Dragon Age: The Veilguard - The Companions

We caught up with BioWare's John Epler and Ashley Barlow after the Dragon Age: The Veilguard panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2024 to talk about how they brought the game's companions to life.

If you’ve played a Dragon Age game in the past, then you know a big part of the experience is your relationship with the companions that join you on your journey. So naturally there was a lot of buzz around the reveal of the companions that will be fighting by your side in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. While the new and returning companions were unveiled a week before San Diego Comic-Con, Bioware hosted a panel at the con to give gamers their first real close-up look at the personalities of the companions. I was able to attend the panel, and then afterwards spend a little time with John Epler (Dragon Age: The Veilguard Creative Director) and Ashley Barlow (Dragon Age: The Veilguard Creative Performance Director) to learn more about the companions’ personalities and what it took to bring them to life.

If you missed the companion reveal, you can find it here, but here’s a quick list:

• Harding, a dwarven scout returning from Dragon Age: Inquisition
• Davrin, a bold and charming Grey Warden
• Bellara, a creative and romantic Veil Jumper
• Neve, a private detective and a member of the Shadow Dragons
• Taash, a dragon hunter allied with the Lords of Fortune
• Emmrich, a necromancer of Nevarra's Mourn Watch
• Lucanis, an assassin who descends from the bloodline of the House of Crows

The panel featured both Epler and Barlow, as well as voice actors Zach Mendez (Lucanis), Jessica Clark (Neve), Nick Boraine (Emmrich), and Ali Hillis (Harding).

So why do the companions matter in Dragon Age? As Epler put it during the panel:

“It's a game built on some core principles of being who you want to be, in a world worth saving, and with characters who matter. So, again, companions always have a heart of Dragon Age, they're at the heart of this one as well.”

”What's really fascinating, what I really love to see come out through the game and through this development, is the way these characters form relationships not just with you, but with each other. So, whereas sometimes characters maybe don't interact as much, each one of these has a relationship that extends beyond Rook, the protagonist. But also some become friends, some become lovers, and some become rivals. And it's just the way that they learn to get over their differences or put them aside has really been fun and exciting, because they all represent a different part of the world, they say.”

After the panel, I was able to learn a bit more about the game’s companions from John Epler and Ashley Barlow.

GT: In Veilguard you have a mix of returning characters and new companions - how did you determine who gets to come back and who doesn't?

JE: Honestly, it really comes down to fan response in a lot of cases. We see who resonates with the fans, but it also has to be a character that a writer wants to bring back. In the case of Harding, Harding's writer really wanted to do more with her as a character, but also we saw the reaction to Scout Harding in Inquisition, even with the very limited flirts that you had with her, and it's like, well, this feels like a pretty natural character to bring back.

GT: What went into the process of creating the new companions? Did you start with a huge list and have to whittle down, or did you already have in mind who you wanted?

JE: It's a little bit of both. Honestly, the companions serve the story, serve the game we're building, so we figure out what we want the main story to be, we figure out kind of what we want the structure to be, and then we find characters that fit. And again, much as with Harding, it has to be a character that somebody is interested in bringing to the forefront, so as an example of Bellara, we knew we needed a character who was an expert in ancient elven magic. Who Bellara became, though, is much more of a collaborative process, so it comes down to the art, it's the actors as well, though.

AB: And the performance, when I got it in my hand, it was already whittled down to the core companions, so it was easier to take those descriptions and take that artwork, and you could see the ensemble form.

JE: So Harding being the only veteran companion coming back, we knew that, okay, who's going to play off of her, what juxtaposes, who's going to get along with her, who would she romance to, just as far as casting goes.

GT: So it sounds like personality goes a lot into this in determining who makes the cut. How do you balance that with their abilities, because when you get down to it you need them to fight for you, right?

JE: Yeah. I mean, it's, again, what you said about balance, you always want to make sure that one of the things that we learned previously is we never want you to feel forced to take a character you maybe don't love because they're the only ones that can do X and only ones that can do Y, but at the same time you don't want each character to feel a cookie cutter version of each other in terms of abilities and combat.

So we start with a cast and then we kind of look at, okay, what's our balance in terms of class, abilities, style of gameplay, and find the ones that make sense.

And in some cases, I mean, the case of the Veilguard, we have seven companions, so obviously it's not going to be an even balance between Rogue, Mage, and Warrior, but that's where we start blending them.

So for example, Harding is very much a Rogue-focused character, range-focused, whereas someone like Nav is a very, more specifically based around Ice Magic, but then you've got characters like Ballara, who's kind of a combination, a little bit of Rogue, a little bit of Mage, same thing with a character like Tosh.

And you find these opportunities to make the gameplay balance work around the characters you build.

GT: So you mentioned how you were selecting characters based on how they would interact - were there any that you were so in love with their personalities that you decided, okay, we'll just make it work with the other characters?

JE: Well, I think that's the interesting thing is, again, it's not just about them getting along sometimes. It's about the conflict and the contrast between them.

AB: Yeah, you mean with casting, falling in love with an actor or something, and how they portrayed it. With Jessica, she didn't tell this story, but she originally auditioned for a different role. So I guess in that way, we're like, this is a powerhouse Amazon woman. She needs to be part of our hero's journey.

GT: So when you cast the personalities, obviously you're picking people you feel embodies each companion, but do the actors ever bring out aspects of the personality that made you think, oh, I never saw this side of this character, especially with the writing that we've been provided?

JE: It's not in a box. Like it's not, it's limitless. It is limitless. And you know, like any hero's journey, like it's vast, and they get to play all facets of being a human. We're not shying away from their anger, sadness, ugliness, the things that annoy them.

I think also character creation is a conversation. It's again, it's not just the writing and the actor. It's also the art. It's also the gameplay. But as we start to work more with these actors and you find out different ways that they approach their lines, maybe they have a different tone, a different timber to their character that you didn't expect. We move forward and the writing changes as well. So again, that's why I think for us, it's always been the best characters are a collaborative thing.

You don't just write a script, put it in front of an actor and say, do this, you write, as Ash said, we create some lines, we start creating the character, then we start casting them.

And once we cast them, you know, that's when we really figure out who the character is in a way that I think you don't necessarily get if you just give them a script and say, that's good, do this.

But again, bouncing between us, bouncing with the actors, you find these aspects of their personality that you maybe didn't even expect to find.

AB: And then the other interesting thing is too, when they start working with each other, and you know, obviously banter is a huge part of the Dragon Age games, as these characters start bantering with each other, you find these interaction points, you feel like, oh, I never even thought about that element of this character.

JE: Let's dig deep into that. I mean, I wrote Bulara, one of my favorites is how Bulara and Emrick have this almost student professor relationship that kind of evolves over the course of the game. And that wasn't something that originally existed. But as we started building this character, like, oh yeah, this makes sense. And it becomes this part of her character, a part of his character as well.

GT: So it sounds like it's really collaborative with the voice actors. They're almost set to be involved in a long part of the process. You're not just bringing them in to record lines and then thank you, bye kind of thing, right?

AB: We really build somewhat of a family vibe, like we're working together, we have a friendship. The most important thing in the booth to me is that we can mess up, try things, get it wrong, get it right, have an open dialogue for how we feel. You know, my job mainly is to just give the actor context, feed them images, feed them writing.

John will come in, give them backstory. And if they have questions or concerns, if they don't believe it, no one else is.

JE: Well, I think that's exactly, and I love what you said there, because I think I love when an actor tells us that this actually doesn't make sense for this character because it shows an investment and an understanding of the characters. I mean, we're not just, the writers on the project aren't just writing the companions, we're writing villains, we're writing other characters. So sometimes we are a little bit, we have to remove ourselves from these companions a little bit. And then the actors come and they're reading and like, I know that you're doing this, but I think if you went this way, it would make way more sense. But I mean, as Ashley said, there's a collaboration, almost a family vibe to you.

I've met a lot of these actors for the first time this weekend, and it's just been so amazing to get to know these people who have voiced these characters and meet them as people and learn who they are because I think, again, the best work comes from these environments where everybody feels like they can explore creatively in a way that you don't necessarily get when you don't have that connection with them.

GT: Have they added any ad-libbed lines where you though, that's fantastic, we got to put that in the game?

AB: We get the scripts and so the writers are holding it all in their heads. They know the world, they know the lore better than anyone. I'm not, I'm a director, I'm not a writer, they can hold it.

I'm the first audience with the actor and oftentimes, because of the vastness of this world and the dialogue, the actors are seeing it at the same time I'm seeing it, sometimes for the first time, and we're working it out in booths together.

And I've had even Lucanus say, you know, Lucanus' accent, it lends itself better to this word rather than this and they just stopped using the word altogether.

We all want to believe what we're hearing and if they add hums, ha's, I say take out the punctuation if you need to, just take some liberties and luckily the writers are just like so open to working together because we all know, maybe people who aren't.

GT: How difficult is it in a game that's so dynamic in which the player controls a lot of the relationships? How hard is it for the actors to say lines that exist on different relationship pathways?

JE: It's challenging. It's for sure challenging because in one conversation and the way we build our conversations, you can have two very different versions of the same dialogue and each one has to draw from a specific context that has happened earlier in the story.

So you make a choice with a character, you'll go into a later conversation and one version will be you made choice A, the other version will be choice B and they'll have to put themselves into both of those shoes like, okay, remember that this character, you know, said this to you and it made you feel this way.

Oh, but here's the other version where they said something different and made you feel the complete opposite.

Writing it is challenging for sure and I think branching dialogue is one place where games writing becomes the most difficult, but it's also in my mind the most rewarding because it gives players that feeling of involvement that you don't necessarily get in more linear media such as film, TV and that sort of thing.

AB: Yeah, we really have to slow down in the booth when those those big scenes and branching dialogue with the different kind of pronouns and etc. depending on what follower you're bringing and I basically draw a line from the top line and we form one path at a time down to the end of the scene and just get a grasp of it and we'll do it again. We just have to kind of take our time with those.

GT: So do you record all of those path lines? AB: Yeah, we record it. Like I'll read if someone else isn't in, I'll read with the actor and we just got to get through it once. Once we get it, oh, we can get a picture and the visuals start to come. We understand the flow of the writing and then we can go back and do it again.

GT: Thank you for your time, we look forward to playing the game!

JE: Thank you so much!

AB: That was fantastic – I enjoyed speaking with you!