Dragon Age: The Veilguard was always going to "pay off" the ending and "promise" of Inquisition's DLC

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is finally offering closure for the ending of Dragon Age: Inquisition, a decade after its release, but that was always the plan.

Despite the fact that some version of Dragon Age 4 was floating around the minds of BioWare employees for a decade, the game's main anchor was always firmly in place. You see, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is tightly wound to the character of Solas, a former companion in Inquisition who turned into an unquestionable, maybe-world-ending threat by the end of its Trespasser expansion.

"The world exists as it does because of Solas," director John Epler reiterated in an interview with Edge Magazine. "He shaped the world because of the kind of character he was. That's, to me, what makes Dragon Age so interesting. Everything can tie back to a person who to some degree thought they were doing the right thing." 

Solas is so important to the future of Thedas, Eplen explained that the next Dragon Age game was always intended to be his story: "We set that up at the end of Trespasser. There was no world where we were ever going to say, 'And now let's go to something completely different'. We wanted to pay off that promise."

BioWare did agree that one thing was slightly more important to the fourquel than Solas, though: the titular Veilguard, AKA your gang of companions who apparently carry the game so much, they inspired its name change (RIP, Dragon Age Dreadwolf.) They'll be pretty attached to your hip throughout the whole game, but in a massive departure for the series, you won't be able to take direct control over any of them because it's supposedly "more technically demanding on the player" this time around.

Elsewhere, Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s director said it wouldn’t repeat Inquisition’s biggest mistake: “You spent ten hours in Hinterlands.”