Dragon Age: The Veilguardwas almost a very different game, and likely wouldn’t have even been called Dragon Age: The Veilguard if it had launched during one of its previous iterations. Over the course of its development, the company went through several drafts, but we can still see traces ofthe Veilguard gangwe would come to know in the concept art.
Yet there is one companion we can see in these pieces that never made it into the final game: Calpernia. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because she was actually inDragon Age: Inquisition, appearing in the story if you recruited the Templars. We already knew that she was considered as a potential companion, but we now have a piece of concept art that shows her with the rest of the Veilguard crew, suggesting that she was in a draft of the story for quite some time.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard Concept Art Shows Calpernia And Early Versions Of The Companions
This piece was shared by Dragon Age artist Matt Rhodes,who often shares scrapped concepts for a fourth Dragon Age game. Here, we can see earlier versions of Davrin, Taash, Lucanis, and possibly Lace Harding. The other figure that we can clearly make out might not be obvious at first, but she looks just like the version of Calpernia that we saw in another piece of concept art.
What immediately jumps out at us here is her prosthetic leg. This suggests that her design was reused for Neve once Calpernia was scrapped, since she also sports a prominent prosthetic.
Previous concept art gave us a look at a few other companions that never made the cut, but it’s interesting that Calpernia is featured here alongside those we could recruit in The Veilguard. From this, we can assume that she made it fairly far in at least one draft of the story, most likely the first one, which had to be cancelled whenBioWarewas told to make Dragon Age 4 a live service. This is backed up by Rhodes dating it as being from 2016, a year before the original vision for Dragon Age 4 was cancelled.
When the live service version of the sequel was in development, world state imports would have been incredibly limited - or even completely absent from the game. This would have made it very hard to have Calpernia as a companion, since her actions prior to The Veilguard would have been influenced by our decisions in Inquisition. It’s possible that this is why Calpernia was cut, although there is a chance that the writers simply wanted to go with a different Tevinter mage, since Calpernia and Neve have very different backgrounds.
This is far from the only reveal we’ve gotten from the concept art. Recently,Rhodes shared a design for a submarinewhich would have acted as our party camp.
