Dragon Age: The Veilguard Learned Baldur's Gate 3's Most Important Lesson

Nearly a decade after Dragon Age: Inquisition gave fans the third installment in BioWare's epic saga, the journey continues with the reveal of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. After initially being announced as Dragon Age: Dreadwolf in 2022, development has continued and the game has been given a different name with a shift in focus for the upcoming sequel.

Now with a full twenty minutes of gameplay footage and official word from the community team leading the road to launch, it's clear that Dragon Age: The Veilguard has picked up on one of its cousin's greatest strengths. Baldur's Gate 3 knows what it got right, and it looks like Dragon Age: The Veilguard knows too.

Baldur's Gate 3 Taught Dragon Age: The Veilguard Companions Are Key

While the latest reveal is by far the most extensive look at Dragon Age: The Veilguard to date, teasers from the time before this new title seemed to have a very different focus. Dragon Age: Dreadwolf hype focused more on the lore of the land and the powerful enemies you'll be up against, but they've now firmly put the focus on the companions that'll be by your side through this epic journey.

There's nothing official indicating that Dragon Age: The Veilguard changed course explicitly because of Baldur's Gate 3, but it's not difficult to see why the success of that release may have made an impact. Lore and environment are an important aspect to these kinds of fantasy stories, but it's the characters we fall in love with that make all the difference.

Baldur's Gate 3 is built upon mountains of lore from both the Baldur's Gate games specifically and more generally across Dungeons and Dragons adjacent media. That's not what everyone talks about, though. Everyone talks about their favorite companions. Gale, Karlach, Astarion, Lae'zel, Shadowheart, Wyll, Halsin, and so many other characters are the things that really made people fall in love with the game.

Those are the things that build an entire fandom, the kind of love for media that can spawn extensive fanart and fanfic, and makes it something more meaningful to so many. Dragon Age: Dreadwolf was about what you're up against, which is like trying to sell someone on Baldur's Gate 3 by talking about the Elder Brain. Sure, it's cool, but who am I spending most of the game with? It's not the big bad, it's the companions.

In the official BioWare blog about the name change, they stated that "you and your companions – not your enemies – are the heart of this new experience." While the core gameplay of Dragon Age: The Veilguard is certainly very different in an active combat sense than the turn-based nature of Baldur's Gate 3, both of them have picked up on the value of unforgettable characters we fall in love with throughout a larger narrative.

It's difficult to draw a hard and fast line about how the full combat experience will feel until more can sample it for themselves, but the gameplay footage shown and early impressions of the demo are definitely positive. It looks like it'll feel like a Dragon Age game that's taken a decade's worth of technological advancement and testing, and observation of what worked and didn't for others in the industry, to finally deliver the experience fans had hoped for. 

After all, it's not really Dragon Age: Inquisition that likely kept this franchise alive. If Inquisition was the end of the road for all Dragon Age media, interest may not have stayed high enough for BioWare and EA to continue investing in a project that went through so many development setbacks.

Since Dragon Age: Inquisition was first released in 2014, along with a Game of the Year Edition and expansions in 2015, it's been the love of this world and the characters that inhabit it that kept fans engaged. Dragon Age books, comics, a tabletop RPG, and even an animated streaming series have all been released since Inquisition first hit consoles.

We'll have to wait for "Fall 2024" to learn if Dragon Age: The Veilguard can deliver on the promises it's making, but that isn't stopping anyone from falling in love with Harding, Lucanis, and all the other characters while the release date draws near.