Who is the face of Dragon Age? It’s a simple question with a tricky answer because there’s no obvious candidate. There’s no Commander Shepard through-line running through the series. Each game has had a different protagonist. There’s the Grey Warden in Dragon Age: Origins, Hawke in Dragon Age 2, and the Inquisitor in Dragon Age: Inquisition. And now there’s Rook in Dragon Age: Veilguard. Heck, even the game’s main companions have changed. Though there is one amongst them who could fit the bill: Varric.
Varric, a wise-cracking and hairy-chested dwarf with a crossbow named Bianca, was introduced in Dragon Age 2 as the game’s narrator and as a companion character. He’s also a central companion and character in Inquisition, and he stars in the early marketing material for Veilguard. Varric’s face apparently verifies something as Dragon Age.
There’s only one problem with this: he should be dead. I can’t look at Varric without hearing Dragon Age creator David Gaider telling me he wanted to kill Varric, first in Dragon Age 2 and then in Inquisition. This dwarf shouldn’t be alive, yet somehow he is. But for how long? That’s the question on everybody’s lips, because if you watch the debut Veilguard gameplay trailer again, you’ll see this might be his fatal third strike.
Before we go there, let’s rewind to Dragon Age 2. If you don’t know, that game revolves around Varric, who’s forced to recount the story of Hawke while being interrogated by Cassandra Pentaghast (who becomes a companion in Dragon Age: Inquisition). Thus, Varric recounts Hawke’s life from his perspective as a close friend, and the game ping-pongs between Varric talking and you playing the story out. This set-up even continues in the game’s two downloadable add-ons, Legacy and Mark of the Assassin.
But there was going to be a third add-on where this would change. This expansion was going to be called Exalted March, and here, Varric was going to finally step out from the interrogation room so we could play in the present day, so to speak. It was also here that Varric – in a climactic confrontation new villain Corypheus, introduced in Legacy – was going to die.