Once upon a time (read: 1998) there was a nerdy teen who was obsessed with the game series Quest for Glory. The fifth game in that series was coming out that December, and this series had the ability to import your character from the previous games so that you had a leg up. This mostly mattered in terms of stats (both your character sheet stats as well as spells), with decisions you previously made not really a factor since the games didn’t offer much in the way of deciding how an outcome took shape. You were the big damn hero, which meant heroic conclusions to quests (though you might be more sneaky in how you got there). This nerdy teen proceeded to make import files for each of the games’ four classes, spending hours grinding out the stats and spells (which improved with use).

Adult me sees this behavior and recognizes a similar excitement in the lead up to Dragon Age: The Veilguard, but with neither the inclination nor time to spend quite so much time in creating various world states for the series. Partially because I have wider access to a number of different media, and partially because world state decisions are not to have such an outsize impact in this new entry in the series. The boyfriend can also only handle so much excited gushing on my part as I explain theories and the lore.

Thanks to similarly excited Dragon Age nerds, I have had the pleasure of playing the Dragon Age TTRPG. It has taught me very quickly that there are lots of things I consider in creating tabletop characters that isn’t quite wholly addressed in the videogames themselves (or might be a passing note in the codices or some overheard banter between either companions or NPCs). What does theater in Thedas look like and at what stage of development is it? What grains and vegetables are available in the varying regions of this continent’s countries? Why does Nevarra not have its own language, and how does its fairly recent clashes with Orlais factor into their national identity? My tabletop character is a Nevarran playwright, skilled in music and rhyme, and traveling about trying to better understand the world so that the Nevarran hero worship pageants are not the only type of play they create. They’re non-binary.

While I may not be playing the entire Dragon Age series from Origins to Inquisition in preparation for Veilguard, I am replaying Inquisition with a new character to both see things I haven’t before, and to bring things to the forefront of my mind that I may well have forgotten (it’s been a decade since that game released, after all). What I’ve found is that it is my personal least favorite of the series. I am neither a fan of of its main villain or how it feels to play. I hate the combat. The exploration of vast, largely empty spaces doesn’t particularly thrill me. There are enough further smaller gripes that make the experience not particularly pleasurable (why is Power even a resource beyond early game gating?). Thankfully I can mod a lot of my gripes away and move on with the story.

Which I do like! Each of Inquisition’s DLC offer self-contained maps with their own story, providing lore nerds like myself tons to geek out about with fellow lore nerds. The companions, as with most BioWare games, are a stand out, and even when I don’t agree with them (Vivienne and Sera, meet Carver), I appreciate their learning about their viewpoints and how they are written. While Power may feel like a useless gating mechanism to me, I like the idea in theory, offering a glimpse into this massive organization my Inquisitor is building and how they are affecting southern Thedosian politics (particularly once you get to the Trespasser DLC).

My latest Inquisitor is a former member of the Carta who has changed as the game progresses, with decisions I was certain I was going to make changing along the way so that it fit better the person he has become. His romance with the Iron Bull feels very much like an introduction to a safe and respectful relationship founded on BDSM and kink. Where initially this Inquisitor was far more cruel and doled out particularly harsh punishments, as he discovered a wide variety of cultures and a degree of power, he found he wanted to exercise it with a softer hand, giving more thought to Josephine’s lessons on soft power. He came to better understand how to better mesh his own Carta backgroundto work with both Leliana and Iron Bull to play at espionage and intrigue.

For me part of the magic of the Dragon Age setting has been that each game has a new character. While world states certainly inform the world in which those characters are living, breathing, and interacting, they are still responding to the here and now. I can imagine the nightmare that three games’ worth of decisions would be to account for when writing this series, so going into Veilguard’s three decisions to import I know that the world states I do have will still inform my Rook, even if there aren’t callbacks to them in-game. Their examples of heroism in the Heroes of Fereldan (HoF), Hawkes, and Inquisitors will still ring true as stories of which they are aware. But those are decisions I get to make regardless of how the game acknowledges them.

So! Going into Veilguard I am no longer that excited teenage self who played an entire four-game series four times over just to have everything prepared. I am instead an adult who is grateful for a game series where I can play multiple times and never have to play a straight person unless I absolutely want to. I can say goodbye to the real-time with pause style of combat that I hated with Baldur’s Gate the first and never particularly grew to like in the decades that followed. I can make non-binary characters who won’t really reflect my own experience with being non- binary, but are characters whose headspace I want to occupy for a bit to see Thedas from their point of view. BioWare games have tended to allow me to feel like I am an actor stepping on to the stage, a metaphor I particularly like for approaching any roleplaying. It’s about collaboration, whether that’s at a table with friends, or with the developers of a more pre-defined story.