It is impossible to discuss or show footage of Dragon Age: The Veilguard without necessarily spoiling the ending of Inquisition. You have been warned.
Solas and the Betrayal: A New Chapter in Dragon Age
A decade after the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition, I think it’s fair to say that BioWare needs a win. They’ve had a project cancelled, released two critically-disappointing games, and lost a lot of their luster as a reliable producer of single-player RPGs, a reputation they’d had since the 1990s. Where both Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda were noted for feeling rushed out, the studio knew it had to take its time and get their big Dragon Age comeback title right. So, is Dragon Age: The Veilguard the game that’s going to restore this venerated team to its former glory? Based on the seven or so hours I’ve gotten to play so far, I think so.
Inquisition ended with the shifty elf wizard Solas revealing his true nature as a figure of mythic legend, an “ancient god” of lies often called “The Dreadwolf”, and more or less betraying the Inquisitor as part of his plan to set right something that went wrong in the distant past. Veilguard‘s story picks up with Varric, a dwarven archer companion from the previous title, recruiting “Rook”, this game’s player character, to help track down a famous detective in Tevinter, and after one of the most impressively detailed-yet-usable character creators I’ve ever seen, the game opens with Rook entering a tavern in search of information, and coming across a hostile scene.
A More Cinematic Combat Experience
This interaction in the tavern immediately establishes a best-foot-forward first impression for Veilguard, as the player is given options for how to speak to the treacherous proprietress and her hired help, and this allows them to begin to establish a personality for their Rook. Inquisition started with the player avatar being interrogated by a cast of powerful strangers for information they didn’t have, but giving you more control over the situation as happens here allows for more intentional dialogue choices, all of which are given a strong amount of personality.
I had two major issues with Inquisition that are relevant here, the first of which was its lead character. The Inquisitor can certainly have a personality, but it didn’t always come out in cutscenes and felt like such a blank slate that I sometimes thought it seemed like they had just spawned into the universe at the beginning of the game rather than being someone with established emotions, behaviors, and habits – they are an adult, after all.
Rook feels like a much more natural character that has at least something of a defined personality, which is an excellent compromise that still makes sure players can leave their stamp on Rook while not leaving it entirely up to them to fill in all of the blanks. From the first wisecrack out of my Rook’s lips, I was immediately more hooked and invested in the situation at hand, because I wanted to see what they’d say next.
Refined Structure with Focused Missions
From the tavern, this stellar first impression continues with a highly cinematic and action-packed opening that I’m going to leave mostly unspoiled in text, though the footage in this review is going to contain visual spoilers for it, and the player gets right into the action – so let’s talk about that next.
Rook feels like a fully realized character with a personality that shines through every dialogue choice.
If you, like me, didn’t really like the combat in Dragon Age: Inquisition, it probably had a lot to do with the weird MMORPG feeling that it had, where you were dodging mechanics but not really controlling your character’s finer actions. The tutorial literally instructs the player to just hold down the attack button for combos, Final Fantasy XV-style, and this just doesn’t ever feel satisfying. There was also a lot of management of party health, which could get frustrating because your team would often get hurt without you having much say in the matter, and it never felt like I could predict when my mage would heal me.
Veilguard expertly tosses out the parts of this system that don’t work and strengthens its best ideas. The old combat has been replaced by a much more up-close system, heavily reminiscent of God of War (2018), where it’s not quite challenging or punishing enough to be Dark Souls-esque but is still heavily centered around dodging, blocking, and parrying while getting your own strikes in between. This seems like it would homogenize the three different player classes, but the way each goes about it is different enough to feel satisfying anyway.
I chose to make my Rook a Rogue, since I tend to enjoy the fast pace and liked the notion of having a bow as well as daggers, but over the course of the demo we got the opportunity to try builds of all three main classes (Warrior, Rogue, and Mage). Unfortunately, my Warrior and Mage footage were both in areas I was either not permitted to record or chose not to due to potential spoilers, but I can briefly summarize my experience with all three.
The Rogue fights with two swords and a bow. The two swords mean blocking isn’t much of an option but parrying is an excellent way to create openings and keep momentum up, and the bow is just one pull of the trigger away, with bonus damage for a headshot. The bow was actually fun enough to use that I frequently opted for it even in less efficient situations where melee would have ended the fight more quickly.
BioWare’s refined combat system in Dragon Age: The Veilguard brings players closer to the action than ever before.
The build of the Warrior I got to play had an axe and shield, with the shield able to set nearby enemies on fire on a successful parry. Their ranged weapon, a boomeranging projectile, was sometimes useful for far-off enemies, but it was clear that the best way of using them was getting right into the action and drawing enemies in to cleave and set them ablaze with the shield’s reaction ability, and getting into this groove was rewarding.
The Mage was the one I had the most difficult time with – probably because I picked it up in the final and most challenging segment – but once I got into the rhythm of it I found it immensely satisfying. The Mage can switch between a two-handed staff, and a dagger with an arcane orb, the former more suited for long-range combat and the latter better for the close-up stuff. The staff’s block is a full shield sphere around the player, but the dagger’s is a more traditional parry, and I combined it with the build’s area-of-effect ice magic to draw foes in and hit them all at once.
I’ve alluded to it already, but the demo was split into five sections – the opening of the game (the only one where I actually got to use my created character, unfortunately), a mission a little further in, a major plot choice that ended in a boss fight, a character quest for companion Lucanis, and finally a climactic sequence where I defended a town from the corruptive and demonic force of the Blight.
Of the companions, I only got to see Rook actually meet about half of them – Harding, a dwarven rogue, is with Rook from the start, Neve, a mage, is the detective the player is searching for in Minrathous at the start of the game, Bellara, also a mage, is a member of the Veil Jumpers faction that Rook meets early on, and Lucanis is a rogue assassin who you’ll have to recruit into your team. While I got to see group scenes and do content in later sections with the other three – Taash and Davrin the Warriors, and Emmrich the mage – I don’t know a ton about them since they were already there in the parts of the game we picked up part way through, so I’m excited to learn more about them. Lucanis is almost certainly going to be my romance pick, but I do admit that Emmrich has me curious, being a necromancer. Unfortunately, we did not get any details about which Rooks can romance which companions.
The other major change from Inquisition comes in the overall structure of the game. While Dragon Age: The Veilguard does still feature larger, more explorable zones (one of which is part of the player’s home base area), the open-world structure of the previous title has been overhauled into a more focused, mission-based experience. On paper, this might sound like a downgrade, but I think it makes complete sense if you look at the biggest piece of feedback they got last time.
Inquisition was, famously, so overloaded with distractions and things to do that BioWare put out a statement begging players to leave the starting area behind, even if they hadn’t finished everything there yet, because people were putting hours into the game without actually making any progress towards the exciting parts. This is a much more frequent style of game now, with massive worlds full of small content, but spending hours walking through picturesque woods and completing errands doesn’t do much to keep the tension of “the world is on the brink of disaster and you have to stop it as soon as possible”.
In The Veilguard, the world is quite literally in the process of ending because of Solas’ plan, so while there will definitely still be plenty of moments of levity according to the team, it makes a lot of sense to focus the play experience and increase the overall quality level of the content. I can understand that this may lessen the role-playing element people look for in Dragon Age titles, but from what I’ve played, I feel that the rest of the game has been bolstered to make up the difference, and the game as a whole is going to be a much better ride.
Where Dragon Age: Inquisition was the first major RPG title of the eighth generation (so early that it also released for seventh-gen consoles) and was basically uncontested until The Witcher 3 came out, The Veilguard is launching in an extremely big year for RPGs. Even so, from what I’ve played here, I have faith that it will manage to carry the series into the future and make a splash of its own. If nothing else, it’ll give us all seven new characters to flood the internet with fanfiction about, and really, isn’t that what counts?
Dragon Age: The Veilguard releases on October 31, 2024, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series consoles, and PC via Steam.
