Dragon Age Veilguard review

Why did I get demoted?

*Image taken from ea.com. No copyright infringement intended.

Categorization: Fantasy RPG

Where played: PS5

Non-spoiler review.

I had been waiting for this game for years.

Let me just preface this by saying I absolutely loved Dragon Age: Origins, skipped the next game, but then came back to Dragon Age: Inquisition, and this remains to be one of the best and most fulfilling games I have ever played. It had an incredible open world before “open world” became a buzzword, but more importantly, it felt like an epic fantasy. You were the Inquisitor, for crying out loud! This creepy title continues to have the ability to send shivers of fear that power is about to be ABUSED!! - running through the spines of any living person through generational memory, and EA absolutely nailed it in the gameplay. You were given an entire town to rule, for God’s sake, you had taverns, and priests, and fey spirits, vagabonds and deserters running about through your town contributing to your cause seeking redemption and following your orders, and three deputies that you could gather around your table full of maps (with those little pins in them evoking the brilliance of your strategy) who represented your strength in military, diplomacy, and central intelligence! You had to choose which of these forces to deploy per scenario throughout your campaign to garner the most influence and strengthen your power throughout the land! When you failed to deploy the correct resource you received jack shit! And best of all, when you and your squad were successful in defeating the hordes, their leader was delivered up to your throne, forced to their knees, and made to plead their case before you so that you could sentence them to life imprisonment or death by hanging (or some more benevolent but less exciting judgment)!!!! The POWER!!!!! It makes my toes tremble with excitement just thinking about it.

And so when I finished Dragon Age: Inquisition (including all the expansions) a few months or so after the pandemic, I eagerly waited YEARS for the next installment. I wanted MORE, MORE of the same. Bigger, better.

And well, spoiler alert, I didn’t get that.

And well yes, while I have enjoyed the game (I would say, politely, very much?), Veilguard just didn’t boil my blood the way Dragon Age: Inquisition did. It just didn’t feel as high stakes. No town was built for me to rule. No stragglers came begging for a place in my army. No criminals were delivered to my feet for sentencing, which was, to be quite frank, a real downer.

The story is also, compared to Inquisition, honestly a bit meh. I see that EA tried to raise the stakes with the whole Lighthouse as your “base” and you being the leader of your squad, and I see the effort in the very long (but engaging) squad sidequests to really flesh out and pad what is a very straightforward stop-bad-demons-from-destroying-the-word plot, but really, after having a whole town to rule, this lighthouse with your eight or so squad members, no matter how cute they decorate the place, is a let-down. I mean, during your conferences with your squad to decide what to do next, you literally sit on a couch, instead of a throne. From being leader of the free world (or at least a rogue state), you are now a foot soldier whose base isn’t even in the physical realm. No matter how you dress it up, I was basically demoted.

It honestly felt more like I was playing a version of God of War, which I loved and which was an incredible game, but when I opened up Dragon Age: Veilguard, I wanted to play Dragon Age: Inquisition. Not God of War.

And this is really the only problem with it. Other than that, it is a very fun game. The battles are similar to those in Inquisition, in that you would go adventuring with a team and basically use abilities to (in my case, as I only ever wanted to play as a sorcerer) blow up stuff, but EA made it less complicated in that you would give the squad specific instructions to use abilities during the battles, instead of a general pre-battle strategy (offense, defend, focus on healing, etc.). One thing, however, that I really dislike in Veilguard is that your squad members can no longer die in battle, which I think is unrealistic and makes the game too easy. Again, another God of War-like mechanic, when I didn’t want to play God of War. But other than that, since I wasn’t too big on controlling other squad members in Inquisition, anyway, the gameplay remained the same for me; I can see how other players with a different playing style might be seriously bothered by this, though.

Veilguard did have some of the fun moments that I loved in Inquisition –I spent a few weeks of complete relaxation just wandering through the beautiful Arlathan forest (which looks exactly like how an elven forest should look with its lovely glades, rivers, flowy gold and white architecture and giant and worn-out statues of animals and gods) discovering elven artifacts, picking up lore and opening chests in forgotten nooks, and I was completely happy. One thing that EA did right was to have the squad members make random conversation and tease each other and tell jokes while adventuring, just like in Inquisition, and this for me was and continues to be an essential part of the franchise. It makes the squad members feel like real people, and is for me so much a part of the quintessential Dragon Age storybuilding that if EA had left this out, I would have put the game down immediately.

So as you can see, my only gripe about this game is how it compared to Inquisition. If you are coming into this blind (and well, I think that would be the optimal way to play), then I think this game would be very enjoyable. Even better if you are about ten to twenty years younger than a jaded, grumpy little elder goblin like me (those were the good ol’ days! Shakes wrinkly fist).

And now I feel that something needs to be said about the dragon in the room.

From scanning reviews of this game (I don’t read reviews in depth to avoid spoilers, as you know, and I don’t like to be influenced by what other people think), it has come to my attention that many people were bothered by certain what was called “woke” plot points in Veilguard concerning one dragon-person called Taash.

I really don’t want to wander too far into this landmine-filled discussion, as I think millennials (and by millennials I mean me) are always not able to track the currently culturally-acceptable language as well as the younger generations would like. I will say however that I liked Taash’s character, so much so that even with this (flaps hands around), I would often put her in my active battle squad together with Lucanis (whom I chose to romance, obviously; there was really no other competition – the literal inner demon! The Italian accent and mustache!) to hear her jokes and listen to their amusing conversation. Taash reminds me of Karlach in Baldur’s Gate 3, a tough, sweet, funny, fire-breathing heart-of-gold bad-ass.

But truth be told, I did not appreciate the inclusion of the gender-plot point in the game. Not because I have anything against the LGBTQ, but because I don’t think that the problems and issues of the real world (Earth) should have been carried over to Veilguard’s world (Thedas). It is distracting and detracts from full immersion into a fantasy world. I mean, don’t we go into a fantasy world precisely to take a break from real-world issues? I don’t know why anyone would go play Veilguard or any of the other Dragon Age games except to fight stuff, find stuff, and explore an elven forest; I am not sure that people who started playing this game did so wanting to ruminate on this particular Earth-people problem.

So my final love letter to EA: Thedas has enough problems, let’s not add any more Earth ones. Don’t be discouraged y Veilguard's reception, I still love Dragon Age, and overall, the series has given me so much joy that a few missteps do not matter in the long run. But I think go back to Inquisition and just make more of the same. Re-discover and appreciate the things there that made it a unique epic, and I basically wrote down for you what those were here, so again, no need to port over mechanics from any other game. As much as people love those other games, they will not thank you for it.

Update after finishing the game (some spoilers, do not read if you haven’t finished the game) – Now that I have finished the game after five months (dismal pace, but life does get in the way) and something like 90 to 100 hours, I have new thoughts.

It could be that my grumpy review comparing Veilguard unfavorably to Inquisition was a bit harsh. The end scenes with the final encounters with the big bad demons were beautifully and obviously lovingly rendered. The battle scenes finally looked and felt epic, and the consequences of the choices that one made and how far one progressed in the game’s sidequests finally pay off. The in-game mechanic of increasing the “strength” of one’s various allied factions finally makes sense in the last four hours of the game, which, while fulfilling, is less fun for those who do not enjoy such delayed gratification, like me. In the end, I think I got the “happy ending” (go me!), and I was invested enough to wonder what other endings there could have been, but not enough to replay the long final scenes.