Dragon Age: The Veilguard arrived with pretty solid critic scores, racking up an 84 on Metacritic, translating into what appear to be pretty solid sales, at the very least, putting up the highest playercount EA or BioWare has seen on Steam, with seemingly good console performance as well.
But after the critic reviews come in, user scores go live, and it was exceptionally easy to predict how they were going to split between players who had played the game, and ones that likely hadn’t. See if you can spot the difference.
- Steam – 77% “Mostly Positive” scores
- PlayStation – 4.45/5 stars
- Xbox – 4/5 stars
- Metacritic – 3.4/10
You can guess which three platforms there require you to own the game to rate it, and which one does not. The Metacritic user score is mainly being used as a protest metric, where it seems every other review listed there accused the game of being “woke,” using “DEI” or “pushing an agenda.” This is all largely based on a plotline in the game that went viral where a character identifies as non-binary in their personal questline. It’s also the case that you can choose to be canonically trans in the game. This joins, of course, the option to be the straightest, whitest cisgender character ever, if that’s what you so choose.
The confirmed scores are quite good in the sum total history of the franchise. For instance, GOTY winner Dragon Age Inquisition has a 75% positive score on Steam. Dragon Age 2 has an 80%. Dragon Age Origins has the unsurprisingly best 87% score. Veilguard is certainly in line with the series as a whole.
There are of course legitimate criticisms to be made of the game, and I’ve had plenty. I think the tone of the game is lacking any sort of edge, and there are few actual hard or impactful decisions, or meaningful conflicts to address. Other players may take issue with the series’ turn into very arcade-y combat (though I liked this style).
While some of the negative reviews mention these things, many are indeed swarmed with culture war buzzwords as the focus of why the game deserves a low score, often a flat 0/10. Again, wholly unsurprising, but not reflective of what appears to be the general sentiment not just among critics, but the majority of fans. This isn’t to say Veilguard is going to be some megahit, but it does appear to be the most-liked major BioWare game in effectively a decade, and that’s progress for the studio all the same.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
