The New Dragon Age Game Will Include Customizable Top Surgery Scars
Half the fun of a role-playing game is in character creation, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard players will find a wealth of riches available to them when the game drops on Halloween next month — including the option to give your character top surgery scars.
Dragon Age studio BioWare, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts (EA), recently gave some games journalists and streamers access to Veilguard 's character creator, the details of which were finally released today. Alongside options to customize their complexion, lore-appropriate tattoos, and intricately rendered hair, players may also select from a variety of facial and body scars, including an "on/off" toggle for top surgery scars — a boon for transgender fans who want their character to reflect their own identity.
"I absolutely was blown away," said Scottish transmasculine Twitch streamer Uni Fadewalker (aka Eddie) in a video on his YouTube channel showcasing his experience with the creator. "It's beautiful to see the inclusion in the game, and to see yourself represented in the game in this way is wonderful."
Trans representation isn't a totally new concept in the Dragon Age universe, as players met the transmasc character Krem in 2014's Dragon Age: Inquisition , voiced by Mass Effect 's Jennifer Hale. Veilguard is poised to put that representation in players' hands, though, with a suite of character customization options that will persist into the game itself. Players can independently choose main character Rook's gender (male, female, or nonbinary) and pronouns (she/her, he/him, or they/them), as studio heads confirmed in a Discord Q&A earlier this year, also revealing that players can choose to come out as trans in dialogue choices later in the game. Rook is also portrayed by four different voice actors, which can be selected based on player preference — including genderfluid voice actor and comedian Erika Ishii, who previously voiced Valkyrie , the first confirmed lesbian character in the popular online shooter Apex Legends.
"I am both terrified and thrilled to have the Dragon Age community hear me in Thedas," Ishii said in an Instagram video announcing their role in July. "Additionally, as someone who identifies as genderfluid, it means the world to me to have the option to play as a trans or nonbinary character in a Dragon Age game. I can look the way that I want, and I can speak with my voice in a world that sees me for who I am: Rook."
Veilguard won't be the first major studio title to feature optional top surgery scars — The Sims 4 , also an EA game, added that option last year, and players have been able to give characters pectoral scars in recent years in series as far afield as Dragon's Dogma II and WWE 2K . (And, of course, there are dozens of mods for adding top surgery scars to computer games, whether you're a simple Skyrim fan or a transmasc Link truther .) But between the range of options for trans Rooks and the potential inclusion of a nonbinary companion character , BioWare seems to be making a bid for the most transgender-coded video game of the year.
There are, however, some notable limitations to Veilguard 's character creation. While its direct competitor Baldur's Gate 3 allowed full nudity and let players choose from a lineup of genital options, Veilguard players won't be able to take off their lower underwear at all, as Uni Fadewalker noted in his video. The only hint as to what's down Rook's stairs will be a good old-fashioned customizable bulge size.
As some games journalists have also pointed out, Veilguard 's character creator still disappoints in its range of available body types. BioWare's options for skin pigmentation have improved over the years, said Kenneth Shepard and Kate Sánchez for Kotaku this week, but in Shepard's words, "I have to put the glute sliders to the very end just to make it look like my character has an ass to begin with." As Sánchez observed, the studio's default Eurocentrism allows the average white player of any gender to feel embodied in their character, but doesn't extend the same welcome to Black and brown players with different body proportions.
"I think that that's why it kind of hurts a lot, because they did show intent and care for something," Sánchez explained. "And I think that that's actually what makes me feel worse about not including body types that brown and Black women have, because like it's almost like there was intent for everything but that."
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