Dragon Age: The Veilguarddoesn’t have a canon world state. It also won’t have theDragon Age Keep, which was previously used to save world states across the games in the series, but you’ll still be customising your specific world state in character creation by answering questions about the specific choices you’ve made in other games.
Game director John Epler says thatthere isn’t one enforced canon in The Veilguard. There has to be a canon when it comes to external media like comics and TV shorts, but when it comes to the games, “it’s your own canon”. Dragon Age is an epic, and your decisions reverberate throughout the whole series – The Veilguard might be putting the Keep out of commission in favour of having this decision-making native to the games rather than an external tool, but it’s certainly not taking away the repercussions of what you’ve already done.
You have to respect BioWare’s commitment to maintaining this central mechanic. It would have been far easier not to. I shudder to imagine how many possible branching outcomes could result from a single decision, let alone three games worth of decisions that also have impacts on each other and that evolve across time.
We’ve already seen how our decisions inOriginsand Dragon Age 2 carry over toInquisition. Somemajor examples: the ruler you crown in Origins’ Landsmeet appears throughout the series, the way you play Hawke in Dragon Age 2 affects how they act in Inquisition, Dagna from Origins also shows up in Inquisition and reflects your choices from the first game, and Morrigan’s child (if she has one) can also appear in Inquisition.
It’s hard to say right now how many of your choices in Inquisition will affect what happens in The Veilguard, but this is one area where I don’t doubt that The Veilguard will shine. It’s a crucial part of the game, so I’m sure that the Council, the group of superfans BioWare consulted, would have objected if it wasn’t up to par.
But I can’t help but wonder how sustainable this is. If you drew out a tree of every possible decision made in every game, the outcomes made possible because of those decisions, and the situations that could arise from each… well, it would be a knotted, impossibly big tree. Narratively, this kind of flexibility is a massive boon for players, but incredibly hard to maintain for developers. What makes this even more complex is that BioWare doesn’t look so much at overall world states as individual choices, which means a kind of granularity you don’t often see in series of this size.
How long before BioWare has to start pruning that tree, tossing aside existing factors in order to manage a realistic scope? Has it already had to begin doing that? Will players start to question why decisions they felt were important have seemingly been ignored in the service of managing complexity?
It must have been difficult enough to keep this up for three games, let alone four. If there’s eventually another title added to the series after The Veilguard, it’s hard to imagine that the complex individual canon every player has developed over the games can continue to be just as complicated and choice-reliant. Things will have to be tossed out, just to make the series coherent. I love BioWare’s commitment, but I’m not sure that it can last forever.
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.
