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If you’ve played all three previous Dragon Age games, how many choices do you think you’ve made across the series as a whole? Hundreds? Thousands? Certainly enough for it to be a little disappointing that new entry The Veilguard doesn’t really care about any of them.
That’s a little unfair, but it’s not far away from the truth. The Veilguard lets you customise your “world state” during character creation, but it only relates to the events of Dragon Age: Inquisition, and even then they’re disappointingly few and vague. Beyond details of your Inquisitor (their name, race, and appearance, though it doesn’t care about their class), your past adventures are all boiled down to just three questions.
The first asks who your Inquisitor romanced. The second, whether the Inquisition was disbanded completely or absorbed into the Chantry—not one of the game’s most interesting decision points, and it happened in a DLC rather than the main game. The third, also relating to the DLC, asks whether your Inquisitor “vowed to stop Solas” or “vowed to save Solas from himself”—an interesting nuance, perhaps, but a pretty fuzzy one, and given your Inquisitor isn’t even the character dealing with Solas in The Veilguard, it hardly feels like one of the top three most important choices from an entire series.
Though I’ve not yet finished The Veilguard, from what I’ve seen so far the impact of these world state choices seems minimal and, frankly, more an attempt to placate long-time fans as simply as possible rather than a way of building on what came before. Your Inquisitor shows up as a character, but they feel like a glorified cameo, and the game is quick to come up with reasons why they then have to disappear out of sight rather than help you in your quest.
And… that’s 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. It’s a stark contrast to the save imports and manual tools that previous games in the series (and Mass Effect 2 and 3) featured to allow you to bring in most or even all of your decisions, big and small. In a game that already feels disconnected from its predecessors tonally and mechanically, it’s a disheartening wiping clean of the slate.
I do understand that it’s not a simple issue. Accounting for any amount of previous choices is a difficult design challenge, creating huge sets of slightly different world states for different players that all have to work with a new story. And actually reflecting past choices in a satisfying way is its own challenge—Mass Effect 3 became such a parade of minor appearances from characters from past quests that it started to feel like an episode of This Is Your Life.
And that’s before you even think about the gulf of time. Dragon Age: Inquisition launched 10 years ago—Origins was five years before that. In gaming terms that’s a lifetime ago, and while dedicated fans will remember every scrap of their personal Dragon Age history, many potential players of The Veilguard will have only fuzzy recollections, or never have played the previous games at all. I think it’s fair to question how long a series has to stay beholden to its own history like that—and at what point a reverence for the past becomes a barrier to entry for new players. You can understand why BioWare would have wanted to mostly set aside past decisions.
Unfortunately, though, that doesn’t stop The Veilguard feeling not just apart from its own history, but like it’s actively avoiding it. Though not quite as extreme as Mass Effect: Andromeda jetting off to a new galaxy far in the future, it still moves the action geographically north to escape as many familiar locations and characters—and their possible state post-choices—as possible.
That particularly becomes a problem when the story wants to lean on the characters and lore that it knows fans love without accounting for how we interacted with them. Varric, for example, is part of your crew, clearly because he’s a fan favourite—but he’s quickly relegated to hiding silently in a back room for most of the game, only occasionally popping up to offer vague advice. He has to be sidelined, because his personal history across the series is defined by our choices—without them, he’s a thin sketch. Harding is allowed to return and become a full companion, but only because she was a perfect combo of being beloved by fans yet having a very minor role in the story.
Morrigan is the most distracting example. Across all three prior games, Morrigan and her mother Flemeth have been mystical lynchpins of the series—always working on their own grand plans, guiding events, and turning out to be more and more significant to the wider lore every time they appear. Many of the biggest choices in the series’ history relate to Morrigan, and all those choices should dramatically affect her status and goals in The Veilguard.
Instead, the handful of times that you do meet her, BioWare tries to have its cake and eat it too. She feels more important and powerful than ever, but also more vaguely defined, as her dialogue dances around her own canon without ever confirming any of it. Did she have a son with the Warden, and is she therefore motivated to stop this latest apocalypse to protect him? Did she drink from the Well of Souls, gaining greater knowledge and power but also binding herself to one of the elven gods at the centre of the story of The Veilguard? Questions like these are either talked around, ignored, or bulldozed over with new events that render them irrelevant.
I suspect it’s even the reason why Solas himself plays the role of advisor rather than primary villain, as was always promised—because even he is weighed down by the baggage of prior choices that “did the Inquisitor want to stop him, or did they want to stop him in a slightly nicer way?” really don’t cover. The focus is all on his ancient past rather than his recent backstory, and again the Inquisitor who should be so invested in his whereabouts and actions is simply shuffled away to deal with something else off-screen.
Many major factions, locations, and historical events receive similarly short shrift. The Mages vs Templars conflict is ignored, elven oppression mostly the same, and despite much discussion of Archdemons no one seems to have any interest in the most recent time one was killed. These aren’t just lore tidbits, they’re core elements of the series’ personality.
The result is a story that, so far, feels like it’s happy to take from past Dragon Age games without really being in conversation with them. As a long-time fan, I have a deep emotional investment in the series—but a lot of that investment is in the particular version of the story I created with my choices. By wiping the slate so clean, BioWare seems to be giving me permission to stop caring—this isn’t my Thedas anymore, it’s just a Thedas, and it’s not one that particularly speaks to me so far. I had hoped for a continuation of the series I love—instead, The Veilguard seems content to just be an echo of it.
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Kurt Indovina
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