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5 Things I'd Like to See in Dragon Age: The Veilguard - The Desires of a Cautious Optimist

As of writing this, I have not yet watched the trailer for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, much as it has been tempting me since its release last Sunday. I’ve been intending to write this post for months now, and I wanted to keep my expectations entirely free. I’d really like to watch that trailer though, so no further delay – here’s five things I’d really like to see in Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

1. Greater Integration of Backgrounds

Backgrounds have to be one of the most lackluster features in Dragon Age: Inquisition. After their disappearance in Dragon Age 2, wherein your only choice was to play as Hawke the human with a very specific backstory (God love them), differing backgrounds made their return in Inquisition. To poor effect! Sure, you sometimes get a different dialogue choice if you’re an Qunari or a mage, but it hardly makes any difference.

I imagine part of this might have been to avoid FOMO. There are definitely pros and cons to the way it was done in Dragon Age: Origins, wherein a background choice could fully lock you out of certain endings. (Solidarity with every other Alistair-romancing character who found out too late you could only marry King Alistair if you were already starting as human nobility. Not even being a literal princess is enough to make Fereldens look past you being a dwarf, apparently, so obviously there was never any hope for my elf fresh out of the mage tower. I didn’t want that silly crown anyway.)

On the other hand, this is my list, and I lean more on the pros of that situation. What’s even the point, truly, of the different backgrounds if it boils down to nothing more than an aesthetic difference and a handful of dialogue with no long-term effect? For as much as Bioware kicked the Dalish while they were down in Inquisition, it would have been a nice bit of vindication if playing an elf actually made you even a little better at dealing with the Well of Sorrows. I would love to see your character’s background have at least a moderate impact on the story of The Veilguard.

In my ideal world, this doesn’t just mean your character’s ancestry and class, either. I’ve long held onto the impossible dream that our character might be able to come from different factions unrelated to their ancestry. What if the protagonist of The Veilguard could be a former Grey Warden, a rebel from Tevinter, or an Inquisition recruit who’d witnessed the Inquisitor’s rise to power. Let me have loyalties and experiences outside The Veilguard that matter and affect what my character knows and how they move through the world, and I’ll play this game forever.

2. Trans Character Options That Actually Matter

Given how common it’s become for video games to uncouple pronouns from body type, with Baldur’s Gate 3 going the extra mile of letting you select pronouns, voice, body, and genitals all completely independent from each other, I’ll honestly be pretty shocked if The Veilguard launches with the traditional male/female only gender options locked to specific body types. As common as this simple bit of character creation has become in recent years, there is something that feels a little … Incomplete about it, isn’t there?

Sure, in Baldur’s Gate 3, I’m able to play a character with a vulva who also has a deep voice, he/him pronouns, and a body that would otherwise be traditionally identified as ‘masculine’. I could say to myself that this character is a trans man who has had some kind of magic masculinizing procedures, and I could play the entire game with that understanding of his story. Except, the game’s never going to really validate it, is it? The script will never misgender my character or anything like that, but nor am I going to be given opportunities to assert my transness. I’m not going to be able to say to Nocturne, the singular trans side character, I see you, me too.

At the end of the day, how is that, functionally, any different from Dragon Age: Inquisition, where I told myself in my head that my Inquisitor was trans, even if the game gave me no chance to interact with transness aside from sticking my foot in my mouth and my nose in Krem’s business with a list of weirdo questions and misgendering? Baldur’s Gate 3 might treat its trans side character with more modern sensibilities (although, Krem still has points up on some more recent trans characters in that we never learned his dead name), and it might offer you a chance to have the aesthetic of transness and gender nonconformity, but the script is still written with a cis audience and cis player characters solely in mind.

I’m not really asking for a lot here. A throwaway line when we (fingers crossed) inevitably run into Maeveris would more than suffice for me, though of course, more would always be welcome. More than that, even if a throwaway line would suffice, we deserve more. I look at indies where your character can say in explicit terms that he’s a boy who has periods or can transition from one gender to another between chapters, and I feel pretty undignified begging for scraps from one of the biggest names in RPGs.

3. Greater Companion Diversity

Remember Maeveris, of ‘being mentioned a couple sentences ago’ fame? I’m pretty sure she’ll play some minor role in The Veilguard, since she’s from Tevinter and is familiar with major characters Varric and Dorian. If we’re lucky, maybe she’ll even be a reoccurring side character. If we’re really lucky, maybe she’ll even be around with some constancy, like the advisors in Inquisition. Maeveris is a popular character originally from the extended universe, and she also happens to be a trans woman. I’ll be very glad to see her when she turns up in The Veilguard.

… That said, wouldn’t it be really cool if one of our companions was trans, too? Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a trans love interest? This goes back to what I was saying before – modern, mainstream RPGs are happy enough to let you play at being trans, to have trans people on the sidelines or in the background, but why hasn’t any mainstream RPG placed a trans character in the main cast? It just seems kind of bizarre, doesn’t it? It’s like there’s this discomfort there, pressing out at the edges to keep these characters to the background when writers aren’t really sure what to do with them.

Still, doom and gloom and all, but I’m not actually pessimistic about this one. Under lead writer David Gaider, who is gay, Bioware introduced Dragon Age’s first gay and lesbian companions and love interests, in Dorian and Sera respectively. Patrick Weekes took over as lead writer in 2015, and having an openly nonbinary, pansexual lead writer in charge of this Dragon Age release gives me some small hope that we might see new breakthroughs for mainstream queer rep in this installment.

Again though, that said, it’s not just queer rep Dragon Age: The Veilguard could do more with. The Dragon Age fandom has been a historically unwelcoming place for fans of color. It goes back to the beginning, no doubt, but some of the most recent examples from around when Inquisition was released include people drawing whitewashed versions of Vivienne before the game was even out and users on the Nexus forums requesting mods to turn her white. (One example I found of the latter was full of insistence that the users weren’t racist, no, no, they just thought being lighter skinned was “more fitting” for a noble character like Vivienne. Seriously.)

Shameful, racist behavior isn't reserved for the fans, though. Bioware also doesn’t have the best record when it comes to how they treat their characters of color. They’ve done their own share of whitewashing over the years, with characters getting paler and paler with every iteration of the game they appeared in, with other characters, notably Vivienne, being treated poorly in general by the writing in a way other companions just weren’t. The Veilguard doesn’t just need more characters of color. It needs more characters of color – particularly Black characters – given the same respect, love, and understanding in their narratives as white characters.

This is the part where I remind you, I haven’t watched the trailer yet, and I’ve steadfastly avoided leaks and discussion since the game was announced, so I have no idea what the companion lineup is looking like. My point is, I’d really like to see greater diversity among main characters in The Veilguard. Companions, but other major characters like the roles the advisors filled in Inquisition, too. More queer people, more people of color – I’d also love to see another major character with a disability and major characters of more varied body types. It’s not just about representation, it’s about representation among core cast members, among the heroes. As much as I’d enjoy being The Iron Bull’s right hand arm man who gets pushed over a lot during sparring practice, I’d like to see myself in a character with some actual screen time, too.

Again, I actually have genuinely high hopes about all this! For all my complaints and deserved critique, Bioware has consistently pushed forward with diversity in their games, right back to early depictions of lesbian and bisexual women in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. (Fun Fact, did you know Juhani from KOTOR was the first explicitly LGBT+ character in the Star Wars franchise?) I may not think we’re getting complex backgrounds in The Veilguard, but by God, I can hold out genuine hope for this Bioware game to be more diverse than the last.

4. Fuck It, Let’s Bring Back the Dragon Age: Origins Combat System

No, I know it’s not actually going to happen. I’d buy The Veilguard having Obsidian Games level character and story depth before I bought them bringing back Origins’ combat, since I’m apparently the only person on planet Earth who actually prefers it. I understand that my experiences are not universal.

On the other hand – no, no, hear me out. It’s not that I really, truly want a whole cloth return of Origins’ combat system. I just want that complexity back. I want the return of ability points. I want the return of broken-as-hell spell combinations. (In fact, can I get Mana Clash back in the game? Not that it’s really mattered since enemy mages became weak shit in Inquisition, but I’d like to have it anyway.) I want the return of blood magic, shapeshifting, a proper Arcane Warrior specialization that lets me use an actual sword, and every other wacky use for magic in the previous games.

With every iteration, Dragon Age has become increasingly simplified and aimed at a broader and broader audience. I don’t want to sound like I think broad appeal is a bad thing! I’m glad that as many people as possible get to share my favorite game franchise with me! At the same time though, I just think it’s unnecessary that Dragon Age continues to flatten itself for the sake of broad audience appeal. If Baldur’s Gate 3 proved anything, it proved that you can be a smash hit without sacrificing any of the weird, esoteric, confusing, and clunky mechanics of your tabletop forefathers. Surely Dragon Age could afford to bring back the persuasion skill and let me pointlessly min-max the weakest, clumsiest, most smooth-talking mage this side of Orlais, no?

5. Dwarf Romance

please please please please please please please please please please please please