If you've yet to play any of the Dragon Age games, but Dragon Age: Veilguard's recent gameplay video piqued your interest, I have good news. You can currently scoop up the first three games for less than £10 thanks to a new Steam deal.

For a total of £8.47, you can purchase Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Dragon Age Inquisition - with all the major DLC and expansions for each included.

EA's Dragon Age promotion is running until 27th of June, and you'll find the sales page here if you fancy something to do this weekend that isn't Elden Ring.

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Former Dragon Age lead writer and Summerfall Games co-founder David Gaider has strung together some opinions on Xitter - the original spawning ground for all opinions - about the full reveal video for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, expressing broad enthusiasm for the new RPG’s narrative tone, combat system and environments, while offering a more ambivalent analysis of BioWare's decision to let players seduce every last member of their party.

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Former Dragon Age lead writer and Summerfall Games co-founder David Gaider has strung together some opinions on Xitter - the original spawning ground for all opinions - about the full reveal video for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, expressing broad enthusiasm for the new RPG’s narrative tone, combat system and environments, while offering a more ambivalent analysis of BioWare's decision to let players seduce every last member of their party.

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Be warned: this piece contains spoilers for Dragon Age 2.

As someone with South Asian heritage, I'm typical in that family is an essential part of my life story. I grew up amidst cousins and aunts, weddings and birthdays, weekly visits to my uncle and great uncles after school, and weekend drives with my grandmother as I sat in the back of my father's car, clinging to a book.

It's made me think. So many role-playing games I have encountered focus on gathering friends and romantic interests around the protagonist, but how much focus do they give to your character's family members? There are lots of games about found families, but could I think of one that was about siblings and parents and grandparents?

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Shortly after David Gaider was born, his parents bought a set of 1971 encyclopaedias to freeze-frame the world as it was when he entered it. He still remembers the maps they contained: his first atlas. But there are two moments in Gaider's life when a gift of maps leads to adventure. In the second, he's older, and already working at the job we know him best for. He was a lead writer at BioWare.

At the time, BioWare was embarking on a new adventure, creating two brand new games and the universes around them. One was to be science fiction and would become Mass Effect. One was fantasy and would become Dragon Age. That's the game Gaider was working on - or rather, it was the world he would dream up.

Ideas had been swirling about what Dragon Age would be for a few months. The team knew it would be like D&D but would not be actual D&D, because BioWare was sick of licensed games at the time. They knew they were going for Tolkien rather than Conan or Diablo. "We definitely had at least some idea of the kind of RPG this was going to be," Gaider tells me when in a video call. But BioWare didn't have a world, and that's where the second collection of maps comes in. One day, Gaider was handed a historical atlas of Europe and tasked with going away and coming up with a fantasy world for players to explore.

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