Dragon Age: The Veilguard Exclusive Q&A – ‘No Side Quest Exists Without Contributing to the Narrative’

During our trip to San Francisco to play Dragon Age: The Veilguard for the first time, we had the chance to speak with two members of BioWare's development team: Francois Chaput, Missions and Level Design Director, and Matt Rhodes, Art Director, both of which delved into their respective areas of expertise.

As a reminder, Dragon Age: The Veilguard will launch on October 31, almost ten years after the previous installment's release. It will be available for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X.

Related Story Dragon Age: The Veilguard Hands-On Preview – Rook Takes Queen, Checkmate

I know you are taking a different approach as far as levels go. Rather than trying to build out a massive open world, you went for the hub-and-spoke iteration. Can you talk more about the hub world you are creating for this game?

Francois Chaput: Yeah, absolutely. There are two key pillars that we really wanted to have a part here in the design of this world, and one of them was to focus the experience so that we can bring players to the best content that we can as efficiently as we can. The second one was maintaining a sense of player freedom. In some cases, it'll narrow down a little bit, and then we make sure that we open back up and give you some options. The thing we want is to present you with options as opposed to a whole buffet of everything, a menu of options that we think are all going to be good.

Matt Rhodes: Which then gave us an opportunity from an art perspective to create even more variety. We are really proud of the work we did on Dragon Age: Inquisition, in which you had a few large areas, whereas now we have many more, far more distinct areas. So it really allows us to experiment and have fun with like, the wilder tone. There's more contrast between the necropolis and the sunshiny beach somewhere. Just that structure is actually a really great opportunity for us to focus on polishing each area and making it even more distinct from each other.

Is there a typical through