Yet more artwork created during the development ofDragon Age: The Veilguardhas been released, giving us another look at what could have been. Here, we see unused locations, such as a dwarven embassy and the centre of Thedas. We also have unused character posters, which were presumably supposed to be part of the game’s marketing.
As usual, fans love the look of these designs, and are gutted that we’re only seeing them now, afterthe game underperformedanddevelopers lost their jobs. It especially stings after a report from Bloomberg confirmed what many of us suspected -Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s development was chaotic, and devs reportedly fought withEAto get the time they needed to improve the game.
Here’s Some More Unused Artwork For Dragon Age: The Veilguard
As spotted by RPG content creator Kala Elizabeth, these pieces were just shared on ArtStation. They come from Volta, a studio thatBioWareoutsourced some art projects to during The Veilguard’s development. As we can see here, they were brought on to create images that highlight each companion (plus Solas and Varric), as well as some environments.
Volta also designed many of the icons and art pieces we see in the UI, so much of their work did make it into the gmae.
While the character posters don’t give us anything new, they are utterly gorgeous, and it’s a mystery why BioWare or EA never rolled them out as part of the marketing campaign. It’s possible that they wanted to avoid another mishap like the initial reveal trailer, which also focused on every new companion - although I’d argue that this wasn’t the reason why the trailer was so unpopular. Rather, it was the tone of the trailer and the fact that it revealed an unpopular new artstyle.
Now, the environmental artwork does tell us a bit more. For starters, this is much more detailed and refined thanthe environment concept art we’ve seen in the past, suggesting that these locations made it much further into development. If so, then there may have been plans for us to journey to many more locations, even the centre of Thedas itself. It’s interesting that there’s a dragon under there - perhaps this explains where they were after the people of Thedas assumed they had been hunted to extinction.
But of course, we’ll never know now. The Dragon Age series is presumably on ice, andnone of the writers who worked on the series are at BioWare anymore. According to a recent report, the team were shafted at every turn, given no time at all to turn a multiplayer version of The Veilguard into a single-player game, explaining many of the complaints fans had with it at launch.
