Warning: This article contains spoilers for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. If you want to enter completely blind, click now.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard opens with the most inclusive character creator I’ve ever seen. In addition to the millions of possible permutations for your player character, Rook, there are options for creating a non-binary or trans character. The Veilguard gives you options for major surgical scars, pronouns, and various sliders to modify your body exactly the way you want. Bulges, butts, breasts, and more are all finely adjustable, and their inclusion is just part of the many ways the game handles gender identity better than any other triple-A game to date .

Trans and non-binary characters also benefit from additional conversation options where appropriate, providing insight into the experiences of a gender diverse person in situations that feel authentic and well-executed. It’s not about a character inserting their identity into every conversation, it’s just where it makes sense, and it’s always handled with shocking elegance for a triple-A game. These additional choices come into play most when working on the personal questline of Taash, the Veilguard’s resident Qunari dragonslayer.

Taash is a character torn between two different worlds. Born to a strict and loyal Qunari mother and brought to Rivain at a young age, the noble dragon slayer does not truly feel Rivainian, and does not truly feel Qunari. After years of being isolated from most of society, in part due to his rare ability to breathe fire, Taash joined the Veilguard when the team needed a dragon slayer, and soon after, one realizes: Taash doesn’t feel himself. like a woman and doesn’t feel like a man. A few discussions with the team, and this feeling corresponds to one word: Taash is non-binary.

The rest of Taash’s story is a mix of dragon hunting and Qunari secrets revealed, but the underlying thread is their realization. We see Taash worry about how being non-binary interacts with their twin cultures, what words to use for himself, and what the team thinks about it all. But most of all, they worry about how their mother will take it.

Scattered throughout the game are notes written by Taash as they grapple with it all. A visit to other trans and non-binary characters in the game – of which there are many – sees Taash taking notes while these characters explain what it means to be trans and non-binary. It is a concept largely foreign to Qunari and Rivainian culture and faith, and even when they know what they feel internally, there is still much to learn. This note ends with a touching conclusion, where another character assures them that what they feel is valid, no matter what others think and no matter when they learned the words to describe that feeling.

It’s a note that brought tears to my eyes, because I’ve been in Taash’s shoes. I also have a complicated relationship with gender, and when I finally learned to describe this feeling, a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. But it also made life much more complicated: I had so much to learn, so much to process, and many questions I couldn’t answer alone. It was my friends and loved ones who helped me get through this, and in The Veilguard, Taash’s friends and loved ones do the same for them. It’s authentic and messy and raw, and there’s no doubt in my mind that it was written by a non-binary person.

Another note shows Taash writing a speech to tell his strict, religious mother that they are non-binary. They consider a dozen possibilities, dismissing each one as something that just wouldn’t pass. At the bottom of the page, they opt for a direct approach:

“I am non-binary. This means that I am neither a man nor a woman. I now use “they” instead of “she”.

I won’t reveal exactly how this conversation ultimately plays out, but it’s a powerful and heartbreaking moment that many queer people will recognize and empathize with. This is one of Taash’s many stories, and the ability to step in as someone with a trans or non-binary experience, to offer advice and guidance, is a nice touch. You become the queer elder every queer youth hopes for, providing a way forward when nothing inside makes sense.

It’s a story with the best of intentions, well-told and no-holds-barred, which is extremely rare for a triple-A game. BioWare has touched on queer stories in the past, even in the Dragon Age series – Dorian’s personal struggles as a gay man in Inquisition come to mind – but The Veilguard goes even further, unabashedly and unapologetically calling the one of his most compelling non-binary characters and continue with a story that is not afraid to stand out from the crowd.

That’s not to say that The Veilguard handles everything regarding the LGBTQ+ spectrum perfectly. Having every romantic character able to be romanced by a player of any gender expression – sexual player, as often called by gamers – is a small step backwards from Inquisition and its predecessors. A story like Dorian’s couldn’t be told in The Veilguard, and while Taash’s story is more than a suitable alternative, it’s a bit disappointing that no romantic characters in the game are explicitly gay or lesbian. They are exactly what you want them to be.

But it’s not entirely BioWare’s fault either. When your character’s creator allows such depth when it comes to gender identity, you have to ask yourself a lot of tough questions about how to deal with sexuality. Would it make sense for a gay man to fall in love with a non-binary, feminine-presenting person? This happens all the time in real life, but making every gay character attracted to every non-binary character would seem a bit cheap in a game like this. The result is an inelegant solution to a good problem: the Veilguard is so good at representing gender identity that it can’t do everything perfectly.

But with the way Taash is handled throughout the game and the options given to players to represent their identity in the game, all the little details are left out. After decades of triple-A game development, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the first to finally get a proper genre identity, and it’s a solid win, to say the least.