This week, Dragon Age fans have been able to dive back into the continent of Thedas in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Longtime players may recognize that events in the game were foreshadowed in some of the previous installments. According to former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider, that’s because he laid out of the series’ lore years ago in a document that’s still influencing the direction of the games.
“The way I created the world was to seed plots in various parts of the world that could be part of… a single game,” Gaider told Eurogamer. “Then there was the overall uber-plot, which I didn’t know for certain that we would ever get to, but I had an understanding of how it all worked together… A lot of that was in my head until we were starting Inquisition and the writers got a little bit impatient with my memory or lack thereof, so they pinned me down and dragged the uber-plot out of me. I’d talked about it, I’d hinted at it, but never really spelled out how it all connected, so they dragged it out of me. We put it into a master lore doc, the secret lore, which we had to hide from most of the team.”
Although Gaider left BioWare after Dragon Age: Inquisition, there are signs in The Veilguard that his original plan is still being followed, at least to a degree. He pointed to the return of Fen’Harel as a major example. However, Gaider declined to state what his original ending for the Dragon Age lore was just in case BioWare ever gets around to telling that story.
“I always had this dream of where it would all end, the very last plot,” added Gaider. ” But the idea that this uber-plot was this sort of biggest, finite… That the final thing you could do in this world that would break it was there as a ‘Maybe we would get to do that one day.'”
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is out now on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.