BioWare spent more than 200,000 hours testing Dragon Age: The Veilguard on PC: 'Getting the PC experience just right was crucial to us'

With Dragon Age: The Veilguard creeping ever closer, BioWare has shared a new insight into what PC players can expect from the game, including customizable controls, advanced display options, and "Steam native" features like cloud saves, Remote Play support, and verified functionality on Steam Deck.

"The Dragon Age franchise started out on PC, and we wanted to make sure PC is a great place to play our game," the studio wrote. "Many of us at BioWare are PC players ourselves, and when testing, PCs made up 40% of our platform testing effort, with over 200,000 hours of performance and compatibility testing. Getting the PC experience just right was crucial to us and we created a dedicated team to focus on PC."

On the input side, that means native support for PlayStation 5 DualSense controllers along with Xbox controllers and keyboard and mouse, which is of course the best way to play and no further discussion on that front is required. For players who just can't make up their minds, you'll also be able to seamlessly switch between controllers and keyboard/mouse in menus or during gameplay; you can also set up class-specific keybinds, so "your Rogue Rook can use a different set of keybinds than your Warrior Rook" if you find that makes things more manageable.

As befits the wide range of PCs that will be running the new Dragon Age game, The Veilguard will support 21:9 ultrawide monitors, including in cinematics via an optional "Cinematic Aspect Ratio" option, and will also have adjustable FOV, uncapped frame rates, full HDR support, DLSS 3 frame generation, and DLSS 3, FSR 2.2, XeSS upscaling.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is Steam Deck verified, meaning it's been tested by Valve to be "fully functional" on the mobile device, and will also support Steam Cloud saves and Remote Play. Publisher Electronic Arts has already confirmed that Dragon Age: the Veilguard on Steam won't require the EA app to launch; there will be an option to link the game to your EA account if you want, but it will be "completely optional."

This isn't the full extent of the PC-specific features in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, as BioWare said it has "more PC features to share" closer to launch." Which seems a little weird to me: Sure they can't be worried about PC performance option spoilers, right? Then again, they did it for penises, so I suppose anything's possible. Anyway, here's what we've got so far:

Display Features

• Full Support for 21:9 Ultra Wide Resolutions
• Ability to Uncap Frame Rate
• VSync, including fractional rate VSync
• HDR Support
• Optional Upscaling (DLSS 3, FSR 2.2, XeSS)
• NVIDIA Reflex
• DLSS 3 Frame Generation
• Optional Dynamic Resolution Scaling
• Cinematic Aspect Ratio (Disable this option for cinematic 21:9 ratio)

Graphics Settings

• Presets Available (Low, Medium, High, Ultra)
• Texture Settings: Texture Quality, Texture Filtering
• Light and Shadow Settings: Lighting Quality, Contact Shadow, Ambient Occlusion, Screen Space Reflections, Volumetric Lighting, Sky Quality
• Ray Tracing Settings: Ray-Traced Reflections, Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion, Ultra Ray Tracing (* Ray Tracing can be “ON” or turned to “Selective”. Selective Mode
  enables Ray Tracing features in specific areas that can best take
  advantage of the feature)
• Geometry Settings: Level Of Detail, Strand Hair, Terrain Quality, Terrain Decoration Quality, Visual Effects Quality
• Camera Effects: Depth of Field, Vignette, Motion Blur, Post Processing Quality, Field of View
• Controls: Class-specific Keybinds, Keyboard + Controller Bindings

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is set to launch on October 31. If you want to get a head start on which party member you're planning to date (this is a BioWare RPG, after all), we've got a guide to the Veilguard romance options that can help.