What Does Getting Rid Of World States Tell Us About Dragon Age: The Veilguard?

By 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Rhiannon Bevan

Published Oct 2, 2024

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168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon Age: The Veilguard is not the fourth 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon Age game I wanted, and that’s fine. As much as this series means to me, it does not belong to me or any other fan. No game should be made by the committee, and if 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:getting rid ofಌ importable World States is the vision BioWare has for The Veilguard, I respect that.

On a personal level though, this sucks. Like many of you, I have waited a decade for the next chapter of this story, perfecting my canon Worl♒d State, making my peace with some of the tougher decisions put in front of us, and desperately waiting for some closure on the various plot points that have never been fully explored.

Are the Wardens from the first game hearing the Calling? How is Kieran getting on now that he’s all grown up? Are Ferelden and Orlais facing a succession crisis if we left them with monarchs who haven’t - or can’t have - children? I thought that these were issues that The Veilguard would grapple with, and many others did too. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The reveal that Morrigan is returning only seemed to 🍸confirm that, since she bridges the gap between the lower 🐲stakes of Dragon Age: Origins and the elven god-plot of The Veilguard.

Davrin from Dragon Age: The Veilguard speaking into a podcast microphone.

I🐬 Hope Dragon Age: The Veilguard Is 👍Nothing Like Its Companion Podcast

Because… woof. It’s not looking good.

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Now, it’s abundantly clear that this won’t be happening. Tucked away in an interview 👍with , The Veilguard director John Epler has finally explained how the game will import World States: it won’t. Instead, we’re just asked three questions about our Dragon Age: Inquisition playthroughs when we create our character.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard Is Stepping Into New Territory

This is a first for a Dragon Age sequel. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon Age 2 imported a ton of choices from our Origins save files, throwing in occasional nods to what the player decided in the last game. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Inquisition used the Dragon Age Keep, asking you to input every single decision you ever ma🎉de, no matter how small, and showing the consequences of many of them.

It’s a matter of 🌠debate as to whether or not the Keep is good game design, but many fans were undeniably happy to see the world react to their choices, even if it was just an edited codex entry. In many cases, it was the old BioWare trick of pallet swapping but keeping the story much the same, as we saw with how Inquisition handled the returning Grey Warden ally.

Now, we know that The Veilguard will have none of this, as it goes for a more curated experie📖nce. But what does this tell us about The Veilguard?

The first answer is more obvious - it wants to focus on its own characters and wrap up Solas’ storyline. In fact, one of the three questions we’re as🅺ked about our Inquisition playthrough is how our character plans𒅌 to deal with Solas.

A second, much less optimistic answer, is that The Veilguard is moving away from some of the “bad endings” the previous games set up. I say this because another of the three choices - who our Inquisitor romanced - seeming𝄹ly only allows us to import their “good endings”. So, your Inquisitor won’t be someone who was jilted by Blackwall, or betrayed by Iron Bull. This either means the romance actually isn’t going to play that much of a role, despite being one of the three questions, or BioWare is ignoring that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:some o♛f us like to make bad decisions on purpose.

BioWare does have form here, disregarding Jacob’s romance when we meet him and his wife in Mass Effect 2, as well as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:having Shep🌄ard overlook T🐻hane’s tragedy even if the pair were lovers.

Another thing this tells us is that many of the most iconic characters and organisations fr♍om the first three games cannot appear now. Right off the bat, characters like Leliana, Alistair, Fenris, and a bunch of others who fans thought might turn up just… can’t any more. They have too many different fates to account for. Morrigan works because she’s always largely ended up in the same place regardless of our actions.

So, that’s a few would-be cameos we have to mourn, but BioWare has been forthcoming in admitting that it isn’t interested in those anyway. What is more worrying is that entire political systems and even countries will have to be omitted, unless The Veilguard sets🥀 up some canon decisions.

Epler has previously said that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:there is no canon World State, so this is unlikely.

Ferelden and Orlais can have wildly different monarchs depending on our decisions in previous games, so they have to go. Given that one was the stage of the Fifth Blight and the other is the heart of the Chantry, this feels like a pretty big omission. Speaking of the Chantry, who’s leading that again? We can’t say who our Divine was at the end ofꦬ Inquisition, so it’s hard to see how the dominant religion of Thedas is going to work in The Veilguard.

With that in mind, I can only imagine that The Veilguard is going to give us such a whistle-stop tour of Thedas that we don’t notice these omissions. Going to Weisshaupt and not 𓄧having any reference to our Hero of Ferelden (who is buried there if they died during the Blight) still works if we’re not wandering around and taking in the sights.

Dragon Age’s One-Liners And Cameos Were Impactful

But there’s a final layer to t🍸his - how The Veilguard views what it means to be a Dragon Age game. Previously, many of us would have seen nods to our previous cꦕharacters and decisions as an inescapable part of the series’ DNA. Now, it isn’t.

And while it seems that BioWare is slightly dismissive of cameos, they have been effective in the past. Alistair had three different ways to pop up in Dragon Age 2 if yo🙈u didn’t bump him off in O🎉rigins, two of which (king and exile) tied into the politics of Ferelden, and showed how much it, and your role in it, can make or break a person. The game even remembered the favour you asked from the monarch at the end of Origins, with Meredith not being especially happy if Ferelden’s Mage Circle was free. It’s also mentioned that a Dalish Warden’s wish for their people to be granted land wasn’t realised, but the monarch is still pushing for it.

It was as if we were slowly seeing the influence our characters were having on the world of Thedas. Perhaps if Inquisition hadn’t jumped the shark and let us elect t💯he Pope, The Veilguard could have done this too. So, if we are steering away from the nitty-gritty politics of Southern Thedas, then I hope it’s replaced by the same focus on what’s going on in the North. If not, and this is all to signal that we’re focusing more on Elven god shenanigans, then that would be a huge loss of one of Dragon Age’s greatest strengths.

Regardless of the themes it explores, for many fans, The Veilguard will have to be an incredibly good game to justify getting rid of World States in the first place. Of course, if The Veilguard isn’t good, then its problems would be at a foundational level, not because of a lack of a Leliana cameo. There would not have been a point mid-development when they could have pressed a button to allo💞w for World State transfers, and everything would have been fine. But that’s the narrative that will spread - that the game is bad because our Warden isn’t in it.

Whatever happens, it’s worth remembering Epler’s most recent words on the subject: this is still your Dragon Age. The cameos and one-liners meant so much to us because of what we took away from ༒them, specific to our characters. Sure, our imagination will h𝔉ave to work a little hardeౠr this time, but your Wardens and Hawkes are still out there, and we never needed The Veilguard to validate that. We just need The Veilguard to make the most of the freedom it has afforded itself, otherwise, this is a huge sacrifice without much to show for it.