Michael Beckwith 
BioWare has revealed that it has dropped its Dragon Age Keep system for the upcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard, meaning players can’t transfer their saves, story, or characters from the previous games. That doesn’t mean their past work in the games won’t matter, though.
Dragon Age Keep dropped in 2014 to accompany Dragon Age: Inquisition. While fans couldn’t bring over their player characters from the previous games, key choices they made during the story could be emulated thanks to Dragon Age Keep. This allowed the world of Inquisition to line up with players’ previous decisions in Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2.
One would hope BioWare would keep this for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, but the studio has confirmed this isn’t the case. However, it has explained its reasoning for ditching Dragon Age Keep and what it’s done to replace it.
Why won’t Dragon Age: The Veilguard have Dragon Age Keep?
Dragon Age Keep will not be a part of The Veilguard, with BioWare opting to integrate facets of Keep into the new game directly.
This marks a big change for BioWare. Past long-running series by the studio allowed players to transfer past progress to influence their game world in some way. Mass Effect let players import save data across each game. This allowed for story decisions and even their own custom Commander Shepard to start and end the story. Dragon Age Inquisiton lacked this feature but let players use Dragon Age Keep to tailor their world.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard will have neither save transfers nor Dragon Age Keep to let players bring forward their characters, story, and world.
Speaking at a creator roundtable, and reported on by PCGamesN, game director Corinne Bushe and creative director John Epler gave an explanation for why Dragon Age: The Veilguard won’t have Dragon Age Keep functionality. Their reasons were two-fold.
Firstly, Veilguard is set in the northern parts of the world of Thedas. With things so far removed from the settings of the previous games, past events aren’t going to have had as much of an impact. Secondly, it’s been a decade since Dragon Age: Inquisition. There’s a good chance even diehard fans of the series won’t entirely remember all the choices they made.
“For us, the core philosophy was that we want you to make choices that matter; choices that we can actually reflect…We really wanted to focus on decisions we knew would matter; that we knew we could do something interesting with,” Epler said.
That being said, players will still be able to shape the world to their liking. BioWare has incorporated a new system into the game to accommodate this.
Can you transfer save, story, or characters from Dragon Age: Inquisiton into The Veilguard?
Players will not be able to directly transfer their save, story, or character data from past games into Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Instead, they can make in-game choices regarding the previous games that are reflected in the world of The Veilguard.
Simply put, players will be given choices that are meant to replicate ones from the previous games. These, in turn, impact the state of the world. Busche described it as an onboarding tool since it can not only help longtime players remember their previous choices, but help newcomers catch up too.
“If I’m a player that doesn’t remember, or hasn’t played, the past games, you’re going to see those choices – those beautiful tarot cards – with all the context of what they meant and why they mattered,” he explained.
This more streamlined experience sounds like a fair compromise that should benefit all players. How effective it will be at recreating prior story decisions won’t be known until The Veilguard is in peoples’ hands.
It also makes sense for BioWare to take this approach for story choices since it’s done something very similar with bringing over Inquisition’s main character; the Inquisitor. As a reminder, The Veilguard features a brand new protagonist, Rook, but the Inquisitor is set to return in some form. While players can’t directly import their version of the Inquisitor, BioWare previously revealed they will get the opportunity to recreate them at some point in The Veilguard.
