Dragon Age creator David Gaider has weighed in on the romance system that will be featured in the forthcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and it sounds like he’s not a fan of the way the game will handle relationships.
A few days ago, in an interview with IGN, The Veilguard director Corinne Busche confirmed that it will be possible to romance any companion you like in The Veilguard, in a manner similar to Baldur’s Gate 3 (with two notable exceptions in that case).
Now, Dragon Age: Origins writer and series creator David Gaider has given his thoughts on The Veilguard‘s romance system, and he’s less than pleased with it due to how he feels it limits character development.
In a rather refreshingly even-handed thread on X (formerly Twitter), Gaider says that he understands some Dragon Age fans will just want to romance “whoever they want”, and that not getting to do so is “tantamount to a slap in the face”.
Despite that, he says that making characters romanceable “limits the type of character they can be” insofar as they’ll always need to be “appealing” to the player, which restricts the writing team to only being able to tell certain types of stories.
Gaider says this is the reason Varric wasn’t romanceable in Dragon Age: Inquisition; making him a romance option would have “destroy[ed] his character”, according to Gaider.
Making any character romanceable by any player character destroys their “agencies”, according to Gaider, transforming them into “sex dolls” rather than fully-rounded people with their own stories to tell.
Gaider does, however, admit that his opinion is a “personal (and uncharitable) preference”, going on to say that if The Veilguard‘s writers “unapologetically lean into” romanceable characters, it “should be fine”.
He does also have some thoughts about Baldur’s Gate 3‘s romanceable companions, though, saying that several of the game’s characters “would have had a stronger arc” if they couldn’t be romanced.
We’ll have to wait and see whether Gaider’s worries come to pass in The Veilguard, but if you want to get a sense for how the game plays on a moment-to-moment level, you can check out our hands-off preview right here.
