Dragon Age: Inquisition's final expansion was going to force us to blow up our home base to kill a fan favorite Origins companion

GamesRPGDragon AgeDragon Age: InquisitionDragon Age: Inquisition’s final expansion was going to force us to blow up our home base to kill a fan favorite Origins companionWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: BioWare, Matt Rhodes)

Sten from Dragon Age Origins with half of his face burned holding Inquisitor�s helmet in empty throne room

“An earlier version of the story. Sten would arrive to arrest you for meddling with magic, but Dagna has reverse engineered their explosives,” Rhodes wrote onTwitterto explain the series of four concept pieces. “You have a trap for when they return, sacrificing Skyhold in the process.”

Image1of4(Image credit: BioWare, Matt Rhodes)(Image credit: BioWare, Matt Rhodes)(Image credit: BioWare, Matt Rhodes)(Image credit: BioWare, Matt Rhodes)

Image1of4

(Image credit: BioWare, Matt Rhodes)(Image credit: BioWare, Matt Rhodes)(Image credit: BioWare, Matt Rhodes)(Image credit: BioWare, Matt Rhodes)

(Image credit: BioWare, Matt Rhodes)

Inquisitor watching Skyhold explode from snowfields outside

(Image credit: BioWare, Matt Rhodes)

Inquisition courtiers walking away from throne room while Inquisitor is confronted by large figure.

(Image credit: BioWare, Matt Rhodes)

Alchemist Dagna with singed hair holding gunpowder smiling crazily while men look on from behind tower shields

(Image credit: BioWare, Matt Rhodes)

Sten from Dragon Age Origins with half of his face burned holding Inquisitor’s helmet in empty throne room

Trespasser already sees a ton of plot whammies, like the Inquisitor losing their hand (and powers), the Inquisition either disbanding or getting absorbed into the Chantry, and Iron Bull potentially betraying the party for the Qun. The literal destruction of your Normandy-style home base to go along with the political and symbolic death of the Inquisition would have been the icing on the cake.

As of The Veilguard, Stenishok survived the Antaam rebellion against him that figures prominently in the game’s story, and he shows up in a few codex entries. The fact that he was once set to be a major antagonist in Inquisition, resulting in his spectacular death alongside the destruction of my home base, blows me away.

Like the choice tokill either the Warden from Origins or Hawkefrom DA2 that was ultimately cut from Inquisition, this would have beensick as hell, heartbreaking, and probably enough of a headache to implement that it makes sense the team moved in a different direction. The fact that Sten could have been dead via Dragon Age Keep world state complicates things, necessitating a stand-in body double like Grey Warden Stroud or any number of characters from Mass Effect 3. Inquisition was also BioWare’s best-selling game, meaning that all those first time players would lack context for who Sten even is.

Part of me is relieved not to have had to betray my beloved bro in such a fashion, but I still would have loved to see him again⁠—Rhodes' concept art shows a burned, partially disfigured Sten fuming in the Skyhold throne room, and this appearance would have been so much more impactful than learning about what happened to Sten through comics and codex entries.

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Rhodes has been liberally sharing development stories and concept art from the Dragon Age series on social media. He’s got a big dump of Trespasser concepts onArtstationin addition to what he showed on Twitter. Previously, Rhodes shared some of theearliest concepts for The Veilguard, as well asrejected designsfor multiplayer characters in Inquisition.

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