Dragon Age The Veilguard

Stories are supposed to hurt. Not all of them. Not most of them. The handful of them that are doing the specific cultural-cognitive work the form has been doing for almost as long as humans have had narrative. The Greek tragedies asked their audiences to watch Oedipus lose his eyes and Antigone hang herself and Medea kill her children. The seventeenth-century English novel asked its readers to watch Clarissa die slowly across nine volumes of correspondence. The Victorian novel asked its readers to watch Little Nell and Anna Karenina and many others end the way the realism of the form required them to end. The twentieth-century film, the twentieth-century theater, the twentieth-century literary novel: each kept the practice alive in its specific way. Each one of these works hurt to consume in the moment, by deliberate construction, and the hurting was the work the form was doing.

The frame this essay wants to give the reader: there is a specific cognitive practice that fiction has been performing on human audiences for several thousand years, and the practice depends on the fiction being willing to deliver losses the audience cannot avoid. The practice has been one of the few reliable ways human cultures have provided for adult populations to develop their capacity to handle real loss. The contemporary commercial cultural environment has been progressively withdrawing the practice across multiple media, in the name of audience comfort. Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the 2024 BioWare RPG, is the franchise's contribution to the withdrawal, and the audience response has been more sharply negative than the surrounding critical conversation has been able to fully explain.

This is a frame that travels. The reader who has it can apply it to almost every contemporary commercial story they encounter. The film that has been carefully engineered to deliver no loss the audience cannot bear. The streaming series whose plot has been smoothed to avoid the discomfort the source material had been built around. The novel whose later edits have softened the original ending. Each of these is a specific instance of a broader cultural pattern, and the pattern matters because the cultural function fiction has historically been performing depends on fiction being willing to hurt.

The cognitive-science evidence for this is some of the most-replicated work in the contemporary literature on emotional regulation. The Canadian psychologist Keith Oatley, whose 2011 Such Stuff as Dreams consolidated three decades of research at the University of Toronto, documented across multiple experimental designs that adults who read substantial amounts of literary fiction score measurably better on tests of emotional understanding and empathy than matched controls who read primarily non-fiction or who do not read substantially. The effect is not subtle. The effect has been replicated across many subsequent studies, in multiple countries, with various methodologies.

What is the mechanism? Oatley's argument, drawn from the cumulative experimental record, is that fiction is structurally a low-stakes simulator for emotional situations. The reader who follows a character through a difficult emotional situation is, in the neurological sense, simulating the situation in their own emotional system. The brain does not, for these purposes, distinguish very sharply between situations the reader is actually experiencing and situations the reader is reading about. The neural systems that process real emotional events are activated by fictional emotional events at substantial fidelity. The activation is the practice. Across the cumulative reading of many fictional emotional events, the reader's emotional system becomes more developed, more nuanced, more capable of handling complex real emotional situations.

The crucial design property for this to work is that the fiction has to deliver the difficult situations, not protect the reader from them. The novel that pulls back from the hard emotional event the plot has been building toward is not delivering the simulation the brain has been preparing to run. The brain has been activating the systems for the hard event; the brain has not been given the event to process; the development the simulation would have produced does not occur. Fiction that consistently pulls back, on Oatley's framework, fails to provide the cognitive practice the form's continued cultural value depends on.

This is the foundational scientific argument for why the protective fiction is structurally different from the older fiction in cognitively measurable ways. The argument has roots that go back substantially further. Aristotle, in the Poetics, made the version of this argument that the European literary tradition has been working through for two and a half thousand years. The argument was that tragedy works on its audience by producing what Aristotle called catharsis: the controlled experience of pity and fear, produced by witnessing the protagonist's fall, that the audience encounters in the contained space of the theater rather than in the unmanageable space of their actual lives. The catharsis was not, on Aristotle's argument, just a side effect. The catharsis was the form's cultural-political function. The polis needed citizens whose capacity for pity and fear had been developed enough to handle the real situations the citizens would encounter outside the theater. The tragedy provided the controlled environment for the development. The development was the form's contribution to civic life.

The Aristotelian argument has been refined and contested across two thousand five hundred years of subsequent thought, but the core proposition has held up: fiction that delivers difficult emotional events provides a controlled environment for the audience to develop emotional capacities the audience will need in their actual lives. Martha Nussbaum, the American philosopher whose 2001 Upheavals of Thought consolidated decades of work on this topic, gave the framework the contemporary philosophical articulation it has been most influential through. Nussbaum's argument, developed across multiple books, is that the great literary works have a specific ethical function that no other cultural form can fully substitute for. Literature provides what Nussbaum calls the cognition of the particular: the audience's careful tracking of one specific person's interior life, in conditions that allow the reader to feel what the character is feeling at the depth of the character's specific situation. The practice is what produces, across cumulative reading, the moral imagination that adult ethical life requires.

The BioWare-style RPG, from Baldur's Gate II (2000) through the Mass Effect trilogy through the first three Dragon Age games, has been one of contemporary mass culture's most accomplished forms for delivering exactly this Aristotle-Nussbaum cognitive work in a commercial-game vehicle. The form has, in its better entries, asked the player to attach to specific fictional characters across many hours of campaign play, and has then delivered the difficult losses, betrayals, sacrifices, and unresolvable moral choices the characters' situations required. The player has, in the small interactive way the medium permits, practiced the cognitive work Aristotle and Nussbaum were describing. The player has felt the loss of the companion the player cared about. The player has experienced the betrayal that the player could not have prevented. The player has made the choice that hurt every available option. The cognitive work the form was doing has, on the available reception evidence across two decades, been a substantial part of what made the form one of mass culture's most loved.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard has stepped away from this. The 2024 game's narrative architecture has been structured, deliberately, to protect the player from the kinds of unresolvable losses the previous Dragon Age games had specialized in. The companions cannot, in any meaningful way, die. The major moral choices have been softened to versions where most outcomes feel survivable. The romance options have been simplified. The cumulative weight of the campaign's emotional events is, by every available measure, lighter than the previous entries' weight. The game is, in every paragraph, more comfortable to consume than its predecessors. The game has also, in the same measure, withdrawn the cognitive practice the form was structured to deliver.

The audience response to this has been substantially negative in ways the critical conversation has had difficulty articulating. The standard explanations have included: BioWare's struggles with the franchise's long development timeline, the game's specific writing decisions, the visual-style departure from the previous entries. All of these are real. None of them is, on a careful read, the deepest explanation. The deepest explanation is that the audience for the BioWare RPG had been showing up, for fifteen years, for the cognitive practice the form was delivering. The new entry has substantially withdrawn the practice. The audience has noticed the withdrawal without quite being able to name what was withdrawn.

The Larian Studios game Baldur's Gate III (2023), released the year before Veilguard, is the contemporary commercial test case for what the audience for this form actually wants. Baldur's Gate III commits, throughout its very long campaign, to the older BioWare contract. Companions can die in ways the player cannot prevent. Moral choices have weight the player cannot retroactively soften. The romance system has the specific narrative texture that allows it to actually hurt when something goes wrong. The cumulative emotional weight of the campaign is substantial. The game became, on commercial measure, one of the most successful single-player RPGs of the past decade, and the success was substantially driven by the audience's recognition that the older contract had returned.

This is not, on a careful read, a market signal that BioWare needs to make Baldur's Gate III. The signal is broader. The signal is that the audience for the cognitive-practice form is substantially larger than the publishing arithmetic has been assuming, and that the audience can tell when the form has been withdrawing the practice in the name of accessibility. The audience is not asking for the trauma to be sensationalized. The audience is asking for the form to keep doing the cognitive work the form was structured to do.

This argument matters more than the games. The same dynamic has been playing out across multiple contemporary cultural forms over the past decade. The Marvel Cinematic Universe's later phases have, by most readings, drifted away from the consequence-bearing storytelling of its early successes. The contemporary streaming series, on average, has been softer in its endings than the prestige cable drama of the 2000s and 2010s was. The contemporary commercial novel has been, on the available editorial evidence, increasingly nudged toward more comfortable resolutions by publishing-house anxieties about audience response. The withdrawal is not uniform; the older contract still exists in many specific works. The drift, however, is real, and the drift has cumulative consequences for what the broader cultural-cognitive environment is making available.

The reader who has the frame can apply it forward into evaluating almost every contemporary commercial story they encounter. The question is whether the story is willing to deliver the difficult emotional events the story's situation has set up, or whether the story has been engineered to pull back from those events in the name of audience comfort. Both kinds of story can be entertaining. The first kind is doing cognitive work the audience can carry forward into their actual lives. The second kind is not.

The implication for the reader's own cultural diet is straightforward. If the reader has noticed, in their recent years of cultural consumption, a sense that the stories they have been encountering have been delivering less of the specific emotional weight the older stories the reader loved had delivered, the noticing is not nostalgia. The noticing is a real cultural-historical pattern the reader has been registering accurately. Seeking out the specific contemporary cultural products that still commit to the older contract is one of the small useful pieces of work the reader can do for their own continued emotional development. The products are still being made. The products are easier to find when the reader knows what they are looking for.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, the contemporary neuroscientist whose 2017 How Emotions Are Made gave the constructed-emotion framework its most accessible recent articulation, made the closing argument the analysis depends on. Barrett's claim, drawn from two decades of imaging studies and behavioral research, is that emotions are not fixed biological responses to external stimuli. Emotions are, on her evidence, constructed by the brain from a combination of physiological signals, contextual interpretations, and learned conceptual categories. The conceptual categories matter most. The brain that has access to a wider range of emotional concepts can construct more refined emotional responses to complex situations. The brain that has access to a narrower range can only construct cruder emotional responses, even when the underlying situations would justify more refined responses.

Fiction is one of the primary cultural-historical sources of emotional concepts. The reader who has spent years reading novels, watching dramas, and engaging with serious narrative fiction has been, in Barrett's framework, accumulating a richer library of emotional concepts than the reader who has not. The accumulation has measurable cognitive consequences. The richer library produces better emotional responses to real-world situations. The thinner library produces worse responses.

The Veilguard's specific withdrawal of the older contract is, in Barrett's framework, a small contribution to the thinning of the audience's emotional-concept library. The game's longtime players, who had been accumulating concepts across the previous Dragon Age games and across the broader BioWare-style RPG form, were expecting the new entry to continue the accumulation. The new entry has been delivering thinner concepts than the previous entries. The audience has noticed. The audience has been correct to notice.

The frame the reader should walk away with: when a story has been carefully constructed to protect the audience from loss, ask what cognitive practice the protection has been substituting for. The form may still be entertaining. The form may not still be doing the cognitive work the older form was doing. The forms that continue to do the work are, on the available evidence, doing something for their audiences that has very few other contemporary substitutes. Recognizing this matters because the cumulative effect of a cultural environment that consistently withdraws the work has, on multiple converging research lines, been documented as one of the small ways the contemporary developed-world adult has been getting less of one specific cognitive good than previous generations had access to. The forms that still deliver the good are worth seeking out. The audience for them is, on Baldur's Gate III's evidence, larger than the publishing arithmetic has been assuming. The audience can tell, even when the language for what is missing has not yet been supplied by the surrounding conversation.