BioWare art lead Matt Rhodes just keeps sharing explosive Dragon Age development details and alternate storylines on Twitter, all with accompanying concept art to boot. This latest revelation might just beat murdering Origins' Sten in a draft version of the Trespasser DLC—it seems BioWare considered bringing our Origins protagonist back for The Veilguard, but they would have been sickened and horribly disfigured by the Grey Wardens' Blight-based Calling.
Rhodes shared a few concept pieces of the Anderfels region of Thedas, home to the Wardens' Weisshaupt Fortress and the Hossberg Wetlands zone of Veilguard. The third piece is the really shocking one, showing a cloaked figure wrapped in bandages, their skin mottled and purple-grey where exposed. They're sitting on a throne with a Warden bodyguard posted behind them, and this character no longer seems able to speak, instead relying on a quill and stack of parchments to communicate. They're holding one such message up to the viewer: "Don't let her see me like this."
"Nobody else seemed to like the 'leper king' direction, but I thought it'd be cool," Rhodes wrote in the caption, referencing the historical Baldwin of Jerusalem who was memorably depicted by Edward Norton in Kingdom of Heaven and also inspired the Leper in Darkest Dungeon. "The Hero of Ferelden has been putting off 'The Calling.' The Blight takes more each year, but there's still too much to do on the surface."
This would have been an absolute bombshell if it had made it into The Veilguard. Dragon Age's Blight-fighting Grey Wardens take a little nibble of the stuff to get their powers. It means they're able to kill Archdemons, but it also starts a roughly 20-year countdown until they hear The Calling and start transforming into maddened ghouls. Once it looks like their ticket's been punched, a Warden's supposed to travel underground to the Darkspawn's home turf and go out fighting. In Inquisition, world state codex stuff had the Hero of Ferelden out looking for a cure for The Calling—it's why they weren't around to help out.
Clearly, things didn't fully work out in this iteration of Veilguard's story. Rhodes doesn't say explicitly, but it seems like our Origins hero also would have been First Warden of the order in this scenario—in the final game, the Wardens are led by a bellicose chap straight out of central casting for an obstructionist police commissioner and voiced by none other than Nicholas Boulton, Hawke's actor from Dragon Age 2.
And like the prospect of Sten getting blown up in Trespasser, this fate for our Origins hero would have been a megaton bummer but also rad as hell. The "don't let her see me" message in particular is so goddamn heart-wrenching—it presumably refers to Morrigan, the hero's friend and companion even if they never entered a relationship. The hero's disfigurement and silence would also have elided questions of player customization and voicing a previously silent protagonist—even if you played a dwarf, this presumably came at a time in development where world states were still on the table, and could have been addressed with a cheeky shortened model.
I'm basically a net neutral on this not having made it into the final game. On the one hand, while I really loved Veilguard, its version of Thedas definitely lacks a lot of the strife, edge, and tragedy from previous games. Seeing the Hero of Ferelden like this would have been utterly chilling and unforgettable. On the flip side, it might have stuck out like a sore thumb in the swashbuckling, D&D podcast-core game we wound up getting. I can blissfully pretend my Origins Warden (City Elf Rogue, romanced Morrigan) is out doing errands for the Witch of the Wilds, maybe delivering a care package to their adult son who used to be a demon god while he attends Redcliffe University, home of the Fightin' Mabari.
This isn't the first time BioWare considered doing something utterly heinous to our Origins characters: In an early draft of Dragon Age: Inquisition's Here Lies the Abyss quest, we would have had to choose whether the Hero of Ferelden or Dragon Age 2's Hawke gets lost forever in another dimension.
