Dragon Age: The Veilguard Review

BioWare has a lot riding on Dragon Age: The Veilguard. A company once revered for creating some of the best RPGS has seen less than stellar success over the years. Dragon Age: The Veilguard presents an interesting story, enticing characters and fantastic environments wrapped in a gameplay package that starts off with a great impression, but chinks in its armour begin to show as this tale unfolds.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the fourth entry in the Dragon Age series, albeit in a more action RPG vein compared to the more traditional systems seen in previous titles. You take on the role of Rook, a character that has seen their fair share of Thedas and has ties to familiar characters such as Varric. Thrust into the middle of a clash between eleven gods and a familiar face trapped in the veil, Rook takes on the role of protecting Thedas.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard opens with a character creator that offers a lot of customisation options. I was more than happy with the options allowing for me to go as detailed or stick with a default pre-done design. On top of this, in Bioware fashion, I was able to select a class, backstory and adjust how the Inquistor (the protagonist from Dragon Age: Inquisition) looked and handled certain key events. Throughout my journey in Veilguard, the backstory I picked did offer variety in conversations and opened options with my chosen faction. Some factions are more central to the story, so people may feel shortchanged picking a minor faction in context to the story. The Dragon Age series has a large amount of lore and the game does a great job of informing you each step of the way with its detailed in-game codex, informing you of key events and your place within the world.

You’re not alone in Thedas, of course. Rook will run into a large cast of characters, gathering like-minded individuals for the battles to come. All these characters are excellently voice-acted, have a great life about them, and all feel wonderfully unique. In particular, Tash is a standout, with a brisk in your face attitude that stands out to other characters happy, good-willed nature. Characters you meet throughout Thedas are all executed well, enriching the world and what these people are fighting for.

From the opening moments, Dragon Age: The Veilguard looks absolutely fantastic; the environments look great and vibrant. Running through a brightly lit forest with sun shining through or delving deep into a dwarven city with haunting colour hues, each environment looks wonderfully crafted. This entry does present a cleaner look compared to previous Dragon Age titles; forget the gritty, dark themes of the original titles. Although this series has been evolving in its art style for a while now, this more pristine look should not be a sudden shock.

I enjoyed this lighter, happier-tone that is present in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Comedic moments are aplenty, and some moments are very sweet between characters, developing on their backstory and making me feel attached to these characters. However, I do not think this tone lends itself any favours in context to Veilguards overarching story. There is meant to be some form of impending doom, and I appreciate the charm and humour, but I feel it undermines the gravity of the situation as a whole. It is hard to take this end-of-the world tone seriously when its characters do not. One example I found quite jarring is when a side character literally died. Their companion I was with proceeded to sigh and immediately switched focus to a puzzle. Things like that make it very difficult to take anything seriously and feel like Dragon Age: The Veilguard is trying to have its feet in both worlds, lighthearted and serious, without knowing which area it wants to fully commit to.

Combat in Dragon Age: The Veilguard starts off feeling great. Skill trees for each class felt like there were limitless builds and approaches to combat. I went with a warrior class, and from the beginning, combat feels weighty and impactful. I have 3 core skills: an ultimate and class-specific moves such as a shield throw or a parry. I would dive in with a dropkick, slam an AOE, throw my shield, and mix in some abilities of my two party members. Apart from a slightly jerky camera when locking on, this all worked great apart, that is, until I began to realise that each combat scenario is playing out the same way.

A routine became evident after a few hours when the flashy spectacle wore off. I would run into an enemy group, throw down my abilities, and wait for skill cooldowns to reactivate while hitting the same attack button with the occasional dodge. Enemies do have varied appearances, with thug types, blighted demons, and larger ogre enemies. These all look varied and thematically different, but combat-wise, they don’t feel different to face. The detailed skill tree offers various different paths, but even after respeccing into different areas, I found that these skills had a nice visual change and temporary novelty, but after a few encounters, I would fall back into the same systematic approach to combat. I tested out the other two classes, Mage and Rogue, to see if these fared any differently, and this same feeling applied. This simple combat loop is not helped by the enemies being fairly easy and posing little to no challenge even on a higher difficulty; the difficulty would only turn these monsters into damage sponges, making this combat loop play out all the longer. 

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is trying to have its feet in both worlds, lighthearted and serious, without knowing which area it wants to fully commit to.

In combat, you can have two party members alongside you; each party member has their own skill tree and abilities that can be directed in combat. The problem is, each party member has a single cooldown for all abilities. Each party member tends to have either an Apply or Detonation skill, using these skills in tandem with the other member, resulting in great damage. Outside of these combo skills, I would not use anything else because this combo would always provide the most damage. These party members did feel like they had little to no impact combat-wise. Sometimes I would forget who I chose to have in my party because it really didn’t matter; characters would all play the same, and my only deciding factor was who I wanted to improve my relationship with.

In a sprawling RPG, there’s a great main quest, of course, but the beauty is sometimes in the side paths, the unexplored off the beaten track, and the experiences we find there. Dragon Age: The Veilguard does have a great main story that builds dramatically, especially during the final act. Throughout this journey, I was presented with decisions that felt like they made an impact; areas were changed, and my companions were changed for better or worse. These impactful decisions were few and far between, however, and were usually at the culmination of a main chapter.

Thedas is filled with a large amount of side quests, some that help a faction grow stronger and understand their place in the world, one-off quests that can reveal more about the lore, or quests that involve your many companions and their personal stories and struggles. When I was not proceeding with the main act, companion quests were my go-to choice; these felt much more important and helped me understand my companions, and I really did care more about them. Outside of the main act and companion quests, I felt other quests did not possess the same level of storytelling, often resulting in me finding a group of items in an area, fetching a certain item, or… tracing the lines to destroy those dreaded blight balls.

Throughout my time in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, I noticed one thing that continuously popped up. Blight bulbs that needed to be destroyed before proceeding to the next area or objective. This is a good enough and interesting task on its own, but after doing this probably more than 20 times, the novelty wore thin and quickly became a monotonous task. For example, in a companion side quest, I was exploring an underground sanctum that looked visually fantastic; the characters we met were engaging, and everything felt substantial. Until we ran into the blight and everything reverted back to “find the blight balls and destroy them.” I get the blight is one of the main enemies in Dragon Age, but there could have been different ways to approach this. In saying this, Veilguard does try to alter this with other objectives, but these tasks feel the exact same. Instead of blight bulbs, I am now tracing red crystals in a similar fashion. making me wish I could skip through to the next great story beat or meaningful conversation.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard has a lot of RPG systems that excited me on the many possibilities, but, similar to the combat, all feel very surface level, and once that spark is gone, it does not feel meaningful. Exploring these wonderful-looking areas, there is an absurd amount of chests and little boxes on the ground that contain gold or valuable items. These valuable items can all be sold to faction vendors, increasing their strength and, in turn, offering more valuable items to purchase. The truth is, I never felt like I needed to purchase these items, as I was always picking up something new. If anything, it did feel like there was too much littered around the map. It did not feel like I needed these items and instead felt like I was progressing slower because my looter brain cannot leave an unopened item even though it will only have 7 gold. There is an upgrade shop, but I felt no need to utilise this at all; it felt redundant because duplicate items I picked up would automatically increase in rarity and stats on their own.