Davrin, and friendly neighborhood necromancer Emmerich carry the cast for me. I was worried that Bellara would just be a worse version of Talli from Mass Effect or Merrill from Dragon Age 2, but after a poor first impression, I found her to be a winning, layered character with a great arc. Davrin brings a nice edge to the sword-and-board knight sort of guy, and I really dug how things played out between him and pet griffon Assan⁠—there's a bit of a Lone Wolf and Cub, "step dad who stepped up" thing going on, and I found that much more fun and palatable as one aspect of one member of an ensemble as opposed to The Plot of Every Console Triple-A Game For A While. Emmerich, meanwhile, is just a nice guy, a sweetheart⁠—he reminds me most of Gale from Baldur's Gate 3⁠—but the contrast of his chirpy attitude with his grimdark necromancer profession and aesthetics really charmed me.

It took us 10 years to get a new Dragon Age game, but it wasn't a linear process of toil on a singular vision. What would become The Veilguard saw one hard reboot and the departure of numerous longtime BioWare developers, including writers David Gaider and Mary Kirby, as well as directors Mike Laidlaw and Mark Darrah (Darrah did return as a consultant). The game then went through some kind of soft reboot from a live service multiplayer orientation back into a singleplayer game.

That's development hell, and somehow, The Veilguard escaped it. With a backstory like that, you might expect the finished result to be a mess, a cross-section of competing visions and stratified eras of development that's simply unfit for prime time.

But that's not what we got at all. The Veilguard is a fun, well put-together, and engrossing action-RPG that's had me hooked for 60 hours and counting. I know it's a good RPG because I indulged in my favorite vice and rerolled my guy after 20 hours to make a slightly different guy, and I didn't mind experiencing the first act of the game again⁠—I even cranked the difficulty up to the "tough customers only" Nightmare setting to spice things up. BioWare actually managed to do the thing with Veilguard despite all the factors working against it, and I'm proud to call Dragon Age: The Veilguard my third-favorite game of 2024.

After BioWare bid farewell to the Forgotten Realms following the modders' playground that was Neverwinter Nights, I—a fantasy-obsessed 19-year-old—was beyond excited to hear that it was building its own fantasy realm. The first screenshots of Dragon Age—which bore no resemblance to the game we eventually got—instantly became my desktop wallpaper. It took a long ass time, but when Origins finally materialised, it convinced me that it was more than worth the wait.

I was 24 when I at last got my hands on the RPG I was sure would reveal the future of the genre; the same year I decided to stop trying to find a real job and instead embarked on my questionable career as a videogame critic. Dragon Age: Origins was everything I'd hoped for, but I would have perhaps been less enthusiastic had I known that it served more as the conclusion of an era of exceptional CRPGs.

Every BioWare game since then has shifted further away from the design philosophy that had initially enthralled me. Dragon Age 2 with its rushed dungeons and action-RPG combat; Inquisition with its big open-world-inspired maps and reduced character agency; and of course the second and third Mass Effect games, which existed in a completely different RPG space.

I loved them all the same. Hawke's misadventures featured some of BioWare's strongest, boldest writing; Inquisition boasted an epic scope, companions I couldn't help become smitten with, and a brilliant extension of BG2's strongholds as you became the leader of the titular organisation; and while Mass Effect may have been a million miles away from the CRPGs of yore, Shep's quest to save the galaxy over and over again absolutely gripped me.

So as I mourned the loss of the old design, I still accepted that things had moved on. People didn't want CRPGs anymore, I kept being told. So I just accepted modernity and found plenty of things to love about the new games. These were still, ultimately, BioWare RPGs, after all.

With Andromeda, though, that all changed. I genuinely could not tell you a single character's name. I can't even be arsed looking them up. I just do not care. From a combat perspective, it was a decent shooter, but that's as much faint praise as I can muster. Dull story, forgettable characters and choices I didn't give a hoot about—it was the first BioWare game I didn't bother finishing. Until Anthem, anyway. I put maybe five hours into that multiplayer disaster before I just ejected forever.

Not my Thedas

So I was simultaneously excited and extremely worried when BioWare announced that it was finally returning to Thedas. What changes were in store for us this time? Unlike Andromeda, this new Dragon Age was a direct continuation of Inquisition, as we hunted down our treacherous pal, Solas, the titular Dreadwolf—at least until the game was renamed as The Veilguard. This connection to a game that, while not reaching the heights of Origins, had so many brilliant qualities reassured me. What an idiot.

I really tried to enjoy myself. God, I tried so hard. I attempted to find nuggets of joy within its hamfisted dialogue, one-note companions and the flashy but soulless fights. But I just couldn't do it. Every time there was a glimmer of hope, it was dashed against the rocks of infinite disappointment.

Honestly, I'm amazed I finished it. There was certainly a point where I was starting to feel like I'd rather do anything else than listen to a hot Grey Warden talk about his big dumb bird for the hundredth time, or play therapist to a giant dragon slayer who just wants to moan about how their mum doesn't understand them. These should have been great characters. A veteran knight reclaiming his order's lost legacy, a proud warrior wrestling with their cultural and gender identity—there's so much good stuff to mine here. But nope, they're just plain boring. All of them.

I'm beating a dead horse, I know. I've already said my piece. But it's just a real shame. When I got to the final cutscene that teased what we can expect from the next Dragon Age, it really sealed the deal. I'm out. BioWare just isn't telling stories I care about anymore. Instead of moping around, I'm moving on. BioWare had an exceptional run, but that developer is long gone. What's left is just an EA studio that makes middling games I'm not really interested in.

The silver lining, of course, is that all the claims about nobody wanting CRPGs proved to be complete nonsense. We've got plenty of them again, not least of which is Baldur's Gate 3. Waiting to find out what Larian's planning for us next, I feel like I'm that eager 19-year-old again. So instead of being bummed out about The Veilguard, I choose to be excited about what other developers are doing. I'm choosing optimism, it's just not directed towards BioWare.

BioWare art lead Matt Rhodes just keeps sharing explosive Dragon Age development details and alternate storylines on Twitter, all with accompanying concept art to boot. This latest revelation might just beat murdering Origins' Sten in a draft version of the Trespasser DLC⁠—it seems BioWare considered bringing our Origins protagonist back for The Veilguard, but they would have been sickened and horribly disfigured by the Grey Wardens' Blight-based Calling.

Rhodes shared a few concept pieces of the Anderfels region of Thedas, home to the Wardens' Weisshaupt Fortress and the Hossberg Wetlands zone of Veilguard. The third piece is the really shocking one, showing a cloaked figure wrapped in bandages, their skin mottled and purple-grey where exposed. They're sitting on a throne with a Warden bodyguard posted behind them, and this character no longer seems able to speak, instead relying on a quill and stack of parchments to communicate. They're holding one such message up to the viewer: "Don't let her see me like this."

"Nobody else seemed to like the 'leper king' direction, but I thought it'd be cool," Rhodes wrote in the caption, referencing the historical Baldwin of Jerusalem who was memorably depicted by Edward Norton in Kingdom of Heaven and also inspired the Leper in Darkest Dungeon. "The Hero of Ferelden has been putting off 'The Calling.' The Blight takes more each year, but there's still too much to do on the surface."

This would have been an absolute bombshell if it had made it into The Veilguard. Dragon Age's Blight-fighting Grey Wardens take a little nibble of the stuff to get their powers. It means they're able to kill Archdemons, but it also starts a roughly 20-year countdown until they hear The Calling and start transforming into maddened ghouls. Once it looks like their ticket's been punched, a Warden's supposed to travel underground to the Darkspawn's home turf and go out fighting. In Inquisition, world state codex stuff had the Hero of Ferelden out looking for a cure for The Calling⁠—it's why they weren't around to help out.

Clearly, things didn't fully work out in this iteration of Veilguard's story. Rhodes doesn't say explicitly, but it seems like our Origins hero also would have been First Warden of the order in this scenario⁠—in the final game, the Wardens are led by a bellicose chap straight out of central casting for an obstructionist police commissioner and voiced by none other than Nicholas Boulton, Hawke's actor from Dragon Age 2.

And like the prospect of Sten getting blown up in Trespasser, this fate for our Origins hero would have been a megaton bummer but also rad as hell. The "don't let her see me" message in particular is so goddamn heart-wrenching⁠—it presumably refers to Morrigan, the hero's friend and companion even if they never entered a relationship. The hero's disfigurement and silence would also have elided questions of player customization and voicing a previously silent protagonist⁠—even if you played a dwarf, this presumably came at a time in development where world states were still on the table, and could have been addressed with a cheeky shortened model.

I'm basically a net neutral on this not having made it into the final game. On the one hand, while I really loved Veilguard, its version of Thedas definitely lacks a lot of the strife, edge, and tragedy from previous games. Seeing the Hero of Ferelden like this would have been utterly chilling and unforgettable. On the flip side, it might have stuck out like a sore thumb in the swashbuckling, D&D podcast-core game we wound up getting. I can blissfully pretend my Origins Warden (City Elf Rogue, romanced Morrigan) is out doing errands for the Witch of the Wilds, maybe delivering a care package to their adult son who used to be a demon god while he attends Redcliffe University, home of the Fightin' Mabari.

This isn't the first time BioWare considered doing something utterly heinous to our Origins characters: In an early draft of Dragon Age: Inquisition's Here Lies the Abyss quest, we would have had to choose whether the Hero of Ferelden or Dragon Age 2's Hawke gets lost forever in another dimension.

Well, that was quick! Bioware's long-awaited (and moderately successful) return to the Dragon Age universe has been out for a little over a month, and already EA is treating us to a steep discount on the game. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is now available to buy on Steam for $39 (£32), marking a hefty 35% price drop from its original price of $60 (£50).

It gets better, because all the other games in the Dragon Age series—Dragon Age: Origins ($4/£4), Dragon Age 2 ($6/£4), and Dragon Age Inquisition ($6/£5)—can now be picked up at 85% off, which by my just-about functional internal calculations means that you can now own the entire Dragon Age franchise, including Veilguard, for the same price as Veilguard was when it came out. It's also worth noting that Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Inquisition all come with all their own DLC and expansions.

That's a whole lot of RPG goodness right there. It's interesting for a blockbuster release like this to go for so cheap a price, so soon after launch. For a little perspective, neither the three month-old Black Myth: Wukong nor the 16-month-old Baldur's Gate have dropped this much in price yet, while Dragon's Dogma 2 took a little over three months to see a comparable price drop.

So it's a steal, even if the game itself has spawned some mixed feelings here at PCG. There have been some standout moments and missions, but also a lot of placidly nice companions, weirdly redesigned Darkspawn, and overly safe storytelling. The consensus is that it's certainly not bad, but lacks the special something of earlier games in the series (even if we're finally wavering on our aeons-long defence of Dragon Age 2).

So if you want to experience the series' massively fluctuating trajectory all the way from Origins to The Veilguard—from the Baldur's Gate 2 spiritual successor to a sparkly action adventure with your bestest pals—then now's a great time to do it.

One of the big bummer moments from Dragon Age: The Veilguard, especially for many long-time fans of the franchise, was the fact that key decisions from the past games—Dragon Age: Origins, 2, and Inquisition—didn't really matter all that much.

As a matter of fact, you only get to make three real decisions when you boot up the game for the first time. How the Inquisition was disbanded, who your Inquisitor romanced, and whether you vowed to stop Solas or… save him from himself, which is sort of like stopping him with extra steps. While your Inquisitor does get a cameo, it's all a little surface-level.

As our own Robin Valentine puts it: "All those choices made across three games—who lived and who died, how factions were shaped and changed, who rose to rulership or fell from grace, the ultimate fate of the Warden, Hawke, and countless others—are simply discarded." But there might just be hope yet. Kinda. Sorta.

In an interview with IGN, game director Corinne Busche and creative director John Epler say they've got big plans to make sure that library of choices matter in the future. As Busche puts it: "One thing that we could have stated more clearly, or maybe alluded to … is the idea that just because these choices from the past library of games didn't necessarily impact this particular story, that doesn't mean they're gone. This is a chance for us to really key in to what matters with these events and what's happening in Northern Thedas.

"I do fully expect that these choices going clear back to Dragon Age Origins will again matter. So [I] just wanted to be on record with that."

I mean, listen—I am sceptical of this, highly sceptical, but I at least want to be fair and measured. Dragon Age: The Veilguard has had an impossibly complicated and winding development cycle, with the entire thing having to be torn away from a teetering live service multiplayer edge.

The decision to severely limit the representation of past choices might've just been strictly necessary to ensure the thing came out at all, or, as ex-BioWare lead writer David Gaider put it, due to a thinning of the writer's ability to shape the game. Videogames are expensive to make, this one took forever, and it's entirely possible nobody had the space to make the choices they wanted.

At the same time, I think it's super easy to say this now while it's a popular idea, and before it's an actual development issue. I had an okay time with Dragon Age: The Veilguard, sinking around 60 hours into it before my interest peeled away, but nothing I saw gave me any real hope that BioWare had, or in fact would, return to its storytelling roots. And you know what? I'm over it—studios change, sometimes. Maybe BioWare just makes fairly bland but satisfying action RPGs that go down smooth, with the harsh edges of worldbuilding all sanded off. I can accept this.

But I just don't know if the studio's got the juice to be making these kinds of promises, anymore. Maybe I'll be proven wrong—maybe The Veilguard was just a product of its circumstances, and the next Mass Effect game will blow my socks off and jam freeze-dried humble pie into my mouth at lightspeed. At the same time, the "choices matter" gong has been rung before. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, and you'll have to decide if you were fooled again, or vowed to never let anyone be fooled in the same way you were. There's a difference, I swear.

BioWare art lead Matt Rhodes just keeps coming with the development revelations about the Dragon Age series. As reported by Eurogamer, Rhodes shared some pieces of concept art for Dragon Age: Inquisition's Trespasser DLC that show a different, even darker ending for the status quo-upending expansion.

"An earlier version of the story. Sten would arrive to arrest you for meddling with magic, but Dagna has reverse engineered their explosives," Rhodes wrote on Twitter to explain the series of four concept pieces. "You have a trap for when they return, sacrificing Skyhold in the process."

Trespasser already sees a ton of plot whammies, like the Inquisitor losing their hand (and powers), the Inquisition either disbanding or getting absorbed into the Chantry, and Iron Bull potentially betraying the party for the Qun. The literal destruction of your Normandy-style home base to go along with the political and symbolic death of the Inquisition would have been the icing on the cake.

But even crazier would have been the reappearance and subsequent death of Sten, one of my favorite companions not only of the Dragon Age series, but BioWare's entire back catalog of digital buddies. It's possible for Sten to die or even be missed by the player altogether in Dragon Age: Origins, but in the comics it's established that he helped save Ferelden before returning to his people and becoming the new Arishok, replacing the one we see in Dragon Age 2⁠—ironically that would also mean "Sten" isn't even his name anymore, since that was his military rank. But come on, he's Sten.

As of The Veilguard, Stenishok survived the Antaam rebellion against him that figures prominently in the game's story, and he shows up in a few codex entries. The fact that he was once set to be a major antagonist in Inquisition, resulting in his spectacular death alongside the destruction of my home base, blows me away.

Like the choice to kill either the Warden from Origins or Hawke from DA2 that was ultimately cut from Inquisition, this would have been sick as hell, heartbreaking, and probably enough of a headache to implement that it makes sense the team moved in a different direction. The fact that Sten could have been dead via Dragon Age Keep world state complicates things, necessitating a stand-in body double like Grey Warden Stroud or any number of characters from Mass Effect 3. Inquisition was also BioWare's best-selling game, meaning that all those first time players would lack context for who Sten even is.

Part of me is relieved not to have had to betray my beloved bro in such a fashion, but I still would have loved to see him again⁠—Rhodes' concept art shows a burned, partially disfigured Sten fuming in the Skyhold throne room, and this appearance would have been so much more impactful than learning about what happened to Sten through comics and codex entries.

Rhodes has been liberally sharing development stories and concept art from the Dragon Age series on social media. He's got a big dump of Trespasser concepts on Artstation in addition to what he showed on Twitter. Previously, Rhodes shared some of the earliest concepts for The Veilguard, as well as rejected designs for multiplayer characters in Inquisition.

David Gaider, creator of the Dragon Age universe during his time at Bioware (and the lead writer on Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Inquisition) has been on a bit of a tell-all spree lately. Seemingly seized by an unquenchable thirst to show you behind the curtain, Gaider's been revealing truths about the series' cast, such as Morrigan's audition tape, a scrapped cameo for the Grey Warden, and Shale's salvation via an ode to how much he hated bird poo. Dorian brushes a little closer to home for Gaider, though. Character spoilers for his role in Inquisition to follow.

In case you're unfamiliar, while homophobia isn't necessarily a big, institutionalised deal in Thedas, Dorian's father attempted to change his sexuality using blood magic, because he was both gay and also unwilling to supply House Pavus with an heir. While blood magic doesn't exist in the real world, "conversion therapy", a relic of an era where homosexuality was criminalised and pathologized, unfortunately does.

Gaider, who is a gay man himself, led the charge on some of Dragon Age: Origin's bisexual romances, which were a pretty big deal back in 2009. Dorian, however, was his first gay character: "It's no big secret I have a lot of feelings about Dorian, not least of which because he was my first (and only) gay male companion. There's a lot more to him than that, of course" Gaider writes, "(as there should be), and it was quite a trip."

He explains that Dorian's initial concept was born out of a set of short character briefs to help the artists design them better. "We stuck to vibes and the *emotions* we wanted the concepts to evoke," Gaider writes, before explaining that Dorian's elevator pitch was "rock star mage". In a stroke of both tablet pen and genius, Dorian's concept artist turned Freddie Mercury into a mage and gave him a monkey. "Sadly, we had to lose the monkey." We can't have it all.

His sexuality, however, didn't pop up until a later writer's meeting. Gaider writes that he even "didn't think that could work. 'Rich kid gets kicked out of the house for being gay' wasn't a trope I wanted to explore. But, then again, magister families in Tevinter are obsessed with the appearance of perfection.

"Any deviation from the 'norm' is considered scandal-worthy. It said weakness. It said you couldn't control your house. Now... THAT had real promise. The writing pit discussed it a lot. So I think it's fair to say that the gay fairy was already circling Dorian even before we got to the romance talk."

While Gaider doesn't go into any details (and is certainly not under any obligation to), he does go on to hint that "Dorian's story is not MY story, but it's also not far off. I wrote the entire confrontation scene in one go. After I was done, I probably cried harder than I ever have in my life."

The scene he's speaking of is when Dorian confronts his father about his attempt to preserve his family's legacy at the cost of his son's agency and trust—it's a heartwrenching bit of writing, made more impressive being allegedly written in one go, with Gaider saying the only feedback he got was a tearful "it's good".

He then goes on to make a pretty salient point about his work: "I don't think a writer needs to be a minority in order to write a minority. Sometimes those characters should simply exist, and we want them to. But if that character's story is about their experience as a minority? That's different.

"Dorian's story didn't need to revolve around his sexuality … but my writing him meant it could be. It allowed me to SAY something. That felt good. It felt right." Gaider goes on to say that he was pleased by the amount of straight men who chose to romance him—a sign of a well-written character, no doubt—but also "the number of fans who privately contacted me who'd been through conversion therapy, some who said Dorian helped them survive? Well. Gosh."

One of my favourite companions in Dragon Age: Origins is Shale. She's a deadpan, dry-voiced golem with a hatred for pigeons that does credit to her dwarven, grudge-bearing heritage. She was also a day-one DLC character but, while discussing her, series creator and lead writer David Gaider reveals that was mostly due to a lack of time, and the fact she was downright impossible to write.

During a recent saga of Bluesky threads shared by the writer on the series' many companions, Gaider reveals that Shale was initially the darling of a BioWare writer who wanted to bring her stony-ness to life: "Shale was initially taken on by Jay Turner, then one of our junior writers," Gaider explains. "Jay had an idea to make Shale more of a robot, an emotionless automaton killer... think HK-47, but without the layer of sarcasm. I was leery, and told Jay he'd have to be very careful. 'Emotionless' can very quickly turn into 'boring', after all, unless you're VERY careful. But Jay was determined."

Things, unfortunately, didn't go so great—and Gaider regards his decision to let Turner jump into the deep end as a mistake: "There's been a couple of times in my career when I've let a junior convince me with their enthusiasm to take on something my experience said they shouldn't. And then watch their confidence crumble despite every effort I made to reassure them it was OK … It felt flat. Jay tried numerous revisions, but the issue wasn't his ability—it was the concept."

The duty to spin up the now-beloved golem into an actual character fell into Gaider's hands. "I recall being a bit bitter about the whole thing," he adds, noting that he'd been moved to a window with a god-awful view he resented. One, importantly, overlooking a HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) unit that pigeons would gather around to escape the cruel winter temperatures. I'm just going to let his rant play out unaltered, because it's a thing of beauty:

"They pooped all over everything—there was this alcove around the access door, right? The pigeons roosted there and it was POOP FAUCET city. Not only that, the pigeons used the HVAC like some kind of sex den. Angry, ugly pigeon sex. The only respite was when a hawk would appear and the pigeons scattered. Then I'd get maybe a day when there was a single pigeon corpse, like an exploded ball of down, to act as a scarecrow. Good days, those."

It is said that adversity is the father of ingenuity—said far less, I'd imagine, is the adage that adversity can sometimes be 'pigeon poop', and the ingenuity can be 'man, I hate pigeon poop so much'. As Gaider writes, "well, there's me, staring out the window trying desperately to think what I'm going to do. But I CAN'T stare out the window because, gross. But what else am I going to stare at while I think? It was making me furious. I hated those pigeons SO SO MUCH.

"And then it hit me: Shale is basically an animated statue, right? Something that pigeons are rather notorious for also gathering on? And so I wrote. I wrote like the angry, angry wind. I had zero time to do this so it was basically me vomiting all my annoyance at everything into a single character."

That wasn't the end of Shale's woes, though. Despite being one of my more fondly-remembered companions, there was plenty of hubbub about her being a day-one DLC. Gaider explains that this was mostly due to other design issues, such as the art team trying to make every door bigger to fit her inside them. "Shale got cut anyhow. There wasn't time to do her abilities and we were short on cinematics time. There was never enough time on DAO."

However, the team figured something out—they'd simply release Shale as a DLC a while after the game's launch, giving everybody more time to figure her out. Then "shenanigans" happened. Gaider writes: "This particular shenanigan was EA deciding to sit on the finished DAO a few months in order to delay the release. Why? Again, not my level … It did mean Shale ended up being ready for release day. Unexpected confluence of events, honestly."

Given the absolute microtransactional nightmares we endure nowadays, I'm willing to forgive that particular trespass—and it's a reminder that game developers rarely get exactly what they want. It's a subject Gaider's written about before, when he painted a picture of a BioWare that "quietly resented" its writers. The fluster of confusion he paints here on the art and organisational level was, admittedly, probably the fault of the writing team, but at the same time, Shale's a hilarious delight. I am quite happy they were given time to cook.

As reported by Eurogamer, Dragon Age: Inquisition initially featured the return of the protagonist from 2009's Origins, complete with full visual customization, similar to Dragon Age 2's Hawke appearing in Inquisition, or when the Inquisitor then returned in this year's Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Spoilers for Inquisition ahead.

Former Dragon Age scribe David Gaider recently referenced the plan in a thread on Bluesky about the difficulty of making player choices matter across multiple games: "'Here Lies the Abyss' in DAI was about as good as it gets," Gaider wrote. "And even that was a far cry from how I originally pictured it (hello last-minute insert of Stroud when a DAO Warden import got cut)."

The Inquisition story quest Gaider references sees the return of Hawke alongside one of three Grey Wardens depending on player choices set in the save's world state: Companions Alistair or Loghain from Origins, or minor character Stroud from Dragon Age 2. Back in 2020, Gaider explained why Stroud ultimately took the place of Origins' Warden on a stream with fellow Summerfall Games developer Liam Esler.

"We can't make the Hero of Ferelden look like the same character from DAO," Gaider said. "We'd have to give them a voice, and everyone's gonna get really upset. Very late in the day we had to cut them, and boy did that require some fancy dancing on [BioWare writer Trick Weekes'] part to write that differently."

I gotta say, I would have freaked out (in a good way) if BioWare had managed to pull this off, even if the Warden didn't sound the way I'd imagined in my head⁠—getting some big name VOs like Mass Effect's Mark Meer (a player voice option in Origins already!) and Jennifer Hale certainly would have softened the blow. But I'm very sympathetic to the logistical and pacing concerns, especially for players new to the series being asked to create the protagonist of a game they'd never played for the second time in Inquisition. But this could have made what was already a highlight quest into an all-time whammy.

At the end of Here Lies the Abyss in the shipped game, you have to choose whether Hawke or the Warden in your world state dies. Loghain and Stroud are whatever, but having to pick between fan favorite companion Alistair and previous protagonist Hawke is just brutal. But it could have been so much worse: imagine if you had to decide between Hawke and another player character you had built and invested dozens of hours into⁠—It's so sadistic, it could have been an Aerith dying in disc 2-level trauma for the gaming world (again, in a good way).

Morrigan will always be an icon—as we've already discussed on this site, she's one of the all-time companion greats, pretty much stealing the show in Dragon Age: Origins. A razor-sharp wit, a barbed tongue, and a deeper, sympathetic vulnerability. There's very much a reason why she keeps popping back up in sequels to play the hits.

According to David Gaider, who wrote the character (and several others I quite like), her origins were slightly less high-brow than the end product. Posting to BlueSky, Gaider writes: "Originally, we were looking for a Middle Eastern actress to play her, as Shohreh Aghdashloo was slated to play Flemeth and we wanted a similar sounding voice—but it was a real struggle, and then Shohreh unfortunately had to drop out to do a movie. So suddenly we had nobody for either character!"

"Then, one day, Caroline (our VO Director) comes in with a recording sent by a rep for Claudia Black—who hadn't done game VO back then but wanted to get into it. And it was Claudia doing a slow, beat poet rendition of [Smack That]. I kid you not. I was already a fan, so I lost my goddamn mind." My edit in that quote is there because Gaider briefly got 'Baby Got Back' and 'Smack That' mixed up, which he later corrects. Easily done, they occupy the same venn diagram, and this was 15 years ago. "Yes, I still have the recording. No, you cannot have it." Aw.

Gaider also reveals that Morrigan was meant to be a heck of a lot younger-sounding, as per orders from on high. "We had to agree to get Claudia to sound 'younger', which I was dubious about. The first two sessions we asked her to pitch her voice up and it was AWFUL.

"Claudia had to focus on sounding 'right' instead of acting. So Caroline and I did the sneaky thing, and in the third session we asked her to just... act. Use her natural voice. We loved her performance so much we had the feeling that the team would love it too and forget their nonsense. They did."

Not to apply a layer of cynicism to an anecdote that's otherwise pretty joyous, or anything, but hearing Gaider speak about pressure from the higher-ups this way is sort of fascinating, considering the comments he made last year about writers being "quietly resented"—you have to wonder if Black would have been made to force that higher register in the present day.

Gaider also shares a fun, heart-in-mouth moment wherein, upon speaking with Black, he committed a cardinal sin—comparing her to another actor. "So I meet Claudia, and I'm sweating. I think: I'll start from the beginning, right? 'Well, when I started writing Morrigan, the voice in my head was Helena Bonham Carter' … Claudia gives me a look and tilts her head. 'So what you're saying is... I'm a very cheap version of Helena Bonham Carter.'

"I'm mortified. I melt. I gasp and stutter and she lets me implode for maybe 30 seconds before she throws her head back and LAUGHS. So wicked. I love her instantly and forever."

Gaider finishes his tell-all with a similar expression of love for the character herself: "Morrigan became a real touchstone for me, the heart of DAO. Way beyond her initial inspirations. Some said 'she's just an ice queen' like some I'd written (Viconia, Bastila, etc.) but such categories are very reductive, I find." I'm in complete agreement—though I'm afraid to say that Alistair stole my heart before she did. Gaider can still be chuffed, though, seeing as he wrote him, too.

I've got more than my share of misgivings when it comes to Dragon Age: The Veilguard, but there's one thing that's been bugging me more than anything else as I get towards the end of Rook's adventure: why do the darkspawn look so… funky?

From the first moment an ogre bursts in on you, during your early introduction to Bellara, it's clear something's wrong. With its cartoonish skull face and glowing eyes it's unrecognisable as the monster that first terrorised players back in Origins. As it attacks, its rubbery body deforms and warps like a Stretch Armstrong doll. Even with the game's versatile photo mode, it's actively difficult to take a shot of it that doesn't look like I'm deliberately catching it at a weird angle. This thing sucks.

As it turns out, darkspawn are pretty key to the storyline of The Veilguard. New villain Ghilan'nain controls the Blight, and draws an army of the creatures to her side. At least, that's what I'm told—I certainly wouldn't have recognised any of them on sight.

The various darkspawn enemies are labelled as being the same species seen in past games—hurlocks, genlocks, ghouls, etc—but share almost nothing in common with their predecessors, in looks or behaviour. The Veilguard's darkspawn grow spears out of their backs to throw at me, or sprout giant, glowing pustules like the energy drink mutants from Sunset Overdrive. Ghouls have become hordes of generic grey zombies, somehow spawned directly out of those big red tumours you spend half the game popping. Hurlocks lumber towards me with armour and weapons seemingly born out of blight itself—why do they remind me so much of a World of Warcraft orc in raid gear?

The terrifying armies we saw in Origins feel a long way away. The darkspawn as we first knew them were emblematic of the game's dark fantasy tone—they stood in for Tolkien's orcs and trolls, but with a nasty edge and a grimy layer of body horror. They were recognisably twisted reflections of the forces of good—human-looking hurlocks, squat, dwarf-like genlocks, lithe shrieks with pointy, elven ears, all wielding crude, filthy weapons and armour in imitation of their victims. Discovering the reason behind those parallels in Origins was one of the game's most disturbing and memorable moments.

The Veilguard's darkspawn aren't a reflection of anything. They're just gooey monster men with skull faces. Their design implies nothing about their place in the world beyond simply being the bad guys, obviously monstrous and mindless creatures for me to slam spells into. The Blight is so important to The Veilguard's story, and in one sidequest you can even discover its true origins at last, completely changing how you think about the darkspawn—but none of that thematic weight is conveyed in them visually. They look parachuted in from an MMO you've forgotten the name of.

I can acknowledge, at least, that this isn't the first time this has happened. BioWare has a strange lack of confidence in its darkspawn designs—either that, or it's deliberately making them worse each time as an act of self-sabotage. Dragon Age 2, released only about a year after Origins, inexplicably did its own complete redesign, turning genlocks into gorillas and hurlocks into gangly goths as part of its overall shake-up of the setting's art style. You'll get no historical revisionism from me—I didn't like that change at the time, and looking back, it still sucks. Inquisition seemed so embarrassed that it mostly just swept darkspawn aside, despite its villain having a direct connection to them, and where they did appear they were sort of washed out, grimier versions of Dragon Age 2's designs, striking an awkward balance between the two previous looks.

But even compared to those past crimes, The Veilguard's take is easily the worst yet, both settling on incoherent designs and putting them front-and-centre in its story. If I never see another grinning mush man or giant, door-blocking tumour again it'll be too soon. The game may have a lot of other flaws, many of which you could argue are rather more pressing. But this is the hill I'm choosing to die on: these darkspawn are ass and it's not OK.

BioWare art director Matt Rhodes has shared 21 character concepts that never made it into Dragon Age: Inquisition on X: "The Everything App." The rejected character pitches were originally intended to be playable in Inquisition's aggressively monetized yet surprisingly great co-op multiplayer mode.

The released mode had plenty of out-there, zesty concepts for the characters you could play (the Silent Sister and Saarebas spring to mind), but these rejected concepts bring a sense of zany fun that I can get behind. I'm a big fan of "The Pirate Queen," a swashbuckling Qunari rogue who looks like DA2 companion Isabela but with horns. The Rivaini Guard, meanwhile, brings a bit more pizazz to the classic sword and board warrior concept.

Others are truly out there, or otherwise offer exciting tidbits of Dragon Age lore. I love the description of the "Cube Golem," a construct that looks more at home in Destiny than Dragon Age: "Some rocks can be really weird." The "Automaton," on the other hand, is an Orlesian "metal soldier who knows how to cry," while the cheeky little candle to help the dwarven "Excavator" see in his dark tunnels really makes my heart sing.

The biggest surprise is "The Hermit:" Yep, that's just Anders from Dragon Age 2 and Origins' Awakening expansion. "There are many reasons for mages to hide in the wilderness," his description reads. "From Templar persecution, to the crippling guilt of starting a war that threatens to burn the world to ashes."

BioWare (or maybe just Matt Rhodes) were clearly turning over a number of options for an Anders appearance in Inquisition that never came to be. Shortly after Inquisition's release ten years ago, Rhodes shared a similar concept of a mad hermit Anders getting discovered out in the desert. "Some guy in a cave," Rhodes wrote of the controversial companion.

Even if we never got to see these guys in-game, I appreciate getting the chance to see the concepts now. Rhodes also recently shared a look at some of the earliest concepts for this year's Dragon Age, The Veilguard.

First reported by GamesRadar, BioWare art director Matt Rhodes has shared the earliest concept art for Dragon Age: The Veilguard to X: "The Everything App." The eight pieces date back to 2014, before Dragon Age: Inquisition was even on store shelves.

"All the way back in 2014, before Dragon Age: Inquisition had even shipped, I started sketching out what cool things might come next," Rhodes wrote. "We had momentum, so these quick mock ups explored where some of the unfinished story threads might lead."

The first four pieces Rhodes posted show scenes of conflict throughout Thedas⁠—my favorite has what seems to be the Chantry's Divine commanding a naval battle from the deck of a ship. A bearded Qunari (maybe an older Iron Bull?) and Tevinter-looking creeps plot over a map in another, while a third shows nobles bowing before the Inquisitor. The fourth shows casteless dwarves walking out into the sunlight of a tent city, covering their eyes and looking up to the sky in fear⁠—possibly their first time on the surface.

Another batch from Rhodes shows Dailish Elves in forest scenes, with Solas having taken refuge among them. One of them shows the bald jerk summoning an Elven god from the Fade, as happens in the final game.

In a third post, Rhodes shared what he characterizes as his "first real piece of concept art" for what would become The Veilguard. "We knew we were going to Tevinter, so this was the first real attempt to flesh that out," Rhodes explained. You can definitely see a lot of the final game's take on Minrathous in this earliest mock-up.

I really dig these pieces, and I'm pretty happy with the Dragon Age 4 we eventually got, but I felt my heart break at Rhodes saying "we had momentum" regarding the earliest development on what would eventually become The Veilguard⁠—could BioWare have enjoyed a less fraught decade if that momentum hadn't been lost or stymied somewhere along the way? Regardless, I always appreciate getting a peek behind the curtain like this.

My biggest disappointment with Dragon Age: The Veilguard is that everyone likes me. Seriously. I genuinely wish one of my companions would yell at me for my choices. But none of them seem to care about anything enough to ever disagree with me, and that lack of tension is what's flattened my party into the cast I've cared least about in the entire series.

The Veilguard sets out a pretty rigid framework: six of my seven party members come from factions around Thedas that I spend the majority of the game working with to stop the elven gods from destroying the world. I hoped that those factions, and my party by proxy, would bring with them disagreements about strategy, priorities, and questions of morality. But companions and factions both have been watered down into a thin gruel of niceness that I find it hard to care about.

I explained briefly in my Dragon Age: The Veilguard review how disappointed I was that the game seems to have stripped all its companions of values related to the wider world. They think that we should stop the gods who want to destroy Thedas, and they all agree that anyone who accepts power from the gods and uses it to hurt others is evil. That's pretty much where their opinions end.

Take the Antivan Crows and Lucanis, for example. I thought surely that our first real dive into Antiva's assassin guild would bring up all sorts of questions about how they operate, and natural opportunities for Rook to either support or butt heads with Lucanis. I hoped to see some acknowledgement that maybe an unregulated murderocracy isn't actually great for Antiva. I hoped to see how Dellamorte family heir Lucanis had been shaped, for better and worse, by the awful things we know from past games about how the Crows operate: trafficking, child conscription, and worse. Lucanis should be, at a minimum, complicit in a pretty terrible status quo, if not actively defensive of it.

But The Veilguard ignores all of that in favor of painting the Crows as purple spandex-wearing action heroes with hearts of gold. The only character who ever questions the Crows is, conveniently, an evil power-hungry traitor to the country. So Rook never gets put in a position to challenge or question Lucanis' loyalty to the family's goals.

I don't even get to disagree with him over the fact that he's possessed by a demon called Spite who has a habit of taking his body for joyrides when he falls asleep. Spite never causes any real harm. Lucanis isn't even personally to blame for the possession. Despite his "perfectly gathered clouds of doom" about the situation, Rook is forced to be supportive and never gets to question whether Lucanis is compromised—by Spite or the Crows.

I could write a similar tirade about Neve, who apparently has no problem at all with Rook making a deal with a local crime syndicate in Minrathous to fight against the oppressive Venatori cult. I had hoped to see the underdog detective actually wrestle with whether the ends justify the means when allying with the Threads. But it never comes up. The ending of Emmrich's personal quest, which I won't spoil, is the only one that gives me something close to an interesting question.

Part of the problem is that there's no functional mechanism for disapproval in The Veilguard. For the past three Dragon Age games, companions could take issue with your protagonist's decisions. But the Veilguard pretty much does away with that concept. There's a scant handful of choices in the game that my party members can allegedly disapprove of but never with any noticeable effect—in the menu or in dialogue—on Rook's bond with them.

Even the most likely source of companion disapproval, Minrathous or Treviso, really falls flat. That decision has consequences, sure. I do appreciate that it has actual effects on romancing Lucanis. He and Neve can both be hurt by the possible outcomes, but the choice itself lacks complexity when the threats are functionally identical. The trolley problem may be a mostly stupid moral gotcha question, but it would be even stupider if you were choosing between two individual people at equal risk of becoming roadkill.

I understand that The Veilguard is fundamentally telling a story about an unlikely hero so there's no room for Rook to be evil. But couldn't Rook get into debate about ideals with someone other than Solas?

I really miss some of the touchstone debates of past Dragon Age games. Fenris and Anders in Dragon Age 2 are both messy loose canons who resent one another and disapprove of Hawke's leaning too far for or against the rights of mages in Kirkwall. Origins gives its hero the awful choice of what to do with a child who's been possessed by a demon, and Alistair is livid if you choose to handle it in a certain way, culminating in a steep disapproval hit. I even enjoy Vivienne in Inquisition, hotly debated as she is, for effectively being a scab who believes her fellow mages should be relegated to the Circle towers. Those are just a small sample of the ways that Dragon Age heroes have wrestled against the morals of their party in the past.

The Veilguard doesn't want to come anywhere near disagreements like that and falls flat even when it does attempt to introduce conflict. More than one pair of companions winds up with some personal differences to sort out: Lucanis and Davrin being two who don't initially respect one another's work. Not to worry though, Rook gets to step in on that fight and choose between two functionally identical ways for them to resolve those differences. And then they do, in whichever manner Rook instructs. Copy paste that across a couple other companion disagreements.

By the end, Rook's companions are all pretty much goodie two-shoes characters with uncomplicated beliefs. There's a ton of groundwork to each character that could have made them morally complex and interesting but, frustratingly, that all goes unrealized. I get that, in the plot The Veilguard has laid out, everyone has to be willing to put aside differences to fight the greater evil. But without any willingness to challenge their leader, The Veilguard's companions are the most dispassionate cast in a series that used to be so full of feeling.

I think it's fair to say that Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a game that was developed to be as safe as possible. Complex moral issues are completely bypassed, quest choices are rather simplistic, and 'The Gods' are just token evil characters that must be destroyed. I'm okay with all of that because the game itself has been lots of fun to play and complete.

Compared to previous Dragon Age games and other BioWare classics, I never felt particularly invested in any of the characters I interacted with, but again, not a problem as the combat more than made up for it. The writing and voice acting are partly to blame here but I think it's more a case of that it was all very predictable.

That's because BioWare rolled out lots of elements it has used in previous classics, and having already played the living daylights out of the Mass Effect and previous Dragon Age games, none of the twists and turns in the story were unfamiliar. Safe, remember?

But there's one particular scene, late on in the game, that really caught me off guard. It was a full-blown emotional gut punch and although I wish it hadn't occurred at the time, in retrospect, I wish Dragon Age: The Veilguard had a lot more moments like it.

Naturally, to explain what I saw is going to involve an awful lot of spoilers, so if you don't want to know about what lies ahead, then back on out of here. G'wan now, scoot.

Still here? Right, then.

Spoilers ahoy

If you've played Mass Effect 2, you'll probably guess where I'm heading with this. A critical element of that game is about building up your ship and crewmate relationships such that when the final battle commences, you stand an increasing chance of making it through unscathed.

Veilguard has a similar thing and that's made pretty clear very early on in the game, where different factions have strength ratings that you can improve, as well as the 'bond' levels you have with each primary NPC.

Towards the end of Act 2, you're given a main quest called Isle of the Gods. You all pile into 'Teh g0ds' main base to defeat the baddies but, naturally, you have to split your forces. So far, so familiar, so safe.

I chose to have Davrin lead the second team, as I'd got him to full strength, and completed all his sidequests, involving Assan, his loyal griffon. I don't know if exactly the same thing that I experienced would happen if you picked someone else but I've only played the whole game through once. Besides, picking him made sense, as he's a Grey Warden and built like a proverbial brick house.

So I set off, hacked my way through hordes of enemies, to eventually come face-to-face with one of 'thE G0dz'...sorry, Ghilan'nain. Cue a very protracted punch-up that was a little more frustrating and drawn out than I expected it to be. Still, I was making headway with relatively few tears and not a single save game reload. Safe.

But then a cutscene kicked in, as I moved in to free Lucanis so he could go all stabby-stabby with the wonder dagger. Davrin makes an appearance, doing his Grey Warden thing, but it goes horribly wrong as Ghilan'nain plunges her tentacles through his chest. He then falls into a gaping maw of blight and as he falls, you hear Assan scream and fly in after him.

For a brief moment, I thought the griffon would explode free, clutching his fallen master, because everything had been all so safe and simple thus far. But no, BioWare did its thing and there would be no saving of the Warden and his faithful companion. They're both consumed by the blight.

It was a loss I wasn't prepared for; it was a loss I absolutely didn't want. I've had so many pets in my life, it was like losing one of them all over again. If you want to experience it for yourself, without playing the game, just watch the video above.

But why BioWare, why? I did everything right, I made sure everyone was as strong and as well-equipped as possible. Sure, Grey Wardens make the ultimate sacrifice to take out archdemons but Assan didn't have to die. After all, with almost every other aspect of the game being so safe you could have it babysitting a toddler, it just felt far too much of an emotional jolt.

As much as it genuinely hurt to watch that cutscene again, I'm glad BioWare chose to do it. Mostly because it induced so much rage that I went on an absolute rampage through the rest of the game, battering the living daylights out of anything that moved (or didn't), to the point where I'd finished Veilguard without really noticing.

I'm replaying Dragon Age: The Veilguard to get the last few achievements but now I'm faced with a genuine dilemma. There's absolutely no way I'm having Assan die again, so who do I pick this time? It won't be Harding, that's for sure, as she's awesome, but what if I'm forced to do so? Hang on a second, what happened to the game being all safe and cosy?

Dammit BioWare, you just couldn't help yourself, could you.

Having played about 50 hours of Dragon Age: The Veilguard over the course of the past month, I've felt a lingering dread as a queer person, one that's manifested as a familiar thought: Ah, god damnit, this is going to be talked about forever. I will be unable to escape the hot takes, the tweets, the Reddit threads, the discourse about this thing for years.

In case you're unfamiliar, Dragon Age: The Veilguard has options for trans and non-binary Rooks—moreover, one companion, Taash, has an entire storyline dedicated to realising some big revelations about their gender. Spoilers for that to follow.

I want to make this clear at the outset: I do not think these inclusive elements should be a big deal in an ideal world. In fact, the reason I'm writing this is because I want to take a story with these elements in it seriously, as if there wasn't a big culture war brimming overhead, including a certain election result that'll likely result in harm to my friends across the pond.

We don't just deserve representation, we deserve representation in stories that are also broadly good. We ought to be able to engage with these stories in the same way we engage with any piece of art: With deep investment and a thoughtful idea to identify what works and what doesn't. I want to talk as if the storm clouds were not looming.

In the spirit of that, I'd like to tell you something I find a little nerve-wracking and funny. I feel strongly enough about a videogame that I'm about to come out to try and prove a point. I'm revealing something about my private life so I can do a take on the internet. Honestly, it feels about right.

I've been going by all/any pronouns (that's he, she, and they) for a while now, and feeling weird about my gender long since before that. I chose the non-binary option for Rook partially because I thought it'd be fun to play a non-binary qunari, given the lore implications, but also because I was curious whether or not the game would actually make me feel seen, especially in the way I think it's trying to.

It has both failed and succeeded, and if I don't talk about why, my head is going to explode. In the interest of an intact cranium, I'll now embark on the unenviable task of skirting around sounding like the people who'd rather not see people like me in videogames at all, while also talking about how Dragon Age: The Veilguard falls short for me personally.

I invite you to hear me out—because the truth is way, way more complicated than "inclusion bad" or "inclusion good". And no-one exemplifies this more than Taash.

In defence of Taash

One criticism I've seen making the rounds is about the in-world use of the words "non-binary" in a Dragon Age game, as well as "trans" and various other gendered terms. Those with their knees pre-jerked might tell you that these words aren't "appropriate" for a fantasy setting under any circumstances, but I don't think it's useful to view it through those lenses. However, while I think it could work—I don't think it does, here.

But first, I want to tell you where I think the game succeeded. I don't want to slight the efforts of Taash by writer Trick Weekes, who is non-binary themselves. They've been writing at Bioware for over a decade and a half, and are responsible for some of Bioware's best darlings—Solas, Mordin Solus, Tali—and Taash's story clearly scans as a tale of personal importance to them.

I also want to reiterate that writers also rarely get exactly what they want when working at a studio. There's a chance Weekes wanted to do everything I lay out in the following critique, and simply couldn't. I won't link to the posts on social media that've given me this feeling, out of respect for their privacy, but David Gaider felt a "resentment" in 2016 towards the writing staff when he left, stating last year that the company felt "a good story would simply happen, via magic wand, rather than be something that needed support and priority."

Maybe that problem's gone away in the near-decade since, maybe it hasn't, but it's worth considering that the product we got could have been half-measure, and that a more nuanced presentation might've been cut for time.

Lastly, I want to point out that Bioware's come a long way. Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 both have some super crummy, low-hanging fruit trans jokes in them. For all its faults, this is way better. Anyway, onto Taash:

Plucked out of the river in which it lies, the use of "non-binary" in Taash's plotline is actually a clever bit of metatextual discussion over how we use these terms in fantasy stories. When you're having dinner with Taash's mum, Shathaan, she actually brings up "aqun-athlok", a term used in Dragon Age: Inquisition by Iron Bull to describe transgender individuals who live under the Qun, the qunari's cultural code, which has an otherwise rigid and binary view on gender.

"Why do you keep having to pick at it, why can't you just be happy for me?" Taash snaps. In a way, it feels like Taash is speaking to those who'd take issue with this scene, who will uncritically divebomb the term Taash finds comfortable, and say that it doesn't have a place in Thedas. And there's something really clever being attempted here, I think.

Taash, or rather, their writer, is deliberately using the modern-sounding term of "non-binary" to crack open a dialogue about how we represent these gender identities in fiction. Shathaan is trying to use older, antiquated, more fantastical-sounding words to put Taash into a defined box under the Qun, but that doesn't work for Taash. Taash needs to do what feels right, and they've found that. The fact they also come from a culture with not just a binary view on gender, but a prescriptive role for every one of its subjects, is no coincidence either.

Yet here I sit, sorrowfully picking at it. Because this scene, which is great in isolation, crumples under the weight of the rest of the game. Taash doubtless resonated hard with a lot of non-binary people. And while some moments were genuinely touching and moving, I am, overall, not one of them—because I felt like the rest of the game kept me at arm's length.

In part, that's because the issues I have also apply to the rest of the game's script. Dragon Age: The Veilguard has charming moments and some really affecting scenes, but it also suffers from writing that is scattershot, clumsy, and unpolished in too many areas to count. This, inevitably, applies to its use of queer language in a fantasy context, too.

Permitted, not included

While the word "binary" existed before computers—it has its roots in the latin word "binarius"—the term "non-binary", referring specifically to gender (it was used in science and philosophy before that, from the 1940s onwards) is modern. Which is a bugger when it comes to representation, because those terms are always going to sound anachronistic, even if the people they refer to should absolutely exist in the setting.

To put it simply, Morrigan says "tis passing strange" and not "that's pretty sus" despite them meaning the same thing, because one cuts with the linguistic grain, and the other doesn't.

It's not an insurmountable writing challenge to include them, though, to justify them in the world—my issue is that Dragon Age: The Veilguard doesn't consider it a challenge worth tackling. As a game, it's not really interested in exploring how language is used and why, especially when it comes to gender. Which is a problem, because language and identity walk hand-in-hand.

In my playthrough, Taash briefly mentioned to Neve that they'd spoken to her Shadow Dragon friends about their gender identity. At the time, it made a certain kind of sense—it's a big empire, with folks pushed to the fingers by systems of imperial blood and magic fascism. It tracks that you'd see us there, rebelling with words as well as action, especially considering Dorian's history with actual magical conversion therapy in Inquisition.

I waited for it to come up again. It didn't. These important words, used to describe myself and others, got the "Poochie died on the way to his home planet" treatment. In fairness, there's a codex entry where Taash goes into their conversation with the Shadows, but it adds to this problem rather than subtracts from it.

The words trans, agender, bigender, and demigender make an appearance here, leaving more holes in the narrative that the story itself is too timid to fill. And look—I do get the idea, here. One shouldn't have to justify every single little bit of inclusion in a story to appease the sceptical masses, sometimes the curtains are just they/them. But I think in this case, it actively works to the detriment of the story and the attempt at inclusion.

When you're giving birth to imaginary cultures wholesale, and deciding what is and isn't important to them? Well, historically, gender's been really really goddamn important. Gender identity is such a fascinating topic, it deserves to be woven into the fabric of a fantasy setting. I want to learn how an imaginary culture handles it, because it's exciting and fun to do that!

It feels like a waste to handwave any of this. Thedas could do both if it wanted to, it could include us, but also show us our identities in interesting and complex ways. You might say, 'hey, isn't that what you just said Taash's storyline was doing with the aqun-athlok stuff?' To which I'll say yes, exactly, but the other half of the whole is missing. We get to know that Taash has found this word, and that it matters to them, but the history of the word itself is deemed irrelevant, or unworthy of discussion.

Just imagine if the word "binary" came from a Rivaini word from North and South. Or maybe it could have spawned from a Rivaini term that means "fit to rule", since Rivaini is a matriarchal society and, in a way, has a two-tiered caste system of gender similar to the qunari. Taash drawing the word non-binary from Rivaini culture could've helped play further into how Taash feels torn between the two societies (an inner conflict that, unsettlingly, has a pretty binary solution where you make them lean towards one or the other). It would've been a great way to tie their internal journey with the external forces tugging on them.

Honestly, I take issue with the idea that going into these words' fictional etymology would be non-inclusive, or questioning, or "picking at" them. Quite the opposite—I want to feel like a writer has sat down and genuinely thought about where I might fit (or not) in the cultures of their world. The idea that we might find an interrogation of gender repulsive feels infantilising, and not really accurate to my experience. Like, I did a lot of self-interrogation to get here!

This is a problem the wider story has with other topics, too. It's barely interested in the politics of its own setting. It boils its potential in-universe conflicts into perfunctory, easily-digestible "good guys" versus "guys that suck" battles. Most of its moral conflicts barely have time to touch the sides before they're dealt with. Friction is the enemy of setpieces.

The history of Taash's new language, language that means the world to them, gets relegated to a codex entry that, let's be honest, a lot of people won't read—and it's a muted footnote even when you do find it. This superficial and shy worldbuilding, unfortunately, also led to a scene that made my blood run genuinely cold, in complete opposition to the earnest intent behind it.

I'm trans, just so you know

So—I'm romancing Bellara, and there's an option you get when you're schmoozing with her to (if you picked that aforementioned non-binary option) let her in on your whole gender situation. Oh, interesting, I thought, I wonder how a game'll handle this kind of "disclosure". It's a nuanced topic, and my character is a qunari. I wonder if he'll talk about aqun-athlok, and how he doesn't quite fit into it, or something.

Then my Rook says: "Never a bad thing to hear that someone likes me. The me that's trans, just so you know."

Maybe it's some internalised something-or-other. Maybe I've not just wrestled with some darkness in my heart. Maybe I'm overly fretting that some clunky writing could scupper a rare, genuine effort at representing people like me—but this line made my heart turn to ice. It had the exact opposite of its intended effect. It made me feel condescended to, alienated, and genuinely dazed. I don't doubt that there are trans or non-binary players who would've felt really seen by that dialogue response—but I wasn't.

Choosing this option felt like me reaching out, in good faith, to the game. I wanted to see what I might look like in its world—how I might exist there, how someone like me might explain themselves in Thedas. The response felt like getting brushed off or snubbed. I was given a seat at the venue, but it was at the kiddie table at a wedding while the adults got to talk about taxes. That's when I went searching for that aforementioned codex entry, and it didn't make me feel better.

To be fair, part of this is the classic Mass Effect dialogue wheel conundrum crashing into a sensitive topic in an ugly way. Everyone knows the joke that's been retold since Mass Effect: You pick one thing, but the player interpretation doesn't match between the prompt and what's actually said.

What's messed up, here, is that this same problem that's been plaguing the wheel since its invention clearly has a chance of backfiring tremendously when it comes to sensitive topics. Maybe if I'd been given four or five options, it wouldn't have bothered me so much. But if your character's trans, you get the one response, and if it doesn't match how you feel, or how your character feels? Tough luck. The dialogue wheel's only got space for one gender. The rest are backed up in gender storage.

It's not all bad, but we can do better

Messy writing—whether that be the fault of the author or the publisher they're writing to deadline under—can turn good-faith attempts at inclusion into things that feel genuinely hurtful. Which is wild to me, because Bioware's writers clearly give a damn, and there are other moments where that shows.

I liked, for example, how my character was able to elegantly break down the concept when Taash was first questioning it. When Taash also has their first real crisis about their gender, too, being able to connect to them and tell them that they aren't "blighted, or ugly, or wrong" was genuinely emotionally affecting. Yet considering the whole, I'm just left frustrated, angry, and tired.

I'm frustrated because I can see the vision, but because videogames are such big, complicated engines—and because Veilguard so obviously suffered from that—a script that takes big swings at handling something so deeply personal clips some of the very same people it's trying to represent.

I'm angry because I feel like I don't get to discuss this without somehow caping for the very people who want to legislate me, and people I care about, out of existence. I'm tired because I think that this conversation will either end up spawning hate campaigns—or, worse, causing companies to clam up entirely, and I don't want either of those things to happen.

But I've gotta be honest about how I feel, nothing more, nothing less. It's the message that Taash tries to put forward, after all: "Don't tell me who I am!"—and yet, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is so afraid to tell me who I am in its setting, it horseshoes back around to doing just that.

I've already seen some of my friends get a lot out of how The Veilguard handles its trans rep—it's not all bad, not by a long shot. As for me, I've been given a sanitised and uncomplicated version of myself to look at in the mirror. At times, it's detailed enough that I'm happy anyone tried at all—at other times, it's so blocky and nervously shaped that it scans like a caricature.

Whatever the intention behind it, it remains that the series' nuanced and complicated and thorny discussions of my sexuality from past games, like Zevran's allegories to the CIA, or Leliana's faith under an oppressive church being super interesting, have been deemed too upsetting for consumption when it comes to my gender identity. I feel like I've been handled with care, rather than written about. The game's representation is a brave step forward—but it's only a step, and I hope that (politics have mercy, it's scary out there) we have an opportunity to do better in the future.

If you've clocked your 70 or so hours in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, don't jump out of your seat just yet: There's a post-credits scene with some extra lore teasing the future of the series. Or at least there is if you diligently picked up specific codex entries throughout the game. I'll tell you how to see it for yourself, but even if you don't want to jump back in to do that extra work, don't worry. The scene's turned up in plenty of videos online already as these things always do.

What is the secret ending to Dragon Age: The Veilguard?

The secret ending to The Veilguard is about 50 seconds long. A mysterious voice says the following: "The storm, quelled. The sun, dimmed. The wolf, defanged. At last. We have balanced. Guided. Whispered. And soon, the poisoned fruit ripens. We come."

It's accompanied by images of villains and antagonists from the past games. It shows the Dreadwolf—Solas, who you've just banished and bound to the veil at the end of The Veilguard. It shows Dragon Age: Origins' antagonist Loghain and his betrayal of Ferelden at Ostagar, Varric's brother Bartrand stealing a lyrium idol that we saw return to significance during The Veilguard, and Inquisition's villain Corypheus who made all those big Fade tears that the Inquisitor had to deal with.

The final symbol is one associated with a mysterious group called The Executors, which described itself as "powers across the sea" when it briefly contacted The Inquisition during a sidequest in that game. They told the Inquisition that "for the moment, we are not your enemy," though it certainly seems like that's about to change.

The implication is that the Executors have been pushing and shaping events in Thedas to their current state since Origins and that they're now coming, from wherever across the sea they hail, to further exert their will in some way.

I will say that setting up a mysterious new villain in a post-credits scene sure isn't helping The Veilguard beat the Marvel allegations in my eyes. I also don't really love the implication that all the past antagonists of the series were having their strings pulled instead of being grounded in self-directed greed and ambition. "A secret cabal did it" instead of "sometimes people are awful" is the kind of high fantasy-ification of the series that disappointed me in The Veilguard. I'd really rather see the series develop new plots laterally instead of pulling a Dragon Ball powerscaling move by calling up a group that's bigger, scarier, and apparently controlling the gods.

Regardless of my own reservations, we can probably expect that this scene is pointing towards the next Dragon Age game, whenever that happens. In the past I'd have predicted a DLC, but BioWare's said a few times that it has no DLC plans for The Veilguard. So it will probably be a while before we find out what this is all about. In typical Dragon Age fashion though, I'd bet on some new supplementary media that starts setting up The Executors more, whether it's more comics, another animated series, or something else.

How to unlock the post-credits scene in The Veilguard

To unlock the secret ending to The Veilguard, you need to find three "mysterious circle" codex entries hidden in different parts of the world:

• Arlathan Forest on an island accessed by a puzzle
• Necropolis Halls in the chamber of the final fight of the Pinnacle of Its Kind quest
• The Crossroads after completing the Heart of Corruption quest

The mysterious circle in Arlathan Forest is on an inaccessible island that you'll have to unlock by activating three of those magical beam turrets around the area. After you've sorted them all out, a bridge forms to the island where you'll fight a sentinel, collect a treasure chest, and also find the first mysterious circle.

The mysterious circle in the Necropolis Halls requires completing the Pinnacle of Its Kind quest that sends you around to defeat several demons in other areas of the world. It culminates in a dragon fight back in the necropolis and you'll find the mysterious floating circle in one of the treasure hoard alcoves around the room.

The mysterious circle in The Crossroads is located on Beacon Island, the first area, but can only be accessed after finishing the Heart of Corruption quest. After cleansing all the champions around The Crossroads as pointed out in that quest, you'll return to beacon island and activate a sealed door. This one also leads to a dragon fight. After you win, you'll find the last Mysterious Circle on a little ruin attached to the area.

Few RPG party members are as beloved as the companions of the Dragon Age games, and there's good reason for that. Across memorable story moments, sprawling dialogue trees, companion quests, and a certain amount of adult fun, we've gotten the chance to get to know BioWare's creations on a startlingly deep level—and they've rewarded the investment with complex personalities, rich backstories, and emotional arcs.

Every one of them has their fans—but I think we can all agree that some of them do stand taller than others. Here are our picks for the most memorable and lovable of the bunch—and if we missed out your favourite, that's your cue to make your case for them down in the comments.

Morrigan

Companion in: Dragon Age: Origins
Other appearances: Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Robin Valentine, Senior Editor: RPG players are pretty much the exact demographic primed to want a snarky goth girlfriend who lives in the woods, but there's more to Morrigan than that. There's a reason she appears in almost every game in the series.

From her first understated appearance, immediately soaked in cynicism and sarcasm, she stood out as a rich and nuanced character—confident and prickly, but behind that afraid and confused. As brilliantly noted by Rob Jones in his case for her as the best RPG companion of all time, what makes her so memorable and exciting in Origins is that she challenges you as a player. She prods at your dialogue choices and plot decisions, rankles at your choice of other companions, and all the while obscures her motives and goals—her plans within plans. Her trust (and her love) must be earned—and even then, you'll never truly know where you stand.

I'd be remiss to not give credit, too, to the talents of the wonderful Claudia Black, whose vocal performance brings all of BioWare's efforts together to make Morrigan leap out of the screen. Her clipped tone and oddly archaic way of speaking do as much to mark her out as someone from another world as her actual dialogue or her strange appearance. Every time she's appeared in a later Dragon Age game, just the sound of her voice has seemed to let in some creeping shadow of the dark and wild fantasy atmosphere of Origins—even in the much more colourful and friendly world of The Veilguard.

Alistair

Companion in: Dragon Age: Origins
Other appearances: Dragon Age: Inquisition

Harvey Randall, Staff Writer: I've had to restrain myself from getting in a big fight with Robin over why Alistair doesn't fulfil the scientific criteria for being a "himbo". I'm breaking from my chains and giving a mighty roar to defend my clever boy.

What works about Alistair is due, in part, to the grimdark setting Dragon Age: Origins plonks you in. Here's a world drowned in darkspawn, political intrigue, religious oppression, elves getting shafted, mages getting shafted, Grey Wardens getting shafted—you get the picture. The game's opening hours are drenched in blood and death. Yet here's a guy cracking jokes, despite the fact that he went through the horror of the Joining just like you did.

In my discussion of why Dragon Age: The Veilguard's early dialogue doesn't work for me, I highlight his first appearance as a great example of how to introduce a companion character—his back-and-forth verbal slap fight with a mage is both hilarious and immediately endearing, and a perfect starter kit to his personality. From then on, he continues to pop little surprises out of his sleeve like a handsome magician.

Alistair comes off as a dumb cynic with a motor mouth (and he is that) but he's also thoughtful, insecure, and deeply empathetic. Scratch that thin layer of smarm and you get a stand-up bloke whose sharp tongue gets turned on you with a vicious proficiency if you screw up.

I think that's why I can't himbo-ify the guy in my head, being honest—himbos are all brawn, no brains, and kind goofballs. Alistair's brand of goofball, however, is a film-flimsy shield against a world that's routinely disappointed him, a barely-present mask to slap over his roiling insecurity, and that's what makes him interesting. Morrigan can make you worse, but I can fix him—though I recommend having them in a party together. Their bickering is endlessly entertaining.

Varric

Companion in: Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Other appearances: Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Jody Macgregor, Weekend/AU Editor: My glib summary of Dragon Age 2 is "best companions; worst everything else" and while that's a slight oversimplification, it did give us my favorite Thedan homie in Varric Tethras.

Varric exemplifies Dragon Age's commitment to the "our dwarves are different" bit, being a surface-born scoundrel with a light dusting of stubble rather than a beard. (He seems to have refocused all that follicular effort into growing the luxurious chest hair of a 1970s loverman instead.) A born exaggerator, Varric made a great choice for the narrator of Dragon Age 2, and the sequels, because it means you can never be quite sure how accurate the story he's telling is.

It also makes for a great gag when you catch him doing it in-game—following Hawke's statements with asides like "Hawke said sarcastically" if you choose the snarky options, as you absolutely should.

Varric grows over the course of the series, from a charlatan who practically lives at the pub in Dragon Age 2 to a trusted advisor of the Inquisitor in Dragon Age: Inquisition. By the time The Veilguard rolls around he's become a mentor figure responsible for plucking Rook from obscurity and putting them in charge of his new gang. Which makes sense. After spending so long as Hawke's ride-or-die bestie and a member of the Inquisitor's inner circle, Varric can spot a videogame protagonist a mile away.

Just by dint of sticking around for so long, Varric's become a de facto face for the series, and I love that said face has a boxer's nose and a lantern jaw and belongs to a dwarf with a profitable sideline in turning videogame plots into trashy pulp serials. What a guy.

Dorian

Companion in: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Other appearances: Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Lauren Morton, Associate Editor: It's hard to choose just one standout from Inquisition's cast but I think Dorian deserves a spotlight. After two full games of hearing the words "Tevinter" and "magisters" whispered like boogeymen, we meet this 30-year-old trust fund kid going no contact with his family while taking a gap year in the uncultured south. It would be easy to hate him if he weren't so darn charming.

Dorian is a breath of fresh air among all the mage party members we'd had in the series to date—knowledgeable without lecturing, sarcastic without spite, and an unrepentant flirt. BioWare really broke the mould on Dorian, just the right amount of twinkle in his eye on top of his snobbish facade.

His sidequests are a deeply personal journey about being a gay man seeking closure after a falling out with his intolerant father. It's a story that could have come across heavy-handed if he weren't so believably flawed himself. There are parts of life in Tevinter, like slavery, that he'd just never questioned until the Inquisitor gets the opportunity to press him on them. Dorian eventually acknowledges that Tevinter's imperial culture has even more flaws than the ones that affected him personally. Seeing some nods to that journey of his sprinkled into The Veilguard was a treat too.

Not to mention, Dorian's alluded-to fling with The Iron Bull played no small part in making them both beloved. It was such an enjoyable little treat for those paying attention in Inquisition that BioWare doubled down on the bit for The Veilguard by giving companions overt relationships with one another—when not in one with Rook.

Leliana

Companion in: Dragon Age: Origins
Other appearances: Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age: Inquisition

Jeremy Peel, Contributor: When BioWare first came up with the Dragon Age setting, the big challenge was to distinguish it from the Forgotten Realms. The risk was that players would recognise the actual origins of Thedas—a corporate need to replace the D&D license with a world the company owned itself. One that still resembled medieval Europe and featured fireballs, but didn’t involve working with Hasbro.

With a French accent alone, Leliana went a long way to breathing life into Thedas. While the temperate muddiness of Ferelden felt familiar to players of Baldur’s Gate, Leliana convinced us that there were lands with varied and different cultures beyond its borders. Namely Orlais, which until Dragon Age: Inquisition existed only on the lips of characters who had travelled there.

What’s more, she embodied one of the key differences between Thedas and D&D—the matter of religion. In the Realms, the gods walked the earth, empirically proving their own existence. Leliana’s dedication to the Maker, by contrast, required blind faith, and was subject to that most human and relatable of feelings: doubt.

Shale

Companion in: Dragon Age: Origins
Other appearances: N/A (What an injustice!)

Fraser Brown, Online Editor: Shale was, ludicrously, a piece of day one DLC, which is a terrible way for BioWare to treat one of its best characters. She falls into the category of leftfield weirdo, like Mass Effect 2's Legion, Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening's Justice or Jade Empire's Wild Flower. What makes Shale weird? Well, she's a rock.

She's also an absolute riot. Deeply sarcastic, with an incredibly (and appropriately) dry sense of humour, she is immensely quotable. Case in point: "Now, let us crush something soft and watch it fountain blood. That is a girlish thing to want to do, yes?" She likes a bit of violence, to put it lightly. And she has a deep hatred of birds. Wouldn't you, if you had to spend countless years as an immobile statue while the little critters sat on you and covered you in poop?

Her interactions with the rest of Origins' fantastic party are a constant delight, but she's not just a moody comedy sidekick. I mean, she's a war golem for one, so she pulls her (considerable) weight in battle. And her personal story is a potent one, too. When she cropped up again in Awakening, I was gutted to discover she wouldn't be joining me on that adventure. In DA2, some incidental tavern dialogue confirms that she's still knocking about, so I'm hoping we'll bump into her again one day.

I don't know what the nudity toggle in Dragon Age: The Veilguard does. I mean I know what it says it does—allows nudity during sex scenes—but I've been through two full romances so far and those sex scenes have rationed out exactly one shirtless man apiece and a very PG-13 fade to black encounter. What the hell did I set that toggle to "on" for, then?

Dragon Age games have long been known not just for their companion characters, but specifically for the romances with those characters that eventually lead to hot and horizontal situations. It's been such a beloved pillar of the series that other RPGs have incorporated a very similar style of party member romance. The Veilguard continues that tradition… or so it says. BioWare certainly played very coy ahead of launch about that nudity toggle in the settings menu and just how much my companions would wind up showing off. The answer is, well, basically nothing.

The Veilguard romance options all start out promising enough. Throughout the early hours of the game I get to meet all my new comrades in god-battling arms and have opportunities to flirt a little with each of them. We go on outings together—coffee with Lucanis, a field trip with Davrin—where I can make eyes at them and get a bit of interest in return. But I had to be very patient for more than that.

It isn't until act three, easily 30 hours in, that I got to officially express interest in Lucanis and then, finally, a moment fraught with some sexual tension and an almost-kiss that he runs away from. But then I didn't catch another moment alone with Lucanis for several hours. After fully completing his personal quest, which I was beelining through unashamedly searching for that romance juice, Lucanis says in a quite sultry fashion "I have other plans for tonight" as he and Rook plan to head back to the lighthouse together. Okay, I thought, now we're going places.

His plans were drinking a cup of coffee alone in the kitchen. Oh, and I get to tell him that I'm glad he isn't running off home to his faction the Antivan Crows until after this god smashing stuff is sorted. Did I miss something? Did I screw up?

As act three of the game wore on, the names of my save files grew more desperate:

• Committing to Lucanis (42h33m)
• Is it Lucanis time yet (44h39m)
• Lucanis bro cmon now (55h47m)

That coveted sex scene finally happens on Rook's last night in the lighthouse before the big fight. Lucanis soothes Rook emotionally, looks at them longingly, finally kisses them, and then falls fully clothed onto the uncomfortable-looking lighthouse couch and wakes up shirtless. I can't lie: I was pretty bummed. I suppose if I'd chosen a different undergarment option in character creation possibly Rook would have been shirtless too. I didn't realize I was selecting the nevernude route.

So I went back and completed Davrin's romance. Then I looked up a video of Neve's romance, and Harding's, and Emmrich's, and found they all basically follow this same pattern: an almost-kiss, a conversation about commitment, and a last night together at the lighthouse where everyone's wearing their jammies after. Taash does strip down at one point, at least.

I don't want to make this a pissing contest with the immensely horny and full-frontal nudity sensation that Baldur's Gate 3 was last year. But even when I measure The Veilguard against its own predecessors I'm baffled. Did Dorian really get his whole ass out at Skyhold so that all these Veilguard heroes could chicken out?

Nudity aside, the formulaic script for these romances really robs them of the passion that Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition both managed to capture. Dragon Age 2's romances, especially the rival-mances where you could still be with someone who disapproved of your actions, were full of tension. I'll never forget blushing over Fenris yelling at and immediately making out with Hawke or Isabella tossing aside her daggers as she tumbles you into bed.

Inquisition's romances were incredibly varied: from courting Cassandra with love poems to falling into bed with The Iron Bull at every chance, to Cullen's tortured yearning. There was hardly any more nudity than The Veilguard offers—Taash's backside shot essentially equating to Dorian's—but they communicated each character's personality so much more effectively than The Veilguard's assembly line relationships.

The series' history, that nudity setting, and everything BioWare said ahead of launch really led me to expect something saucier than what The Veilguard served up. Not everything needs to be raunchy. I'm just not sure what I was actually opting into.

It might sound like stating the obvious, but queer representation—in games particularly, for some reason—is a thorny subject. As I myself am starting to nudge into my early 30s (oh, god) I'm beginning to notice that the wants and needs of younger gamers aren't quite aligning with my own.

In mulling over my views on Taash in Dragon Age: The Veilguard (a thing I am still doing), I couldn't help but feel nostalgic (given it's Dragon Age: Origins’ 15th anniversary this week) about the representation featured in that game—flawed and messy, certainly, but still remarkably bold for its time.

As evidenced by recent RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3 and The Veilguard's movement towards "playersexual" romances (I put that in quotes because The Veilguard's characters are all technically pansexual, though I feel like that's playersexuality with extra steps) the general desire for representation among my younger peers seems to have tilted away from being discussed, to being seen and comforted—which is both good and bad.

Playersexuality (which, to be clear, refers to characters whose sexual identity is undetermined until the player starts to flirt with them) has its benefits, of course. In the case of Baldur's Gate 3, it allows players to live out their own personal queer romances, and those romances can shed the baggage that might come from a writer psyching themself out about writing representation. Likewise, it doesn't necessarily stop canon sexuality from happening—Astarion will always, by default, be attracted to men, for example.

But I'm starting to feel a little disconnected from this kind of representation. Because—like my elders, who were doubtless confused by us cooking up a whole grab-bag of words a mere decade ago—I simply yearn for different things.

I didn't realise I liked men until I was 18, and that's mostly because, despite growing up in a very accepting family, I was also raised in a time where a layer of casual homophobia was the background radiation in everything. "Gay" was still flung around as an insult in schools, the Newgrounds-era internet was still a minefield of slurs and screamers, and mainstream media was still wrapping its brain around the ancient construct of bisexuality as… y'know, a thing that people could do.

Dragon Age: Origins, however, has two bisexual characters in it—two! Both Zevran and Lelianna are able to be romanced by male and female players, despite the game coming out in 2009. That's four years before gay marriage was even legalised in the UK, and six before the Supreme Court made gay marriage legal in the US. It's also the same year that the Matthew Shepard Act was passed by Congress, which expanded US hate crime laws to protect people's actual or perceived sexual orientation. To say the climate was messy or complicated is an understatement.

Zevran's writer, David Gaider, the former lead writer and creator of the Dragon Age setting who happens to be gay himself, gave a talk during Pax West 2019. He talked a little about BioWare's history with queer representation, as well as Origins pushing into new territory for the studio. His anecdote about Juhani, a lesbian character from Knights of the Old Republic, puts into stark view the ground that was being broken here: "She wasn't allowed to say 'I love you' or mention the word 'love' at all," Gaider said. It's easy to forget we've come a long way.

I'm struggling to find similar talks from Leliana's writer, Sheryl Chee—but her character similarly discusses themes of queer faith simply by being, well, queer, and having faith. I've never been particularly religious myself, and the church hangs over us in the UK far less than it does in the US. That being the case, here's a great little snippet from some analysis by Sara Khan for Gaymingmag I'd like to share:

"Leliana resists the violence of the Chantry as an institution. She expresses faith as resistance, as a queer thing. In both Origins and Inquisition, you gain Leliana’s approval through helping those in need and demonstrating your commitment to ending systemic oppression. In Inquisition the calm, collected spymaster pretty much only loses her cool when her anger at injustice compels her. Whether as Sister or as Left Hand of the Divine, she consistently uses her position within the Chantry to question, disturb, and queer its space."

Khan also draws threads that I hadn't even considered before—for example, how the Chantry's treatment of mages has some deep connections to our real-life oppression. In particular, the act of making a mage "tranquil", effectively lobotomising them to make them docile and ‘safe’, has a horrific real-world parallel.

While people were lobotomised for a number of reasons during the US and UK's disturbing fascination with the "procedure"—an agony inflicted on around 20,000 victims by 1951—being gay was absolutely one of them. Leliana's queerness, with her deep connection to a Church who performs such analogous acts, is doubly fascinating as a result.

Regarding Zevran, Gaider added that "I initially asked if I could make Zevran gay—I'd been reading about how gay men were recruited by assassins in CIA and KGB, because they didn't have family—but James thought it would be better if the romances were bisexual so they could do double-duty, so to speak. And I thought 'fair enough, fair enough' … suddenly the idea of inclusivity was on the table. Before this, it hadn't remotely been part of the conversation."

The fact that BioWare was breaking new ground at the time was huge—but I can't help thinking about the Zevran that Gaider wanted to write. A fantasy character inspired by a knotty and disputed (usually by the CIA, which tracks) part of our history.

Gaider's talking about, among other things, the dark history of sexual warfare in secret agencies—the kind revealed in "The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence", written by former assistant to the deputy director of the CIA Victor Marchetti. An interview around the subject, as cited in this Reuters article from the ‘80s, reads:

"Soviet intelligence agents routinely cruise gay bars seeking candidates for blackmail who could be co-opted as spies, a spokesman for the CIA, another agency which is concerned about possible espionage, said … Former CIA official Victor Marchetti said in a separate interview that the United States employed similar techniques not only against Communists but in order to extract information from officials of allied governments who were ‘closet’ homosexuals."

I'm sad we didn't get to see this side of Zevran explored as overtly as it would be if he was gay, not bisexual, though it's not entirely absent—he clearly has experience in seducing his targets with the aim to slay them, but never having his true feelings, or existence, treated as something appropriate to express. As he puts it: "I grew up among those who sold the illusion of love, and then I was trained to make my heart cold in favour of the kill. Everything I have been taught says that what I feel is wrong."

Nonetheless, Gaider would later get to write Dorian in Dragon Age: Inquisition, and directly tackle the issue of conversion "therapy"—that is, attempting to torture a gay person into suppressing their sexuality—before he departed the developer in 2016.

That's not to say that this representation was ever perfect. There's the obvious snag that, well, when Circle Mages are allowed to go unfettered, they do actually have a chance of being worn by a demon and murdering people—and considering a lot of homophobia is based on how "dangerous" we are… yeah, there are problems with reading Dragon Age that way.

Similarly, this is not a series with a great record representing trans people. In Origins, the Pearl brothel in Origins has a "surprise me" option wherein the player wakes up to find a dwarf dressed in drag, poised to be the butt of an uncomfortable and very poorly-aged joke. There were also some problems with deep-voiced drag queen Serendipity in Dragon Age 2, which even prompted writer Mary Kirby to apologise after accidentally writing a scene where, even if your character hasn't slept with Serendipity before, everyone involved seemed to be made uncomfortable by her sheer existence.

This kind of rep improved with Krem in Dragon Age: Inquisition—a huge stride to see a trans character normalised, though he was voiced by Jennifer Hale. While she does a good job, and being cast as such isn't inherently her fault, there are absolutely transmasc voice actors out there who could've been picked up for the role.

Still—I think what the early Dragon Age games did otherwise is commendable, and I'd rather have messy and imperfect representation than none at all (though the Pearl's "surprise" joke can be nuked into orbit). There's a part of me that misses these weird, gnarled undercurrents, too. I want complicated representation that gets at the heart of real-world issues. I like that Dorian explored some topics that were difficult to stomach, and I lament that Zevran's CIA-inspired backstory never fully intersected with his queerness in an overt way.

Looking ahead, while I think the sanitisation of these inclusive elements is a great comfort to many, I don't want RPGs to leave them by the wayside entirely. In the same way that we should get to tell stories in videogames that are validating, triumphant, and mostly clean of any identity-related trauma—I don't see why fantasy stories also can't continue to represent the messier and more complex facets of our existence. 2009 was a weird year, and not all of the weirdness of Dragon Age: Origin's queer representation is worth keeping… but some of it, at least, I miss.

If you want to go back to the original Dragon Age today, you'll need some help. Origins was made in the Eclipse engine, which had some long-standing bugs that never got patched and given there are "maybe 20 people left at BioWare" who understand how it works, aren't likely to ever be officially fixed. Unofficially, they've already been solved and all it takes is a dive into the PC Gaming wiki and Nexus Mods to sort them out.

Without these patches, running Dragon Age: Origins is likely to make your PC overheat, performance will degrade the longer you play without a reset, and you'll probably see flickering red squares appear underneath dead bodies. These issues are fixed, or at least mitigated, by two mods. The first is the 4GB Patch, which makes Origins large-address aware. By default it'll only use 2GB of your RAM, but as the name suggests the 4GB Patch doubles that. It's an easy install in either the EA App or GOG versions of the game, but if you're playing on Steam you'll need to follow a different installation guide.

Next up is the Performance and Memory Leak Fix. Take the d3d9.dll and dxvk.conf files out of the archive and put them in the "bin_ship" directory of your Dragon Age: Origins install. With that done, you'll have the game in a much more playable state—one that won't melt your laptop—and you'll be ready to install some mods for fun instead of just to make the game run properly.

How to install Dragon Age: Origins mods

Almost every mod for Dragon Age: Origins comes in one of two formats. Some you can paste into the "BioWare\Dragon Age\packages\core\override" subdirectory of your documents folder, and will work automatically the next time you launch the game. Others will be dazip files, which take a bit more effort to get working.

To install dazip mods, find daupdater.exe in the "bin_ship" directory of your Dragon Age install. It'll probably be in "Program Files\EA Games\Dragon Age". When you run daupdater.exe it'll open a window you can drag and drop your dazip mods into. Then highlight them and click on "Install selected".

Next time you launch Dragon Age: Origins, go into the DLC section of the menu. Your dazip mods will appear here next to whatever official DLC you have. Make sure they've got a green tick in the box next to them, and they'll be activated. With all that out of the way, here are the best Dragon Age: Origins mods.

Dain's Fixes

Does it bother you that ugly animations for buffs like the angry red tears flowing down threatening warriors or the glowing fire of burning weapons remain on even in cutscenes? Or that rogues drop out of stealth the moment they steal things? Or that you have to loot everyone manually after every fight? Or how slowly you have to jog around outside of combat?

All these annoyances and many more are fixed by Dain's Fixes, a modular set of tweaks that incorporates quality-of-life improvements as well as fixes for bugs you may never have noticed, like the fact that Mighty Blow doesn't actually halve the speed of anyone it hits like the description says it should. Each of Dain's Fixes comes in a separate folder, making them easy to pick and choose between.

Qwinn's Ultimate DAO Fixpack

If Dragon Age: Origins released today instead of in 2009 there would be a legion of YouTubers telling us about how its "cut content" proves it's actually unfinished and borderline unplayable. While obviously that's not true, there is a lot of dialogue and a fair few codex entries, items, and alternate quest options restored by Qwinn's Fixpack—including 18 interparty banters you'd otherwise never hear. It also fixes a bunch of bugged items and scripting.

FtG UI Mod—More Readable Fonts and UI

"Follow the Gourd" is a modder who has done the vital work of boosting the size of Origins' UI so you won't be squinting at your screen to read the text on a modern-sized monitor. Subtitles, codex entries, tooltips, and the inventory can all be resized to your liking, and the subtitles moved to the bottom of the screen if that's where you prefer them.

Extra Dog Slot

The mabari warhound is a Grey Warden's best friend, with their snappy jaws, pointy ears, and muscled chest. They're fantastic, happy partners, and essential tanks for mages and ranged fighters. Still, it's easy to let your canine companion get left behind in favor of more useful companions who can carry inventory, equip items, and, you know, talk.

With the Extra Dog Slot mod, your dog joins you as a permanent fifth party member. Adding a bloodthirsty mabari warhound isn’t the most balance-friendly addition to the Dragon Age combat system, but have you seen those big, sad eyes? You can't leave him behind. Who's a good hound?

Once you've recruited five companions, install Extra Dog Slot. Then on the party select screen, highlight four of the non-dog party members. When you return to the game, your faithful hound will still be by your side.

Character Respecialization

A dark raven appears on a fencepost. A sour elixir full of evil portent is strapped to its leg. Drink it, and… respec your skills and attribute points at any time! Well, that was unexpected.

As strategies shift in Dragon Age, it's great to be able to rebuild a team to better support each other. The Character Respecialization mod pulls this off in a (mostly) lore-friendly way, and can be used at any time. After installation, find the dark-but-slightly-stupid-looking raven perched in most of Ferelden's major cities.

Equal Love

Equal Love erases gender restrictions on companion interactions, so you can flirt, kiss, and get freaky with any companion you'd like to, regardless of your player-character gender. Best of all, the new genderless rules carry over into the storyline's conclusions, so now male player-characters can [spoiler] with [spoiler], provided he chooses the [spoiler] ending.

Madd Gift Guide

Interpersonal politics, as we all know, begin and end with the giving of gifts. In vanilla Dragon Age though, finding a special "gift" item only leads to a bunch of hassle as you try to figure out who is supposed to receive it. With the Madd Gift Guide, the item descriptions of gifts suggest which of your companions would enjoy them, saving a lot of trial and error. For anyone trying to win the Most Popular Grey Warden contest, this is a simple but essential mod.

You can get a gift guide for the Awakening expansion too.

Forced Deathblows

Every once in a while, a melee fighter will kill an opponent with a combo of brutal finishing moves straight out of Game of Thrones. These are supposed to be a rare treat, but if you’re the kind of person who rejects the idea cookies are a sometimes food, Forced Deathblows can dial up the carnage. A variable setting makes the special kill animations happen slightly more regularly, most of the time, or for every single melee kill. The highest setting is recommended for the folks who played Sniper Elite with the X-ray gore animations turned all the way up, as it leads to the same amount of repetitive, gratuitous spleen-smashing.

No Helmet Hack

From Mass Effect 2 on, BioWare's games featured a simple checkbox that made helmets invisible so you could see your characters' beloved faces at all times, even when they were strapped into a thousand pounds of high-tech armor. Back in the Bad Old Days, helmets would only go away in dialogue scenes. The rest of the time, you'd have to see them running around in a daft wizard hat or leather bonce protector. Enter No Helmet Hack, a simple little mod that gives each character a weightless, valueless book to read. Using it toggles their helmet visibility on or off. Beautiful, simple, and efficient.

Ser Gilmore Companion NPC – Fully Voiced

The Human Nobles among you may remember Ser Gilmore as your well-intentioned, but only briefly relevant, childhood friend. Originally thought to be the next Grey Warden recruit, Ser Gilmore instead sacrifices his life to give you and your mother time to escape your burning castle.

Thanks to the retconning of this mod, however, Ser Gilmore is back. Even better, he's ready to join your quest and features full voice acting. The voice acting isn't half bad, and it's remarkable how well he fits in with the other companions. After installing this mod, you can recruit your miraculously alive childhood chum near the Lothering chantry.

Baldur's Gate 2 Redux

For a taste of something a little different—and a break from Dragon Age entirely—the Baldur's Gate 2 Redux mod is a thing of beauty. The first dungeon, Irenicus's Dungeon, has been entirely recreated by a team of modders, including the original audio and famously snappy dialog. Though this project was supposed to eventually recreate all of Baldur's Gate 2, unfortunately it went on hiatus in 2014 when the project lead got a job at Beamdog. Still, this bite of BG2 is good for about an hour of nostalgic dungeon-diving.

Alley of Murders

Alley of Murders is an add-on campaign that introduces a serial killer in the grungier areas of Denerim. The local constabulary aren’t having any luck solving the case, so it's up to the Grey Wardens to step in. This mod is fully voice-acted (to varying degrees of success) and should take about half an hour to wrap up.

The Shattered War

Alley of Murders was the first fully voice acted Dragon Age: Origins mod, and an impressive proof of concept. The Shattered War is the real deal, a standalone expansion of near-professional quality with more than 3,600 lines of recorded dialogue. Set after the events of the game, it casts you as a member of a military expedition sent to investigate a darkspawn threat in the Frostback Mountains, and should give you around 10 hours of bonus adventuring.

Shortcut Through the Deep Roads

By your second or third playthrough, you'll probably be pretty sick of Deep Roads dungeoneering. This mod lets you skip straight to the Brood Mother, though you'll have to be careful not to get turned around after defeating her, because if you wander into the Dead Trenches you'll get teleported back to the Brood Mother Fight. On a similar tip there's Skip the Fade, though some users on Nexus Mods report issues with it and it does conflict with mods like Ser Gilmore.

So you've decided to embark upon a romance with Dragon Age: The Veilguard's freckled scout, Lace Harding. Congratulations. You've made the best choice. A relationship with Harding has a lot of things going for it. She's fun without devolving too much into MCU-style banter, she's tough as hell, and her storyline is one of the more compelling ones.

Harding also makes more sense as a paramour. While the rest of your companions are strangers to you, Rook and Harding have been buds for a whole year by the time the game kicks off. And if you've played Inquisition, you'll already have spent a bit of time with her—albeit as a different character—in her role as Inquisition scout.

How to romance Harding

Good news! Like most characters, you have to actively avoid Harding if you don't want the option to develop your relationship with her. She doesn't have a faction, unlike every other companion, but simply using her during quests and picking flirty dialogue constitutes the bulk of your task if you want to get a date.

One thing to note: increasing your bond with a character does not contribute to your relationship status. What it does is unlock their personal quests, which often give you opportunities to flirt, and that's what puts you on the path to romance.

• It's not essential, but in the prologue if you bring her rather than Neve while Varric is confronting Solas, you'll get a nice early bond bump, though the events will leave her battered and bruised
• Bring her with you on quests
• Choose flirty dialogue options (but if you miss some it's fine)
• Pick up her companion gift at the Black Emporium
• Be supportive while she's dealing with her new magical powers and when she's reeling from the revelations about dwarves and elves after you've collected all of Solas's regrets

Harding romance scenes

Outing: An Unfamiliar Sense

Harding wants some help getting a handle on her new abilities, so the two of you go on a field trip to move some rocks around. There's not much to this quest aside from some terraforming, though you will get a flirty dialogue option.

• Ask her if there's anything you can do to help

This will set you on the path to a romantic relationship, and you'll have a cute (if a bit chaste) scene where you snuggle a wee bit, before you mysteriously start to feel a bit woozy. At this point, you can still continue romances with other companions, so you aren't locked into anything.

Commit to a romance with Harding

This is where you become an exclusive couple, setting tongues wagging in the lighthouse. You'll need to visit Harding in her room after continuing to develop your bond, and she'll ask you to join her in the Halls of Valor, starting The Bond Rekindled.

While you're hanging out in the Lords of Fortune's stomping ground, she'll express her worries about her newfound power, and you'll get a quartet of supportive responses. Despite them all broadly having the same tone, three will end the relationship and one will commit to it. Which is which is clearly marked, but you should choose:

• "I won't let it take you."

And there you have it. You are now in an exclusive relationship with The Veilguard's best companion. There are, naturally, more romantic encounters, especially since there are certain obstacles getting in the way of your happily ever after, but by this point you're locked into the romance.

Final scene

There is a possibility that you'll miss out on the final romance scene with Harding depending on a choice you make during the quest The Shadowed Sun. If you're more worried about screwing up than spoilers, you can get the details in our Veilguard endings guide. Your gut will probably tell you the right call to make though.

Before you deal with the final Big Bad, you'll get your classic BioWare "Let's have a steamy night before we risk our lives one last time" scene. And like all of The Veilguard's romantic moments, it's extremely chaste, with a only a smooch before you get the fade to black. Then you're on the sofa in your underwear having a heart to heart.

And that's pretty much it for your romantic encounters, with the exception of one scene right before the end where Harding briefly plans her future with you, before you march off towards the final confrontation.

The Mage's Tower section in Dragon Age: Origins is already quite the marathon: Four floors of labyrinthine halls stuffed with demons and fleshy growths on the walls, with side quests and classico BioWare moral quandaries (let a guy have his soul stolen by a sex demon, or kill them both?) galore. But three quarters of the way through, it also has one of the most breathtaking roadblocks I've ever seen in an RPG.

A real nasty ugly guy who looks like he got lost on his way to Scorn forces you to take a nap, bringing all the momentum of the Broken Circle quest to a grinding halt in favor of an hour-plus digression into surreal solo puzzle-solving. Everyone hates The Fade: Lost in Dreams, but you know what? There's nothing else like it in the Dragon Age series.

Sleepy time

Dragon Age: Origins' strengths are character writing and tactical group combat, so of course The Fade sequence has you exploring completely solo and in contemplative silence. Your jaunts into companion dreams are some genuinely great explorations of their respective characters, but they serve as these brief blasts of fresh air before your head gets held down for yet more surreal dissociation.

The zone consists of an archipelago of floating islands in Dragon Age's sickly yellow-green dream world, with the discrete areas connected by warp points. You have to scurry about, defeating the guardians of your companions' dreams to unlock their respective cutscenes and recruit their help for the final battle against Sloth, the demon who trapped you here. The big twist is that the islands are crammed with impassable terrain and other obstacles, requiring you to also collect four shapeshifter forms to have the full run of the place:

• Mouse form to squeeze into holes.
• Spirit form to get past force fields (sorry, "spirit doors").
• Burning Man to microdose hallucinogens and be annoying walk unharmed through flaming rooms.
• Golem form to break through barriers.

My overriding memories of first going through The Fade in 2010 are of frustration and feeling lost: Pushing through promising paths only to find obstacles I didn't have the form for yet, muddling through solo combat encounters, and generally just wishing I could get back to the main plot. A mod to skip the section entirely (save the companion scenes and big fight at the end) has remained one of the most popular Origins addons at the Nexus for 14 years.

Sickos yes

And yet, I find myself having this fascination and nostalgia for The Fade: Lost in Dreams. Maybe I've played one too many incomprehensible indie horror games at this point, but there is something genuinely dreamlike and unsettling about the much-maligned exploration and puzzle solving in this sequence that really speaks to me.

Looking at the Fade's appearances in later Dragon Ages, it might as well be a layer of Hell from D&D or something: Just a nasty place where demons come from and big, high level plot points happen. Lost in Dreams' isolating exploration amid such a strange implementation of familiar Dragon Age assets has this almost vaporwave quality that I find myself digging more and more as years pass. It's more a really experimental, fan-made Dragon Age mod, but it's part of the official game.

The Fade: Lost in Dreams really feels like it should have been cut, this vestigial digression that kills all the momentum of its parent questline, and that makes it even more interesting. Surely the one-off shapeshifting mechanic and companion dreams were somebody's (maybe multiple somebodies') darlings, not quite fitting in anywhere else, but too dear to get rid of.

For better and for worse, you just wouldn't see this kind of thing in a game of Origins' scale and profile nowadays: Too many developers working on it, too much money riding on its success, a more pressing and established drive toward flow and approachability. That makes sense, it's not any kind of moral or artistic failing, but it's why I think I'll always cherish Origins' weird little hour-long tumor of a dream sequence.

Taash's romance questline in Dragon Age: The Veilguard is truly unique. As you get to know the towering dragon hunter, you also follow them on a journey in exploring their identity. I don't think there's another character in all of RPGs that decides to change their gender expression during your relationship, let alone in previous Dragon Age games.

I can't say that it's always the most masterfully written storyline—much of Taash's self-reflection is quite awkwardly inserted into conversations, and the use of very modern, real-world terms and ideas can feel jarring in a fantasy world, even if the underlying struggle doesn't feel out of place in Thedas. But it's certainly a bold choice to make it such a major part of the romance and the wider story, and it feels like a significant step to see trans inclusion so front and centre in a major game release.

Plus, you also get to just enjoy smooching with a character that looks like they could lift you over their head with zero effort—and Taash's direct and dominant approach to romance definitely has its charms, especially if you're the kind of person that often wishes a fictional character would step on them. Read on to discover how to romance Taash in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and some of the key scenes you'll get to see if you do.

How to romance Taash

Like all romances in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, romancing Taash is very straightforward. The game makes it obvious which options will lead to romance, so you just have to pay attention and pick the right ones. But in case you have any doubts, these are the steps to follow to make sure it happens:

• Complete Taash's companion quests and events whenever they come up. Make sure to check whenever you go back to the Lighthouse to see if they have anything new for you—either an exclamation mark or a speech bubble over their icon on the map.
• Choose the dialogue options marked with a love heart every time they appear. You can miss some early flirting opportunities and still win Taash's affections, but after a certain point these options become now-or-never, so play it safe by always getting lovey-dovey when you can.
• Give them the "Priceless Ancient Trinkets" gift—if you're not sure where to find it, check our companion gift guide.

You don't need to do every one of their companion quests (many of which are just short conversations or scenes) to romance them, but it's good to see them all through to experience Taash's complete story and make sure you don't miss anything. The crucial turning point is a conversation you'll be able to have at the Lighthouse shortly after the events at Weisshaupt. Say you're interested then, and things will unfold from there into the A Little Dragon Hatches quest, where you can fully commit to the relationship.

Taash romance scenes

Feeding the birds

Shortly after meeting Taash for the first time and adding them to your party, you'll receive the Fire on the Sands quest. This is a chance to get to know them better, by joining them as they run an errand on the Rivaini coast and feed the local birds. You'll get the opportunity to flirt with them here, lighting the spark of a potential romance. Make sure you don't run into the birds as you go, though—hilariously, disturbing them while they're eating actually hurts your bond with Taash a small amount.

Just flirting?

After the events at Weisshaupt, a conversation with Taash should become available at the Lighthouse. It may take a little while to trigger—if it's not showing up, just do some more sidequests while you wait, checking back after each one.

Taash will tell you about their mother scolding them over applying the traditional ropes to their arms. Choose the option:

• "You deserve kindness, Taash"

Taash will quickly change the subject to asking you pretty directly whether you're just flirting for fun or looking for something serious. Tell them you're looking for "Taamlok"—that's basically Qunari language for a serious relationship—and things will start to get steamy. That is, until you're interrupted by Harding with a message that leads into the A Little Dragon Hatches quest.

Commit to a relationship with Taash

The A Little Dragon Hatches quest will send you to a dragon's lair, but you don't need to prepare for combat—this is just another dialogue scene in a different setting, basically. Taash will express their frustration with being confused about their identity—their role as the dragon hunter of the group, their gender expression, and their mixed Rivaini/Qunari heritage. When they bring up their mother, you'll get the dialogue option:

• "She cares for you. So do I."

That commits you to a relationship with Taash for the rest of the game, and closes off any flirting/romance options with other characters. Then there's some kissing in a cave to seal the deal.

With your companions collected and the dragons defeated, there's only one thing left to do: get the best ending for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. The good news is that by diligently completing your companion and faction quests you can pretty much breeze through getting very close to the best possible ending to the game. Strong factions and companions are more likely to succeed in the final battle, but there's still no guarantees.

We've seen the very best and the absolute worst endings for The Veilguard, so I'll walk you through how to achieve each. There's still a little wiggle room in between to make your own choices about how you think certain characters' stories should end. So first up, let's break down the best ending for The Veilguard.

The Veilguard best ending

Dragon Age: The Veilguard best ending decisions

The best ending for The Veilguard is one where only one of your companions will die and you'll be able to give Solas a redemption arc—better late than never.

Before the quest The Shadowed Sun, make sure you've gotten Mythal's Essence so she can help you reason with Solas. You should also have all factions at maximum strength and all companions become a Hero of the Veilguard by completing their personal quests.

Here are the choices you need to make to get the best ending to The Veilguard:

• Choose Davrin to lead the distraction before the fight against Ghilan'nain
• Choose Bellara to dismantle the magical wards before fighting Ghilan'nain
• Have Emmrich assist the Veil Jumpers in dismantling the wards during the fight with Elgar'nan
• Have Lucanis help the Crows kill the Venatori war leader in the fight with Elgar'nan
• Have Taash help the Wardens kill the golem in the fight with Elgar'nan
• Send Taash to help protect the barricades with The Inquisitor while you climb the tower
• Tell Solas "You don't have to do this" in your final confrontation with him

Should Harding or Davrin lead the distraction?

You should send Davrin to lead the distraction while the rest of the group hunts for Ghilan'nain during the quest The Shadowed Sun. Here's the thing: this is the one guaranteed death in the entire ending. Either Harding or Davrin is going to get ganked by the gods.

There's no true right answer here, but all other things being mostly equal, it makes the most sense for Davrin as a character to make this sacrifice. As a Grey Warden, he was fully prepared to die killing the archdemon at Weisshaupt and was frustrated that he wasn't able to achieve that. He's prepared to do what it takes.

As for the endings of their personal stories, Harding has a lot more left to discover about the Titans while Davrin was largely able to settle a future for the griffons that doesn't require him, bittersweet as that is.

Be aware that if you're romancing one of the two of them, this will lock you out of the final romance scene with your partner that's supposed to take place after this battle. So that might factor into your decision more than the larger character arcs.

Should Neve or Bellara dismantle the wards?

You should have Bellara dismantle the wards instead of Neve during the quest The Shadowed Sun. Like the choice between Harding and Davrin, there is no actual more optimal choice here, and this one fortunately won't result in a death as long as they're a Hero of the Veilguard. You will lose access to either Neve or Bellara when they get snatched away by Elgar'nan though.

Again, I recommend picking Bellara for lore and character reasons. You'll save your companion from Elgar'nan's clutches later but the big moment they get to defy him during the final battle feels way more relevant to Bellara as an elf and makes for a more emotional payoff.

This decision will also muck with your ability to see that final romance scene, so take that into consideration. You won't be able to save your companion until after that final night at the lighthouse where you'll get to spend the night with whoever you romanced.

How to assign your companions for the final quest

If you've been following my recommendations for the best ending so far, you should have all factions at full strength and have gotten all your companions to "hero of the Veilguard" status by completing their personal quests.

At full strength, you may be able to succeed by placing your companions in less optimal positions, but the choices below I've verified for success.

When planning out your final mission, here's who to assign to each job to guarantee there will be no other character deaths:

• Choose Emmrich assist the Veil Jumpers with the wards
• Choose Lucanis to help the Crows kill the Venatori war leader
• Choose Taash help the Wardens kill the golem

This will leave you with Neve and Harding as your party members to fight through the hordes of enemies on your way to Elgar'nan.

A little later, you'll have another choice of who to send to help the Inquisitor and their forces defend the barricades while you climb to the final fight. You should send Taash with them.

What should you say to Solas?

After your fight with Elgar'nan, it's time for a final confrontation with Solas. You'll get a choice between tricking Solas into binding himself to The Veil or attempting to fight him.

If you successfully acquired Mythal's essence earlier in the game, you'll have the third option of asking Mythal to reason with Solas. No matter what, Solas winds up bound to The Veil to preserve it and save the world. It's just a matter of how you get there.

The best ending is to tell Solas "You don't have to do this," which is only available if you collected Mythal's essence. Your second dialogue choice doesn't seem to have any bearing on the ending, so pick as you please. This will summon The Inquisitor, Morrigan, and Mythal to all talk him into doing the right thing. This is definitely the most emotional and satisfying ending you can choose for Solas.

Choosing to trick Solas by saying "Let's try this your way" is also a decent ending, though a little less emotionally impactful. Solas will acknowledge that Rook managed to outplay him through wits alone.

Choosing to fight Solas is definitely the worst option among the 'best ending' choices. You won't actually enter a combat encounter and this is a much shorter ending that just leads to tying Solas to The Veil in a rage without any of the emotional send offs from other characters.

Worst ending to The Veilguard

What's the worst possible ending for The Veilguard?

Everyone dies. Seriously, similar to the worst ending for Mass Effect 2, everyone can die, including Rook, though you are still ultimately victorious. There are three things you need to do to ensure this worst outcome:

• Have weak strength for every faction
• Complete basically no companion quest lines so they aren't "Heroes of the Veilguard" though the worst ending is still possible with one or two depending on your choices
• Choose the wrong characters for each assignment during the fight with Elgar'nan and make sure none of the characters you assign are Heroes of the Veilguard

If you want to see this ending guaranteed—and it is a pretty cool ending to be honest—do the following during the ending quest in Minrathous against Elgar'nan:

• Send Taash to aid the Veil Jumpers
• Send Davrin to assassinate the war mage
• Send Lucanis to fight the golem

When climbing the tower:

• Send Emmrich to defend the barricade

Whoever was kidnapped earlier—Bellara or Neve—will sacrifice themselves to the blight to free the Dreadwolf and the last two companions with you will be turned to stone by Solas during the final fight. Rook will sacrifice themselves to imprison Solas in The Veil. Faction death wise, the Viper of the Shadow Dragons will die, as will Strife of the Veil Jumpers.

It's worth noting that, as mentioned earlier, nothing you do during the first ending quest against Ghilan'nain on the island will change anything, apart from who dies while fighting her, and who sacrifices themselves to the blight later if you're on track for the worst ending.

If you've been theorycrafting in Dragon Age: The Veilguard any, you'll probably have come to the same realisation I have. Most builds in the game can be split into two categories: Make stuff hurt, or stagger them. Weapons in particular seem evenly split between offering damage values or huge stagger numbers, the latter especially true for the big, stonking two-handers you'll be using (if you've got good taste, that is).

Well, turns out, the game has a killer unique ring for you that's basically best-in-slot for any stagger build, whether you're a based Slayer like me or something lame like a Spellblade Mage (sorry, Robin). It's called the Call of the Hall ring, and it's your new best friend.

To get your mitts on this thing, all you need to do is—after unlocking Taash as a companion—wait until the game gives you The Hall of Valor side quest. Follow the markers, knock over 10 waves of mooks in the arena, and the ring is yours. What's more, none of these enemy waves are particularly challenging; just your garden variety bozos you spend most of your time popping detonations on, anyway.

While a whopping 50% stagger and 50% takedown damage are enough to make this ring sing, the real star here is its unique ability, which gives you a random advantage (that is, a buff) whenever you takedown an enemy. Playing as a Warrior, I've had great success combining this with the Garb of Kinship, which gives me 10% damage for every advantage I've got stacked. Together, I’ve found they’re best served with skills that give me buffs for smashing, slamming, and crushing my enemies into paste.

While you might find some late-game synergies, this ring is likely to be a winner for any stagger build throughout your adventure, thanks to how easy it is to obtain early and how flatly good the bonuses are. Almost every unique in the game comes with some form of downside or trade-off, but not here—The Call of the Hall ring is here to give you maximum walloping potential with no downside. Happy thumping!

Bellara's solidly in the running for most wholesome companion in a cast full of good eggs. In this guide, I'll tell you how to properly lift the veil and romance Bellara in Dragon Age: The Veilguard—for which you'll need a tolerance for endearing magic technobabble rambles and stumbling sentences. The hummingbird's trying her best, bless her.

Bellara Lutare is a member of the Veil Jumpers. Unlike some of the other factions in the game, the Jumpers are a relatively new alliance of interested geeks assembled from various elven Dalish clans. You meet Bellara early on, and very quickly realise she's one half of a missing pair—with her brother, Cyrian, vanishing after an accident with an artefact.

While she comes off as quirky and a bit of a clutz, Bellara's romance is actually pretty lovely—if understated, mostly relying on mutual support through the shocking amount of heartbreak she goes through. Her storyline revolves around dealing with sudden loss, the unseemly past of the ancient elven empire, and the question of whether to preserve knowledge for future generations—even if that knowledge is dark.

How to romance Bellara

Here's the cliffnotes on how to woo Bellara's nerdy Dalish sensibilities:

• Complete Bellara's personal questline, ending in "The Forest of Spirits".
• Flirt with her when the game prompts you to. Otherwise, Bellara generally approves of optimism, kindness, and supporting her interests with enthusiasm. Hummingbirds like nectar, after all.
• Grab Bellara's companion gift from the Veil Jumper merchant in Arlathan Forest.

Like a lot of companions in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Bellara's romance hinges on some key, clearly-signposted conversations.

Bellara romance scenes

Express romantic interest in Bellara

As long as you've been expressing interest in Bellara, being nice, and wooing her as you complete the main story, you should get a cutscene at the Lighthouse during act three wherein you walk in on Bellara composing her own serial.

This is, essentially, Bellara writing fanfiction about you—and you've got to keep your cool and be supportive. Continue selecting those romantic dialogue options, and Bellara will just straight-up ask you "Do you want an 'us'? I mean, romantically". Here's how to respond, immediately after she adds "Okay. Worst possible way to ask that" like a bumbling nerd:

• "It's not, and I do like you" in response. Clear communication is a plus!
• "Do whatever feels right" seems a winner in the immediate aftermath, she's a creature of impulse, after all.

Bellara will then execute the time-honoured manoeuvre of staring at you like she's smitten while leaning on thin air. It's what passes for rizz among the Dalish. Don't question it.

Commit to a romance with Bellara

As you progress Bellara's personal questline, you'll eventually unlock the quest "Hummingbird's Lament", wherein you'll go to the Arlathan Forest to reconnect with a long-lost family member. The conversation doesn't go great, but all that means is a great opportunity for some emotional catharsis and romantic commitment bonding. Score!

This conversation will play out once you're both back at the Lighthouse. Once more, for someone so clumsy and roundabout with her words, Bellara is remarkably responsible and communicative—asking you what you want in no uncertain terms (as long as you expressed interest in her beforehand). Here's how to respond when she asks "Are you sure you still want that, I mean? With everything I've got going on with Cyrian, I mean…":

• "I'm sure." Doing this will lock you into a romantic relationship with Bellara.

The Final Night

From here on, it's just a matter of completing more of the main story and wrapping up Bellara's companion quests—as seems to be standard with these romances, Bellara will tell you she's got plans to swing by your room later in the night before you set out to give Elgar'nan a long-overdue wedgie, where a tame, but very emotionally sweet confession scene will play out.

Honestly, I've been shocked at how charmed I've been by Bellara the further I delved into her romance— Rook becomes her rock in a very endearing way. If you're looking for a sickly-sweet love story based on mutual trust, emotional support, and affection, you could do much worse than the Veil Jumper's nerd representative.

Dragon Age is an utterly baffling series that has reinvented itself three times now, but one of its more confounding choices was having the main plot of Inquisition pretty much flow entirely from Dragon Age 2's first DLC, Legacy. All the Mage-Templar stuff DA2 teed up mostly got resolved in Act 1 of Inquisition, and the real meat of the plot is obsessed with some Cenobite-type guy who unhelpfully looks like a season pass premium skin of another, different Dragon Age DLC villain.

But despite all the plot funkiness, Legacy has something else to recommend it aside from being required reading for Inquisition: Legacy is Dragon Age 2 at its full power, Dragon Age 2 with actually decent fights and unique environments. Legacy is a peek into the alternate universe where Dragon Age 2 got more than a year and a half of development time, and I want what they're having.

In my house, we respect Dragon Age 2⁠—I was in high school at the time, but I 1,000% cosign Rich McCormick's 2011 94% review of the divisive sequel. It had some of BioWare's best character work, and a story that felt like three seasons of a TV show instead of the same "round up a posse to go take down the ancient superweapon" story BioWare's been telling variations of since Knights of the Old Republic.

But it has issues, and it always bugs me that its real problems are so often buried under misapprehensions ("it was too actionized") or culture war bullshit ("Anders flirted with me, so now I have to commandeer the Eastern Command of the Japanese Self Defense Forces and turn my life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood"). I've always found that Dragon Age 2 offers comparable party control and character build options to Origins⁠—which was never as complex as Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights in the first place⁠—just free from a lot of Origins' crust and cruft.

The problem was fighting the same awful encounter in the same warehouse over the course of Hawke's 10 years of living their best(?) life in Kirkwall. A covert anti-mage insurrection goes down in the same tunnels where a serial killer Buffalo Bill'd my mom, while any number of illegal hijinks occur in those same goddamn spider caves out in the boonies.

When a fight goes down, grappling with a Carta criminal plays out exactly the same as tangoing with a baby dragon (who coincidentally fight exactly like giant spiders), while elite enemies bring in a noxious combo of burst damage, hard crowd control, and war of attrition tankiness. You can also always rely on fights to prolong themselves with multiple waves of enemies and self-heals for the big boys.

Will and testament

But Legacy was different⁠—it had entirely bespoke maps and honest-to-god encounter design. It raises the question why you wouldn't just make the whole Dragon Age 2 out of Legacy, but it was apparently critical to EA that BioWare turn the sequel around in just 16 months.

It's something that was sorely lacking in Dragon Age 2's base game: A sprawling, multi-part dungeon in classic Infinity Engine or DA Origins style. It's a striking environment, a Grey Warden stronghold built into the side of a desert canyon, transitioning from a wild west exterior, to the somber, warmly-lit upper halls of the Wardens, down into a cavernous underground city tinged with a sickly green blight. The landmarks of Kirkwall have their own charm, but the lavish one-off of Legacy's Grey Warden fortress makes it one of the most memorable locations of Dragon Age 2.

And by god it has actually good fights. A real "we're not in Kansas anymore" moment comes early on in the exterior area. Blight-crazed Carta criminals ambush you with real tactics, with melee boys rushing you as ranged attackers pick away at a distance from behind a rough fortification. The battlefield layouts and enemy positioning genuinely impact how you approach fights in Legacy and manage to be genuinely challenging, all without a single phantom reinforcement wave to be had.

Legacy's final fight against Corypheus not only proved a better final boss than base DA2's, it also put every follow-up battle with the wizard in Inquisition to shame. Puzzle battles can be hit-or-miss in BioWare RPGs, but Corypheus' elemental maze was challenging and unique from other fights in the game without being obtuse.

But no matter how well Hawke fights, the dastardly magister gets away to make his weird hangups everybody's problem in Inquisition, and that perfunctory ending only serves to underline how weird the transition between DA2/Legacy and Inquisition was. With Legacy doing all the heavy lifting on Corypheus' character, he kind of just shows up in Inquisition expecting everybody to know his deal. Whatever those foibles though, I'll always appreciate Legacy's take on a DA2 whose moment-to-moment gameplay better lived up to its character writing and big ideas.

No RPG is complete without a dialogue pop quiz and you're going to get a deadly one when you try to obtain Mythal's essence in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. If you collect all the wolf statuettes to complete the Regrets of the Dread Wolf quest, Morrigan will have a chat with you about all the things you learned from Solas' memories.

Along with a lot of other lore about Morrigan's history and relationship to the elven gods, she suggests that you should hunt down a fragment of Solas' former partner in godhood Mythal. This essence of Mythal could be useful in the future, she suspects, but you're going to have to convince Mythal to trust you. Morrigan's advice on the matter is that Mythal will "demand respect but detest flattery" and "appreciates righteous anger but will not tolerate pity." If that's a little too vague, I've tested out all the options so you can easily convince Mythal to join your cause.

How to obtain Mythal's essence

The easiest way to obtain Mythal's essence is to complete Bellara's full personal quest first. You can tell Mythal "I want your help," then "We must stop the gods," and finally "We stopped Anaris" to instantly win her favor without completing the rest of the conversation.

Essentially, Mythal will allow you to convince her to help you by giving your arguments on four different topics: the blight, the gods, your own worthiness, and having Solas on your side. Some answers will lead to an instant fight with Mythal, but she transforms into a level 45 dragon so I don't recommend that. Among the other answers, some are better than others. Your goal is to be convincing enough across those four topics to win Mythal's support.

How to convince Mythal to assist you:

In your conversation with Mythal, you'll get to address four different topics to convince her to assist you. I don't know what the actual under-the-hood math is, but based on all my testing, you need to gain six 'points' in the conversation, at which point Mythal will immediately relinquish her essence.

You can achieve that with the instant win talking point "We must stop the gods" followed by "We stopped Anaris." Or you can give the best answers (two 'points' each) to three different subjects.

Your first dialogue choice must be "I want your help." Both other options lead to an instant fight with Mythal as a dragon. Here are all the dialogue options for the four topics of conversation, the best answer in bold for two points, a less optimal answer for one point, and the option you should avoid unless you want to fight.

Again, your goal is to get six points, using the dialogue choices below:

"We must stop the blight"

• +2: "You stood against it"
• +1: "People will die"
• ⚔: "The blight is your fault"

"We must stop the gods"

• +2: "They wronged you"
• +1: "Put the blight aside?"
• ⚔: "We need no gods"
• +6: "We stopped Anaris" (Available if you've completed Bellara's personal quests)

"We are worthy"

• +2: "Building a safe place"
• +1: "Fighting monsters"
• ⚔: "I'm following your example"

"Solas is helping me"

• +2: "Respected him"
• +1: "Forgotten him"
• ⚔: "I'm sorry that happened"

If you manage to recruit Mythal—by wit or force—you'll have a powerful ally in your pocket. Mythal's assistance does come in handy if you've recruited her prior to finishing the Heart of Corruption quest. She'll swoop down in dragon form to help you take down the Revenant Dragon in The Crossroads at the end of that quest.

Mythal's support is also a critical ingredient in what I consider to be the best possible Dragon Age: The Veilguard ending you can get.

We're several days into the first week of a new major RPG, which means it's just about time for everyone to take a little screen break from Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Not that you have to take a break from Thedas entirely while getting away from the computer: Instead, you should crack open the short story collection Tevinter Nights, especially if you think the Antivan Crows assassin guild is kind of cool.

Tevinter Nights was written by a number of BioWare writers and includes stories with several of The Veilguard's companions. Neve and Lucanis both feature prominently while others like Emmrich get nods in bits related to their factions. The Crows are an attractive concept—who doesn't like a group of assassins?—and The Veilguard definitely brings us into their world more than Dragon Age has in past games. But even so, there are two Tevinter Nights stories that give them so much more depth than The Veilguard manages to.

"The Wigmaker Job" by Courtney Woods is a must-read for fans of Veilguard's Crow companion Lucanis. It showcases his relationship with his cousin Illario during a contract they're working together to kill a blood mage in Tevinter. There's also little treat of a line about Lucanis' appearance in there, setting up what he looks like in The Veilguard for those paying attention.

That job highlights Lucanis and Illario's differences in approach, in personality, and in the palpable tension between two Dellamorte family heirs: one who absolutely wants the limelight and status within The Crows and one who just wants to do his job. It also gives a lot more insight into Lucanis' own values by showing how he makes difficult choices about avoiding bystander deaths while still completing the contract.

My absolute favorite story from Tevinter Nights is also by Courtney Woods, "Eight Little Talons." This one is a Clue-like murder mystery that takes place during a summit of the Crows leadership as they reckon with the Qunari military threat that winds up being a prominent part of the faction's story in The Veilguard.

The Veilguard mostly flattens Teia and Viago, two of the Crows highest ranking members, into quest delivery mouthpieces but they're both full of flair in "Eight Little Talons." Teia is a charmer overflowing with self-confidence and an expansive wardrobe that likely rivals Illario's. Meanwhile Viago is a staunchly serious and emotionally constipated lover of poisons. Wouldn't you know it, but they've been dancing around an attraction to one another for quite a while, which comes to the fore during this close-quarters mystery.

If you think the Lucanis romance in The Veilguard is brimming with sexual tension, it's got nothing on Teia and Viago's simmering tryst as they work together to sort out which of their fellow Talons is a traitor. You even get treated to both of their perspectives, watching how they continually struggle to snare one another.

I'm not normally one to call the supplementary materials required reading. Given some of the complaints about storytelling I had in my Dragon Age: The Veilguard review though, both of these stories in Tevinter Nights really flesh out the nuances of what these characters and The Crows as a whole value in a way that The Veilguard just doesn't leave space for.