With series like Mass effect And Dragon AgeBioWare has made a name for itself as the studio where choices matter. These games have allowed players to import their choices from previous games to maintain a consistent state of the world that feels shaped to some degree by their actions. The process by which players do this has changed over the years. Mass effect Games that read your old save games and Dragon Age a separate app to design your world state for inquisition. Dragon Age: The Veilguard will handle this differently, so that you Make some important decisions in the character editor reflect the decisions taken in inquisition before embarking on your next journey. Despite all its obvious efforts to make players feel like their choices have lasting effects, BioWare’s track record in this regard is arguably a little patchy, and at times the studio has completely nullified the impact of key player decisions. At a preview event earlier this month, John Epler, Creative Director of the veil guardtalked a little about the studio’s philosophy in dealing with these decisions.
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During a Q&A with developers at publisher Electronic Arts’ Redwood City studio, an audience member asked how BioWare decides which decisions are canon when developing new games. Epler’s answer was refreshing: BioWare doesn’t want to undermine players’ choices.
“Honestly, we’re trying to avoid the idea of a single canon,” Epler said. “I mean, it’s a game about choices. This is a game about your choices as a player.” […] The philosophy is that we never want to invalidate your decisions. And if we feel like there’s nothing we can do that respects the decision we’ve made, we often just don’t necessarily point it out. […] We therefore do not want you to feel that your world is being devalued.”
Most The Veil Guardian takes place in the northern regions of the Dragon Age universe, whereas previous games were mainly set in southern areas such as the lands of Ferelden and Orlais. Therefore, Epler said that many of the decisions you made in previous games Dragon Age Games do not come into play, meaning the studio did not have to rewrite or undo decisions from your past adventures. This also applied to Mass Effect: Andromedaset in another galaxy and just asked you whether Commander Shepard, the protagonist of the first three games, was a man or a woman.
However, the term “canon” has taken on a different meaning in relation to both BioWare games and the wider video game fanbase. Some people refer to the “default state” you get when you boot up a game without changing anything as “canon”. However, this is a bit misleading and at least at BioWare, it sounds like a misunderstanding within the community. The Veil GuardianFor example, you can use your Inquisitor, the protagonist from Dragon Age: Inquisitionand import some decisions from previous games. When you start the character editor for the hero, The standard version is an elf woman. For long-time fans, this seems to be a reference to the only character who can romance Solas, the inquisition-party member-became-Veil Guardantagonist. But that’s just a default state for anyone who doesn’t want to change it to suit their own world state, and not a “canon” decision that BioWare deemed to be the “right” choice.
The studio recently worked on both The Veil Guardian and the upcoming fifth Mass effect Gamethere were concerns among some fans about how the studio would carry over decisions from previous games. While we still know very little about the next Mass effectWhen it was announced that Liara T’Soni, a character from the original trilogy, would be included, fans wondered if the next game would be a difficult decision about the state of the universe after Mass Effect 3‘s galaxy-changing ending. Some have suggested that an easy solution would be for BioWare to simply make a single decision and treat it as canon, but I’ve argued for years that anyone who says BioWare should just pick one ending for the sake of simplicity and make it canon isn’t 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 all stories and leave it at that.” So, as a longtime fan who has invested heavily in its characters and decisions, it’s reassuring to hear Epler say so clearly that this isn’t what the Dragon Age team. However, it is worth a closer look as BioWare’s implementation has been inconsistent.
Both Mass effect And Dragon Age have a habit of not necessarily directly contradicting the player’s choice, but certainly writing around it in such a way that what you did becomes largely irrelevant. Dragon Age II And inquisition Found ways to bring back party members like Anders and Leliana, even if they were supposedly killed in Origins. The team explicitly addresses these contradictions (Anders was simply presumed dead, Leliana was a ghost), but they were still sore points for those who made certain decisions in previous games. BioWare has also used assumed canon in spin-off materials such as comics, anime, and novels.
Mass effect was less egregious, but BioWare has found ways to circumvent player choice in the sequels, such as promoting Udina to human advisor in ME3 even if you didn’t nominate him at the end of the first game or still find ways to include Rachni enemies in ME3 even if they seemingly wiped out the space bug race two games earlier. Ultimately, I appreciate that BioWare makes this philosophy clear, I just hope it actually gets implemented when Dragon Age: The Veilguard starts on October 31and I especially hope that it will Dragon Age when the next Mass effect Game comes out sometime in the distant future.