Dragon Age: The Veilguard is probably BioWare’s most polished game. The RPG looks great, runs exceptionally well, and I had a pretty good, mostly bugless experience in my first playthrough. However, during the review period, I experienced a devastating glitch that almost ruined what was otherwise an exceptional finale. Typically, if something is fixed by the time the game is out, I won’t mention something I ran into during the pre-release review, but I’ve since confirmed this particular issue is still in the game as of launch. We won’t talk concrete details about the ending, but if you’re reading this you probably have either encountered it or are worried about it messing up your late-game experience. The bug has to do with the Inquisitor, the protagonist of 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition who shows up in the sequel.
Mild, non-specific spoilers for Dragon Age: The Veilguard follow
Without diving into the story specifics, the Inquisitor shows up in The Veilguard’s final quest. This is a character you make in the character creator at the beginning of the game so they can resemble the hero you played as in the previous entry. I wasn’t thrilled with their integration in The Veilguard, but I was always happy to see my old protagonist show up when he did. However, after replaying The Veilguard’s final levels multiple times, I’ve been running into a bug that has been incredibly deflating each time I’ve run into it.
The first time this glitch surfaced was in the final scene with the Inquisitor. I’d met up with him earlier in The Veilguard’s last big push, and nothing seemed amiss. However, when he entered the non-descript climactic moment, he looked almost entirely different. His hair and beard were the same, but none of his other features were. Here’s a comparison of the same shot, one as he’s supposed to appear, the other how he showed up the first time I fought through The Veilguard’s final stretch.
Those are two different people. But if he’s showing up how I made him, I must have found a way to fix it, right? Well, I did temporarily, at least. Unfortunately, the bug seems inconsistent. I have seen the finale play out with my Inquisitor looking like himself the entire time, then also had multiple playthroughs of the final hour where he looks like some other guy I’ve never seen before. However, after I looked at this other guy long enough, I realized he was one of the default models in the character customization screen I’d used 50 hours prior to try and recreate my old hero. Sometimes this bug happens in the final scene, other times it’s during all the pre-final battle banter. But best I can tell, it seems like something is bugged in The Veilguard’s finale that results in the Inquisitor defaulting to one of the base character models the game offers you to make them. So how do you fix this issue?
The only solution I’ve found thus far is to reload an old save and see if the character you made shows up in those late-game scenes. Sometimes you’ll have to do this at multiple points in case the character somehow reverts to an incorrect appearance later in those final quests. I’ve seen other players report that this has happened to them not with the Inquisitor, but with the new protagonist Rook. Some have said it will revert to your custom character upon reloading an old save or approaching the Mirror of Transformation in the Lighthouse infirmary. At the very least the bug doesn’t seem permanent. It’s just really deflating to see it during one of the most important scenes of the game. Hopefully, BioWare fixes this soon.