Dragon Age: The Veilguard occupies an awkward position within the series. Technically speaking, it features solid combat, excellent level design, and very few bugs, making it a quality game. However, players generally consider its writing to be the worst in the series, falling far short of expectations for a sequel to Dragon Age: Inquisition. In other words, it's a good game, but not a worthy Dragon Age entry.
The most telling example of this is the game's abandonment of the series' previous choice inheritance mechanism. Before launch, officials announced that the "Dragon Age Keep" website, used to record player choices across the series, would not be utilized in The Veilguard. Players could only select three key decisions from Inquisition, while choices from Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II were completely ignored. For many players, this marked the beginning of the game's reputational collapse.
Players weren't the only ones thinking this way. Mark Darrah, a veteran producer at BioWare, returned as a development consultant for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. He recently stated on TikTok that he had strongly advocated for reinstating the Archives system, allowing choices from the first three games to be reflected in the new title.
When asked what he would change in each Dragon Age game if given the chance, Darrah brought up this point. Regarding The Veilguard, he couldn't think of anything he would remove, but he knew exactly what should have been added.
"I would have added the Archives system," Darrah said. "I mentioned it to them at the time. It wouldn't have taken much effort... well, actually it would have been quite a bit of work, but..."
He stopped there, making his stance clear. It was evident that during his time as a consultant, he had warned the development team that cutting the world state inheritance system would surely cause player dissatisfaction.
From the development team's perspective, game files reveal that they actually attempted to include more choice inheritance content. For instance, the game originally supported importing more decisions from Inquisition, but these features were ultimately not implemented. Concept art also hinted at other ideas that never came to fruition, such as allowing players to save characters left behind in the Fade during Inquisition. This meant that Hawke, Stroud, Alistair, and Loghain could potentially appear—with specific appearances depending on choices made back in Origins.
So, what exactly went wrong? As I mentioned in my previous in-depth analysis, it's clear that the development team disagreed with many of the mandatory requirements for The Veilguard. Many developers have hinted that player criticisms hit close to home. Similarly, the player advisory group invited to test early versions explicitly requested more choice inheritance content, but it was never implemented. If I had to guess, the developers actually wanted to create a world state system but simply ran out of time. After all, the The Veilguard we played was built upon the skeleton of a canceled multiplayer game—a foundation insufficient to support a single-player experience centered on player choices.
Unfortunately, things didn't go as planned. Despite this, many players still enjoy Dragon Age: The Veilguard for what it is, though they can't help but feel regret over what it could have been.