Dragon Age: The Veilguard Review: BioWare’s Most Ambitious Game Yet
BioWare’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard delivers an intense, but meaningful experience about regret, found family, and fighting to right past wrongs.
Posted a month ago
Platform reviewed on: PlayStation 5
Pros
- The best Dragon Age cast yet
- Combat is equally stylish as it is smooth and enjoyable
- Character customization is inclusive
- A game full of hard-hitting decisions
Cons
- Limited world choices leave older players behind
- A lack of tactical camera can make some fights difficult to follow
ESRB Age Rating: Mature
ESRB Content Descriptors: Blood, Nudity, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Violence
Review code provided by the publisher.
It’s been 10 years since Dragon Age: Inquisition’s Trespasser DLC revealed that Dragon Age: The Veilguard (known previously as DA4, then Dragon Age: Dreadwolf) would be focusing on stopping the elven god Fen’harel, also known as Solas, a friend or a lover to many heartbroken Inquisitors, from tearing down the Veil. With so much time having passed, the expectations of what players would want answered in the sequel have only grown. Who is Solas, really? What were the ancient elves, the Evanuris, really like before all of this happened?
BioWare’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard seeks to answer these questions, and in doing so, turn everything you thought you knew about the world of Thedas on its head.
The game starts at breakneck speed, with main character Rook meeting up with Varric Tethras in a bar in Tevinter to find a missing detective, a cool-as-a-cucumber ice-mage known as Neve Gallus. Without her, they can’t track down Solas and interrupt his ritual. As introductions go, it’s not a bad one, and feels reminiscent of every RPG’s ‘you meet in a tavern’ setup, which lets you know that you’ll start this adventure as a scrappy hero, but will inevitably fall into the same legend as the previous Dragon Age protagonists. Hell, it even has Varric there, a fan-favorite character since his arrival in the second Dragon Age game, to assure returning players that the formula is sacred and unchanging.
As expected, stopping Solas’ ritual from tearing down the Veil and dooming the world as we know it, goes wrong. We learn Solas was moving the Evanuris, the elven pantheon who aren’t as benevolent as the Dalish and other myths make them out to be, to a new prison that could hold them and prevent them from escaping. Unfortunately, our interruption of the ritual ends up letting two gods go: Elgar’nan, a power-hungry tyrant who wishes to crush those weaker than him simply because he can, and Ghilan'nain, a genius, but unethical mage whose experiments led to the creation of monsters. Solas on the other hand, becomes imprisoned inside your head, and glares angrily at you each and every time you remind him about it. Having little choice but to work together with Solas to put these two evil cats back in the box, Rook must recruit allies from around Thedas to help them stop the world from ending.
Stories in the Dragon Age series have continuously operated on a grand scale (with varying levels of success), with even its littlest home-town heroes having to face impossible odds. Veilguard is its biggest story yet, and because of its whirlwind pacing at times, it doesn’t always succeed in letting the narrative breathe. Thankfully, this changes the more you play, but it leaves Veilguard’s introduction feeling far less cohesive as a whole.
Thankfully, what’s always made these stories so inviting for me is that you don’t deal with these terrible circumstances alone. Your companions this time around aren’t just the people you meet on the street, or recruit because you have nobody else who believes in your cause, but are in a similar vein to Mass Effect 2, BioWare’s sci-fi RPG: a group of professionals who have every reason to want to stop the elven gods from ruining the world. Each companion (outside of returning fan-favorite, Harding) comes with their own faction, with examples including Bellara Lutare representing the Veil Jumpers, a group who tinker and protect ancient magical artifacts, and Davrin, a monster-hunter representing the beloved-but-kind-of-deeply-messed-up faction, the Grey Wardens.
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It isn’t just your companions who belong to a faction. Alongside the most customizable character creation that Dragon Age has ever had – with far more inclusivity with the addition of trans surgery scars, different body shapes and sizes, and pronouns that signify your identity to you, and your identity to the world – Rook is able to belong to one of the following factions: Mourn Watch, Grey Wardens, Veil Jumpers, Shadow Dragons, Antivan Crows, and Lords of Fortune.
Unlike Dragon Age: Inquisition, where your background and the importance of it could fit into a small thimble, your faction has narrative weight and is often referenced throughout the main storyline, as well as by characters and companions. Playing as a Crow, I giggled gleefully at reading letters from my Rook’s boss, Viago, after a job gone wrong, and the ease at fitting into these factions whenever I interacted with them granted me a sense of belonging in this world with real care.
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BioWare’s decision to focus on factions this time makes sense. After all, the Dragon Age series has always been about people, and what better way to highlight that than showing the different people that come together to stop evil? It helps that these new companions are expertly crafted, with plenty of opportunities to get to know them. While previous installments had meaningful interactions occur over time, usually based on conversations and quests, Veilguard takes on a much more dynamic approach by allowing companions to have lives outside of the player. Neve and Bellara have easily my favorite party dynamic, sharing Tevinter serials with each other, but the rivalry between Davrin and Lucanis is just as great. There’s even romance, depending on who you choose to romance. I chose to pursue Bellara, who quickly became the love of my life, but what brought me joy was that it wasn’t just Rook who was finding love. It made the companions seem more real. As for Rook, the connection they can share with their companions can swing from wildly romantic to steamy and lustful, but there is plenty of room for friendship too.
But it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows for your companions, and Rook’s relationship with them. Rook must also make difficult decisions. The series has had plenty of those in the past (Alistair vs Hawke, Archdemon Baby vs Sacrifice, etc) but this time around, consequences are almost always immediate. For example, a key moment has players making the decision to help one faction, or another. With companions belonging to these factions, your decisions will not just strain your relationship with that group, but also have an impact on the relationships you make. One decision stuck with me throughout the rest of the game, which, as a credit to BioWare’s masterful writing and skill in making you care about these characters, made me feel so guilty I had to take a break from the story to go do something else, aka, go and kill a lot of things.
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Combat has never been the strongest point when it comes to a Dragon Age game. While Inquisition was the series best, even that felt far from fun. Veilguard, however, blows it all out of the water. If someone had told me that I’d be playing my first time as a rogue, a class that has been my most hated since Origins, I’d have laughed at them. Now I’m struggling to imagine playing as anything else because it is the most fun I’ve had in combat in a Dragon Age game since ever. It’s fluid and feels as easy as breathing, with a combination of daggers, arrows, and bombs to help keep combat interesting and unique with each and every battle.
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Instead of me actively avoiding combat as much as possible, I found myself seeking out fights just so I could practice my dodging and parrying as a rogue. The downside is that a lot is going on during battles. As someone who was disappointed at BioWare making sure you only have two companions with you instead of three, and that you couldn’t control them, I have seen the light and realize how impossible it would be to keep track of everyone. It doesn’t help that everything is so closed in, and unlike in previous installments, you have no way to pull the camera outwards to navigate what’s on the battlefield outside of swerving left, right, up, and down. While the ability wheel does help negate some of this frantic, frenzied feeling in battle, I can’t help but miss the tactical camera that allowed you to see everything and plan accordingly.
While the combat has been improved, the world of Dragon Age is usually the centerpiece that has players so eager to return with each new installment – particularly with how player choice acts as the red ribbon that ties the games altogether. Yet while this is certainly a sequel to Dragon Age: Inquisition, with returning characters like The Inquisitor, it quickly became evident that Veilguard was meant to stand on its own. The general gist is spelled out during a quick introductory scene, depicted by gorgeous 2D art and Brian Bloom’s enchanting, dulcet tones, and overall, a player new to the series can jump into Veilguard and play. But it is far easier to digest the (often convoluted) plot and revelations revealed if you’ve played throughout all three games. BioWare has done its best to ensure Veilguard can be a brand new start, but I’ll be honest: it simply won’t hit the same as it would for fans of previous games.
Of course, BioWare hasn’t made it so Veilguard is unreadable. Instead, it has written Veilguard in a way that tries to respect each player’s world by simply not going into detail. BioWare’s reveal that only three choices would matter from the previous games was met with a mixed reaction, with fans openly wondering what this meant for the future of Dragon Age. While I can’t go into specifics, the issues of the South and what happened 10 years ago in Dragon Age: Inquisition aren’t entirely left behind. Even so, fans eager to see if they could recognize their world, the one they’ve impacted throughout previous installments, may leave feeling as disappointed as I was in that regard.
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But that doesn’t mean the setting, and what fans love about it, isn’t there. As a long-time fan, I gleefully cackled at every cameo, and gasped and took note with each new revelation. There are so many new things to discover that it gives the previous games a new sheen to them, so much so that as I neared the end of Veilguard, I knew immediately I was going to head back to Dragon Age: Origins with a brand new perspective. Whether these revelations hit for you is all about perspective, and I imagine not all of it will land well for everyone, but for me? The world of Dragon Age is so rich with history, it felt like cracking open my favorite book to discover that 10 new chapters had been written overnight.
Ultimately, Veilguard is BioWare going back to its roots: a single-player, story-driven RPG with a scrappy hero and the people they meet along the way. Previously, I made a comparison to Mass Effect 2, and despite these two games being very different in style and setting, I feel content in making that comparison with just how grand the scale of Veilguard is and its overall mission design. Veilguard has ditched the open-world setting from Inquisition (but for those who enjoyed it, there’s still plenty to explore) and replaced it with a much more linear experience, though instead of being back and away from the action with guns and abilities, Veilguard is melee-orientated, which comes with its own pros and cons.
However, it’s the narrative beats of Mass Effect 2 that stick out as the key comparison to Veilguard: how Shepard’s success meant the survival of the galaxy to fight another day, with the ability to lose friends and loved ones along the way. Veilguard follows in similar footsteps, and is a much more compelling game for it.
When I’d finished Inquisition and then Trespasser for the first time, I left it feeling unsure about the future and direction of Dragon Age. Veilguard has rectified all of my dislike for its predecessor, massively improving everything, adding meaningful things to do in its world’s hubs, artfully depicting region after region with unique cultures that aren’t bogged down in pointless side quests that make them a chore to uncover. No longer do I need to collect meaningless crap and ‘earn power’ to simply pursue the story, and no longer does combat feel like having my legs stuck in the mud, relentless in how unmoving it was. And now, most importantly, I look back on Inquisition with respect for what it set up: the best Dragon Age yet.