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There's a good chance that, if you're familiar with BioWare's Dragon Age franchise, the look of the classic enemy darkspawn in Dragon Age: The Veilguard will be surprising. There's a certain gross fleshiness to them in the new game that's hard to define. And while some folks might think they look silly, I can confidently say that yes, there's a reason they look like that, and it does actually make some amount of sense.
In an effort to not reveal major story spoilers, the short version is that during my extensive hands-on preview across Dragon Age: The Veilguard's first act, characters canonically speculated about how strange and unusual the darkspawn they fought were and why that might be. Even with the assumption that there's more to the story than what was revealed during those moments, it goes a long way to justifying the new look.
A developer Q&A at the same preview event also addressed the skeletal elephant in the room without ever definitively and explicitly explaining, but there's at least a culprit that we can all collectively point at: Ghilan'nain, one of the Blighted elven gods accidentally freed at the beginning of Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
"You're going from these creatures that feel, up to this point, kind of mindless, they're kind of swarming, to there now feels like there's almost a central intelligence behind them," says John Epler, creative director on Dragon Age: The Veilguard. "And Ghilan'nain, obviously, [is] a character who has a lot of tools in her tool chest, and she's using as many of them as she can to accomplish her goals in this game. And for us, if we do these redesigns, there's always a reason behind it. In this case, a very strong lore reason why the darkspawn look the way they do."
"It is certainly a lore narrative that we reinforce throughout the adventure, that the song of the Blight, it sounds different," adds Corinne Busche, game director on Dragon Age: The Veilguard. "There's something alive and unnatural about it. You can really feel Ghilan'nain's influence over this otherwise kind of decrepit, almost immobile entity before. What I love, as it relates to the darkspawn as an enemy faction, is the freedom it allowed the gameplay team to have fun with that palette, to explore new possibilities – darkspawn that are literally ripping off parts of themselves and throwing it into the thick of the battlefield."
And she's right; there are certainly plenty of new possibilities being explored in Dragon Age: The Veilguard when it comes to the darkspawn. Like, for example, the possibility that they will kick your butt – they genuinely can feel overwhelming!
Dragon Age: The Veilguard releases for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X on October 31, 2024. Where do you think it will end up in our ranking of the best BioWare games?
