Of all the trailers in this week’s epic Xbox Showcase, only one really worried me. The tonally bizarre Dragon Age: The Veilguard was truly awful. It looked like a trailer for a hero shooter or a mobile game. It was weirdly upbeat and the character designs looked like Fortnite skins.
I was not alone. Everywhere I looked online, from gamers to YouTubers to game journalists, almost everyone who had any love for the earlier games agreed: This was worrisome. The only saving grace was that sometimes marketing departments screw up. Until we saw more, we couldn’t really say if this was just a bad trailer or a sign of a bad game.
Now we have 24 seconds of gameplay ahead of tomorrow’s big gameplay reveal, almost certainly because BioWare saw all the negative feedback and wanted to get something out to assuage our fears.
All we see is the player character and one of his companions walking through a fantasy city at night—walking slowly, the player character notes, wishing (as we will also wish I’m sure) that we could jog and not be kept at a forced walk. Check it out:
As you can see, this looks leaps and bounds better than the CGI trailer. The setting is gorgeous. Shafts of light from some large, hovering vessel above shine down on the dark city streets below. Lanterns glow in shops and taverns. This looks like a place I want to explore.
Of course, it’s just a tiny clip. And even Tuesday’s gameplay reveal will only tell us so much. But it’s a salve after the burn we all suffered during yesterday’s reveal trailer. Let’s hope this game is good. We’ve waited long enough for it!
