I was pretty skeptical about Dragon Age: The Veilguard after BioWare showed off the game’s first trailer and gameplay footage, and the reasons I was skeptical turned out to be at least partly true. On the other hand, I’ve been playing the game for the last week-and-a-half and I’m having a blast.
Where Veilguard flounders, I find myself wishing BioWare had made a few different design choices. But overall, this is an incredibly solid single-player RPG that’s incredibly polished, lots of fun to play and exactly the kind of game I’ve been hoping for since Baldur’s Gate III. That’s a very different type of single-player RPG, but these two games both remind us that the genre is far from dead. In Veilguard’s case, I’m pleased to say that BioWare is back in form and far from dead as well.
Before I talk about what works, I’ll discuss my main problems with the game.
The tone is a bit too chipper. I’m not sure how else to phrase that. This is a game about ancient, diabolical elven gods who want to destroy the world and everyone in it, but it feels like half the time the characters are effervescent with bubbly happiness. I wish this game had a bit of a darker tone to go along with its story. I may be exaggerating how chipper your companions can be, but it’s a bit glaring at times. I’m all for comic relief in darker fantasy stories, and I’m not suggesting this should be 100% grimdark, either (Dragon Age has always had its flippant dialogue, after all) but tonally the game just feels a bit off.
The aesthetic is too cartoony and the monster color pallette is too neon. Don’t get me wrong, the game looks absolutely stunning and the attention to detail in the character design and world design is astonishing. But neon blue energy coming out of half the monsters you encounter feels—again—tonally very strange. This, combined with character design that leans heavily toward cartoonish, just throws me off. I’ve gotten used to it, but this is definitely not the direction I would have gone. I’m not saying they should have gone super realistic, either, but there’s a happy medium.
Combat is fun, but I miss the tactical aspects of earlier games. I need to emphasize that I actually genuinely enjoy combat in this game, which is action-oriented and fast and can be quite challenging. I’m super, super picky when it comes to video game combat, so the fact that I’ve enjoyed this game’s fighting so much is a big deal. But I do miss the ability to zoom out a bit over the battlefield, pause the action and direct my companions, or even switch into a companion and control them directly. As far as the visceral combat feel itself, this game is way better than previous entries, but I’m sad that it abandoned tactics entirely. Why not do both?
The writing is hit-or-miss. I like the overall story and characters and often the dialogue works just fine. At other times, it feels amateurish and cliched. One example is when your party shows up at a village that has been overrun with Blight and one character says, “It’s quiet” and another says “Too quiet.” Hilariously, I’ve also been watching the third season of The Legend Of Vox Machina and there’s a whole bit in the new season where one of the characters makes fun of this, chiming in every time someone mentions it being quiet with “Too quiet!” There are other instances where it feels like a bit more creativity could have gone into the writing. But overall, it’s mostly just fine.
I haven’t finished the game yet—Paul Tassi’s review is here; he and I both agree that this is a fun game worth playing—so all of this is merely an impressions piece. But I am generally pretty picky about games in general, often burning out quite quickly if I don’t like something. I am far from burnt out with Dragon Age: The Veilguard. I’d have finished it by now if I wasn’t also reviewing the new Black Ops 6 and about half a dozen TV shows. Instead, I’m enjoying playing it a bit more slowly. I’m already excited to do a second playthrough as another character.
For this run, I’m a female elven rogue Veil Jumper:
I’ve actually spent far too much time in the character creator, and changed my character back and forth at the Mirror Of Transformation to be male, female, tried out different hairstyles and voices and so forth. There are a ton of options to fine-tune your character’s appearance.
There are also tons of choices when it comes to story decisions, though I’m not sure how these will impact the ending just yet. Clearly, the story will change based on your choices—some of which impact which missions you’ll go on and which companions will be affected by those decisions—so this will require more than one playthrough to see it all.
Combat is very action-packed, and for someone like me who enjoys action games, I’m very pleased with how engaging and fun it is—despite my caveats about wishing for more tactical options and deeper systems to exploit. Then again, I have Baldur’s Gate III if I want tactical, turn-based combat, and I get a totally different experience here. As a rogue, I’m often either shooting enemies from range with my bow (and there are headshot multipliers, so aiming precisely makes a huge difference) or rushing in for fast strikes at close-quarters. Here, you’ll want to play offensively so that you can break an enemy’s stance and unleash a powerful takedown. But you’ll also want to play defensively, countering blows or dodging out of the way of incoming attacks (I mostly do the latter, finding parrying unwieldy). You’ll also unlock a ton of special abilities, from elemental attacks to special blows that replenish health and much more, each varied by class choices and the sprawling skill-tree.
When it comes to tactics, you can pause and assign which abilities your companions will unleash, but I find that I rarely do this unless I need a healing boost and I’m out of potions. Mostly, your companions will do their own thing. I’m sure you could get more tactical here, but it seems relatively unimportant at least at this stage of the game. Which companions you choose for any given mission, and how their powers and yours combine, has more of an impact.
As far as the story goes, I’ll have to keep playing and find out. I like some companions more than others. I’m largely uninterested with romance options, and if I could make my own AAA single-player RPG I would dispense with these altogether. If anything, I’d prefer a romance to be part of the larger story, and not necessarily one involving the player or the companions as its principal players. That’s just me, of course. I find romances largely silly and superfluous in this sort of game.
I’m also a fan of the world design, both in terms of the game’s gorgeous graphics (caveats about saturation and enemy color-scheme aside) and that it isn’t just another open-world filled with busy-work. Yes, the linearity of the earlier game slowly opens up, but there is some linearity, and branching paths. It’s more of a hub-and-spokes design than an open-world design, and as a fan of Dark Souls this is more up my alley. There are plenty of secrets to find and puzzles to solve as well.
I suppose it all comes down to how you feel playing a game. Is it a chore? Are you bored? Or do you look forward to firing it back up and completing another quest? For my part, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is fun. I’m always excited to dive back into this world and take on my role as Rook. It’s no Origins, of course, but it’s also no Anthem. It’s solidly single-player and takes me back to earlier days of BioWare, when Origins and Mass Effect were at the top of the world.
Obviously, for a variety of reasons both good and bad, this will be yet another divisive entry from the studio. I think players who wanted something a bit closer to Origins will be justifiably disappointed in some aspects of gameplay. But Origins, no matter how great, didn’t have the best combat in the world, either. It was, in many ways, trying to bridge the gap between Baldur’s Gate and a more 3D action experience. This game just dispenses with bridge-gapping and does one thing very well, instead of two things half-baked.
Then there is the culture war. You can play as a trans character. There is tons of diversity. Since everything in the culture war is ramped up to 11 now, people are already writing this off as “woke” or whatever, but I find these complaints largely frivolous and silly. Dragon Age has always been diverse, for one thing, and other stellar RPGs in recent years, from Cyberpunk 2077 to Baldur’s Gate III have had gender options and loads of diversity, and this didn’t impact their stories in a negative way. I haven’t encountered anything particularly galling or preachy in the story itself, and I’m happy to see more options for more players. You get to choose, right? That’s what makes RPGs so great in the first place. Having more choices is a good thing.
I’ll keep playing and have a second piece later on when I’ve finished the game. Maybe I’ll whistle a different tune by then, but for now I’m having a blast playing the game on Steam both with mouse-and-keyboard and a controller. It looks and runs great and I’ve had very few performance-related issues, which is also a pleasant surprise. BioWare has had some big misses in recent years (when they’re releasing anything at all) but this feels like a hit. Hopefully it means we get lots more BioWare games in the future, and they’re each crafted with this much care.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard launches on October 31st on PC, Xbox and PlayStation.
