BioWare has confirmed Dragon Age: The Veilguard takes place 10 years after its predecessor Dragon Age: Inquisition.
Confirmation comes from a recent Discord Q&A session shared by Shinobi602 on X / Twitter (via Eurogamer) wherein BioWare revealed a ton of details about its upcoming fantasy role-playing game.
Among the tidbits, it was revealed that The Veilguard will be set a decade after Inquisition, and that the 2014 game’s playable protagonist, the Inquisitor, will “definitely be part of the story”.
Following its extended gameplay demo reveal at Summer Game Fest 2024, game director Corinne Busche confirmed that the new locations players will be able to explore in The Veilguard are more linear than those in Inquisition and that it will not be open-world, but “mission-based”.
“Everything is hand-touched, hand-crafted, very highly curated,” Busche said. “We believe that’s how we get the best narrative experience, the best moment-to-moment experience.
“However, along the way, these levels that we go to do open up, some of them have more exploration than others. Alternate branching paths, mysteries, secrets, optional content you’re going to find and solve. So it does open up, but it is a mission-based, highly curated game.”
In the Q&A, it was clarified that players will be able to return to these story locations later on and complete side content, such as quests, and freely explore anything they might miss. Once again, the developers said that these quests are “handcrafted and story focused” and won’t be fetch quests.
Thankfully, there is no progression block in The Veilguard either, unlike in Inquisition, where the player was forced to scale their power to certain areas.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard doesn’t have a release date just yet, but it’s expected to launch on PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC in “late 2024”.
