When it comes to triple-A game franchises, the length between installments has grown longer and longer. Dragon Age is often cited as a key example of this, since we’re coming up on nearly a full decade of a gap between Dragon Age: Inquisition and October’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Whether it’ll be fully worth the wait will depend on players come October 31, but having played it at a recent event, I can say that Veilguard feels very well-put together and like it’ll be the best possible version of itself.

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Along with playing Veilguard, io9 participated in a roundtable with several BioWare staff at the event, including game director Corinne Buche and producer Jen Cheverie. If you’re worried about spoilers, don’t fret—these questions are about continuing Inquisition’s lingering threads, the relationship Dragon Age has with fellow BioWare franchise Mass Effect, and other topics that don’t give anything away about the new release.

Justin Carter, io9: Solas was always going to be a part of Veilguard, but when did you decide to bring in a new hero/organization rather than continuing the Inquisitor v. Solas thread?

Corrinne Busche, game director: Fundamentally, it comes down to the nature of what it is to be a Dragon Age game. Every single adventure is a different main character, series of locations, but never a direct sequel or continuation. It’s really central to the franchise’s loose ends, and of course we have loose ends and mysteries that span the whole series. Inquisition ended with an unresolved danger looming, and we knew that we both needed to address it, and that it’d be a big part of the next game. But it was still very important for us to continue the series’ throughline of a new character and part of the world taking center stage.

io9: With the new hero, Rook, how do you feel like they’re distinct from the heroes of the earlier games? Was there a particular protagonist you wanted them to be more in the mold of, like Hawke in DA2 or the Inquisitor?

Jen Cheverie, producer: We really wanted to approach Rook with the goal of letting players create the Rook they wanted to be and see. In developing the character creator, we put a lot of intention behind the hairstyles, complexion, and everything. Hopefully, it results in the feeling [that] creating Rook feels very personal, and you can relate even more to the Companions and characters you know and the problems you solve throughout Thedas. 

Busche: I’ve always been a fan of the games and their protagonists—the Hero of Ferelden, Hawke, my dear Inquisitor, whom I still love. One of the most interesting challenges is to have one of those prior leads, like the Inquisitor, meet Rook. Both of them have distinct, important roles within their own journeys and that of Thedas. So when they and Rook cross paths, it’s almost like two titans meeting; those interactions are so complex, and for longtime fans, they’ll also be so full of memories and feelings.

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io9: Most of the Companions are all-new for the game. But some, like Neve and Lucanis, were previously seen or mentioned in EU material. Other than them being in Tevinter, what made you want to bring them into the game proper? Conversely, what’s your process for deciding to fill a companion slot with a character from a previous game, like Harding?

Busche: It’s a mix of a few things. Tevinter is in Northern Thedas, a place full of brand-new locations we’ve alluded to before. Fans have wanted more of that region, but they never got to go there in the prior games. We knew we wanted to do right by them, and we also knew we needed Companions that represented these parts of the world, and who were affiliated with these new and returning factions.

Cheverie: When I was a QA analyst on Inquisition, Scout Harding was such a constant for us. Seeing the reaction players had to her, we knew we had to bring her back to dive into her story more and let players develop that relationship with her. It was an exciting endeavor to let players get to know her more, and learn more about dwarven history in the process. 

Busche: Harding was a Companion choice we made early on. Seeing players fall in love with Harding back in Inquisition was a bit of a surprise, honestly. But we were inspired, so it felt like a natural extension to make her return as a fully-fledged Companion that also had ties back to the Inquisition.

Other times, we know what roles the story requires, and we spend a lot of time looking through our backlog of characters and their histories to find the perfect fits for this moment in time. Sometimes we try out different characters and find out someone’s better suited to that particular need. As for those returning characters, we can’t include everybody from the prior games, but I think longtime fans will be pleased with the cameos that show up throughout Veilguard.

io9: There hasn’t been a new game since Inquisition, but you’ve filled that gap with EU content like short stories, the show, etc. How have you found a balance between onboarding new players, the diehards who’ve been keeping up, and those in that in-between space?

Cheverie: As a Dragon Age fan, these games are why I wanted to work at BioWare in the first place, so it’s exciting to come back to this world again. I love that we can continue stories in Thedas with characters fans know and love, and start new stories with characters introduced through other media.

Busche: Even if you’re a diehard fan, it might’ve been 10 years since you played Inquisition, and there’s a lot of lore to keep in your head. For lapsed players or new ones, we made sure Veilguard was going to be a great entry point: in our first few hours, we take great care to focus on core concepts—like who’s Solas, your immediate next step, and motivations to keep going. 

For the lore junkies, around every corner, you find new information about these longstanding mysteries. As you get deeper into the game, a lot of longstanding theories will get some resolution. And speaking to expanded media, I love that we’ll get to feature characters that came from the comics or books and haven’t shown up in the games yet. My immediate go-tos are Strife and Irelin [from Dragon Age: Tevinter Nights], and fan-favorite character Maevaris Tilani. There’s other surprises in store too, and I can’t wait for players to experience them.

©BioWare/EA

io9: Dragon Age and Mass Effect have now borrowed each other’s gameplay DNA with Veilguard and Andromeda, respectively. Did you ever worry that you were taking too much from that franchise and losing some of DA’s (admittedly fluid) identity?

Busche: We approached it from the lens of, “Was this right for the story, and how would it help us?” We look back at our entire catalog of games to see where we had similar successes, or “What makes sense for a story, environment, and development team like this?” Every Dragon Age game has reinvented itself in some way, from the combat to how we approach the world. It’s the greatest challenge, and for me, the most interesting opportunity, since it allowed us to look back on fan-favorite features spanning all previous games, and see if they make sense to pull forward.

Quick-swapping weapons mid-combat is pulled right from Origins. If I think about the pace of combat and the companion depth and their character arcs, I see a lot of Dragon Age II. You also see a lot of the DNA from Inquisition in there as well—but Veilguard is still its own entity and experience. Our hope is that this all comes together to respect where we’ve been, and also advance the franchise into this next adventure into Thedas.

Cheverie: There are people on this team who’ve been with BioWare for a long time, even going back to Origins. The idea of what a Dragon Age game is is pretty strong with a lot of the team, and it’s a collaborative effort. As we’re going through the game, people are giving feedback and offering their insight into things. The magical moment for us is when you sit down and play through something you had a hand in making and you go, “This feels like Dragon Age, this is it.”

Dragon Age: The Veilguard releases October 31 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

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