Dragon Age: The Veilguardis shaping up to be a sanitised product of the internet age in which everything has to appease everybody. Lead writer Trick Weekes recently said thatthe game is “unlikely” to feature blood magic because it’s too “nasty”and isn’t something that BioWare thinks its protagonist would use.
The protagonist is us, the player, andDragon Ageis an RPG, emphasis on the ‘R’. When it comes to roleplaying games like this one, deciding where the line is for the player completely rips away agency, but it’s also endemic of a much wider problem across all media.
I’m Gen Z myself, so this isn’t some ‘Gen X screams at the kiddos on the internet’ take — our generation isn’t great at handling media that makes us uncomfortable. We’re notoriously sex-negative because it can be awkward to watch such scenes, which leads to us demanding that movies cut the ‘unnecessary’ intimacy even when that intimacy is the perfect vehicle for unpacking who a character is at their most vulnerable.
Beyond sex scenes,Baldur’s Gate 3is a prime example of this reluctance to feel unsettled, as people were so uncomfortableslaughtering the tiefling refugees to recruit Mintharathat Larian Studios added a peaceful option rather than making players grapple with the horrors of a villainous path. Art is supposed to make you feel strong emotions like discomfort, killing refugeesshouldupset you, andMinthara is not a good personno matter how much you like her.
Feeling those emotions isn’t the art slighting you in some way, it’s you resonating with what you’re reading, watching, or playing. It should make you think and question your core beliefs and the world around you, but too often people demand that what makes them uncomfortable be changed to fit their standards and to no longer incite those emotions.
Baldur’s Gate 3 continually caters to this mindset with each update and, as Editor-in-Chief Stacey Henley wrote,diminishes what made the game so special to begin with. It’s sanitising itself to appease as wide an audience as possible. Unfortunately, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is walking out of the Fade with that mindset drilled into its foundations, but art for everybody is art for nobody.
“I think [blood magic] can be ethically neutral if you only use your own blood, but after seeing it used as a required part of mind control and demon binding in [Dragon Age 2] and [Inquisition], it’s just not a road we want the hero to walk right now,” Weekes explained.
The framing of the protagonist as a hero is already an issue. Roleplaying games excel when they let you decide your own motivations—maybe you’re saving the world because you truly believe it’s the right thing to do, selflessly turning down coin and material rewards because this is a quest of moral importance first and foremost.
Or maybe you’re driven by survival and are actually another villain saving the world simply because you don’t want to die in the crossfire. To that end, you wield what’s available to you, whether that’s blood magic, necromancy, or whatever unethical scraps of power you’re able to find. It should be in your hands because funnelling you into the hero’s path makes the ‘roleplaying’ part of RPG far less meaningful.
The Veilguard has a ‘Dragon Age Council’, a group of superfans acting as advisers on the game’s development.As Stacey writes,they’ve mostly weighed in on issues of difficulty, but the idea of a group of fans who are inevitably tied up in the internet subculture that has twisted complex characters like Anders into a cute flirty terrorist is concerning.
If Larian were to have listened to fans for a hypothetical Baldur’s Gate 4, Ascended Astarion would have been radically sanitised to make players less uncomfortable. The once toxic, controlling, power-hungry vampire would become a girlypop boyboss slaying across Faerûn with you cuddled up on his lap. Gortash, the skeeving politician vying for control of the Sword Coast, would have become a hot, younger fling with all the edges sanded off to make it palatable. Too often fans latch onto characters with moral complexities and demand that they be ‘fixed’, as if those moral complexities aren’t what made them interesting to begin with.
Thankfully, we got the Dark Urge instead, an origin character who incentivised seeing the seedier underbelly of the Sword Coast. Larian Studioswantedplayers to unravel the uncomfortable, and it made its world that much more compelling and real, which is why we latched onto it so much more intimately. The Veilguard’s approach by contrast is an act of cowardice that feels run through countless focus test groups to avoid upsetting as many people as possible.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard won’t let us be the villain, because it feels icky and wrong. It’s a worrying start to a game that is already mired in red flags about not wanting to make us feel uncomfortable, giving into the demand that art should avoid tricky subject matter so that you’re not forced to feel anything beyond thinly-veiled, hollow happiness.
It’s an inherently privileged point of view to want to avoid what makes you uncomfortable. Subject matter you find so distressing that you demand it be removed from a game might be the day-to-day experience of someone else, and you’re only able to shut out and ignore that perspective completely because it’s not something you have to see. It’s close-minded and comes from a place without empathy, and hides away stories thatcanshed a light on issues we’d otherwise be ignorant to.
This mindset leaves writers unable to grapple with anything of meaning, unable to reflect the real world and make us think about our place within it. And ultimately, it’s an impossible goal. Youcan’tavoid upsetting everyone, so all you’re left with is a vapid attempt that strips back so much of the nuance and depth because that nuance and depth involves subject matter that bursts our comfortable bubble.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
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Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the long-awaited fourth game in the fantasy RPG series from BioWare formerly known as Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. A direct sequel to Inquisition, it focuses on red lyrium and Solas, the aforementioned Dread Wolf.
