The gaming equivalent of Oscar Bait
If Dragon Age: The Veilguard has proven anything, it’s the absolute dissonance between games journalists and gamers themselves. Is this the best RPG of all time? Not by a country mile. Is it the worst game to come out this year? Well, it’ll be on the list of contenders but no, it’s definitely not the worst.
Instead, what we have here is the gaming equivalent of Oscar Bait. A bland, safe, forgettable experience that ticks all the boxes for journos but missing the heart, emotion and staying power that will make gamers rally behind it. And the problems with Veilguard only compound the longer you play.
Bioware have a long, storied history with RPG titles. The Mass Effect trilogy is legitimately one of my favourite sci-fi experiences, and Mass Effect 2 in particular is the absolute pinnacle of what Bioware can achieve when they put their minds to it.
Similarly, the Dragon Age series has also been going strong for a while, with deep lore, interesting characters, factions and deep-rooted decision making that impacted the world around you and your character’s trajectory moving forward.
Along the way, Bioware have kinda abandoned their deep narrative roots for leaner, meatier gameplay. Bethesda are another company that have gone this same route too, diluting their core playing experience to open the franchise up to newcomers. Sure the gunplay in Fallout 4 is much better, but the story is lightyears away from 3 or Obsidian’s excellent New Vegas. Oh, and the less said about Starfield the better.
So all of that background brings us along nicely to Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Its been a hot minute since the disastrous release of Anthem and with a decade to lick their wounds And come back stronger, everybody seemed to be enthused for the result of Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
Now, I’m not going to go into the social and political issues surrounding this game. What I will say however, is that Veilguard makes it incredibly difficult to avoid these topics when they’re deep-seated into the very foundation of the game itself. From the narrative, to the character creation, all the way over to the companions and dialogue choices, everything here is skewed in one direction and it really doesn’t do this Dragon Age game any favours.
With that in mind, Veilguard also hits a double-whammy here by deciding to march to the beat of its own drum, away from what’s always made this series (and Mass Effect) so appealing. Player choice.
See, the reason Mass Effect 3’s ending is reviled so much by fans is simply because the choices given boil down to one simple black and white choice for two endings. That’s it. There’s no nuance or morally grey ambiguity here, it’s all binary – good or bad.
Veilguard bizarrely decides to abandon all the player choices from the previous games and instead whittle this down to only selecting three choices made in Inquisition, the previous game in the franchise. According to Creative Director John Epler, this was to “avoid contradicting” past choices individual players made. But then the game itself constantly contradicts itself by rewriting lore surrounding factions, characters, ideas and worldbuilding to fit with that aforementioned biased social and political worldview, making for a pretty difficult game to really rally behind.
So what is this game about anyway? Well, Veilguard takes place 10 years after the events of Dragon Age: Inquisition, with previous companion Solas, now known by his previous alias, Fen’Harel, attempting to destroy the Veil. This is the metaphysical boundary between the physical world and the Fade, the world of spirits and demons.
Solas previously created the Veil to imprison other elven gods after they misused their power, but now attempts to restore the world out of regret for sealing ancient elves off from the Fade and causing the downfall of their society.
After creating your character, you’re thrust into this world as “Rook”, a player from one of six factions, who sets out on a mission to stop Solas. Despite sealing the veil, two ancient elven Gods manage to get out and in doing so, set into motion a series of events leading to the destruction of the world itself. The only solution is to try and defeat these ancient Gods, and banish them back to the Veil. In order to do that, Rook will need to recruit new companions and strengthen their resolve to see this through to the end.
The story does have some nice narrative beats, especially midway through when you fight a really imaginative boss involving various creatures in an arena (no spoilers here don’t worry) but around these set-pieces, Dragon Age is nowhere near as epic as it tries to be. Part of this stems from the tone (which I’ll circle back to later) and the other comes from the companions themselves.
The characters you encounter are a rather diverse bunch and they tick all the boxes. You start with Varric, as the gruff older advisor, and Lace Harding, the Scout from Inquisition.
As the game progresses, you recruit six other mandatory companions: Bellara, a Veil Jumper; Davrin, a Grey Warden; Emmrich, a Mourn Watcher; Lucanis , an Antivan Crow; Neve, a Shadow Dragon; and Taash, a Lord of Fortune.
Each of the companions play a key role in the final fight, and the game encourages you to deviate from the main mission to complete each of the side quests that these guys have to offer. Each companion is given 4-6 little mini-quests to complete if you want to boost their affinity to you, and most include cannon fodder bosses and simple fetch quests that flesh out a bit more of their past.
Taash is easily the worst companion out of the lot and I genuinely can’t tell if the person writing this character wanted them to be a non-binary caricature. Taash is immature, unstable, hypocritical, self righteous and she preaches a lot of the time. I won’t go into too much detail here, because others will be way more scathing than me but suffice to say, I was more than happy to see the back of them during the final mission.
As for the other companions, they range from pleasant to tolerable. They’re all quite archetypal, but they also all blur together because of the terrible dialogue. Honestly, I cannot emphasize here how bad the writing is in this game. The dialogue is so stilted and exposition heavy, and the tone is wildly inconsistent. This game suffers from the “Marvel Effect” of just adding humour and quips to lighten the mood, even when you’re in the middle of a tense encounter.
Oh, a dragon is flying overhead and killing everyone? What a great time to throw in a few jokes. Someone is summoning the undead to fight in droves against you? Lets not waste time with silly suspense, straight in with the humour. These moments don’t do the game any favours and at no point did I ever feel the gravity of the situation.
Bellara is so stupidly awkward too, despite her cool attacks, that it’s legitimately difficult to include her in a party without eyerolling at her quips. She does that annoying thing that seems to be the trend now where she rambles on, talking quickly about different topics but in a “ohmergod I’m suuuch a geek! Crazy, right?” way. I legit was expecting her to show up with a pair of glasses and buck teeth to complete the look.
Even worse though, the game does the music equivalent of a “laugh track”, by throwing in comedic jingles just to let audiences know that this is supposed to be a funny moment. Thanks Veilguard.
So what of the gameplay? With the story and narrative focus, Dragon Age’s combat isn’t too bad but everything outside of that ranges from passable to abysmal. Traversal is simple enough, although the level design is actually quite bad overall. There are loads of chests and random pick-ups just lying around in towns and while this may seem like a nit-pick, given Elder Scrolls and GTA have got worldbuilding right decades ago, it’s really inexcusable here. Especially since this game has had 10 years in development.
Seeing beggars in the street, asking for coins, only to be kneeling about 3 meters away from a bag of gold that nobody else has picked up other than your character just feels lazy. Similarly, NPCs don’t really do anything unpredictable, there’s no random bits of crime or interesting random encounters to stumble upon, it’s all just perfunctory story.
The dungeons fare a bit better than the towns, with a few light puzzles ranging from destroying floating crystals to unlock doors or finding keys to bring over to podiums. The chests here usually are worth grabbing, as they include equipment to help bolster up your stats when fighting against enemies.
Enemies themselves are okay, ranging from mildly aggressive to towering behemoths, and combat is generally quite fun. It took me way longer than I care to admit that the companions you bring along never run out of MP or stamina, so the idea here is to usually overwhelm your opponents by queuing up attacks to take them out.
Holding down the trigger during combat will slow everything down to a crawl, allowing you to choose different magic spells or buffs/debuffs to use. This allows for a bit of mix-and-match gameplay, and the six different companion quests give you a chance to try them all out before settling on your chosen party.
The enemy variety is a massive concern because, well, there’s not too much in the way of differing monsters and creatures. You’ll start to see the same enemy types crop up throughout the 15-30 hour experience and it does become a bit tedious after a while.
It’s definitely advisable to bring someone along with healing capabilities though because while you do have potions to use during dungeon crawls and boss fights, this will definitely make your life easier. Playing on Normal difficult is a sufficient enough challenge but the harder difficulties aren’t really harder per-se. Don’t expect the AI to change much here as instead, Veilguard goes the bullet-sponge way and simply increases enemy damage, HP and lowers your overall attack.
The result is that combat feels much more grindy than it has any right to be, especially as you have shields, barriers and HP to whittle down. It all starts to devolve into watching bars slowly decrease rather than a genuinely unique challenge.
The true stand-out exception to Veilguard’s combat comes from its boss fights. These are genuinely really fun and most of the designs are imaginative and give you the feel of an epic encounter. I just wish there was more of this and the game leaned into adding extra enemy variety in little combat skirmishes.
Character skills and levelling up is a simple enough affair and for those that have played Final Fantasy X, the system is quite similar here. Every time you level up, you’re given a series of points that you can use around a grid to level your character up. What’s cool here is the option to recycle points and redistribute them without punishment. If you’re struggling against a foe weak to fire for example, you can easily recycle every point and solely focus on Fire-based attacks.
Similarly, if you’re fighting an enemy that’s quite slow and laborious, it makes sense to redistribute all points into two handed, heavy weapons. This does add a bit of extra strategy to the game, and this extends out to the equipment too. You can stock out your character with different weapons, which you can “level up” using material found scattered around the environments. You can also Enchant them too with extra Buffs like Ice-damage, extra damage or stagger capabilities. These are definitely worthy inclusions here and just add a little bit extra to the gameplay.
Visually, the game looks great as well. There’s very little lag and the draw distance is impressive. The landscapes you traverse are beautiful to look at, and seeing these vistas and looking forward to the next unique area the game throws at you kept me playing until the very end. This really is a beautifully realized world, which is such a shame because the character models by comparison are… well.
Other reviewers have commented on this as well so I certainly can’t take credit for this but the models all look like they’ve been kicked out of a Dreamworks or Pixar movie. It’s completely jarring against the world’s aesthetic and the voice acting certainly doesn’t match the lip-syncing either, which is usually stilted and flat. My character is an absolute monstrosity so it maybe doesn’t do it justice but the companions are equally just as bad.
Sticking with the aesthetics for now though, the soundtrack to Veilguard is outstanding. As a proper geek when it comes to videogame music (complete with a massive playlist on Spotify full of incredible tracks), Veilguard is definitely up there with one of the best Bioware have put out. Some of this stems from the orchestral efforts of Han Zimmer and Lorne Balfe’s collaboration. Honestly, if there’s a prize for best soundtrack in a game this year, Veilguard should be in the running for that.
Pretty aesthetics aside, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a boring sludge of grey. It’s not awful enough to poke fun at for its broken mechanics like Star Wars: Outlaws, but similarly, it’s nowhere near good enough to compete with the best Bioware have put out. Veilguard is a complete nothingburger; an indifferent shrug of a fantasy epic that fails to live up to what’s come before, and destined to be thrown into the veil, reduced to a passing whisper of what could have been.
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