Dragon Age: The Veilguard makes me flirt like I’m extremely cold

BioWare RPGS have earned a reputation for extensive world-building, complex characters, and difficult choices. Not to mention the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises’ knack for building on science fiction and fantasy tropes and remixing them into full-fledged developments of those genres. But we can’t forget that BioWare is also praised for having great characters to cuddle with!

Dragon Age: The Veil Guardthe latest installment in the Dragon Age franchise, is no different from its predecessors in this regard, but it strikes me that it has evolved from previous BioWare games in at least one way: it lets me flirt like a normal person. .

(Ed. remark: This piece contains some mild spoilers for the first act of Dragon Age: The Veil Guard.)

This may be a bold statement from someone who has admitted to this publication that he doesn’t know how to flirt, but hear me out. All the early game flirt options I’ve seen Veil Guard They’re nice, relaxing things to say to someone you like but don’t know very well. That may seem like faint praise, but let’s take a little tour of some of the most outrageous flirting options in BioWare games.

Dragon Age and Mass Effect didn’t always have flirt options that were labeled as flirty in the UI. Instead, you had to uphold your companion’s approval and infer what counted as 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 friendly sympathy, the game counted that as flirting. Even if you didn’t show any overt signs of intimate affection, Kaidan would eventually get mad at you for leading him on, which, suffice it to say, didn’t endear me. Someone should be able to say to a guy, “Hey man, that really sounds like it’s stupid,” without it being taken as a relationship commitment.

Dragon Age 2 was the first Dragon Age game to utilize the now standard BioWare conversation wheel, which explicitly sets tone, clarification questions, and of course whether a line mechanically counts toward the game’s romance storylines. Dragon Age 2 is also the game where – after Anders tells you that since he invited a spirit of righteousness to indwell him, he has no idea where his personality ends and begins – a clever player character can flippantly say: Well, at least the demon has a hot body. The game’s animation did not support suggestive eyebrow movements, but this is believed to be implied.

And while DA2‘s Merrill, a sweet mage who has just moved to a human town for the first time after her elven clan disowns her, is one of my favorite characters in the entire game. I’ve never had a romance with her. That’s because I never figured out how your first opportunity to flirt with her happens immediately after she tells you that you’re the only person she knows. Dragon Age 2! Right now Merrill needs more friends! She doesn’t need me trying to break!

When I was growing up Dragon Age: The Veil Guard‘s relatively normal flirting options, my colleague Petrana laughed and immediately remembered a conversation with Cullen, your military advisor in Dragon Age: Inquisition. It’s not the first time you should express your affection for him, but this early flirtation involves looking him in the eyes and ask if he is celibate. I can safely call that an HR violation.

This is all why I was ready for Rook, the player character of Dragon Age: The Veil Guardto enter the arena of love with, well, a certain person progressiveness. Instead, I was impressed by Rook’s genuine calm.

Bellara, the absent-minded but dedicated researcher, apologizes for her talk, and a flirty Rook is able to tell her that they enjoy seeing her enthusiasm. They can tell Taash that they enjoy traveling together. There were a few times where I chose the flirt option just because I thought it would be fun to say. Since the days of Ol’ Friend Zone Kaidan, BioWare has updated the dialogue wheel to provide explicit indications of when romantic dialogue options open up and establish romantic storylines. And thank goodness! I’m not trying to hug Lucanis on this flight, but I am Doing I want to talk to him about whether he’s okay with being alone with the demon in his head. He has been through a lot!

Options did get tastefully hornier later, like when my Rook said to a companion, “I think your fingers are perfect,” and, “Wow, in my daydreams you’re leaning over me here and punching the wall.” As it should be – my Rook knows these characters better now, so she has built trust and, perhaps more importantly, a mood.

I pressed a lot of flirt buttons for a lot of different characters in the early hours Dragon Age: The Veil Guardand I was ready to hear a real doozy of line fall out of Rook’s mouth. I was looking forward to having a healthy laugh about it, taking a screenshot for my friends and moving on. Instead, I noticed that my Rook said a lot of nice, supportive things to her new, nice acquaintances.

Veil Guard achieves the best of both worlds among the more overt romantic excesses of previous games, And doesn’t get me into social hot water because I’m only vulnerable and kind to my companions. Is this what flirting is like in real life? As previously 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 incremental evolution of 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 cuddling.