Dragon Age: The Veilguard gives players multiple opportunities to not only make decisions, but to explain to other characters why they’d made those choices. These range from life-and-death choices like which city you’ll save from a dragon attack, to smaller moments of introspection where you color in the lines of decisions you’d made in the character creator. However, one decision you make doesn’t have any kind of in-game debrief, and that’s the climactic choice about how to handle Solas, the Inquisition party member turned Veilguard antagonist. But at one point in development, the game would have included a moment that had you reflecting on this momentous choice as well.
I recently sat down with Trick Weekes, one of the writers on BioWare’s Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, and as we spoke about the “logistical nightmare” of representing a protagonist’s various backgrounds in a game like The Veilguard, they told me about a final decision the player would have originally made in the game that was cut.
In the final game, the player binds Solas, the elven trickster god, to the Veil, a barrier between the real world and the spirit world. This can be done in one of three ways: brute force, outsmarting him, or trying to redeem him through knowledge you gain via an optional quest line. Regardless of what you do, the day is saved and Solas is bound to the Veil, but your character, Rook, can part ways with him as allies or enemies depending on the choice you make. Then the game has a celebratory montage and the credits roll.
In one of the earlier drafts of this scene, Morrigan, a returning character from the original Dragon Age: Origins, and the Inquisitor, the protagonist from Dragon Age: Inquisition, would have asked you why you did what you did, and BioWare wanted to account for all the nuances of each decision and whether or not the Inquisitor may have left for the Fade as Solas’ lover at the end of The Veilguard if the player made the right choices to reunite the two.
“One of the things that I was most bummed about losing, honestly, was in an early version of Veilguard, after you took down the elven gods, you had a final conversation with the Inquisitor,” Weekes tells Kotaku. “In that final conversation with the Inquisitor, we had the chance to do what I love doing for players, which is to have the Inquisitor and Morrigan together say, ‘Why did you pick the ending you picked?’ but in a non-fourth-wall-breaking way. It was either Morrigan alone saying ‘I can’t believe that the Inquisitor left, why did you decide he was worth it?’ or it was the Inquisitor and Morrigan saying, ‘So I guess you chose to fight him,’ ‘I guess you chose to outsmart him,’ or ‘you redeemed him, but I wasn’t romancing him and didn’t go in [the Fade] with him.’”
Weekes says designing choice-based RPGs is a balancing act between giving players a lot of room to express themselves on one hand while also having them role-play a character who isn’t a pure self-insert on the other, but they say moments like this and one much earlier in the game when Rook has to ascribe meaning to props in their bedroom based on their class, race, and background, are chances for the player to actually speak their motivation into the game rather than having to simply internalize it.
“I think that there is a small percentage of our players who, maybe the people who are on their fourth or fifth playthrough, who will do the ‘this time I’m playing evil, this time I’m playing a character with this specific mindset,’ but the vast majority just want to see themselves as the hero,” Weekes says. “‘What is it like to have me in here?’ And the conversation would be, ‘Why did you make this kind of choice?’ Those are some of my favorite ones to write because it’s giving the player a little bit more chance to color things in and say ‘here’s why my Rook did this.’ ‘My Rook didn’t think that Solas was just misunderstood and tragic and needed a hug. My Rook hates Solas but did this for the Inquisitor because the Inquisitor deserved better.’”
While the Solas debrief was lost in development, Weekes says the aforementioned scene in Rook’s room, spearheaded by Veilguard director Corrine Busche, was one chance for BioWare to have the player interrogate the decisions they’d made in the character creator, and it was important to the team that it not be an optional, missable interaction.
“That conversation in Rook’s room was a chance to say, ‘Hey, here are the choices you made and [we] just reminded you because you’ve kind of gotten through the prologue. It’s been a little while, you know, let’s talk about what you feel about yourself. Let’s talk about what it feels like being a dwarf, what it feels like being non-binary, what it feels like being a Grey Warden and let’s let you bounce off that a little bit now that you’ve broken the new boots in the game world and how you feel about them. Players love getting to react to things and say, ‘here’s what my character feels about this,’ and so any extra time you can give them that is really time well spent on it.”
Weekes says that a “valuable push and pull” BioWare faced with both Dragon Age and Mass Effect involved acknowledging that there were folks who were less invested in dialogue and roleplaying and would skip through it, but the team wanted to ensure that scene in Rook’s room wasn’t optional because it was a chance to make players reflect on who their character was just before some of the more weighty choices.
“Figuring out that balance is vital because there are players in both camps, and most players honestly are somewhere in the middle. So we did make it non-optional, and it was important to us to kind of remind you who your Rook was because that scene comes kind of before you then get one of the first big choices of the game, the choice between which city you’re gonna save, and we kind of just wanted to ground you a little bit and remind you who you were.”
Weekes left BioWare in 2025, and those still at the studio are working on the fifth Mass Effect game.
