Dragon Age: The Veilguard creative director Jon Epler says BioWare "never wants to invalidate" players' choices from previous games - and if that means ignoring those choices, that's what it'll do.
In an interview with 12DOVE, Epler explained how the Dragon Age: The Veilguard developer is managing the myriad choices players might have made over the RPG's three predecessors. Part of the team's solution stems from the fact that we're in a different part of Thedas now, so "a lot of the decisions you had made in Southern Thedas that are hugely important for Ferelden, for Orlais… Who's the Divine doesn't actually matter that much." But just as important for BioWare is the need to be "respectful of the choice you made."
Epler explains that the developers are trying to find "those choices that we actually feel we can do something meaningful for and never invalidating the player choice. That's the key there - we may not always reference your choice, because it may not have an actual impact on the story that you're telling right now, but we're never going to be like 'and that thing you did never happened'."
"It's a balancing act, because we want to make sure that we respect player choices, but also we need to make sure that our games don't get so complicated we're basically building the game six times each time we build it."
Later, during a roundtable Q+A, Epler expanded on those ideas, stating that BioWare tries "to avoid the idea of there being a single canon" in the Dragon Age series. The team's philosophy, he says, is that "if we don't feel we can do something respectful of the choice you made we oftentimes just don't necessarily reference it," and that "we never want you to feel like your world state is being invalidated.
Epler previously explained how "there's no canon" in The Veilguard, because that canon should depend on what individual players want it to be. That's fine for a single game, or at least one distanced substantially from its predecessors, like Baldur's Gate 3 or Skyrim, but it seems it'd be much harder to do in a series with as much narrative glue as this one. Thankfully, with The Veilguard set to release in less than six weeks, it shouldn't be too long until we discover whether Epler and co's attempt has been successful.
