Veilguard is the first triple-A game to handle gender identity well

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. If you want to go in totally blind, click now.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard opens with the most comprehensive character creator we’ve ever seen. In addition to the millions of regular permutations possible for your player character, Rook, there are options to create a non-binary or trans character. Veilguard gives you options for top surgical scars, they/they pronouns, and various sliders to modify your body exactly the way you want it. Bumps, bottoms, breasts, and more are all finely adjustable, and their inclusion is just one part of the many ways the game handles gender identity better than any other triple-A game to date.

Trans and nonbinary characters benefit from additional conversation options where appropriate, providing insight from a person’s lived experiences with different genders in situations that feel authentic and well-executed. This isn’t a character who inserts his identity into every conversation, he’s only there where it makes sense, and he’s always treated with shocking elegance for a triple-A game. These extra choices come into play the most when working through the personal quest line of Taash, the Veil Guard’s resident Qunari dragon slayer.

Taash is a character torn between two different worlds. Born of a strict and faithful Qunari mother and brought to Rivain at a young age, the noble dragon hunter doesn’t quite feel Rivainian or Qunari. After years spent isolated from most of society, in part due to his rare ability to breathe fire, Taash enters the Veilguard when the team needs a dragon hunter, and not long after, a realization hits: Taash doesn’t it feels like a woman and doesn’t feel like a man. A few chats with the team and that sentiment is paired with one word – Taash is non-binary.

The rest of Taash’s story is a mix of dragon hunting and Qunari secrets being revealed, but the bottom line is their struggle with this achievement. We see Taash worry about how being non-binary interacts with their twin cultures, what words to use for themselves, and what the team thinks about it all. Most of all, though, they worry about how their mother will take it.

Scattered throughout the game are notes written by Taash while dealing with all of this. A visit to other trans and non-binary characters in the game – of which there are quite a few – sees Taash taking notes as those characters explain what it means to be trans and non-binary. It’s a concept largely foreign to Qunari and Rivainian culture and belief, and even when they know how they feel inside, there’s still a lot to learn. That note ends with a poignant finale, in which another character assures them that what they feel is valid, no matter what anyone else thinks, and no matter when they learned the words to describe that feeling.

It’s a note that brought tears to my eyes because I was in Taash’s position. I also have a complicated relationship with sex, and when I finally learned how to describe that feeling, it was a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. But it also made life a lot more complicated—I had so much to learn, so much to process, and so many questions I couldn’t answer on my own. It was my friends and loved ones who got me through it, and in The Veilguard, Taash’s friends and loved ones do the same for them. It’s authentic and messy and raw, and there’s no doubt in my mind that it was written by a non-binary person.

Another note shows Taash drafting a speech to tell their strict, religious mother that they are non-binary. They run through a dozen possibilities, dismissing each one as something that simply couldn’t pass. At the bottom of the page, they settle on a direct approach:

“I’m non-binary. It means I am not male or female. I use ‘they’ instead of ‘she’ now.”

I won’t spoil exactly how that conversation ultimately goes, but it’s a powerful and heartbreaking moment that many queer people will recognize and sympathize with. It’s one of many in Taash’s story, and being able to step in as someone with lived trans or nonbinary experience, to offer advice and guidance, is a nice touch. You get to be the older queer that every young queer hopes for, offering a way forward when nothing makes sense inside.

It’s a story with the best intentions, told well and without restraint, something extremely rare for a triple-A game. BioWare has addressed queer stories in the past, even in the Dragon Age series—Dorian’s personal struggles as a gay man in Inquisition come to mind—but The Veilguard takes it a step further by unashamedly and shamelessly naming one of its characters the most compellingly non-binary and following a story that isn’t afraid to pull its punches.

That’s not to say The Veilguard perfectly handles everything on the LGBTQ+ spectrum. Having every romantic character be romanced by a player of any gender expression—the sex player, as it’s often called by players—is a small step back from Inquisition and its predecessors. A story like Dorian’s couldn’t be told in The Veilguard, and while Taash’s story is more than a suitable alternative, it’s a little disappointing that no romantic characters in the game are explicitly gay or lesbian. I am exactly what you want me to be.

But that’s not entirely BioWare’s fault either. When your character’s creator allows for such depth when it comes to gender identity, you have to ask a lot of thorny questions about how to handle sexuality. Would it make sense for a gay man to fall in love with a non-binary person who presents as feminine? It happens all the time in real life, but making every gay character attracted to every non-binary character would feel a little cheap in a game like this. The result is an inelegant solution to a good problem to have — Veilguard is so good at representing gender identity that it can’t do everything perfectly.

But with how well Taash is handled throughout the game and the options given to players to represent their identities in-game, any minor quibbles fall by the wayside. After decades of triple-A game development, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the first to finally live up to its proper gender identity, and that’s a solid win if nothing else.