BioWare RPGS have earned a reputation for expansive world-building, complex characters, and difficult choices. And that’s 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 advancements of those genres. But it should not be forgotten that BioWare is also lauded for having great characters to smooch!
Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the latest installment in the Dragon Age franchise, is no different in this regard than its predecessors, but I can’t help noticing that it has evolved from previous BioWare games in at least one way: It lets me flirt like a normal fucking person.
[Ed. note: This piece contains some mild spoilers for the first act of Dragon Age: The Veilguard.]
This might be a bold statement from someone who has admitted, in this very publication, that they don’t know how to flirt, but hear me out. All of the early game flirt options I’ve seen in Veilguard are nice, chill things to say to someone you like but don’t know very well. That might seem like faint praise, but let’s take a little tour of some of the most outrageous flirt options in BioWare games.
Dragon Age and Mass Effect didn’t always have flirt options that were labeled in the UI as flirtatious — instead, you’d have to simply keep your companion approval high and infer what counted as signaling your intentions. That was not always easy.
During a conversation in the first Mass Effect game, for instance, your colleague Kaidan confesses his struggles with debilitating migraines (a side effect of his telekinetic abilities). If a female Shepard player character made the dialogue choice to express gentle sympathy, the game counted that as flirting. Even if you made no overt signs of intimate affection, Kaidan would eventually get pissed at you for leading him on, which, suffice to say, did not endear me. A person should be able to tell a guy, “Hey man, that really sounds like it sucks,” without it being taken as a relationship commitment.
Dragon Age 2 was the first Dragon Age game to use the now-standard BioWare conversation wheel, which explicitly indicates tone, clarification questions, and, of course, whether a line mechanically counts toward the game’s romance plotlines. Dragon Age 2 is also the game where — after Anders tells you that since inviting a spirit of Justice to inhabit him, he has no idea where his personality ends and its begins — a smart-mouthed player character can flippantly quip, Well, at least the demon’s got a hot bod. The game’s animation did not support suggestive eyebrow wiggling, but one presumes it is implied.
And while DA2’s Merrill, a sweet mage who’s just moved into a human city for the first time after her elven clan disowned her, is one of my favorite characters in the whole game, I’ve never romanced her. That’s because I’ve never been able to get over how your first opportunity to flirt with her happens immediately after she tells you you’re the only person she knows. Dragon Age 2! Right now, Merrill needs more friends! She doesn’t need me trying to smash!
When I brought up Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s comparatively normal flirt options, my co-worker Petrana laughed and immediately remembered a conversation with Cullen, your military advisor in Dragon Age: Inquisition. It’s not the first moment you have to signal your affection for him, but this early flirt involves looking him in the eyes and asking him if he’s celibate. I can confidently call that an HR violation.
This is all why I was ready for Rook, the player character of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, to step forward into the arena of love with, well, a certain forwardness. Instead, I was wowed by Rook’s earnest cool.
Bellara, the scatterbrained but dedicated researcher, apologizes for rambling, and a flirtatious Rook can tell her that they like seeing her enthusiasm. They can tell Taash they enjoy traveling together. There were a couple times I chose a flirt option just because it seemed like the nice thing to say. Since the days of Ol’ Friend Zone Kaidan, BioWare has updated the dialogue wheel to give explicit indications of when romantic dialogue options open up and lock in romance plotlines. And thank goodness! I’m not trying to smooch Lucanis on this run, but I do want to check in with him about whether he’s OK being alone with the demon in his head. He’s been through a lot!
Options did get tastefully hornier later, like when my Rook told a companion, “I think your fingers are perfect,” and, “Wow, in my daydreams, this is where you lean over me and slap the wall.” As they should — my Rook knows these characters better now, so she’s established trust and, maybe more importantly, a vibe.
I hit a lot of flirt buttons for a lot of different characters in the early hours of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and I was ready to hear a real doozy of a 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 found my Rook saying a ton of nice, supportive things to her new, hot acquaintances.
Veilguard hits a best-of-both-worlds middle ground between the more overt romantic excesses of previous games, and doesn’t get me in social hot water for just being vulnerable and nice to my companions. Is this what flirting is like in real life? As previously stated, I’m not in a particularly good position to know. What I can say for certain is that it’s exactly the kind of incremental evolution of romance storytelling that I like to see in a new BioWare RPG. New developments in world-building, new developments in gameplay, and, yes, new developments in smooching.
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