The party from Dragon Age: The Veilguard 

Characters have always been BioWare’s bread and butter, but Dragon Age: The Veilguard has the strongest collective cast that the studio has ever put into its fantasy RPG series. There are no flops hanging out in the Lighthouse and scheming to stop the elven gods from taking over Thedas. Neve, the Tevinter detective, is a dutybound freedom fighter who still finds time to care about the little guy when the world is ending. The necromancer Emmrich spends hours waxing about the cultural significance of death but can’t just safely depersonalize it through study, instead needing to confront whether or not he’s actually at peace with what it means to manipulate death. Davrin, the elven Grey Warden, has spent so long assuming his life was forfeit that he has trouble conceptualizing a life for himself if he’s no longer doomed by the narrative.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is full of small moments that encapsulate big ideas. Taash struggles with their gender, and it plays into the push and pull they feel between the culture they grew up in and the one they’re drawn to. Bellara is inextricably wrapped up in the history of her people, the Dalish Elves, and she uses that history as a reference for her own fiction which you can stumble upon her writing. Lucanis has a demon inside him that takes over his body when he sleeps, so he drinks more coffee than an overstimulated college student. Harding begins The Veilguard in a drab, unkempt room in the Lighthouse, but as she stays there, her caring nature shines through as it’s gradually grown over by a garden of her own making.

No, the members of the titular Veilguard don’t bicker or want to kill each other like the characters in previous Dragon Age games; instead, each of them is a beacon of light that shines all its own in a dark world that may grow darker if they don’t save it. Everyone wants to fight for a better Thedas, even as they each occupy disparate areas of BioWare’s fantasy world. — Kenneth Shepard