BioWare RPGs have earned a reputation for expansive world building, complex characters, and difficult choices. Not to mention the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises’ gift for building on science fiction and fantasy themes and transforming them into full-fledged evolutions of those genres. But don’t forget that BioWare is also praised for having great characters to kiss!
Dragon Age: The Veil Guardianthe latest entry in the Dragon Age series, is no different from its predecessors in this respect, but I can’t help but notice that it has evolved from previous BioWare games in at least one way: it leaves me feeling like a normal one damn man flirt.
[Ed. note: This piece contains some mild spoilers for the first act of Dragon Age: The Veilguard.]
Image: BioWare/Electronic Arts
This may be a bold statement from someone who admitted in this publication that he doesn’t know how to flirt, but he’s listening to me. All the early game flirting options I’ve seen Veil Guardian are nice, relaxed things to say to someone you like but don’t know that well. That may seem like faint praise, but let’s take a quick tour of some of the most outrageous flirting options in BioWare games.
In Dragon Age and Mass Effect, there weren’t always flirting options marked as flirtatious in the interface – instead, you simply had to keep your companion’s approval high and infer what was considered a signal of your intentions. That wasn’t always easy.
For example, during a conversation in the first Mass Effect game, your colleague Kaidan confesses that he struggles with debilitating migraines (a side effect of his telekinetic abilities). If a female Shepard player character made the dialogue choice to express gentle compassion, the game counted this as flirting. Even if you didn’t show obvious signs of affection, Kaidan would eventually get mad at you for messing with him, which, as I said, didn’t exactly endear me. A person should be able to tell a guy, “Hey man, that sounds really shitty,” without it being construed as a relationship commitment.
Dragon Age 2 was the first Dragon Age game to utilize the now standard BioWare conversation wheel, which explicitly states the tone, clarifying questions, and, of course, whether a line automatically counts toward the game’s romantic storylines. Dragon Age 2 is also the game in which – after Anders tells you that since he has absorbed a spirit of justice, he has no idea where his personality ends and where it begins – a clever player character can quip carelessly: Well, at least the demon has a hot body. The game’s animation did not support the suggestive eyebrow wiggling, but it is assumed that this is implied.
And during DA2Merrill, a sweet mage who has just moved to a human city for the first time after her elf clan cast her out, is one of my favorite characters in the entire game, I’ve never romanced her before. That’s because I’ve never gotten over how the first opportunity to flirt with her comes right after she tells you that you’re the only person she knows. Dragon Age 2
When I was growing up Dragon Age: The Veil Guardian“These are comparatively normal flirting options,” laughed my colleague Petrana and immediately remembered a conversation with Cullen, your military advisor Dragon Age: Inquisition. It’s not the first moment you’ll have to express your affection for him, but this early flirtation involves looking into his eyes and I ask him if he is celibate. I can confidently call this an HR violation.
Image: BioWare/Electronic Arts via Polygon
For this reason, I was ready for Rook, the player character of Dragon Age: The Veil Guardianto enter the arena of love with, well, a certain degree audacity. Instead, I was struck by Rook’s earnest cool.
Bellara, the absent-minded but dedicated researcher, apologizes for her ramblings, and a flirtatious Rook is able to tell her that they like seeing her enthusiasm. You can tell Taash that they enjoy traveling together. There have been a few times where I’ve chosen a flirting option just because it seemed nice to say so. Since the days of Ol’ Friend Zone Kaidan, BioWare has updated the dialogue wheel to provide explicit indications of when romantic dialogue options open and establish romantic storylines. And thank God! I’m not trying to snog Lucanis on this run, but I Do
Options did Later I become more and more tasteful, like when my rook said to a companion, “I think your fingers are perfect” and “Wow, in my daydreams you’re leaning over me and banging on the wall.” As they should – mine Rook knows these characters better now, so she’s built trust and, perhaps more importantly, a Mood.
I pushed a lot of flirt buttons in the early hours of the morning for a lot of different characters Dragon Age: The Veil Guardianand I was ready to hear a real sentence from Rook’s mouth. I was excited to laugh out loud at it, take a screenshot for my friends, and move on. Instead, I found my Rook saying lots of nice, supportive things to her new, hot acquaintances.
Veil Guardian strikes a best-of-both-worlds middle ground between the more overt romantic excesses of previous games. And doesn’t get me into social trouble just because I’m vulnerable and nice to my companions. Is flirting like this in real life? As mentioned, I’m not in a particularly good position to know. What I can say with certainty is that it’s exactly the kind of gradual evolution in romance storytelling that I’d like to see in a new BioWare RPG. New developments in world building, new developments in gameplay and, yes, new developments in making out.
