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

Dragon Age: Veilguard opens with the most comprehensive character creator I’ve ever seen. In addition to the millions of neat possible permutations for your player character Rook, there are also options to create a non-binary or trans character. Veilguard gives you options for high-level surgery scars, they/them pronouns, and a variety of sliders so you can transform your body exactly the way you want. Bumps, butts, breasts, and more can be precisely adjusted, and their inclusion is just some of the many ways the game tackles gender identity better than any other triple-A game to date.

Trans and nonbinary characters also receive additional speaking options where appropriate, offering insight from a gender diverse person’s experiences in situations that feel real and well-executed. This isn’t a character who thrusts her identity into every conversation, only where it makes sense, and for a triple-A game it’s always handled with shocking grace. These additional options come into play most when working on the personal questline of Taash, the Veilguard’s resident Qunari dragon slayer.

Taash is a character caught between two different worlds. Born to a strict, loyal Kunari mother and brought to Rivain at a young age, the noble dragon slayer doesn’t feel very Rivainian and not quite Qunari. After years spent isolated from most of society, in part due to his ability to breathe fire, Taash comes to Veilguard when the team needs a dragon slayer, and he soon realizes something: Taash doesn’t feel a thing. He feels like a woman but doesn’t feel like a man. A few chats with the team and this feeling is matched by one word: Taash is non-binary.

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

The notes Taash wrote while struggling with all this are scattered throughout the game. When we visit other trans and non-binary characters in the game (and there are plenty of them), Taash takes notes as these characters explain what it means to be trans and non-binary. This is a concept largely foreign to Qunari and Rivainian culture and belief, and even if they know how they feel inside, they still have much to learn. This note ends with a touching ending; another character assures them that what they feel is valid, no matter what others think and no matter when they learn the words to describe that feeling.

A note that brought tears to my eyes as I was in Taash’s position. I, too, have a complicated relationship with gender, and when I finally learned how to describe this feeling, it was a huge weight off my shoulders. But it also made life much more complicated; I had so much to learn, so much to process, and so many questions I couldn’t answer on my own. The people who helped me with this were my friends and loved ones, and Taash’s friends and loved ones do the same for them in The Veilguard. It’s authentic, messy, and raw, and there’s no doubt in my mind that this was written by a non-binary person.

On another note, Taash is seen drafting a speech to explain to their strict and religious mother that they are not gender binary. They walk through a dozen possibilities and dismiss each one as something they can’t achieve. At the bottom of the page they decide on a direct approach:

“I am non-binary. This means that I am neither male nor female. “I now use ‘they’ instead of ‘he’.”

I won’t spoil exactly how this conversation ultimately plays out, but it’s a powerful, heartbreaking moment that many gay people will recognize and sympathize with. This is one of many examples in Taash’s story, and the ability to chime in and offer advice and guidance as a person of trans or non-binary experience is a nice touch. You become the older queer every young queer person hopes for, offering a way forward when nothing makes sense inside.

This is a story crafted with the best of intentions, told well and without restraint; something extremely rare for a triple-A game. BioWare has touched on queer storylines 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 one step further, unashamedly and unashamedly featuring one of its most intriguing characters who is non-binary and unafraid to land his punches. It continues a story.

But that doesn’t mean Veilguard has a perfect handle on everything on the LGBTQ+ spectrum. Having every romantic character that can be romanced by a player of any gender expression (player sexuality, as gamers often call it) is a small step 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 viable alternative, it’s a bit of a shame that not a single romantic character in the game is openly gay or lesbian. They are just what you want them to be.

But this isn’t entirely BioWare’s fault either. When your character creator allows this much depth about gender identity, you have to ask a lot of thorny questions about how you’re going to deal with sexuality. Would it make sense for a gay man to fall in love with a non-binary person with a feminine appearance? This happens all the time in real life, but in a game like this it can feel a little cheap to make every gay character go with every non-binary character. The result is an inelegant solution to a good problem – Veilguard is so good at representing gender identity that it can’t do everything else perfectly.

But given how well Taash is handled throughout the game, and the options given to players to represent their identities within the game, any minor details are brushed aside. After decades of triple-A game development, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the first game to finally get gender identity right, which is a solid win if nothing else.