BioWare Clarifies Dragon Age: The Veilguard's Secret Ending As Misinterpretations Spread Online

Screenshot: BioWare / Kotaku

Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s ending is one of the best segments in the game if not the whole series. But its secret ending, one you unlock by doing specific side quests and finding certain artifacts throughout the world, is a bit more controversial. After fans unlocked the scene in question, some weren’t thrilled at how it seems to rewrite the history of the series. Responding to this, The Veilguard creative director John Epler has tried to clear up some interpretations of the scene. Spoilers ahead!

To start off, let’s lay out what the secret ending entails. After the credits roll, we see illustrations of several key moments in the Dragon Age series. This includes Loghain betraying the Grey Wardens in Dragon Age: Origins, Bartrand stealing the lyrium idol in Dragon Age II, and Corypheus tearing The Breach into the sky in Inquisition. However, the difference is these scenes are depicted with cloaked figures called the Executors. The implication is that the Executors have been pulling the strings of the Dragon Age universe all along, and some fans have taken this to mean that this faction has been controlling the villains of each game to do their bidding.

Epler took to Bluesky to clear this misconception up using the ROT13 cipher to hide spoilers from those who haven’t beaten the game yet. But his translated message explains that while the Executors have perhaps nudged history over the decades, Loghain, Bartrand, and Corypheus were all acting of their own free will.

“[T]he word choice of balanced, whispered, guided is VERY DELIBERATE,” Epler’s deciphered message reads. “No one was forced or coerced or controlled into making any choices.

It’s extremely important that ultimately everyone made their own choices. they still own the consequences of these decisions, because Dragon Age is still a series about people making decisions of their own free will and those decisions having consequences”

It’s unclear just how the Executors “guided” past Dragon Age villains, nor do we have a concrete sense of what they hoped to gain by pushing history in those directions. Right now, the running theory is they may be involved with the Forgotten Ones, elven gods who were long removed from the contemporary pantheon elves worshipped before the events of The Veilguard. Whatever the truth is, The Veilguard’s post-credits scene heavily implies they will play a major role in the next Dragon Age game, but that’s probably several years away as BioWare shifts focus to the upcoming fifth Mass Effect.