BioWare art lead Matt Rhodes just keeps coming with the development revelations about the Dragon Age series. As reported by Eurogamer, Rhodes shared some pieces of concept art for Dragon Age: Inquisition's Trespasser DLC that show a different, even darker ending for the status quo-upending expansion.
"An earlier version of the story. Sten would arrive to arrest you for meddling with magic, but Dagna has reverse engineered their explosives," Rhodes wrote on Twitter to explain the series of four concept pieces. "You have a trap for when they return, sacrificing Skyhold in the process."
Trespasser already sees a ton of plot whammies, like the Inquisitor losing their hand (and powers), the Inquisition either disbanding or getting absorbed into the Chantry, and Iron Bull potentially betraying the party for the Qun. The literal destruction of your Normandy-style home base to go along with the political and symbolic death of the Inquisition would have been the icing on the cake.
But even crazier would have been the reappearance and subsequent death of Sten, one of my favorite companions not only of the Dragon Age series, but BioWare's entire back catalog of digital buddies. It's possible for Sten to die or even be missed by the player altogether in Dragon Age: Origins, but in the comics it's established that he helped save Ferelden before returning to his people and becoming the new Arishok, replacing the one we see in Dragon Age 2—ironically that would also mean "Sten" isn't even his name anymore, since that was his military rank. But come on, he's Sten.
As of The Veilguard, Stenishok survived the Antaam rebellion against him that figures prominently in the game's story, and he shows up in a few codex entries. The fact that he was once set to be a major antagonist in Inquisition, resulting in his spectacular death alongside the destruction of my home base, blows me away.
Like the choice to kill either the Warden from Origins or Hawke from DA2 that was ultimately cut from Inquisition, this would have been sick as hell, heartbreaking, and probably enough of a headache to implement that it makes sense the team moved in a different direction. The fact that Sten could have been dead via Dragon Age Keep world state complicates things, necessitating a stand-in body double like Grey Warden Stroud or any number of characters from Mass Effect 3. Inquisition was also BioWare's best-selling game, meaning that all those first time players would lack context for who Sten even is.
Part of me is relieved not to have had to betray my beloved bro in such a fashion, but I still would have loved to see him again—Rhodes' concept art shows a burned, partially disfigured Sten fuming in the Skyhold throne room, and this appearance would have been so much more impactful than learning about what happened to Sten through comics and codex entries.
Rhodes has been liberally sharing development stories and concept art from the Dragon Age series on social media. He's got a big dump of Trespasser concepts on Artstation in addition to what he showed on Twitter. Previously, Rhodes shared some of the earliest concepts for The Veilguard, as well as rejected designs for multiplayer characters in Inquisition.
