Dragon Age: The Veilguard Review – A Decade-Long Wait Worth It?

When there’s a ten-year gap between a game and its sequel, there’s always some kind of story to be told about what happened in the intervening time. Heck, there’s an entire YouTube show about the kind of troubled development games like Dragon Age: The Veilguard go through, and there’s a lot of material here. Development restarted from basically scratch twice, the creative team was a revolving door, and at one point the game wasn’t happening at all because it couldn’t be made into a live-service – but, at the end of that long road, we have in our hands a single-player, classic-BioWare RPG aiming to deliver on a decade of anticipation. And while the signs of struggle are there if you know what to look for, I think Veilguard has what it takes to stand with the best of them.

The Cliffhanger Left By Trespasser

Trespasser, the epilogue story DLC for Inquisition, left off on a massive cliffhanger where Solas, a member of the Inquisition and ally to the player character, revealed his true nature as an ancient elven god of lies and deception, playing a long game to bring down the Veil. The Veil, created sometime in the distant past, is the barrier that separates the world of Thedas from an endless realm of demons hell-bent on destroying it, and his former friend Varric and ally Lace Harding have spent the last ten years trying to track down Solas and stop his misguided plan.

Rook and Character Customization

The player character, Rook, has been recruited to this burgeoning team, and as I said in my preview, Rook is a highlight of the experience right from the moment you enter the absurdly detailed character creator. The sheer variety of aesthetic options available to the player is jaw-dropping in scope, to the point where I don’t think many players are going to opt into visible helmets after all the work they probably put into Rook’s face. Even cooler, though, is the decisions you can make about Rook’s backstory – something that Cyberpunk 2077 was lacking earlier this generation that Veilguard does exceptionally well.

Player Choice and Factions

The player’s choice of faction doesn’t necessarily change the course of the story, but it does influence many conversations and relationships in the game. I personally chose to make my Rook a Mourn Watcher, the kingdom of noble necromancers who protect and study the balance of life and death, and this not only gave me a built-in commonality with companion Professor Emmerich, but allowed me a special dialogue option pretty much any time the concepts of life and death were brought up. It’s not anything that’s going to dramatically change a playthrough, but it does make Rook stand out all the more as an actual character, rather than strictly an avatar for the player.

Dynamic Character Interactions and Banter

Speaking of Rook as an actual character, their personality shines consistently in every interaction. I’ve had a growing irritation with silent protagonists or blank slates that I’m supposed to fully self-insert with, as I tend to feel they end up lacking depth and intrigue compared to more defined party members, and Rook is absolutely their own existing person that can hold their own next to the colorful cast. The player still has plenty of control over how they come off to others, and the role-playing is a bit let down by a very simple relationship karma system, but my Rook became a very human and relatable hero that I’ll be sad to part from.

Memorable Companion Cast

I’ve mentioned the companions a few times already, and I’m going to have to fight the urge to not spoil anything beyond what’s already shown up in the advertisements, but suffice it to say that Veilguard’s is a top-tier RPG cast. Harding, Neve, Bellara, Lucanis, Davrin, Emmerich, and Taash are unique people that bounce off of each other beautifully, and the amount of thought and effort placed into their interactions goes a long way and actually manages to avoid the “everyone has to have a line in this scene so we remember we’re there” problem that tends to plague big groups like this. I was endeared to all of them right out the gate, and only became even more so when their individual depth came into focus.

New Changes in Party Dynamics and Intimacy

One of the most impressive things about the game is the way that the party interacts with each other, and the subplots that can come up all the way into the endgame out of pure chance. My most common party was my sniper-rogue Rook, Lucanis, and Emmerich, and after a late-game scene discussing past romance prospects, I counted at least three more random banter conversations between them while adventuring that continued this topic as it kept developing. The game was almost over, and yet I was still learning new things about these people, despite assuming that at some point I had to exhaust all their potential dialogue just from having them in my party so much.

The journeys that each member of the cast go on have, with one exception, far-reaching ramifications, and all have deep personal meaning. No spoilers, but several of them did make me cry, and that’s to say nothing of the potential romance options – though you will have to choose one to commit to, I at least flirted with Davrin, Emmerich, and my eventual canon choice of Lucanis, and all of the romantic dialogue is butterfly-worthy. BioWare has not lost their touch for creating interesting hot people.

Pansexual Representation and Companion Nuance

I also want to note that director Corinne Busche went on record stating that the new approach of companions being pansexual did not necessarily make them “playersexual,” and while this is a bit of a vague statement on its own, I was pleasantly surprised that it meant that they actually are all pansexual, regardless of whether or not a same-sex Rook pairs off with them. I was worried that this change would rob the companions of more defined personalities and stories crafted with their romantic preferences in mind (Dorian especially coming to mind, as his entire subplot was an allegory for real-life conversion therapy), and it does for most of them, but the effort that the writers took to follow through on this idea makes it at least a small net positive for me.

Streamlined Exploration and World Building

An important thing that really separates Veilguard from its predecessor is that the player is not assembling a force, like the Inquisition was, but forming a team. A few extra folks occasionally make appearances in the team’s base, the Lighthouse, but it really is about this group finding family with each other and gaining the kind of trust in each other it takes to save the world from evil gods. You’ll gather ally factions, but Rook doesn’t have their own army this time, which I think lends a significantly higher sense of intimacy to the adventure. This might have been a side effect of a reduction in scope, I’m not sure what the initial plan was, but overall I think it was a smart call to downsize this after Inquisition.

Combat Mechanics and New Systems

There are, of course, other massive changes, starting with the structure of the game itself. While Inquisition was famously a bit too big for its own good, Veilguard adopts a God of War 2018-esque “spoke and wheel” environmental exploration system that focuses the experience significantly more. You still get large zones full of secrets to find, and each party member brings their own power to help you access new places, but many adventures will either take you off the map or into a new part of the area custom-made for that mission. This is not the version of Dragon Age 4 that was ever being considered for a live-service model, but if it had been, I would say this is an excellent way of marrying the pick-a-mission-from-a-menu style of many of those games to the single-player experience players expect from BioWare.

Gameplay Convenience and Exploration Trade-Offs

This exploration does illustrate one of my issues with Veilguard’s approach to convenience, however. I mentioned earlier that my party was almost always with Lucanis and Emmerich, two of the people I was choosing between romantically who also happen to synergize well in combat thanks to the system of applying and then blowing up status effects. I also said that each party member has their own exploration mechanic, and these two ideas don’t interfere with each other because the game just allows Rook to use the powers of everyone who isn’t in the current party.

This felt a bit cheap, to be honest, because I think it sacrifices the necessity to explore a diversity of party setups. You can find something that works, and use it for pretty much the entire time you aren’t required to bring a specific person on a quest, and I didn’t even really think about this until the end of the game when I realized that several members of the team were multiple bond levels behind the rest. This feels, to me, like a perfectly solid New Game Plus bonus that was instead implemented into the base Veilguard experience. I think it would have been more in the spirit of the game to have the powers still unlock when you recruit new party members, but have Rook only be able to carry one at a time, encouraging the player to bring different party members when they come back around and see new dynamics play out. I’m a huge fan of all of the other quality-of-life choices made by the team, but this feels like it’s just a bit too easy on me.

Customization Options and Gear Progression

While exploring, Rook can solve puzzles or go off the forward path to find chests with gear or upgrade materials, and the way gear gets upgraded is another extremely intelligent choice. Each piece of normal gear Rook finds has its own list of potential benefits in addition to raw stats that can be upgraded, and all it takes to upgrade rarity is finding duplicates of the item in question. Even early-game gear can be brought into the final fight if you took the time to find the extras and kept it upgraded.

The other half of that coin is the Workshop, the facility in the Lighthouse that enables its ghostly Caretaker to augment and upgrade your gear. As you explore Northern Thedas, you’ll find Memories that slowly unlock new levels of the Workshop, which in turn will increase the level cap of your gear, but helpfully a rarity increase will also bump that item up to the current maximum, so anything you find is potentially usable immediately. Upgrading boosts raw stat numbers, but each piece can also be Enchanted, adding even more effects on top of the existing ones – it’s a simple and streamlined system that nevertheless feels infinitely customizable. Additionally, every single item Rook wears can also carry the appearance of any other item in its category, so if you really like the look of one shield with your favorite armor, but need the stats of another, a simple stop at your Wardrobe can solve that issue.

Character Progression and Combat Style

The last piece of Veilguard’s exploration puzzle is the character progression. Each level grants a skill point to be used on the massive tree of potential upgrades, and each tree ends with a combat style that dedicates Rook to being insanely good at a particular aspect of battle. Helpfully, you can also re-spec either one point at a time or your entire build at will, so if you find that you aren’t enjoying what you’re doing, it’s a simple matter to readjust and refresh your build to something that suits you better. Combined with the fantastic equipment system, it’s fun to break the game wide open, and boy did my sniper-rogue do that by the end.

Action-Forward Combat Mechanics

The combat is the last major difference from Inquisition to Veilguard, shifting definitively but not fully from the tactical, pulled-back combat system of that game and Origins to a more reflex-based, action-forward approach—and, as I said in my preview, I think this is a huge improvement to the feel of the game. You can still easily pause to dictate party abilities, and in fact, doing so is a core part of the flow of combat as most powers do not trigger automatically. But the dodge, parry, and counter cycle makes combat significantly more engaging than the half-real-time, MMO-esque system in the previous title. It incorporates the best idea from that version, and if anything makes it even more important (if not directed to use their cooldown abilities, your teammates aren’t gonna do much more than distract foes), but puts the player much more in control rather than encouraging them to hold the auto-attack button between dodging.

Enemies can have more than just their health bar, potentially sporting Armor (that should be broken through by heavy attacks) or Barrier (easily dispelled by ranged attacks), which definitely do their job of forcing you to change up your attack on the fly. However, where combat falters is likely another effect of the game’s troubled creation—by the halfway point, you will have seen pretty much everything the fights in Veilguard have to offer. They never stopped being fun, but it was noticeable how often boss fights were getting effectively repeated.

Visual Presentation and Art Direction

Veilguard definitely doesn’t disappoint in its presentation, however. Rook might not be able to swim, but they’ll look damn good in the dozens of armor options available, all of which move perfectly with the character animations. Wisely, the team decided not to continue going down the photorealism direction that Dragon Age had slowly been moving towards, instead going for an animated-film-esque style that still looks true to the franchise but is much less likely to age poorly than the previous games, which look pretty rough by today’s standards.

Intricate World Design and Exploration

The atmosphere extends into the game’s exploration zones, my favorite of which is easily the Venetian city of Treviso. Despite the map not actually being that large, it’s clear how much thought went into it (and the rest of them) when you pay enough attention to realize that it contains the rooftops used by the Antivan Crows to traverse the upper-class district, the middle-class market, and the area so poor that it’s literally sinking into the canal beneath it. Minrathous, the Tevinter city in which the game begins, also illustrates this theme, and boy, does BioWare continue to take big swings with its range of theme and allegory.

Simplified Faction and Choice Mechanics

Each zone is associated with one of the game’s factions, but the faction system, like the relationships, is a little too simplified for my liking and almost feels like it’s there out of obligation. Not many choices in the story, beyond one you make pretty early on, actually negatively affect your allyship with the other groups, and this again feels like a result of a reduced scope, which I also feel is the most likely culprit for the controversy over the series’ “Keep” feature.

Very few choices from the previous games roll over to this one, and I can’t help but imagine that Veilguard originally began life as a much more straightforward sequel to Inquisition before the team realized just how massive the scope would have to be. Even here, I felt like it didn’t matter terribly much what I chose to keep—my Inquisitor chose to disband the Inquisition, romanced Dorian, and believed that Solas could be redeemed. The disbandment of the Inquisition did come up (it couldn’t really be avoided with Harding in the party), but not once was it ever mentioned that I had romanced Dorian, which was rather disappointing given the emotional investment I had in that relationship.

Addressing Player Decisions from Previous Games

I frankly don’t think it would have been worth the team’s time and resources to seriously tie in every important decision made in the previous games, from a practical perspective—according to PSNProfiles, only about 21% of PlayStation players actually rolled credits on Inquisition, and that drops all the way down to 15% on Steam. It’s not worth putting a massive amount of eggs into the basket of extremely dedicated players when you can still offer them answers to long-standing questions and resolutions to beloved characters, and the decision to focus more on this game as its own experience makes sense…but I do understand the anger of those most passionate about the series.

Final Impressions: A Satisfying Return to Thedas

I am still trying not to spoil this story, but even with what I perceive are its understandable limitations, Dragon Age: The Veilguard still ticked every box for me from what I was ultimately looking for it—that being, first and foremost, a fun adventure with a new group of fire-forged friends. Our founder recently wrote a piece about how he finds it difficult to finish RPGs, purely because it’s hard to let go of our digital friends and accept that our time with them is over, and coming up on Veilguard’s conclusion this was weighing heavily on my mind. This team of close-knit people that have grown and learned so much together are potentially my favorite cast in any BioWare game, and I would happily take a comic or novel series about their adventures (solo, teamed up, or with everyone) any day.

Veilguard has a lot riding on its shoulders—the weight of fan expectations, the pressure of releasing in the busiest year of the generation for RPGs, and potentially the fate of the entire studio resting on it. But despite all of the trials and turnovers the development team had, and despite the signs that this game was originally conceived differently and at some point the team had to stop designing and work with what they had, I think the final product shows clearly that it’s a game made by an incredibly passionate team, telling stories that they cared deeply about. It might look and feel slightly different, but it is what Dragon Age has always been about—telling modern and human stories through a fantastical world that makes you want to learn more about it. I’ve never been so excited to see what lies in store next for the land of Thedas…and to jump back in, because I think I want to romance Davrin on my next playthrough. His griffon is really cute.