Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024)

Finally met an important Tevinter character from the lore of the past few games, and it turns out she's trans! My character is trans, too, so we got to have a brief lil heart-to-heart about our experiences of coming out. Feels super reassuring to know I've got a queer elder looking out for me, even if it's just in a videogame.

Still totally engrossed by Veilguard but far enough in that I'm starting to find things to nitpick about.

The ability to alter the combat difficulty on the fly is a nice idea but it feels like it's bugged for me. For one, the parry timing feels woefully inconsistent, with some windows being very short and others being agonizingly long. The muscle memory from FromSoft games and other titles involving parry timings has me reacting far too quickly to the parry windows. Though there are three options for Combat TIming - forgiving, balanced, and reactive - I cannot visually tell or feel a difference whatsoever. The visual signal for parrying starts, and there is about 2 to 3 seconds before the parry has to be executed.

That's too fuckin long, man.

I'm trying to parry the second I see that visual cue. The design of putting in slow or delayed parrying in fast paced combat is frustrating.

I'm curious to see if other players are experiencing this, where changing the combat timing setting appears to result in no noticeable change.

Then there's Taash. Reviews have already spoiled that this character is nonbinary. Let me be very clear that I do not care about their gender. I'm an ally. So what I'm about to say about Taash has nothing to do with their being nonbinary, because I've only just met the character and that hasn't even come up in conversation yet.

I categorically do not like this character. Their dialogue is cringey, anachronistic (and immersion breaking by that fact), and I do not like the voice performance whatsoever. This is a total miss. I groaned when they said, "Watch out for the Antaam, they go hard."

Really? We're throwing in late 2010's colloquialisms in a high fantasy game? Didn't they do the same thing with Peebee in Andromeda? She had a few quips or phrases that felt like they were pulled right out of a conversation between college students at the time. I know people are complaining that apparently, the term "nonbinary" is used and that that feels anachronistic, but that actually does not bother me one bit - it's this insistence on using language and phrasing that is specific to a cultural moment that will undoubtedly feel dated much faster than anything else in the game upon revisits.

I'm up in arms about it because up until now, everything has been damn near perfect, dialogue included, and this really put a dent in that, and just within 45 seconds of meeting this character. I still have the rest of the game with them to go through! I hope it gets better. But seriously, I cannot believe they decided to write, and then direct a voice actor to say, "THEY GO HARD." Another example is when they say "eat shit" as they fight an enemy - more passable but barely - and then there was another line where they said, "That's messed up!" Like, totally dude, those heckin' Antaams are hella brutal, bet. I hate it.

That's how I felt about Alien: Romulus. They just had to stick "Get away from her, you bitch" in there. And it feels like BioWare is doing the same thing here, where it's almost like they're writing Taash to speak to a cultural attitude and moment rather than simply being an interesting character that feels like an organic person that would exist in this world. Why does every single other person in this game speak and sound like they were born in Thedas, but Taash sounds like they were born in California 20 years ago? I just don't get it.

Again, curious to hear what others think.

Presentation is everything. You can tell me this character is nonbinary but that doesn't explain why they sound remarkably out of place in this game. You may as well have Harkin saying, "Wazzuuuup" or Emmrich say, "That dragon is for sure the GOAT." It's just so, so silly to me. Which is a bummer because when I first saw Taash, I was like, "Holy shit this person looks badass." I love their physique, their bold facial features are really sharp and impressive, the long braid and the horns - visually, such a superb design for a character.

My bitching about this one very small, silly thing aside, it doesn't tarnish the game whatsoever to me. I'm still having a blast and finding more and more to be impressed with. It's premature but I think it's my current GOTY contender.

Minrathous is noticeably less interesting to explore than Arlathan Forest or Treviso; the layout's too corridor-heavy to sell the sense of overwhelming urban density that it's going for. But it's also got an absurdly charming running conversation between Neve and Bellara about all the trashy serial novels they're reading, and I found the coolest piece of environmental storytelling in the whole game so far by jumping through a random window. So it's still pretty great overall!

It's a low bar, but Veilguard is shaping up to have maybe the strongest level design in the entire series.

Haven't really been enjoying the Rogue's basic attacks, so I retooled my build to focus on firing off special abilities as often as possible. The combat's way more fun this way!

Don't know that I've ever seen an RPG that gated different abilities behind both MP and cooldowns, but it allows for a fun lil feedback loop where one half of your kit buffs the other, and bouncing between the two halves at high speed causes all the enemies to melt.

This open-ended sidequest area in Arlathan Forest is great! It's like the devs built a playground in the middle of the woods, seeded it with little stories and puzzles and buttons to push, and set players loose to scramble up and down its walls. Love this kind of level design that criss-crosses a bunch of paths on top of each other, instead of going completely linear or fully open.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard has its hooks in me pretty strongly. In the past few years, I have an itch to return to my regular rotation of live service games (Diablo IV, The Division 2) even when I'm in the middle of a single-player game. But Veilguard has commanded my attention such that I would be content for those games to be permanently deleted from my account.

There's a weird feeling I'm getting as a result of diving into a game as immersive and deep as Veilguard, where I've been jarred out of a sort of complacency. In other words, playing Veilguard has allowed me to see how meaningless those live service hamster wheels of games are. I don't mean to say they're meaningless as a whole, but when you're well, well past the hundred hour mark and just grinding The Pit for three hours for a measly drop of XP in the ocean that comprises the journey to level 300 or replaying recycled content for a poor quality cosmetic keychain for your Division agent, what's the point?

Anyway, I'm further into the game now. I'm in no rush so progress is at a snail's pace. I'm interested in the lore and the craftsmanship of its writing, so I've been reading all the Codex pages. I'm also interested in the craftsmanship writ large which translates to checking every corner of every environment and admiring the layout, the design, the assets, and everything in between. Sure, I can fast travel, but I elect not to right now. This world is gorgeous and I want to see it, whether that's traversing the Crossroads for the fourth time or simply enjoying the streets of Minrathous. I haven't played a game like this since Hogwarts: Legacy and as much as I loved that one, it didn't hold my attention like Veilguard looks to be.

Because despite being so enraptured by Veilguard, I'm not really chomping at the bit to play it. Isn't that strange? I'm loving a game, but I'm not using every opportunity I have to dive back in. It's almost like I'm just as content thinking about it and processing it all. I didn't have that with Hogwarts: Legacy. But what if that wears off? What if I get tired of it and just decide to wrap it all up abruptly? My friend describes his way of playing RPGs as meandering about for 50 hours and then beelining through the story in the last 10.

I don't see that happening with this game. This is BioWare, after all. I know it may be hyperbolic and inaccurate to attribute the trait of 'BioWare-ness' to this game since a lot of the original crew and leads from 'golden era BioWare' have turned over, but the fact is this: with every BioWare game since ME1 (except Andromeda and Anthem), I have taken my sweet time to get through them and have never rushed. My initial exposure to the Mass Effect games was back in 2013. A friend got them for me as a Steam gift. I think I put about 50 hours into ME1; 65 into ME2; and I distinctly remember hitting 70 hours in ME3 and my friend saying, "What the hell are you doing in there?" Well, I'm living in the game world, man. I'm listening to every conversation I can. I'm checking out every room of every building I get to go in. I'm standing in the middle of a town square looking at the merchant stalls, the architecture, the skyline, and just soaking it all in. I'm revisiting NPCs between every mission to see if their dialogue has changed or they have something new to offer. I know my character is a resident, but I'm playing like a tourist.

I've said it elsewhere but games are made by people and those people spend lots of their time and energy, and most importantly, care into making games. I don't think you get a game as realized and deep as Veilguard is turning out to be with a cynical crew that's there just for the paycheck. It's evident that a lot of passion has gone into it. Maybe part of me is so enraptured with this game because it's getting bullied by cunts, but I don't think so. I loathed Mass Effect: Andromeda and I was highly critical of Anthem. I think this is just a really impressive, charming game.

I hope it does well in sales. I hope BioWare gets more shots to make great games. I hope EA gets off BioWare's ass and stops forcing them to commercialize their art to death. Veilguard was supposed to be a live service and that decision was overturned a while into its development, so let's hope that's a sign that the cooks will continue to be allowed to cook. Because if Veilguard is a sign of what they're looking to put out in the future, I absolutely want more.

The lock-on camera for fights in this is driving me nuts, the vertical angle it snaps to is way too low to the ground and causes your character to obscure whatever's directly in front of them. The game tries to skirt the issue by keeping your character offset from the center of the screen, but that just makes moving around the field feel clumsy! And it constantly drops focus on your target, too.

It's really putting me off a battle system that seems mostly fine, otherwise.

Something is up with GeForce Now. I can play DA:TV on my home rig, which has a 4070 Super, on high setting with full ultra raytracing without dropping frames. I can even boost up to ultra settings if I reduce raytracing to regular or selective.

But GeForce Now Ultimate, which I believe utilizes a 4080, can’t run the game with ray tracing on at all without dropping to 50fps in some areas. If I turn raytracing off, it’s fine. Something is really off about this because technically GeForce Now Ultimate is supposed to be a more powerful virtual rig than my home rig.