What I learned talking to BioWare about Dragon Age: The Veilguard

I was fortunate enough to play Dragon Age: The Veilguard for several hours recently, exploring multiple missions and trying multiple characters at multiple levels and using differing builds, and it was good, I really liked it. You can read my much lengthier preview impressions of Dragon Age: The Veilguard elsewhere on the site. But here I want to cobble together some of the things I learned while interviewing co-game director John Epler, and taking part in a group Q&A with other lead developers working on the game.

Veilguard has really only been in full production for about four years

Technically it’s been 10 years since the previous Dragon Age game, Inquisition, but that doesn’t mean Veilguard has been in full development the entirety of the time. The team has been iterating on ideas ever since Inquisition add-on Trespasser came out, “But in terms of the actual game as you’re seeing it now, as it’s shaped today, I’d say four years,” John Epler tells me. “That’s when everything just started to come together and you’re like, oh yeah, yep, this is what we want. This is what we need for this Dragon Age game.”

There have been rumours the game has undergone some fairly major revisions during its protracted development time. “Absolutely,” says Epler, when I ask him. “The version that we were working on back then and the version working on now: there’s definitely similarities – you’ll see names that are the same in terms of the major actors, obviously Solas is still part of it – but the structure of the game has definitely changed as we refined as we built, and again, as we really focused on making it a single-player story based RPG.”

It’s single-player now, but BioWare did try some multiplayer ideas

BioWare hasn’t been shy about experimenting with multiplayer in the past. Mass Effect had a fairly established co-operative multiplayer mode, and Anthem was built around it. Even Dragon Age: Inquisition had a dungeon-delving, four-player co-op multiplayer mode. It won’t come as a shock, then, to know BioWare explored having it in its newest Dragon Age game too. “We tried a bunch of different things – multiplayer is one of them,” Epler says. “We tried a few opportunities, how it would work and what didn’t. But what it comes down to is we are a studio that’s made around, that’s been constructed and honestly staffed around, building these single-player story-based experiences, so once we started focusing on that, that’s when things really came together for us.”

There are three acts in the game, and it feels large

My day’s play was spread across the first act of the game, playing through character creation right up to level 30 and the Siege of Weisshaupt, which serves as the dramatic climax for the first act of The Veilguard. It is spectacular in terms of the events unfolding and the size of the enemy it throws at you there – those of you who played Dragon Age: Origins will know the enemy well.