What I talk about when I talk about Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Buckle up: we're talking about writing, narrative satisfaction – and how it comes back to books
Happy New Year! 2025, we’re here. I’d like to say the sun is shining in honour of this, but in fact it’s cold and grey and the last time I saw blue skies was three days ago, which is an eternity in winter. As I write, rain is pelting at the windows with what might be considered aggressive enthusiasm.
I’m super excited about 2025 (beyond all the usual reasons of a new year) because The Bookshop Below comes out in November! It’s still a little while away, but my God, the cover is lovely. There are also some Secret Things that will hopefully be unveiled, and explain why I’ve been so very busy over the last year.
I hope you had a restful end of year, and that you’re as excited for this one as I am.
Okay, settle in. We’re getting a little Weird and Niche. But we’re also talking about storytelling across different mediums, which is one of those things that I could yap on about forever.
There is something that everyone tells you when you’ve just got your first publishing deal and your debut is still a year, or even eighteen months away or more, and you’re dying to know what readers think, and you can’t possibly wait two weeks, never mind eighteen months. Actually, there are two things. Firstly: get cracking on your next book because the time slips away faster than you think, and you’ll get busy. (This feels like a good place to whisper a very heartfelt apology to all the people to whom I owe emails.)
Secondly: savour this time. Because it’s the last time it’ll be just you and the keyboard. It’s the last time you’re holding onto just your thoughts, with little idea of their reception. Next time, it’ll be you and the keyboard – and readers.
This is somewhat untrue, in one sense. No one just has a publishing deal fall into their lap, as though you came across a stray kitten and BOOM you’re suddenly a cat owner. By the time you reach the point of submission and acquisition, one way or another, you've already run through the readership of your agent, your editor, and an entire publishing house, who have all weighed in on whether they think your book is worth it (and for how much and for who). But it is true in that it still doesn’t really prepare you for what readers will think and say of your book.
Particularly in the wake of Dragon Age: the Veilguard (to all my very patient friends, I’m sorry I haven’t shut up about it), I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about narrative satisfaction and where it meets expectations, and the general discourse around the game. As someone engaged in the material, what did I want from it? Did I get what I want? What is personal preference, and what is critique? If I didn’t like something, is it that I didn’t like what they set out to do, or is it that I think they fell short – and if so, why? How?
As a writer, this is a really fast way to go insane.
For context, I loved Veilguard, but it took me a while to warm up. The last game, Inquisition, came out a decade ago, and although I just finished it for the very first time a week ago (!), every year or so, I’ve booted it up and sunk my teeth back in. Hinterlands, here we come. But the thing about getting to know these characters over such a long period of time is that it becomes very hard to let go, especially when each game focuses on a different cast. I really fell in love with the tension between each character – the bickering, the reluctant then genuine camaraderie, the hard lines each of them draw about certain decisions – and Veilguard simply doesn’t have that. The characters are different people, and they relate to each other differently. You’re a team assembled willingly in pursuit of a noble cause, not a crew who already have beef with each other, dragged to a village in the middle of nowhere.
The story, too, is not the story I remember. What do you mean, we’re not running around closing Fade rifts, or watching mages and templars dig themselves into a bloody battle? Why am I not fighting bears in the Hinterlands on the regular? (Or doing what I think of as the Inquisition shuffle/jump up mountainous terrain?)
Lots of this I’ve come to enjoy in Veilguard for its own sake, like the character dynamic: think team of dogs vs team of cats. And I actually really love my individual teammates, who are quirky and kind and determined. (I would die for Manfred.)
No more Inquisition shuffle up mountains! (Or the impossible shards in Exalted Plains, dear God.) I also genuinely really enjoy the combat, which feels fluid and exciting, particularly in the later game when it’s more about considering your play-style than maxing out the attack stat. I love the lore side quests that both unravel mysteries hinted at in previous games, and painful character histories that made replaying Inquisition that much more emotionally poignant. And though it takes a while to get there, the ending is a banger. I would love post-game DLC, which I think speaks to the way it drew me in.
Some of it… well. There is a part of me that would have loved to see a more direct sequel, even though to do so would have been fundamentally impossible without disregarding the key choices that players made a decade ago. (For example, who you choose to romance in Inquisition.) Some of it is clearly pragmatic: this is a game ten years in the making, and four games into a series, they want to pick up a new audience – and probably have to, financially. That means complex choices made in the past are left behind, along with characters I would have loved to see again, because their emotional impact is unlikely to hit new players who don’t have that key connection to them. I really miss some of the mystery of Inquisition that came from a more open-world exploration game, and although we get hints of it in the Crossroads, it’s just not the same as stumbling across the Chateau d’Onterre in the Emerald Graves (which gave me actual goosebumps).
Some of it is also that this is a game ten years in the making. And it’s had well-documented development troubles, with some enormous shifts to the story and gameplay. It’s perhaps suffered a little for this. There are big worldbuilding notes that feel ignored, and I wish it had the political nuance and complexity of the previous games. Some dialogue misses the mark (although some made me laugh out loud). Some of the romances fall flat. The stakes are high, but feel a little… generic fantasy, and no one has a personal investment in the same way that they might have done in the mages vs templars fallout. So there’s no real tension within your team as they face the antagonists – or even decide who counts as an antagonist. The ending that I found most satisfying is also the one that relies on you having made certain choices in Inquisition, and is perhaps leaning very hard on your previous knowledge of the characters, rather than what’s in Veilguard itself.
(To be a little tangential, one of my main gripes is the way the narrative slumps after the opening because the initial quests rely so heavily on coincidence. To stop the elven gods, they have to go to ‘where bad people and criminals’ are at, and I’m sorry, it’s too coincidental to just go to where the criminals are and run into the gods messing around! Give them something to find at least, please! It’s also why I think the game really picks up after Weisshaupt – because now they have a tangible, specific goal to strive for.)
While I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve been thinking about the team behind this process – particularly the writers. Who decided what details to include in the codex, or what might make for the most satisfying character arc. Who had a side-quest all mapped out, and then had to pivot to accommodate changes in design, gameplay or something else. How they must have felt, with a decade of high expectations (and BioWare’s future) riding on this game. And how they must be feeling now, with old and new fans weighing in, some with very strong opinions about how they wanted the story to play out. Look, after all, at what I wanted this game to be – more open-world exploration, more mystery, greater character tensions and more call-backs to Inquisition. Yet I don’t think that’s what they were ever striving for, and I don’t know if that would have necessarily made for a better game.
Obviously writing a book is very different to the production of a video game, and I think it must be a minor miracle every time a cohesive game comes out, given the amount of hands telling one singular story. But the Dragon Age series is one that lives and dies on its narrative and the characters who propel it. So does a book.
I said earlier that thinking about all of these expectations as a writer is a fast way to insanity, and I do stand by that. You can’t please everyone. But it’s also impossible to set it all aside, too. There are so many extra voices in your head: that one glowing review of your writing, the one that loathed your character dynamics, the one that would have liked it better if it was in first-person/third-person/had a faster ending/had a slower ending/more romance/less romance. I might not be able to please anyone, but I’d like to please someone. And, ideally, enough people that I get to keep doing what I love for a long time to come.
I was very lucky in that I mostly wrote The Bookshop Below in the space before The City of Stardust came out. It’s a book that I could hunker down with, without these questions weighing so heavily on me. For various reasons, that’s not true with the one I’m working on now. What do readers expect? What do they want? And – I think this is a really good one to grapple with – does it line up with what they actually need from this story? (See also: what if there was a game where the Inquisitor and Solas kissed and then were sad and then kissed again and then were sad again, etc. for 60-100 hours of play time.) How does that match up with the story I want to tell? Can I deliver on these things? What am I setting out to do? Will I fall short?
Like I said, insanity.
I don’t have an answer to many of these questions, and the tricky thing is, I won’t until the book is out and published (by which time I will be fretting about another book, and haha, I will be fretting because I already am). But I guess this is all to say that these are questions that continue to percolate in my head, and that I take very seriously. Because for all my gripes, I hope I get to see another Dragon Age game. I hope it surprises me in the best way, while giving me some of the things I really wanted. And in that same vein, I hope I can do the same for my own readers.
Other things
New year means new reading! I’ve kicked off my first book of the year with My Throat an Open Grave by Tori Bovalino, which slaps as a haunting, fairytale-esque YA horror about small, secretive towns and the minor cruelties that spiral into larger ones. I’m currently reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which won the Man Booker and is so far exquisite.
Over December, I replayed Dragon Age: Inquisition, and now I’m returning to The Veilguard with all of that still percolating in my head. See above, but know that I have Even More Thoughts. (For those of you curious, yes, I romanced Solas.)
I’m trying to get back into being more diligent about two things: art and walks. It’s very easy, particularly in winter and particularly with looming deadlines, to hole up inside and stay glued to the old laptop. But (as I’m always furious to discover) getting out for a little bit of exercise and fresh air does make me feel happier and generally more balanced in myself.
With art, I had about a year and a half (Jan 2022-June 2023) where I was really consistent about drawing/painting on a weekly basis, and I’m going to try and get back into that again. I love having something to do with my hands that moves different brain muscles to the ones locked into my laptop screen for most of the day. And I also love the thrill of seeing real-time improvement (with the caveat that building a skillset is never a truly linear process), which scratches an itch when I’m despairing over commas elsewhere. Onwards and upwards!