With series like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, BioWare has made a name for itself as the “choices matter” studio. These games have allowed players to import their choices from previous entries in order to keep a consistent world state that feels shaped, to some degree, by your actions. The process by which players do that has changed over the years, with the Mass Effect games reading your old saves and Dragon Age getting a separate app to craft your world state for Inquisition. Dragon Age: The Veilguard will handle this differently, allowing you to make a few key decisions in the character creator that reflect choices made in Inquisition before you get started on your next journey. Still, for all its apparent concern with making players feel like their decisions have lasting impact, BioWare’s track record is arguably a bit spotty in this regard, and at times the studio has outright undone the effects of major choices players have made. At a preview event earlier this month John Epler, creative director on the Veilguard, talked a bit about the studio’s philosophy for handling these decisions.
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During a developer Q&A at publisher Electronic Arts’ Redwood City studio, an audience member asked how BioWare decides what choices are canon when making new games, and Epler’s answer was refreshing to hear: BioWare doesn’t want to undermine players’ choices.
“Honestly, we try to avoid the idea of there being a single canon,” Epler said. “I mean, it’s a game about choice. This is a game about your decisions as a player. […] The philosophy is we never want to invalidate your choices. And if we don’t feel we can do something respectful of the choice we made, we oftentimes just don’t necessarily reference it. […] So we never want you to feel like your world is being invalidated.”
Most of The Veilguard takes place in the northern regions of the Dragon Age universe, whereas previous games have been primarily in southern areas like the countries of Ferelden and Orlais. As such, Epler said a lot of the decisions you made in previous Dragon Age games won’t come into play, which means the studio didn’t have to write around or undo choices from your past adventures. This was also true of Mass Effect: Andromeda, which took place in a different galaxy and only asked you if Commander Shepard, the protagonist of the first three games, was a man or woman.
The term “canon,” however, has also come to mean something different both with regard to BioWare games and the broader video game fandom, in that some people have taken to calling the “default” state you get when you boot up a game without changing something “canon.” However, this is a bit of a misnomer, and at least with BioWare, it sounds like a misconception within the community. The Veilguard, for example, lets you recreate your Inquisitor, the protagonist from Dragon Age: Inquisition, and import some choices from previous games. When you boot up the character creator for the hero, the default version is an elven woman. To long-time fans, this seems like it might be a nod to the only character who can enter a romance with Solas, the Inquisition-party-member-turned-Veilguard-antagonist. But this is just a default state for anyone who doesn’t care to change things to match their own world state, not a “canon” decision BioWare has deemed the “correct” choice.
With the studio recently working on both The Veilguard and the upcoming fifth Mass Effect game, there’s been concern among some fans about just how the studio would navigate incorporating choices from earlier games. While we still know very little about the next Mass Effect, when it was revealed that it would feature a character from the original trilogy in squadmate Liara T’Soni, fans questioned whether or not the next game might make a hard decision about the state of the universe after Mass Effect 3’s galaxy-changing ending. Some feel that BioWare just making a single decision and treating it as canon would be a simple solution, but I have been arguing for years that anyone who says BioWare should just pick an ending and make it canon for simplicity’s sake is not thinking hard enough. When meaningful choices are a fundamental part of a studio’s legacy, it feels flippant to say, “BioWare should just apply ending B to everyone’s story and call it a day.” So it’s comforting, as a long-time fan with a lot of investment in his characters and choices, to hear Epler so plainly say that’s not what the Dragon Age team is about. However, it is worth scrutinizing, as BioWare’s follow-through has been inconsistent.
Both Mass Effect and Dragon Age have a habit of not necessarily outright contradicting player choice, but certainly writing around it in a way that makes what you did mostly irrelevant. Dragon Age II and Inquisition found ways to bring back party members like Anders and Leliana, even if they were ostensibly killed in Origins. The team explicitly addresses those contradictions (Anders was just presumed dead, Leliana was a ghost), but they were still sore spots for those who made certain decisions in previous games. BioWare has also used an assumed canon in spin-off materials like comics, anime, and novels.
Mass Effect has been less egregious, but BioWare has found ways to write around player choice in the sequels, such as promoting Udina to the human councilor position in ME3 even if you didn’t nominate him at the end of the first game, or still finding ways to include Rachni enemies in ME3 even if you seemingly killed off the race of space bugs two games prior. Ultimately, I appreciate BioWare making this philosophy clear, I just hope it actually follows through when Dragon Age: The Veilguard launches on October 31, and I especially hope it extends beyond Dragon Age when the next Mass Effect game comes out sometime in the distant future.