
Everything here seems great initially. The team at Bioware and EA got so much right with this release, one couldn't not be excited by this being possibly a new paradigm for AAA gaming in the mid-2020's. DA: The Veilguard had lower price than industry average base price at a time where nothing was being reduced. There was no extra annoying accounts beyond logging into the store you purchased the game on, i.e it is an EA Game but no EA App/Origin nonsense for Steam here. No Denuvo DRM employed to debilitate system performance. A complete game was delivered on day one, no cut story content being offered as DLC. No loot boxes and other pointless micro-transactions in an in-game store. No X-Days early access to the full game for pre-orders. No live service shit. Ultrawide support for all cinematics. And most importantly against industry-norms, Dragon Age: The Veilguard worked flawlessly out of the box on day one, fully and perfectly optimised for nearly all systems.
The gameplay of Dragon Age: The Veilguard took a little while to get used to but it soon became easy to master. I played the rogue class which is far more like a traditional ranger than a rogue as there's no traps or stealth in the game. With two blades and a bow your hero "Rook" can drop foes both at range as well as up close with a small but versatile array of options that can be tinkered with and swapped out depending on what you want. You are always accompanied by two companions who have abilities which can compliment both each other or yours with a primer and detonation combo with somewhat satisfactory results if used correctly. The pause menu allows you to target and unleash powers and hotkeys activate your own abilities to. I'll admit the combat effects can be somewhat too flashy compared to past games but this seems to be the norm among other games now. Levels of difficulty seem only to scale mob hit-points so I increased the difficulty from the easiest setting early on when I felt things were being killed far too quickly and kept it there. It didn't stop me from being killed but it made the whole experience much more satisfying.
The environments were varied and the levels were very well constructed and mapped out. Exploration was encouraged by the fact that if there was a ledge either above or below you, then more often than not there was actually something to find there. It is not quite an open world but still large enough to welcome unlocking a fast travel point when you came across it due to a fair amount of revisiting locations once you were high enough level or had the McGuffin required for the area.
Now with such a fantastic list of pros, how could this be anything but a win? Well there is a few other stars that need to be aligned before a win is declared and most of that comes from what one expects from a company who once held the RPG crown in the gaming world. Dragon Age is Bioware's dark fantasy setting, the keyword here being 'dark'. And anyone playing any of the earlier Dragon Age games knows how that is defined. What one should not do to promote a dark fantasy is to change the realistic art style employed by the previous games and give it a mismatched cartoonish look where characters are clearly too stylised to fully take seriously. This was the first red-flag.
As one progresses through the game it becomes painfully clear that the true magic of Bioware has now long left the building. The dialogue is somewhat infantile both from Rook and your companions and opportunities for the type of role-playing that Bioware is renowned for is non-existent. Choices that appeared in each dialogue wheel from Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect and into Dragon Age which defines your character as a negotiator, goody-to shoes or an outright asshole are absent and have been distilled down to "nice guy", "nice guy with a quip" and "firm-but-nice guy" and that's about it (unless there's an extra specialisation option depending on whatever options you took at character creation). It's a total regression of the system and leads always to the same outcome which is absolutely not what an RPG is supposed to do, certainly not a Bioware one.
The NPC companions on offer here seem to be defined by their quirks or job roles rather than their personalities and considering the quality of previous companions from Bioware it only cements the truth that the magic is gone. Romance, something that Bioware achieved to such a degree that it's been copied and added onto countless games and even noted as a negative absence in RPGs that have not employed it - well here it's tame to an insulting degree and takes up less than 15 minutes of what could be an 80 hour play-through. Fox News once tried to get Mass Effect banned based on "Alien sex scenes", i.e. the consummation of Commander Shephard's romance with Liara in 2008. Well not even the most devout religious holy-fucking-Joe nutjob would have had a problem with the infantile passionless love scenes on display here, PEGI-18 my ass, the only nudity was in the character creation screen!
It seems like the developers went out of their way to not offend a certain 1% of people at the cost of the 99% who wanted a real RPG. They spent longer on a storyline exploring one characters questioning of their own sexual identity, to the detriment of every other character's development (including your own) something that should have only been done if you choose those options but here it was made essential to the characters level progression which was ridiculous and was always cringe-inducing.
One major issue doesn't crop up until near the end and it's a significant issue especially those with expectations based on games following a certain Bioware formula. You are at some point faced with what seems like a normal gameplay choice and by this time you've faced several but this seems like a Mass Effect 2 "suicide mission" choice where you send one companion to do something and based on their loyalty level they live or die. This experience may lead you to ensure your characters are at max loyalty if you want to keep them alive. What they don't tell you is that the choice you're making here is a "Virmire" choice, named after a Mass Effect 1's command-decision of who gets left to die regardless of their loyalty/romance level. It's a bait and switch that may lead to a decision you'd not have made had you known the potential consequences and it feels like a decision taken from you because of it. While I commend the developers for doing something unexpected, something with such a genuinely horrible outcome no matter what you do feels too bitter a pill to swallow and I reject it outright.
With all that said however the game's ending sequence, the last two to three hours leading to and including the final confrontation, is so genuinely exciting and visually impressive that it's like a completely different team was responsible for it's creation. It has some incredible moments that I really think the price of admission was worth it. It's kind of a meme that Bioware doesn't end their games properly with any level of satisfaction and perhaps this is a positive example that this just isn't the true Bioware team because this is one of the best video game endings in many years.
Final Verdict: While technically superior to practically every other game released in recent times, Dragon Age: The Veilguard's exciting and cinematic gameplay and excellent score by Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe is sadly mismatched to chronically juvenile writing, weak characters and misplaced pandering to "sensitive" and "modern" audiences at the cost of meaningful RPG elements or delivering to the players that supported the franchise for so long.
Technicals: 80 hours through Steam on Windows 11 with an RTX4070Ti @ 3440x1440/90FPS with in-game HDR and Ray Tracing.
Bugs: One crash 50 hours in. No recurrence. After one lengthy session, breakables stopped breaking, restarting fixed.
Availability: Dragon Age: The Veilguard is available from Steam or the EA Store for €59.99. Review copy purchased in August 2024 for €59.99 from Steam.
Dragon Age series:
- Dragon Age: Origins (2009)
- Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening (2010)
- Dragon Age II (2011)
- Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014)
- Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024)
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