At Summer Game Fest 2024, BioWare has finally revealed a lot about Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the fourth mainline installment in the fantasy RPG franchise.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t still many unanswered questions. One of those was the degree of openness of the world design. Dragon Age: Inquisition added semi-open world maps, but in an interview with IGN, Game Director Corinne Busche hinted that this new game will be less open and more mission-focused by comparison.
Yeah, so it is a mission-based game. Everything is hand-touched, hand-crafted, very highly curated. We believe that’s how we get the best narrative experience, the best moment-to-moment experience. However, along the way, these levels that we go to do open up, some of them have more exploration than others. Alternate branching paths, mysteries, secrets, optional content you’re going to find and solve. So it does open up, but it is a mission-based, highly curated game.
Some of them are highly curated, especially when it involves the motivations and the experiences of the companions. You’re really along on this journey with them. Others, you’re investigating a missing family… and the entirety of this bog is open up to you. You’re searching for clues, finding a way to solve their disappearance. So really it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. But I do want to emphasize that hand-crafted and curated is our approach.
This is probably BioWare getting back to its historic strengths after some criticism for the open world design of Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda. That said, speaking to Wccftech, BioWare also confirmed there will be a ‘tremendous’ amount of side content in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Hopefully, that means we’ll still have a meaty game on our hands this Fall, even without an open world to explore.
On another note, Busche also talked about the romantic relationships that players will be able to develop in the game. Interestingly, companions could get together on their own if you don’t romance them yourselves. There will also be some nudity for certain sex scenes, depending on how ‘spicy’ the companion is.
Their past experiences or partners, they’ll reference them and indeed who they’ll become romantic with. For instance, we saw Harding. I might be playing a straight male character flirting with her, but I choose not to pursue a romance. She might get together with Taash. So my perception, my identity has no bearing on their identities and that comes through really strongly.
It’s not until the later parts of the game where you really commit to romance and it gets pretty spicy. Some of them are more spicy than others. Just like real life, our companions have such diverse personalities. Some of them are more physical, more aggressive, and some of them are more… we have a gentleman necromancer, for instance, that is more intimate and sensual. Of course, we are an M-rated game. We do have nudity.
BioWare stressed that the writers have strived to make friendships just as compelling as romances for those players who’d rather stick to that type of relationship.
Last but not least, the studio shared how it’s going to integrate choices made in previous games. Whereas Dragon Age: Inquisition had its own Dragon Age Keep app that could be used to import saves from earlier installments, there won’t be any of that here due to the incompatibility between the different clients.
Instead, Dragon Age: The Veilguard has everything baked into the character creator, where players will have the opportunity to fully recreate their own Inquisitor from the previous title. Here, they’ll also get to select what happened in their version of the previous stories, and it’ll obviously influence the plot in some way.
The developers are targeting a Fall 2024 launch on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X. It’ll likely be around the 10-year anniversary of Inquisition, which occurs between 18 and 20 November.
