Dragon Age: The Veilguard Roundtable Q&A

As promised yesterday, following our Dragon Age: The Veilguard hands-on preview and exclusive Q&A, here’s the full transcript of the longer roundtable Q&A that featured BioWare’s Game Directors Corinne Busche and John Epler answering all sorts of questions from the assembled press on the highly anticipated single player action RPG.

As a reminder, Dragon Age: The Veilguard will continue the story of Inquisition a decade later (albeit with a different protagonist, although the Inquisitor will still be featured in the new game). Dragon Age Inquisition launched on November 20, 2014, whereas Veilguard will be released on October 31 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X.

This game allows you to respec on a very organic level. You can do that anytime. That’s something, I’d say, new to Dragon Age. How did that come to be that you could respec and not commit to a class?

Corinne Busche: Yeah, that’s a really lovely question. Thank you. Fundamentally, it comes down to player agency. We, of course, are a single-player offline RPG. We value your choice and autonomy, and we want to respect that. I have a hell of a great time playing around with the skill trees and trying different builds. We want you to do the same. If you want to respec, more power to you.

I’m just curious: when did you guys decide that Rook would be essentially the only playable character and that you should focus more on that instead of what previously was mostly party-based combat?

Corinne Busche: I think I can start this one and then maybe John if you want to jump in. Dragon Age has such an amazing, rich lore and history behind it. The worldbuilding, I really think it’s what’s kept this franchise alive and people discussing it 10 years after Inquisition. So our North Star was that we wanted you to embody Rook, to step into Rook’s shoes, to experience this world on the ground as this character. And what that meant is giving you more autonomy, more control of the character, putting you in control of every single swing, and really making it feel like you’re a part of this world.

What’s more, we’ve talked a lot about the companions. I know a lot of the questions that came up today about Dragon Age: The Veilguard were about the depth and authenticity of the companions. We really felt like there was a big opportunity here to make the companions feel more realized, more like their characters who fight alongside you and have their own styles, motivations, and interactions if you’re not actually embodying them.

But of course, throughout all of that, we do know in the combat system, that sense of teamwork, of pause and play, tactical depth. That has been the throughline through every single edition of Dragon Age. So we wanted to walk the fine line of making that teamwork and that sense of strategy show up but also make you feel like you’re in this world.

John Epler: Yeah, and Corinne touched on autonomy as far as Rook goes, but also part of making the companions feel like their own people, like their own characters, is giving them that autonomy as well on the battlefield. Again, you are the leader of this group, they have their own personalities, their own stories, and we wanted to make sure that you felt that through the gameplay as well.

Most RPGs right now are open world. Dragon Age Inquisition was open world, and I’m glad Dragon Age: The Veilguard is not. Was it hard to adapt, and does it change a lot the way that Rook is going to progress through the story?

Corinne Busche: I’ll tell you what: it’s hard to buck trends sometimes, but we really felt we could tell the best stories and create the most curated moment-to-moment experience by going back to a mission-based structure. But maybe I’ll turn it over to Francois, our Mission Director, and John to talk about our philosophy on that.

Francois Chaput: It’s a great question, and thank you for asking. One of the key things for us was understanding the opportunities. They were different opportunities than in the past. What can we do with this new focus that we found? We had to make sure that we stood on some solid pillars.

One of those was, “Alright, we have an opportunity to stay focused and make sure everything’s contributing to a greater conflict, a greater narrative, and a greater sense of space.” That was the first one. And then, to keep us in check and avoid going totally linear, we wanted to make sure the second pillar supported that in being one of player freedom and agency.

So, understanding how we can focus things and bring things in while allowing players to still have a choice, to still make their impact and still decide where to go, and still have things to uncover and discover. Those were our two key pillars. We had to establish that early on. Once we understood that, this was our new structure for Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

John Epler: I’m just going to add one more thing. One of the things about the spaces in Veilguard that I think is fantastic is that each space has a story of its own. These are not just spaces that exist for their own sake; they tell a story that, in a lot of ways, ties back to the overarching conflict, the overarching story.

Something we heard loud and clear in Inquisition was some of the spaces didn’t necessarily feel like they had a purpose. We wanted to make sure every space felt purposeful and meaningful in the experience of Rook and companions against these elven gods, against the end of the world.

I think we all had a bit of an idea that the character customization would be really in-depth when we came into it, but even still coming into it, it was even more detailed to the point where I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cataract slider in a game ever. When you’re going that granular with that kind of decision, how do you decide how far to go and where to stop?

Oh, it’s a great question. Thank you. We wanted to hit a balance where players could make the characters that they wanted to make but also not be broken. So I think the tactic we took with that was really opening up the possibilities of how far you could take the sliders and the different options that you could take.

And then, through testing, playing, and evaluating it, we figured out how far we could tune it back so that the characters still looked like we wanted them to in the cinematics while still respecting the choices the player wants to make.

John Epler: Also, the character creator is an amazing player-facing thing, and it’s so much fun. My kids, to them, that’s what the game is. It’s the character creator. At the same time, it’s also what we use to build most of the NPCs that you interact with in the world. It is super cool to offer this much variety, but it’s also from us where we just want to be able to tell the stories we want to tell. We needed to be able to push it that much further.

We were talking to somebody before about EA and how it’s been really handy, actually, for hair in particular. I noticed some people really pushing the hair, which is great. But it’s been cool with EA because we’re sharing the engine with a number of other different groups that are pushing here. We’ve been able to borrow from them and learn and get amazing stuff and then share back in return. So it’s been really beneficial.

Corinne Busche: One of the things I might also add is of our three core design pillars, be who you want to be was the first, that was the starting point. We wanted everyone to feel like they belonged in this game to the best of our ability, we wanted that you could relate to the characters, so that meant sclera color. It meant cataracts. It meant vitiligo. Freckles. Respectful skin tones that react to light properly. I’m tremendously proud of the team and everything they put together to make sure that all of the players can feel seen, too.

Was there ever any hesitation when it came to character creation? I read the news from Larian talking about how 80 percent of Baldur’s Gate 3 players are selecting the half-elf, and only a tiny minuscule amount are picking whatever. Is there any sort of talk about that in the development studio, like, ‘Do we really need to make this race of character playable when only a certain amount is going to be playing it?’

Corinne Busche: Challenge accepted is what we say. Here’s a little fun fact for you. In Dragon Age Inquisition, only 5 percent of players ever played a dwarf. What we see in our player testing these days, we’re up to 12 percent, so we’ll take it. What that tells me is the more options you give players to embody the character they want to be, the more engaged they will be. We know our players love that. They’re hungry for it.

This is actually a question for Matt (Rhodes, Art Director). I loved the tarot card art in Dragon Age Inquisition and wondered why you decided against using it for this game.

Matt Rhodes: It was such a core piece of of Inquisition. It was something that was actually born out of a Dragon Age week, where we give people a chance to work on something cool that they want for a week. And two artists just went absolutely nuts. I think they maybe only made three images each, but the art director at the time loved them and was just like, that’s what we’re doing now; let’s do more of that.

One of the best jobs as a concept artist that I did on Inquisition was taking on their tasks so that they could work on those because, yeah, it became a thing. One of the things we’ve tried to do is keep the visual language of these cards and expand on it, so what was once the 2D frescoes from Origins and 2 has always been there, but like inject that style into the 2D cinematics. Even going so far as our UI artists, who extrapolated and took those shapes and started feeding them through the UI, so you’ll see it all across the UI, the exploration icons and in-world diegetic things of the patterns and motifs that you notice on the glint system if you have that activated. We literally tried to take that and basically just blast it everywhere we possibly could get away with it.

This is part of Dragon Age now, and it’s never not going to be part of Dragon Age. There’s no way we could just stop doing this. One of the things that characterizes is that it was a cool passion project at one point, and then it expanded and we just went bonkers with it. But as with every game, people also want to try new stuff. These were actually all done by the same artist who was one of the original card creators. These were some of the beautiful last things he did for our project and they’re gorgeous.

But it’s cool because it’s also this natural growth where, as an illustrator and a painter, you want to push it into new territory and continue that process. If you notice in the skill tree, there’s just little illustrations that were also painted by the same artist (Ramil Sanga). Probably in the next game it’s going to be in even more places.

One of the things I’ve noticed playing through Dragon Age: The Veilguard generally, but especially as you gain more skills, is there’s a lot on screen. There’s a lot of flashy things, and I was wondering, I know Final Fantasy XIV has the idea that you can have many crazy things on screen or just remove them entirely. Is that something you would consider just because there is so much happening on screen all at once, or is that the whole point?

Corinne Busche: Absolutely. Great question. You can. Under the UI customization menus, you can disable damage floaties, whether you show incoming attack indicators or health bars. Hell, if you want to do a UI-less run, more power to you, but you can do that too. Customizing this experience for what suits you, whether we’re talking about difficulty, builds, pause and play versus staying in the moment, and UI, it’s been a central premise to us.

In Dragon Age Origins, I was an elf and couldn’t marry Alistair, so I had to start over as a human. I know part of the story is to try to get all these challenges to the players, to develop more of the story and to get this final controversy and all these things. What are we gonna get through all these storylines in Dragon Age: The Veilguard?

John Epler: So, there are kind of two parts to answering this question. One of which is, again, we’ve spoken before about reactivity, how who your character is, what your lineage is, what your faction is, and even what your class is impacts the world.

Again, using class as an example, mages obviously have a different understanding of the world than a rogue or a warrior. But we wanted to make sure that, again, the world reacts to you, and this cast of characters particularly—they’re all people who have chosen to join your cause, join your party.

Talking specifically about romance, one of the things we wanted to allow is player choice as much as possible, so being able to develop a romance with any character no matter who your Rook is, but those romances may play out a little bit differently based on every activity, based on how you’ve built your Rook, how you’ve customized them.

Corinne Busche: Handling romances and romantic options is quite the challenge, and to be honest with y’all, I’m not sure there’s a right answer on how to approach it. What we felt was best for this game was to make sure you could romance the companions, but I want to be clear that it’s not player sexual. These are fully fleshed-out characters that have their own romantic histories, preferences, and backgrounds.

That doesn’t change based on who you, the player character, are. They don’t adapt their personalities to conform to the player. That’s fundamentally the difference. There’s merits to it and challenges. We’re also mindful of having characters in the world of all orientations so we get that thoughtful representation again where people can see themselves.

We talked about how deep and time-consuming the character creator is. Have you considered putting that up pre launch as a standalone, just so people can really hone their Rook in the time before the game releases?

Corinne Busche: It’s a much-requested feature. We’re TBD on that, but it would be pretty cool.

WCCFTECH: I had a two-part question about leveling. Dragon Age has traditionally had a level cap somewhere around 27 to 35. With the level cap being 50 in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, what kind of challenges did you have with balancing so many more skills under the player’s belt?

Corinne Busche: Oh my goodness, our poor systems design director, Luke Barrett. My goodness, send him all your love because it was quite the tuning and balancing challenge. Coming up as a systems designer myself, the sophistication in the model, the challenge around game balance… I’m in awe. It took a concerted effort and some really insightful forethought in how we were going to handle the underlying damage calculations and contributions from gear versus skill trees.

And also, those tuning plateaus of how enemies scale alongside you. Those moments where you feel like you’re you’re maybe overpowering them, and then they leap ahead of you to keep you constantly engaged and pushing forward. It was hard.

Especially with all the combinatorial effects, I would say one of the biggest challenges we have is we want players to find emergent builds. We want them to feel like they can outsmart us. Maybe not obliterate the game. So when we find those, we try and reign them in. But my goodness, nothing would make me happier than somebody outsmarting our best tuners.

John Epler: There’s a phrase we like to use called error in the player’s favor, which is again, as Corinne said, people finding these opportunities for gear and skills to synergize in ways that we didn’t expect but are always awesome as players to find.

Corinne Busche: I’ll tell you, one of the builds we found early on, did anybody play with the warrior shield toss builds or anything adjacent to that? We had a build that was probably the most broken thing I’ve seen. It would just obliterate entire boss encounters with a single throw and we had to tune that one down.

WCCFTECH: As my quick follow-up, do you have any gear that scales up with your level in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, like the Fadeshear in prior games?

Corinne Busche: We have something adjacent to that. You may or may not have come across gear in your time today that will scale properties based on the strength of the respective faction that the gear comes from. Also, I’m sure some of you experienced upgrading the rarity of your items. That’s the primary method by which we scale the gear.

I really appreciate the forecasting of the abilities. It really gets you curious about how the gear might synergize with your build later on. But that is the primary scaling mechanism. Faction strength, when you come across it, can be quite potent.

When I reached the final portion that we could play today, I was told it was like the finale of the first act of the game. It was already a pretty great scale. It felt like the complete finale of some other games. How many more acts are there in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and were there ever talks about maybe going too big?

John Epler: One of the fun things about working on Dragon Age is that the stakes continue to escalate from game to game. We wanted to make sure that each act felt like it had its own arc that fed into the larger arc of the critical path of the game. For me, every mission should feel meaningful and important in the story’s context, no matter where it takes place.

And then, as you finish the arc, as you finish the act, that’s obviously the thing that drives you to the next one. It’s what we describe as context shifts. With the end of each act, the context shifts, the world changes, and things, how you approach it, but also how Rook approaches their fight against the gods, is going to change accordingly.

We’ve broken it down into essentially a three-act structure. Each act is different, though; not every act is the exact same as the other one, and a lot of the content that’s not on the critical path you can do at any time. Even with the companion quests and arcs, we wanted to make sure that they felt meaningful. You are standing against the end of the world. Everything you do should feel meaningful in that context.

Corinne Busche: One of the things I’d add is that the conclusion of this game needs to matter. It needs to be the natural conclusion of your efforts in building up the Veilguard and taking on these gods. Weisshaupt really serves as your first true demonstration of what you’re up against. While it is a large first act, and it is a very climactic mission to cap it off, from my perspective, that is where you get that sense of the overwhelming power, the stakes of what’s at play here.

John Epler: In Dragon Age Inquisition, Corypheus was somebody who wanted to become a god. Now, for the first time, you’re facing actual gods. As Corinne said, that raises the stakes tremendously. And we also want to make sure you’re aware of what those stakes are.

I was wondering if, given its appearance in Origin and Dragon Age 2, the Blood Mage (which is not in Veilguard) as a specialization ever has a chance of coming back, despite its lore implications?

Corinne Busche: To be honest, we looked long and hard at that. Origins versus Dragon Age 2 and the representation of Blood Mage were very different takes. What I hope you’ve taken away from playing today is that we want everything, including your classes, how you show up in the world, to feel narratively salient to this adventure. Blood Magic is a difficult one in the world of Dragon Age. It comes at a tremendous cost to how you’re regarded. To be honest, when we were having our truest conversations about Blood Magic, to do it proper justice, I almost feel as though it would have to be a class unto itself to fit within the scope and direction of this game. It didn’t feel like the right time, especially given some of the other Blood Magic threats you’re going to come across.

John Epler: Building off what Corinne said, Blood Magic is a weighty thing to decide to do, and if we do it, we want to make sure we do it with the narrative weight and also the respect that it deserves. Because, again, Blood Magic is something that even some of the villainous characters in the games have balked at. We want to make sure that if you go down that path, it feels meaningful. It doesn’t just feel like a reskin of other mage abilities. It needs to feel like an actual massive character choice you are making.

One of the things that I noticed is that when you do the character creation, you choose the history of the Inquisitor. One of the things that I loved about Dragon Age Inquisition was Dragon Age Keep, which was a huge tool. Was there ever a possibility that we could customize the history of what happened for us for more than just the Inquisitor?

John Epler: This project has been in development for a while, so one of the things we did investigate is how deep we wanted that to go. For us, though, the core philosophy was that we want you to make choices that matter, choices that we can actually reflect. Part of going to Northern Thedas is a lot of stuff that matters tremendously if you’re in Ferelden or Orlais doesn’t matter as much in Tevinter.

A great example is the Divine, who is hugely important if you’re Andrastian in the South of Thedas, but they have their own Divine up in Minrathous. We really wanted to focus again on those decisions that we knew would matter and that we knew we could do something interesting with.

Corinne Busche: It’s been a long time since Inquisition. Even if you’re a diehard fan, unless you’re gonna watch a YouTube replay of the whole game, you might have a little cobwebs on the choices you made or their implications. Not only did we want this to be an in-game feature that would allow you to replicate those choices that John mentioned are contextually appropriate to Dragon Age: The Veilguard, but we also view it as a dual-purpose onboarding tool.

If you are a player that just doesn’t remember or hasn’t played the past games, you’re gonna go in and see those choices, those beautiful tarot cards that Matt and his team put together, with all the context around what these choices meant and why they mattered. I view it as a beautiful onboarding tool as well.

Thank you for your time.