Dragon Age: The Veilguard – A Decade in the Making

It is no secret that Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a game from BioWare that is ten years in the making. With Inquisition launching in November of 2014, we are just creeping up on its anniversary, and what better way to celebrate than a brand-new title in the Dragon Age universe? With some rocky games in BioWare’s past, a lot is riding on Veilguard , and luckily, from our hands-on time with the title earlier this month, thanks to EA and BioWare, it looks like Dragon Age: The Veilguard will be exactly what BioWare needs to get back in the game.

CGM sat down with Dragon Age: The Veilguard ‘s Art Director, Matt Rhodes, and Level Design Director, Francois Chaput, to learn more about what goes into making a game over the course of ten years. Nearly a decade of work has gone into the title, and judging by our conversation, the team at BioWare have taken the task to heart. As Dragon Age fans themselves, BioWare have put everything they have into continuing the Dragon Age story, complete with expanded lore, fantastic character design, stunning landscapes and the same witty, sarcastic dialogue the series is known for.

We are back to Dragon Age ten years later. Are you new to working on this title? Have you been a Dragon Age fan, or are you a new fan?

Matt Rhodes: Right, well, I’ve been at BioWare since 2004. And so, I’ve had the opportunity to work on every single one of the games in the series.

Francois Chaput: For myself, it’s a mix of both. I was a fan of the first two, Dragon Age Origins and then 2 , and then I joined the team in 2012 and worked on Inquisition , and have been working on the Veilguard ever since Inquisition .

That being said, people have been waiting ten years for Dragon Age: The Veilguard . How does that pressure feel?

Matt Rhodes: Actually, it’s kind of wonderful. Just because I’m really proud of this game, I think that the team has done an amazing job and I’m really just pumped to get it into people’s hands. No piece of art is done until it’s in front of the people who you want to see it. So yeah, really, I’m just looking forward to it being out there.

Francois Chaput: Yeah, and likewise. A bit of an anecdote here is all this build-up, all this pressure and the amount of personal things that are in here that were from me, it kind of feels like all of you all are seeing me in my underwear today. It makes me feel a bit vulnerable, but I’m excited for what we’re showing.

What goes into developing a game like Dragon Age: The Veilguard ten years later? You’re filling in a lot of holes where there is all new technology with the current-gen systems. Are we picking up where we left off? Are we redesigning some of these characters?

Matt Rhodes: When looking at this game, it’s kind of cool because it’s a continuation of a story we were both really involved in working on. We both worked on Inquisition. I was a concept artist on Inquisition. So, this is an ongoing narrative that we’re both quite familiar with. We’re excited to continue that story, too. On the flip side, or I guess in addition to, because we’re going off the map, we’re going places like we haven’t ever been before.

They’ve only been hinted at, it’s only whispers in lore, little hints, pieces of costume, whatever else like that. It’s a really exciting opportunity to just like branch out, try all sorts of really fun stuff. We want it to be familiar to people who are familiar with what was established before and recognizable, but then just go big and really expand on it.

Francois Chaput: I think likewise, too, it’s the amount of time that’s afforded us a lot of opportunities to work with a lot of different people from diverse backgrounds, from diverse experiences. And the other thing, too, that I think is good to talk about is all of BioWare has contributed to this. It’s not just one team working on one game and the other team working on the other game. So, it’s given us an opportunity to just pull together all of the lessons we’ve learned, all of the good stuff and try and make that show up in this game. It’s afforded us an opportunity, I think, but it’s a lot of pressure.

You mentioned diversity.  We’re looking around the room here at pictures of all of the companions in Dragon Age: The Veilguard and all of the characters we meet. They seem a lot more diverse this time around. Was that deliberate or did it just happen naturally?

Matt Rhodes: I think the companions are really this load-bearing part of every game, but even more so this time around. You know, they have their own story, then they have the face of a faction, then they’re the face of a region. They’re kind of your gateway into things. The process of developing them is so involved. It’s like they have narrative purposes, they serve gameplay purposes, they serve even marketing purposes, like appeal.

And so, it really is just this massively collaborative effort. Artists are involved, writers, animators, gameplay, and until lyou have this final design that’s sort of a byproduct of… The goal is, ideally, even just speaking from art, you want them to look, I say, immutable. You couldn’t add any more, you couldn’t take away any more. They’re exactly what they need to be to support everything that they support.

Dragon Age has been played a lot of different ways. It has been multiplayer, it’s been single-player, it’s been where you control your whole team and leave your team alone. What can you say about how Dragon Age: The Veilguard is going to play, and why was that the right call for this game?

Matt Rhodes: I think, from what I’ve observed as an artist, it’s kind of a fly-on-the-wall perspective, but it’s like every project has been a thing of like, “Okay what do we want to try to do? What does technology allow us to do?” And finding that balance and getting exciting ideas about how we’d like to move forward into the next step. Even yesterday, I was talking about the idea of no one plays a game of D&D with four characters by themselves, typically, on pen and paper. I mean, maybe some people do. I’m sure someone does it.

But typically, you’d play with your friends. And sometimes, as technology has improved, you get kind of closer to the point where it can actually feel like it’s you playing with your friends. You don’t have to step into those other roles. I know some people really like that gameplay style, but it’s cool. It’s that opportunity that, like, as the technology catches up, it really, you get that feeling that like Davrin and whoever you’re taking with or whatever companion you’re taking with you is actually there with you coming along.

Francois Chaput: I mean, I’d like to try and answer that as well from a world perspective but actually maybe more from a mission’s perspective because one of the things that we do want to do is a huge variety as much as we can in our mission types, the mission experiences but also in the quest types and the things you’ll discover.

Specifically, in who comes with you, and this is an opportunity that it afforded us and it allows us to do. You’re going to see Weisshaupt later, all of the companions are going to join you in that. It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation. We’ve got more of those than just Weisshaupt to come later as well. But on the flip side, and what I’m most excited to talk about is, it also allows us to do one-on-one instances. You’re going to go alone with Lucanus to Treviso. He’s going to show you his neighbourhood.

One of the questions we asked ourselves earlier was looking back at Mass Effect. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the scene where you’re in the Citadel with Garrus and you’re shooting bottles, tossing bottles, and you have a choice to miss or hit it and kind of tease Garrus and go from there.

But our question internally was, what if you’re shooting bottles with Garrus but you do the shooting this time? That influenced a whole a whole kind of category of mission type for us that are one-on-one and that that’s one of the opportunities that is really afforded because Davrin is own person, Neve is her own person, Bellara is her own person and we could really dive into that and focus on that.

What can you speak to in terms of staying true to past Dragon Age entries, whether that’s in the style, in the world, how are we nodding to the past?

Matt Rhodes: Oh man, it’s run through everything. Our team is really passionate about visual storytelling. If we just started making stuff up entirely from this, I don’t think anyone would be satisfied with that. That just wouldn’t be good. One of the things we look forward to is that recognition is seeing that, “Oh, this has continued, but it’s been enhanced or changed,” or what have you. And again, we want the story to be visible.

So, I’ll use Tevinter as an example, like Minrathous, where we’ve seen Tevinter architecture in DA2, we’ve seen it in Origins and Inquisition , we’ve seen hints at what Tevinter fashion is in Dorian in the Venatori, and so in taking those things and reverse engineering them and creating systems of rules and guidelines for what that culture might be, All of a sudden someone who’s very familiar with how Dorian dresses can walk down Minrathous and be like, “I can see that he comes from here, but he’s still himself. He modifies his stuff because it’s Dorian, but this is what just the average person going to buy a loaf of bread looks like.”

I think that’s one of the biggest things I’m excited for, I want to hear the reaction of people who are very experienced with Dragon Age , because, it’s like I said, it’s going to all new places, but I wanted to feel like, “Oh, I get it. I see the connection. I see how it works.”

Francois Chaput: From when we’re building the world and putting together these locations and these levels and how they’re going to string together, very early, we established what our key pillars were going to be. The first one being we wanted to focus on the quality. We wanted to make sure everything was meaningful and contributing to the same narrative, but the second pillar is one that runs through the entire franchise, past and future, which is player agency: freedom.

I heard future, did you hear that?

Francois Chaput: I didn’t commit to anything (laughs), but what I do want to say is that I don’t think we could ever pull this pillar outright. It’s basically a stake that goes through it, and that is player freedom, player agency. It’s always been there, and I don’t think we could get rid of it even if we wanted to, but we don’t want to. And the reason why we don’t want to is the other part to answering your question for me: We’re all fans of Dragon Age as well.

We have honest-to-goodness moments where we sit down, we put on our fan hats, and we just brainstorm “What do I want to know?” What are my questions as a fan? What are some of the questions I’ve heard the community asking? You know the, amount of times that I’ve taken notes from watching YouTube videos from fans and just like, “Well that’s a good question, we should try and answer it!” And the amount of times that John will tell me, “No we can’t answer that; it’s got to be a secret.” Break my heart!

You talk about player freedom. Dragon Age: The Veilguard feels a little bit more linear than past ones. How does that change the way you develop the world or style the game when more condensed and not so open world?

Francois Chaput: As the demo goes on, hopefully, you’ll see that there’s a bigger variety. It’s not as linear as it starts, but yes, it absolutely does go linear at times. And you’re going to see that in the demo. We want to show you a spectrum of what we have. There’s a lot of exploration, places you can return to. They’re not open world, we use hub and spoke, but a lot of discoverable narratives, discoverable secrets, optional, missable content that if you don’t want to look you don’t have to. And you know what? You’re still going to have a great time, we think. But it would again go back to that agency-free pillar.

How is Dragon Age: The Veilguard forging its own path, though, rather than just becoming an amalgamation of the other games?

Francois Chaput: That’s a good question. I think for me I want to go back to the fact that we’ve been able to play this game start to finish for about a year and a half. You know, my first playthrough I think was probably finished in June last year or something like that.

Matt Rhodes: Which, I have to add context, that’s unheard of at BioWare. Typically, it’s not playable until…every game I’ve worked on since 2004, it’s not playable fully through to completion until maybe the Christmas before it ships. It’s very, very close.

Francois Chaput: But yeah, it offered us a lot of opportunities to kind of get to know our game, right? And understand where the opportunities were and kind of hone in on those. Like what makes this game a good Dragon Age entry? What makes it a unique Dragon Age entry? What is holding it back from being a Dragon Age entry? And you know, we can dive into those. For me it is playing the game a lot that has helped us do it.

Matt Rhodes: Going to going to new areas and using this hub and spoke model to make more curated, but therefore, more story rich and character focused moments throughout has allowed us to also create a much wider variety because if you take Inquisition, rather than like a few really cool big areas you can take even more smaller but more varied areas.

And so it just has been an opportunity to then explore more settings, more interesting circumstances and just kind of get that. Because, you know, we’re geeking out about being able to go to these places that we haven’t seen yet and building up this stuff. So, we wanted to be able to do that as much as possible.

You both said, “hub and spoke model”, can you explain that a little more to our readers? What does that mean?

Francois Chaput: So, what it means is a series of interconnected spaces that are focusing on where the player can go. Instead of being an open canvas where you can choose to walk over any hill or any field, there’ll be a few more bottlenecks, a few more paths that open up with shortcuts and stuff like that. Hidden areas that you can smash some crates to find “Holy crap, there’s a whole area behind here!” and then it just opens up. But it’s basically everything is interconnected.

You could walk to just about every location or to an Eluvian that takes you to every location. We do have fast travel, but if you choose to, you can absolutely walk to all these, so that’s the key thing: everything’s connected, and a vast majority of it is places you can return to at your leisure. It’s a focus on just making sure that all the landmarks are things that contribute to the lore. They’re all contributing to the problems people are facing.

Now, you said that Dragon Age: The Veilguard has been playable for over a year already. Why is that so different with Veilguard ? You said that’s unheard of. Why is that happening?

Matt Rhodes: Part of it was just how intentional and focused we were on thinking about what we want this game to be. And more of a priority on, “Let’s get this up on its feet so we can start hammering at it.” A year and a half ago, it wasn’t as fun as it is now. (laughs) But it worked, and you could go through it, you could see it.

Even being able to play the story beginning to end, part of the reason we could do that is for this game, for the first time ever, the artists would sit with the writers and would draw out what their idea for the story was, put it in the lunchroom on a big board so it could be reviewed, it could be discussed, people could raise concerns, offer suggestions, and then we could throw that version out, make a new one, and do that again and again and again, to the point where not only did we refine the story more, rather than just like you just start building and then whatever you end up with at the finish line is what you made.

It was like, no, no, we’re on version 10 of this story. We’ve honed in on what we want to say. And everyone on the team knows what it is. It’s not waiting until you’ve played that last Christmas build to be like, “Oh, this is how it all fits together!” It’s like no, no, no, we all know. So, if you’re working on your little corner, you know how it fits into the big picture and what it’s contributing to the overall story.

It lends itself to this feeling, to me, of this cohesive, strong, everybody’s playing along, everyone’s improvising and that leads to the really great stuff. When you know someone who’s very skilled at what they do, if they know what we’re all playing together, they can be like, “ Well, what if I try this?” and everyone goes, “Yes! None of us would have thought of that, but you did, and I’m so glad it’s in there now,” so it’s been really neat.

I have two more fast ones. You have to choose! What is your favourite companion, and your favourite are?

Francois Chaput: Neve. And my favourite area is actually one that you’re going to see today is where you’re going to meet Lucanus. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but where you meet Lucanus is one of my favourite areas.

Matt Rhodes: And I will say, Davrin has ended up being just my most consistent. He just comes with me more often than not. And I think for areas, I don’t think we’re even going to show this one in what we’re playing, but there is this beautiful coastal region that’s just, I love it when a mission forces me there to have to go pick something that’s like “Ah shucks, I might have to spend like an extra half hour or 45 minutes just kind of enjoying this,” because again it’s like the team has done such an amazing job and it’s just beautiful in its own right so it’s like it’s great.

Because we were talking about, this has kind of a risen from our conversations that like we wanted part of this, we want it to be a world worth saving. It’s a place that’s you don’t want evil to take over, because there’s actually some genuinely good stuff here.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard releases on October 31, 2024 , for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and PC.