Dragon Age Veilguard will ignore Origins and DA 2 lore and only recognizes your big Inquisition choices

Only your DA Inquisition choices influence Dragon Age Veilguard’s world state, which skips over all things DA Origins and DA 2

BioWare

Only your DA Inqusition choices influence Dragon AgeInquisition Veilguard’s world state, which skips over all things DA Origins and DA 2. The news comes from a recent interview IGN conducted with series creative director John Epler, where Epler said that he and the team wanted to avoid seemingly flippant cameo appearances where people and decisions from earlier games received only one sentence of mention.

Instead of simulating choices from all three previous games when you start Rook’s adventure, Veilguard only asks you who you romanced in Inquisition – the choices are still race and gender locked – whether you promised to save or stop Solas, and whether you disbanded the Inquisition or handed it over to the Chantry. You’ll make these choices at the start of Veilguard in the Adventurer’s Past section.

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“Our philosophy when it comes to integrating past player choices and world states is wherever possible we want to avoid contradicting what has happened before. We never want to invalidate your choices,” Epler told IGN. “For Dragon Age: The Veilguard, among many reasons why we moved to Northern Thedas is it becomes a little bit more of a clean slate for us. There's not as many decisions you have made up to this point that have an impact on what's happening in Northern Thedas. And we don't have to speak directly to things like who is the Divine? Because again, that's happening in the South.”

“There's never a sense of, ‘Oh, that decision doesn't exist.’ But maybe we don't touch on it in this particular title. Much like Inquisition didn't touch on every decision from Origins, much like DA2 didn't touch on every decision from Origins, it's kind of in that same vein of we're not going to contradict it. We just may not always reference it directly.”

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The choice upset some fans, who wondered how Veilguard could effectively handle decisions such as who drank from the Well of Sorrow and other topics, such as Morrigan’s child, when those are tied to choices other than those in the Adventurer’s Past. Epler didn’t touch on those kinds of questions, but he did say the team worked with the goal of never contradicting the player’s choice.

It seems like a tough balancing act, but we don’t have much longer to wait before we find out how well BioWare pulled it off. Dragon Age The Veilguard launches for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S on October 31, 2024.