When it launches, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is going to have its work cut out for it when it comes to orienting players in its world. Not just because it's the fourth game in a series whose last game came out 10 years ago, but because the beginning of its story hinges on a DLC chapter from that game. Because of its importance to the story, Veilguard's game director said recently that Dragon Age: Inquisition's final DLC probably should have been included in the base game.
After the recent Veilguard preview sessions—during which I got to play and came away feeling like it could be BioWare's comeback—YouTuber MrMattyPlays asked game director Corinne Busche about DLCs.
"I'm a huge fan of Trespasser," Busche says of Inquisition's final big story DLC. "If I were to give any critique, it would only be that Trespasser is so central to the Dragon Age: Inquisition story that arguably maybe that should have been part of the base game."
This isn't the first critique that BioWare has made of prior Dragon Age games, but this is definitely the most deserved one. At the end of Dragon Age: Inquisition, your magical scholar party member Solas vanishes without explanation. There's a teaser in the ending that gives away his identity as the Dread Wolf (the former title for The Veilguard) but you really don't wind up seeing Solas as an antagonist until he appears in the Trespasser DLC that launched 10 months later. That DLC digs into a lot of Solas' motivations and goals and is pretty important context for The Veilguard.
If you didn't play that DLC and don't make a habit of watching lore explainer YouTube videos, you could come into The Veilguard wondering when the heck Solas turned into a 'destroy the world for the greater good' kind of guy. That really wasn't his vibe in Inquisition.
This isn't the first time that a Dragon Age game has jumped off from a prior game's DLC either. Something similar happened with Dragon Age 2's DLC Legacy, which introduced Corypheus, who would go on to be Inquisition's main villain.
It sounds like, no matter what, The Veilguard isn't planning to leave a theoretical future Dragon Age game in a similar position. "We wanted to make it the most complete, out of the box package we possibly could—from the player experience to the narrative—everything else," Busche says.
Whether The Veilguard plans to have any DLCs of its own is less clear. MrMatty says in that video interview that BioWare confirmed there weren't any DLC plans for The Veilguard. What Busche actually said was: "Never say never, but right now the entirety of the team is just focused on making sure this is the right game."
Having heard plenty of game directors dance around committing to future plans prior to a game launch, that isn't quite my interpretation. That sounds a lot more like 'we haven't announced that,' than 'we aren't doing that' to me.
Whether or not there are story DLCs for The Veilguard down the line, it sounds like we can at least expect them not to be critical story epilogues.
