Dragon Age: The Veilguard is getting a prequel in the form of an audio drama podcast

If you've ever heard the old radio dramas based on Sherlock Holmes stories you'll know the joy of listening to actors crisply enunciate a conversation while accompanied by a soundscape of footsteps crunching on gravel. Expect something similar except with more arrows twanging and spells being whooshy in Dragon Age: Vows & Vengeance, an audio drama in podcast form being produced as part of the build-up to Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

A prequel to the game's story, Vows & Vengeance is about a retired thief searching for her lover in the Fade, with seven of the series' eight episodes also highlighting a guest star companion from the videogame. Harding, for instance, the much-loved dwarf scout from Inquisition, will co-star in episode two. Based on the teaser, we can expect to hear characters like Solas and Varric pop up as well.

It's reassuring that BioWare is going hard on narrative support for The Veilguard, with this podcast joining the short story anthology Tevinter Nights and a comic called The Missing as explicit tie-ins—not to mention the Netflix series, which I suspect will factor into the plot as well. It's a reminder of past efforts like Dragon Age: Redemption, the web series created by and starring Felicia Day, which tied into a quite decent expansion for Dragon Age 2.

BioWare has also been showing off the combat, but it's the story I'm here for, and some payoff for the ending of Inquisition we've been waiting a decade for. Dragon Age: The Veilguard will be out on October 31, and is also bringing back the tradition of ugly preorder cosmetics should you want them. Vows & Vengeance debuts on August 29 and can be found on every major podcatching service, as well as Spotify and YouTube.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.