1
0
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is finally out. After so many delays and name changes (this was originally known as Dreadwolf), I honestly figured this was going to be another vaporware title. You know, those games that get forever delayed but are never officially cancelled?
I figured that this would be one of them.
Turns out the joke’s on me. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is legit and just launched a few weeks ago. So why the review now? I wanted to play through the game to the end before I made a decision, unlike some review sites that just fired off a review after a few hours of playtime.
So what do I think about the game?
What is Dragon Age: The Veilguard?
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a third person action RPG developed by Bioware and published by EA. It is available for the PC, Playstation and Xbox consoles.
It is available right now.
Our copy was kindly provided by the awesome folks over at EA!
Taking place a few years after the end of Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: The Veilguard puts you in the shoes of Rook, a person Varric hired to help track down Solas, the Dread Wolf. Solas is planning to teardown the Fade (the barrier between the normal world and another dimension full of spirits and demons and stuff).
You get thrown right into the deep end, as you take control of Rook right as Solas is starting to put his plan into action. Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s plot a bit of a bait and switch (you’ll see when you play it) and the rest of the plot…is honestly a letdown. It only gets better at the final leg, when your crew has to go up against the big baddie that are on the cusp of achieving his goals…
…and <SPOILERS> in the Epilogue, when it’s revealed there’s a new threat that’s actually been pulling the strings all along.
Its time is coming, now that the Elven Gods are gone.
Honestly, that last bit has been fired up for a new Dragon Age more than anything!
Despite playing the original Dragon Age Origins on the Xbox 360 (and all other subsequent Dragon Age games) I barely remember anything about the series except bits and pieces. Its a sorry state of affairs to be honest, because Bioware’s baby has a ton of interesting backstory.
Granted, that backstory’s seemingly been placed on a backburner these recent years, but there’s never been a better time to get back into the universe than with Dragon Age: The Veilguard. That’s because the game actually is a wider spanning adventure than most (perhaps other than Inquisition) games in the series. Your character literally goes pretty much all of northern Thedas (the continent the games are set on) in this one.
That’s a lot of ground to cover.
Thankfully, the game isn’t an open world RPG like Skyrim. It’s not even an semi-open world RPG like Dragon Age: Inquisition was. Dragon Age: The Veilguard has linear maps, with branching paths you can follow. You know, like the maps in Monster Hunter World? Interconnected, but linear pathways.
You might think that this cuts down on the exploration and discovery aspects (and it does) but it also makes things flow smoother. I’ve lost count how much I got bored running around the open maps in Dragon Age: Inquisition, scouring every single nook and cranny for treasure and resources.
It bored the hell out of me.
In Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the maps are more focused now, so there’s much less aimless wandering. They start off small, but gradual expand as more areas open up as you progress in the game. Unfortunately, the maps are still forgettable as hell.
Despite spending so much time in them, I regularly had to check the in-game maps to make sure I was going the right way. The lack of memorable landmarks means everything looks familiar to me. Sure, some of the environments are cool to admire, but the linear nature also means that you can’t make your own way through the maps, as you’re forced to use only the set paths. It’s a double edged sword.
On one hand, the linear maps are better for flow, but they also cut down on the exploration aspects. The environments themselves have potential.
The Elven ruins of Arlathan and the Necropolis are some of the coolest locations yet in a Dragon Age game, yet running around in those areas is tediously boring. Bioware got the big picture right (the promise of a cool location or environment), but forgot about the nitty gritty (making interesting places inside those locations).
There’s a minimap that helpfully guides you around, but weirdly, it doesn’t show enemies. I’m scratching my head on this. Why? What’s the point of having a minimap that’s only a navigation aid? Why not jus a compass then?
Not being able to know where enemies are at a glance is especially bad for casters. You don’t know if anybody is sneaking up on your as you’re recharging your mana or firing off a spell. You don’t know if anybody’s hiding in the area too.
Basically, you don’t know jack shit about your surroundings. It’s a massive annoyance in battles, because you constantly have to keep circling around the camera to keep track. On top of that, the game has a totally broken lock-on system.
It only locks on to the target when its on-screen. If you hide behind a wall or crate or any environmental object and get blocked in the slightest…bye bye lock-on. It’s infuriating. It makes fighting some of the more mobile enemies a massive (I really can’t underscore this) pain in the ass. It affects all classes, no matter if you’re melee or ranged.
Speaking of classes, the game really hates mages. I played as a Necromancer in the game but it didn’t feel like it. At all.
Firstly, there were no necromantic spells to raise minions or undead or anything of the like. Why call the class a necromancer if all it does is poison and leech life from enemies? Which part of necro means poison or leech?
The kicker is that the mage class also has the option to fight in melee combat.
Wuuuuuuuut.
The damn reason I picked a mage was to stay away from melee yet the alternative fighting style for mages is melee. There is a gameplay reason (one of the classes you can specialize in is a magical assassin) but it just doesn’t feel right to be a Necromancer and then have to wade into combat yourself without minions to back you up.
What would Ainz Ooal Gown say?
Whether you do ranged or melee, mages are screwed.
The game doesn’t utilize mana in traditional sense. Rather, it equates every 50 mana to an orb. So if you have 100 mana, you have two orbs. Problem is that massively cuts down on spell use for mages. Spells cost one or two orbs per cast…which means every encounter in the game (until you can get the skill to recharge mana mid-battle) has you casting a single skill or two and then spamming the mage’s regular attacks because the rate of mana recovery in battles is ridiculous.
You’ll likely never be able to cast more spells before the battle is over. Not because the battles are over quick (they aren’t) but because mana recovers that damn slowly.
You can only cast three spells in battle, along with some rune magic (which mainly casts status afflictions) and an Ultimate move. That’s it. Do I feel like a badass Necromancer with three spells to my repertoire?
Hell no. I feel like a punk, that’s what I feel like.
Ranged combat is terrible too.
You can do a total of three hits in a ranged combo chain, with the last hit being the most powerful. Problem is, the ranged attacks…well, they don’t have much range to them. Enemies meanwhile, can hit you clear across the map with their ranged attack. I wish I was joking but I’m not. Enemies on the other side of the battlefield can rain death on your with unerring accuracy, while you can barely hit somebody a few meters away.
Does that sound fair? No it does not.
It is boring. It is cheap. It is tear inducing. It makes waiting paint dry seem like a thrilling prospect.
There’s also the fact that enemies swarm you so you will rarely have the chance to do a full three hit combo. It’s always one, two dodge. One, two dodge. You spend as much time dodging in the game as you do fighting whether you’re in melee battles or ranged fights.
In fact, I hated the combat for most of the game until 75% through. Then, with the right gear and skills, my necromancer could literally just melt everything in his path with the mage’s ranged attack (the magic beam from the staff).
Seriously, that staff skill did more damage per second with crits (you just aim for the head to get them) than all my spells combined! Combined with the other Necromancer perks (dealing damage leeches life), and you can melt bosses with zero effort, while still healing yourself.
Combat was finally quick and relatively painless…but that still didn’t make it fun. The detonation mechanics (where you combined two spell types to do extra damage) is too shallow and too limiting. It also limits your party members because certain members just don’t have the skills that are compatible to trigger detonations. It really, really sucks that I want to play with.
You also can’t command members to do your bidding like in past games. Here all you can do is their attack targets and when to cast the spells you want them to use.
Your allies have no HP (they can’t die) so it means that enemies will be swarming you 99% of the time. A couple of your friends have taunts (which draws the aggro of enemies) but they wear off too soon and take too long to cooldown. You’re back to dodging dodging dodging soon enough. In the early going, I spent more time dodging that I did fighting.
I also despise the new upgrading system. Basically equipment has locked traits. These traits only unlock when you upgrade their rarity. Problem is doing that requires you to find copies of that equipment in chests scattered throughout the world or buy them from shops that sell them.
Theoretically, it means that your favourite weapon can stay relevant throughout the game. In practice, it depends you on exploring every nook and cranny to find the chests with equipment in them, and then hoping those chests have the ones you use.
You can upgrade your gear, but it only affects your stats, not the locked talents in the weapons. It’s super frustrating because you don’t know where the equipment you want is stashed. So unless you waste hours backtracking or hop online for a guide, you’re SOL.
Speaking of luck, that plays a large part with how you interact with the game world. Some genius on the UI team made the decision to have the A button to interact with things (pick up items). A is also the button to make your character jump.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
99% of the time when I want to pick something up or interact with an object, my character jumps instead. How did this boneheaded design choice get through QA?
There’s also the sore point that the game recycles bosses. Or rather, dragon bosses.
You’ll be fighting a few of them (including some optional dragon fights) throughout the game and all of them (save for the Archdemon fights) are the same. They use the same moves, do the same patterns. I honestly dreaded facing dragons because they’re so banal to face!
The bottom line?
The combat sucks. It’s not as fun as Dragon Age II’s action combat or even as tactically rewarding as Dragon Age Origins’. It’s bland, repetitive and boring.
You know what else is boring? The plot.
After having waited years to go after Solas, what we get instead is a cop-out. You spend the game fighting two other old Elven Gods instead, while Solas guides you. Holy shit is that a massive disappointment! It isn’t even a good one (like when Hideo Kojima switched Solid Snake out for Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2)!
It feels like a tremendous letdown after all the buildup and hard work that Dragon Age: Inquisition did. All that lore building, laying the groundwork…most of it gone. Poof! Thrown out just like that.
The new plot is tame, predictable and wholly unsurprising. Even worse, it doesn’t feel consequential. All the monumental decisions that were part and parcel of past Dragon Age games is gone here. There’s only really one really big decision to make, with the rest paling in comparison.
I mentioned earlier that the game only gets interesting at the very end (and the epilogue). It’s no excuse for the tepid experience you have to slog through to get them. A slog made worse, with the worst party makeup in a Dragon Age game yet.
That’s just for the new cast.
The characters that are returning from past games don’t feel like themselves.
Varric isn’t Varric. The Inquisitor sure as hell didn’t act like the Inqusitor I played! Morrigan’s the worse of the lot; she actually made a quip during a fight like she’s in a Joss Whedon movie.
What’s the point of bring back fan favourites if they’re nothing like how we used to know them then?
The game doesn’t even use Dragon Age Keep, so all that time you spent inputting your world choices from the first game to set up Dragon Age: Inquisition goes down the drain.
What you get are instead a handful of questions about what the Inquisitor thinks about Solas and what happened to the Inquisition after. That’s it. Seriously. Did I mention this was a slap in the face to fans who stuck with the series since the beginning?
In fact, some of the cast this time around is also slap to fans and stinks of DEI.
Unlike past games where you can choose not to recruit, here everybody’s forced down your throat.
Take Taash for example.
I honestly don’t give two hoots if you’re gay, lesbian or bi-sexual. I just hate it when it’s pretty much all the character focuses on, in the case of Taash. Instead of delving into her backstory and the firebreathers among the Qunari, the whole sub-plot with Taash is that it doesn’t like being a female.
Boo freaking hoo.
You may notice I call Taash it. That’s because I’m old school. There’s male, there’s female. Anything else is it. I was taught that in school and that’s the road I’m taking. Plus I’m Asian, I don’t have time for Western bullshit and being PC.
Nobody else in the game makes their sexual orientation their core character trait. So why does Taash do it? I want to know more about how it grew up, how its mother sacrificed everything to take it away from the Qunari and the Antaam. How it grew up in Riviani and the Lords of Fortune!
Instead we get multiple quests on how Taash hates it that its mother doesn’t know that it is non-binary.
The DEI-ness of the whole thing even extends to the skin colour and race of your crew.
Bellara is an Asian Elf.
Asian.
Elf.
Let that sink in for a moment.
There have been zero Asian elves prior to this. Three games. Multiple comics. A handful of novels. Zero Asian Elves. Then suddenly we have an Asian one in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Black elves too!
Why the hell do we need representation in a fantasy game?
I’m an Asian male but that doesn’t mean I want an Asian male to be in everything! I don’t need the Master Chief to be Asian, or Marcus Fenix to be Asian. I don’t need Captain America to be Asian. I don’t need Isaac Clarke to be Asian. It’s fine for fantasy races to remain stereotypical! Nobody who isn’t a Karen or woke cares!
Why shoehorn races that don’t fit in a fantasy setting?!
The cherry on top is Bellara isn’t even a hot Asian elf! She’s ugly as sin. In fact, she’s the ugliest character in the game. That is coming from game where I had zero interest in romancing any of the ladies. That’s a dubious first in a Bioware game for me. Think of how unattractive the women had to be for that to be the case.
We went from Miranda in Mass Effect 2 (and her glorious ass) to these travesties in Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
What is wrong with Bioware that they need to bend to the whims of the DEI and woke crowd? What’s wrong with a hot busty elf? Or even decent looking ones like Merrill from Dragon Age II or Sera from Dragon Age: Inquisition?
I don’t play video games for politics. I play to enjoy myself and that means some eye candy! Is it too much to ask for?
Ironically, without the DEI influences, the cast would’ve probably turned out fine. Everybody else (other than Taash and Bellara) is great.
I love Devrin and his bond with Assan. I love Emmerich and his passion for necromancy. I love Lucanis, who talks like Puss in Boots! I love Neve for her passion in wanting the best for Dock Town! I even love Harding and her quest to find out more about the Dwarves and their past history!
Do I care that Devrin is black, Neve is Indian and Lucanis is a latino?
Hell no. Would I have cared if they were all white? Hell no too!
It’s how the characters are written, not the colour of their skin or their race that makes the difference! Ok, to be fair, the dialogue isn’t that great too…but it’s still one of the highlights of the game, as low a bar as it is.
I’m honestly devastated to see how low Bioware has fallen. This was a company renowned for storytelling and creating a great cast of characters for their games. Instead…we now get Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
Visually speaking, apart from the character designs, the environments of the game are pretty awesome. Oh sure, you have generic looking locations like forests and mines, but some of the set pieces in them look great. A few of the locales (particularly those in Nevarra or infected by the Blight) are downright spectacular.
The revamped Blight and the supernatural elements present in Dragon Age: The Veilguard had me wish a billion times over that it was a horror game instead of a fantasy RPG. They are by far, the best looking parts of the game.
Honestly, I hope that EA realizes that too and makes the next Dragon Age a full-fledged horror ARPG.
Can you imagine the awesomeness if it had the story of a Dragon Age game with the action gameplay of Dead Space? Since EA owns both Motive Studio (makers of the Dead Space remake) and Bioware, there’s nothing stopping them from making that a reality!
What will never be a reality though, is playing this on the ROG Ally X.
Simply put, even on 720p with the lowest settings and FSR…the performance is abysmal. Stuttering, insanely long loads, low FPS. You name it. It is just not worth it to play through the game on the ROG Ally X if you can avoid it.
I tried at multiple points to see if the performance got better. Nope, it doesn’t. Spare yourselves the hassle, pretend this game doesn’t even exist if you have an ROG Ally X or other handheld.
The Bottom Line.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard had a troubled development. It’s readily apparent when you play the game.
This isn’t the Dragon Age fans were expecting. Not at all.
While the game do some things right, it gets twice that wrong.
Its most egregious issue?
The total disregard for players who have been invested in the series since the beginning. No consideration for the past choices players made, returning characters acting totally out of character, non-existent tactical combat.
This is Dragon Age. It’s not even a shade of the past games. EA should never have associated this with the brand. It’s honestly that bad for a Dragon Age game.
TLDR:
Dragon Age in name only. Average in every other aspect.
The Good:
- Some visually spectacular locations.
- The endgame and epilogue is cool.
- Maps are more ordered now.
- Horror aspect are top notch.
The Bad:
- Returning characters don’t act like themselves.
- Battle system sucks.
- DEI influence.
- Ugly characters.
- Barely any consequential choices to be made.
- Forgettable music.
- No Dragon Age Keep integration.
Salehuddin Husin, EIC
Sal's been in the industry since the early 2000s. He's written for a ton of gaming and tech publications including Playworks, Hardwarezone, HWM and GameAxis. Recently, Sal served as a juror for the Indie Game Awards at Taipei Game Show 2020. A geek and hardcore gamer, Sal will play everything, on any platform.
You must be logged in to post a comment.