How Dragon Age: The Veilguard transformed BioWare’s approach to world-building

Veilguard, for all its faults and missteps, is BioWare’s best effort at world-building to date - even if you have to meet the developer halfway to see it.

BioWare

Dragon Age: The Veilguard had many expectations to meet, more than usual with major new releases in popular franchises. It was BioWare’s first single-player game in years, the first new Dragon Age in almost a decade, and a chance for BioWare to prove that EA shouldn’t ignore the demand for single-player RPGs. It was also a risky experiment, the first time BioWare ditched its traditional world-building and storytelling methods for something new and potentially controversial. This new method doesn’t always work and contradicts everything BioWare did before. However, setting aside expectations and digging into Veilguard’s codex shows quite the opposite. Veilguard, for all its faults and missteps, is BioWare’s best effort at world-building to date. You just have to meet the developer halfway to see it. 

Veilguard started life as a multiplayer game before EA let BioWare reimagine it as a single-player RPG, albeit one that retained the mission-based structure multiplayer games often use. Dragon Age creative director John Epler tells me BioWare had to rethink its approach to Veilguard’s environment design following this switch. 

“For environments in a multiplayer game, the goal is to get in, do whatever it is you need to do, and move on,” Epler says. “But in a single-player RPG, you need to give the player room and reason to explore and find something that interests them outside the main objective.”

• Read more: No, Dragon Age Veilguard’s secret ending doesn’t retcon the entire Dragon Age series

Veilguard combines both approaches – the maps are restrictive, but players can return to them later to find more loot and extra missions. 

Arlathan is a confounding maze with remnants of a bygone age around every corner / BioWare/GLHF

Epler says the team’s biggest goal for all these regions and secrets in northern Thedas was just living up to fans’ expectations. These are locations longtime Dragon Age fans read about 15 years ago, places and institutions that formed the series’ historical skeletal structure. Their presence – the old downfall of Tevinter, the dark and tangled mess of Treviso and its Crows – was constant, even if they remained out of sight and reach. 

Despite the pressure of meeting those expectations, Epler tells me the overriding emotion and the guiding principle while bringing these regions to life was freedom and a sense of openness. Even with everything BioWare wrote about northern Thedas before, the continent’s northern reaches were essentially a blank slate that the Veilguard team could fill in as they saw fit.

It helped that BioWare could actually bring its dreams of how Thedas would look and feel to life with minimal compromising this time. Epler says one of the best parts about developing Veilguard was creating it in a mature Frostbite engine with a team that understood how it worked (historically, Frostbite, an engine developed primarily to create first-person shooter games, has been difficult to work with for the RPG studio). 

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“What we achieved with The Veilguard just wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago,” Epler says.

The Eclipse engine BioWare used for Dragon Age Origins and Dragon Age 2 was already aged by the time those games were released, and Frostbite was still new when the team started working on Dragon Age Inquisition. 

The results are immediate and visible in every part of Veilguard, from Arlathan’s inverted physical laws to the level of detail in character models and even their hair. A less obvious set of improvements Epler mentions are the elevators Rook and the team sometimes use. Epler tells me the older engines BioWare worked with couldn’t handle elevators, which meant the team had to get creative. Mass Effect 3’s DLC scenes where the squad is traveling down in an elevator actually featured the team remaining still while the game pushed the surrounding scenery up around them. So, those elevators in Minrathous’ Dock Town and Weisshaupt are a pretty big deal.

It's a very clean and orderly military occupation, and no one seems to mind too much / BioWare/GLHF

The thing is, aside from these obvious visual and structural improvements, I have to admit I struggled to see this broader vision for northern Thedas in my Veilguard playthrough. After leaving Minrathous during the prologue, Veilguard pushes you through a series of small maps with limited room for exploration and hardly any codex entries to uncover. These segments put me in mind of the multiplayer map design philosophy Epler mentioned – straightforward, frictionless, and entirely objective-focused. This was the first time Dragon Age opened old Tevinter ruins for exploration and study, and there was nothing inside.

The adventure gradually becomes more open and sets you loose to explore the streets of Treviso or wander the depths of Nevarra’s Necropolis, and I found myself disappointed again. Treviso is fun to explore, with its alleys and multilevel design suggesting much about the dark doings and adrenaline-fueled escapes that play out in the city – suggesting, but nothing more. Despite being the largest port city in Thedas, and this district in particular housing the city’s biggest casino, everything from the streets to the people’s morals is sparkling with cleanliness. 

• Read more: Dragon Age: The Veilguard review — hollow and clinical with small flashes of brilliance

Treviso is a safe playground, not a place where people live and noteworthy events happen. Minrathous has a similar problem. For all the talk of the mages’ dictatorial rule, the city’s poor district is full of smiling peasants with a can-do attitude, and the only sign of harsh government comes from the Venatori, should they be allowed to take control of the city, and the beggars who sit with hands outstretched, never moving. There’s no indication anyone works or exists on any plane in the Necropolis. Rivain is just a ruin and a coliseum. And everywhere the company travels, they meet with silent crowds filling up space and doing nothing. It speaks volumes that you can give beggars money, though nothing actually comes out of your inventory, and there’s no reaction from them when you do, giving each city a Madame Tussauds veneer. 

I thought side quests might provide an opportunity to tell more local stories, but even these disappoint. An early quest in Minrathous puts you in Neve’s line of work after a spirit asks you to track down a murderer. Their victims, ground down by oppression, fell into despair and became easy marks. It turns out the culprit is a demon, though, and there’s nothing uniquely Tevinter about the scenario. Minrathous holds no monopoly on poverty and unjust rule, and the tragedy could have unfolded anywhere.

Just a little imposing / BioWare/GLHF

The Mourn Watch sends you to clear Venatori out from the Necropolis. They’re searching for some artifact for the Elven gods – the same thing the Venatori are doing everywhere in Veilguard – and it never bothers to explain why these items of power are in Nevarra or, frankly, anything about the region at all.  Arlathan’s quests tell stories of ambition and magic gone awry, but the forest itself has little connection to these. They have ties to Bellara’s interests because Arlathan is Bellara’s area, so these quests take place in Arlathan. That’s as deep as it goes. Every character you recruit has a faction and an area tied to them, like the background stages in a fighting game, and just as shallow. 

That left the codex as the last place to see BioWare’s usual expertise in creating places that feel storied and real, and it’s where BioWare tossed tradition out the window and experimented with something much different. Veilguard’s codex entries aren’t designed to tell you about a city or the sociopolitical problems it faces. You won’t get anything about a nation’s history or the habits of the wealthy. They’re meant to tell you about the world as it’s seen and experienced by the people you’re traveling with.

• Read more: Dragon Age: The Veilguard taught me not to judge fantasy characters by their covers

The Mourn Watch section has almost nothing to say about Nevarran politics or the unusual relationship between the necromancers and the country’s king. What it does have, however, are records of daily life in the Necropolis. It’s a framework for understanding what helped shape Emmrich into the man he is, a glimpse into the things he considers important and how he lives. 

A particular favorite is The Visitation, an old Nevarran folktale Emmrich finds for Bellara that explains how the first Nevarrans embraced spirits of the dead as wise helpers. It’s a cute nod to Bellara’s love of knowledge, but it also captures one of the fundamental principles that make up Emmrich’s worldview about life, death, and the role of spirits. Conveying that idea this personal way, through a folktale that Emmrich surely knew from his younger days, instead of in a detached piece of regional history gives it more emotional significance than if you just found a copy of the folktale in a library.

A necromancer afraid of death? Now there's a plot worth digging into / BioWare/GLHF

It’s in how these entries relate to specific character quests that I can see the freedom Epler spoke of, though perhaps not the way he had in mind. I see the freedom to reimagine the idea of necromancy and what it might mean to the people of Thedas or the chance to give physical form to the sense of wonder that Bellara and the Veil Jumpers see when they look at the world. Even Harding’s quest casts the Deep Roads and Dwarvish history in a new and more complex light. 

The best moments and BioWare’s strongest world-building to date happens when people start interacting with places and cultures. Epler tells me the team envisioned Minrathous as a modern, post-industrial city – one that runs on magic instead of electricity and technology. That’s why you see magic neon signs everywhere and why the Archon’s palace is positioned like a panopticon – modern surveillance methods for a modern city. These are nice touches, but they have little influence on your time in the city, until Taash gets involved.

• Read more: Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the first triple-A game to handle gender identity the right way

Sometime after Veilguard’s first act, Taash and Neve have a conversation with you where Taash reveals their discomfort with gender. Taash doesn’t understand how they feel, but Neve, the most worldly-wise of the party, does. She knows people in Minrathous who experienced similar feelings and encourages Taash to speak with them. You don’t actually see this happen, but you can follow Taash’s emotional progress in the codex – their meetings with Neve’s friends, their gradual understanding of who they are and how they want to live. “Trans” and “non-binary” might seem like modern words for a fantasy setting, but that’s the point. No one outside of Minrathous uses these words or displays that level of in-depth knowledge about gender identity.

It’s a remarkable piece of interconnected storytelling of a kind BioWare has experimented with little in the past. So often, video game world-building keeps a barrier between location and character. Characters react to something that happens in a place or shapes it to get a desired outcome, but rarely are the actions and outcome anything meaningful to them in a personal way.

Minrathous' modernity come from more than just its magic neon signs / BioWare/GLHF

In Dragon Age 2, for example, you can find a codex entry about Nevarra’s Death Watch Beetles with an anecdote about how Rivaini people fear them. The bugs became a fashion accessory in Val Royeaux until one fell on the king and made him shriek in public. It’s amusing, but even while it tells you about Thedas’ culture, it has no bearing on the journey at hand or anyone you know. Even in Inquisition, where you finally explore Val Royeaux and meet the people who live there, the context from previous games has no bearing on what you do or who you meet.                                     

In an ideal world, we could have cultural context and deep characters. The two styles aren’t mutually exclusive. It only makes sense that the forces molding a place, its culture, and its politics would, and should, have some bearing on characters and their deeply personal stories, instead of only forming the broad plot they’re forced into. This is BioWare’s first attempt at making an RPG where personality takes precedence over sociopolitical concerns, though. Perhaps it’s fitting that Veilguard foregoes extensive world-building in favor of experimenting with different, deeper kinds of character writing, even if the result leaves the rest of northern Thedas feeling rather thin.