The Veilguard’s Most Important Quest Is Missable
Dragon Age: The Veilguard has a ton of side quests throughout its multiple hub worlds, but one stands apart as probably the most important in the game, if not the entirety of BioWare’s fantasy RPG series. If you’re concerned about spoilers, don’t worry, we won’t get into them here. This is just a PSA to everyone playing the game that if you want to see some of the most important story and character work in The Veilguard, you should seek out Solas’ memories in The Crossroads.
These questlines are twofold: First, you’ll find short quests that depict playable flashbacks to the original elven rebellion led by Solas eons before the events of The Veilguard, then you’ll have a debrief about them with your team. Solas, the Inquisition party member who turned out to be the elven god of lies, has existed throughout large swaths of Dragon Age history, and to learn about his history is to understand the past of the fantasy world of Thedas. Each of these quests will end with you collecting a wolf statue to bring back to your home base. Once there, you can view an artistic depiction of one of Solas’ regrets from his time among the elven pantheon. These include some of the biggest lore drops BioWare has ever put in a Dragon Age game, and fundamentally change our understanding of this world.
You can find these memories early on, but there’s a point in the main story quests when a character will give you one of the wolf statues that puts the questline in your journal, complete with waypoints to guide you to where you need to go. Some will require you to fight mini-bosses in and out of The Crossroads, but they are worth the effort. Not only do they provide some of the best story reveals in all of The Veilguard, they’re also required to unlock the game’s secret ending, among other changes to the endgame worth seeking out.
For more on The Veilguard, check out Kotaku’s review.
How To Unlock The Secret Ending
Dragon Age: The Veilguard wraps up a lot of ongoing storylines for fans of BioWare’s fantasy RPG series. But it also has some new threads to pull on, one of which is the focus of the game’s secret post-credits stinger. Unlocking this final revelation is a hefty affair that will span several quest lines. If you want to see everything The Veilguard has to offer, here’s a spoiler-free guide on how to unlock the secret post-credit scene. We’ll go over the requirements first, then we’ll throw up a spoiler warning and talk about what it all means.
How to unlock Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s post-credits ending
One of the lengthy quest lines you’ll have to complete to see The Veilguard’s post-credit scene is tracking down the wolf statues in the Crossroads. These figures unlock some massive lore bombs and backstory about Solas, the elven god at the center of The Veilguard. You’ll find these behind locked areas in the Crossroads, which will often require you to fight a mini-boss or solve a complicated puzzle. Once you’ve found all five, you’ll have a visitor in the Crossroads who will direct you to the final stage of the quest line, which can unlock another choice in the game’s finale. However, that’s not all that’s required to unlock the secret ending.
You’ll also need to find three “Mysterious Circles” hidden around Thedas. These are artifacts that are tucked away in dangerous places that are only accessible after you put in some work. One is in Arlathan Forest and requires you to complete an elaborate laser puzzle that builds a bridge to some ruins surrounded by a lake you can’t swim through.
The other two are hidden behind dragon boss fights. One is in the Necropolis where you recruited Emmrich. The region is home to “The Formless One,” which is a dragon you’ll fight by completing the quests “Restless Spirits” and “Pinnacle of its Kind.” You’ll find one of the Mysterious Circles in the southwest corner of its lair.
The last is perhaps the most involved of the three. This one you’ll find in the lair of a dragon in the Crossroads as part of the quest “The Heart of Corruption.” This requires you to fight three high-level champion mini-bosses throughout the Crossroads who are siphoning power from tears in the Fade. Each champion defeated gives you a key to unlock the dragon’s lair. Once you defeat the beast (a task made easier once you’ve found all five of the wolf statues), you can find the Mysterious Circle stashed away in a hidden passage south of the dragon’s arena.
Then, all you’ve gotta do is reach the end. We won’t dive into The Veilguard’s finale here, but we will dissect the short post-credits scene below. So if you don’t want to know what it entails, skedaddle.
Are they gone?
Okay.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s secret post-credits scene, explained
The brief, one-minute clip you did all that work to unlock has a lot of wide-reaching ramifications for the Dragon Age series. It depicts art of several key events of each game in BioWare’s series, but with cloaked, shadowy figures inserted into them. This includes the Battle of Ostagar in Dragon Age: Origins that led to the loss of most of Ferelden’s Grey Wardens, Bartrand’s stealing of the Lyrium Idol in Dragon Age II and setting off a chain of events that resulted in the Mage-Templar War, and Corypheus’ opening of The Breach in Dragon Age: Inquisition and nearly destroying the world as we know it. The voiceover from a devilish, unknown individual recounts how their group has “balanced” and “guided” the people of Thedas in one way or another, resulting in the events of previous games. To what end? That’s unclear at the moment. But what is clear is that this voice and these shadowy figures are part of the Executors, an enigmatic group that was first hinted at in Dragon Age: Inquisition, then further expanded upon in the anthology book Tevinter Nights.
In Inquisition, you set up several bases throughout the world of Thedas, and eventually, you’ll receive a war table operation that tells you symbols drawn in chalk have started appearing on those bases depicting a downward-pointing triangle covered by two wavy lines. This symbol is shown at the very end of The Veilguard’s post-credits scene as the voiceover says, “We come.” This entire scene seems to imply the Executors have been putting their plans into motion by manipulating characters like Loghain and Bartrand throughout Dragon Age. Whatever they’ve been working toward is finally coming to fruition, and they are coming to Thedas in the near future.
The art we see of Executors in this scene matches the descriptions in Tevinter Nights, which says they are hooded, robed figures. But we also know them to be from “across the sea,” meaning they come from a land beyond Thedas and represent some force we’ve not encountered yet in the Dragon Age series. The codex entries that you receive from the Mysterious Circles imply they could be followers of the Forgotten Ones, the disgraced elven gods who have been mostly erased from history. Given that one of the only known Executor characters was shown opposing Solas in Tevinter Nights, this seems like a possible explanation that could be further explored in a future game, given that The Veilguard takes most of the elven gods we knew of off the board.
Even outside of this secret ending, there are references to some dangerous force from across the sea in The Veilguard, such as when Taash is given a warning about them in their personal quest. Will current hero Rook be the one to fight these forces when they come knocking, or will the next Dragon Age game keep the series’ long-running tradition of bringing in a new protagonist? The Veilguard does end with a Marvel-style “The Veilguard remains vigilant” text right after this revelation which, to me, reads like a subtle implication that Rook might be leading the fight. But hey, Inquisition ended with a much more direct scene that The Inquisitor could face Solas in this game, and that didn’t happen. So we’ll have to wait and see.