Dragon Age: The Veilguard has been described as a moment of focus for BioWare, a studio finally returning to one of its pillar IPs after 10 often-troubled years away. With its next single player RPG, studio veteran Mark Darrah, a former Dragon Age producer now working as a consultant on Veilguard, says BioWare has redoubled its efforts in character-driven storytelling.
Speaking with Game Informer, Darrah, who's been with BioWare since the Baldur's Gate days of the late 90s, says that "the thing that is so amazing about Veilguard is this is the game where we finally said out loud that BioWare's greatest strength is telling stories through characters."
"If you go all the way back to Baldur's Gate 1, Baldur's Gate 2, these games are telling stories through characters, but there wasn't an intentionality behind that," Darrah continues. "And in this game, we're finally putting that intentionality first and foremost, putting the characters first, building the game around that, around those character moments, which is really the best way that BioWare knows how to tell stories."
Darrah previously called Veilguard "the best Dragon Age game that I've ever played," citing dramatically improved combat and presentation that gets "back to our roots of character-driven storytelling." In a similar comment, Veilguard game director Corinne Busche said the RPG is "almost the total inverse" of Mass Effect's "big action, minor RPG" formula. Busche was leaning into character customization, while creative director John Epler again stresses pivotal characters in a comment to Game Informer.
"We wanted to tell a story this time where you literally cannot save the world without these characters," Epler said. "Beyond that, though, we also wanted to give them their own arcs that can run parallel to the main story and really give them that kind of deep storytelling our fans really enjoy." Maybe it's just recency talking, but when you think of character-driven RPGs, it's hard not to see parallels with Baldur's Gate 3, especially after the lead writer on Larian's masterwork notably said it was standing on the shoulders of BioWare's legendary CRPGs.
Our Dragon Age: The Veilguard preview left us hopeful that we can love a BioWare RPG again.
