Dragon Age: The Veilguard is tremendous. It's a triumph. I've spent nearly 120 hours in the streets of Minrathous, the sunlit cobblestones of the Lighthouse, the eerie floating islands that constitute the Crossroads, and all the other areas the game has to offer. I enjoyed the overwhelming majority of my time there.

I've spent enough that I can see and fully acknowledge the numerous shortcomings of the game, but I'm happy to overlook them, because what I got out of my $70 was an incredible return on investment.

The best: the voice acting is superb. The graphics are impressive. I find the art direction adorable. The setting is rich. The characters, companions, cast - whatever you want to call them - are memorable and well written. The lore revelations we get are awesome in the literal sense of the word and do a great job of demonstrating how flexible the literary setting of Thedas is.

The maps/areas/levels are expansive to the point that I was continually wondering how much bigger they possibly get which is something I haven't experienced since Elden Ring (though to be clear, nowhere near to that level).

The "mostly good": the story has highly impactful moments, but suffers from pacing issues. The villains start off strongly, but become cartoonishly generic by the end (to me, at least). The writing (the dialogue, plot points, character arcs) is impressively complex and nuanced in many cases, but has just as many instances in which it's questionably dumbed down. The ending is dynamite all around.

The less-than-good: the combat systems, while smooth and fully fleshed out, are limited inherently and leave something to be desired, creating points of irritation more often than they create points of enjoyment. Killing enemies can feel good, but it quickly falls into perfunctory hoop jumping.

As mentioned, the pacing gets tough. It feels like the game may have been better with the order of missions flipped or inverted. For example, if you're playing as I played, you do the main missions only after doing every currently outstanding and available side quests, whether those are faction, companion, or exploration quests. Maybe that's not the 'correct' sequence but it feels logical and seems like the best way to ensure no content is missed. But the sheer one-thing-after-another-ness of companion quests that bunched up at the end felt strange. I imagine determining the order of quests is tricky for any studio for a game this size, but having a more even distribution of companion and faction quests among the main quests, I think, would have felt better.

The loot system would be better off eliminated altogether.

Breaking crates, jars, and other objects felt incredibly fun and rewarding at first because doing so rewards gold, materials, and/or valuables to sell, but with it being such a lucrative source of these things, I found myself spending far too much time and effort breaking these items in moments where it felt silly to do so, like during pivotal story moments. Rook would yell, "Come on, we've got to move!" but I'd proceed to spend the next 45 seconds to 2 minutes scouring the room to break all the breakables i could find. I could have just, ya know, not done that, but if you give me gold for breaking shit, I'm gonna break shit.

The opportunities to engage with companions are painfully lacking and what growth there is to have with romantic interests is generally unfulfilling. The conversations to be had are good but they are few, and I miss being able to just go to a character's room and proceed through dialogue options with them like in the Mass Effect games.

There are parts and small slices of the game that feel undercooked, strangely bloated, or like relics or leftovers of when it was being developed with live service elements. An example is the animation that plays when you open a chest. It's this really exaggerated kicking open of the chest accompanied by a burst of light, followed by Rook catching the object from the chest in their hand after it somehow springs forth from the chest. It feels distinctly live service-y to me.

Character quests start off feeling severe in their importance and ramifications, but their conclusions can feel abrupt and inconsequential. For example, we learn some pretty interesting lore stuff that I fully expected to see present themselves in the grand ending, but they were wholly absent, namely Harkin's stuff about the Titans. Maybe I was wrong but I thought for certain the Titans would play a role in everything going down at the end there.

The music, despite being composed partially by Hans Zimmer and mostly by Lorne Balfe, both of whom I admire, is simply serviceable for my tastes.

Other things a lot of players highlight is the dialogue choices feeling limited (Rook can't really be a dick); that the choices never match what Rook actually says; and that there is overall less decisions that have consequences. None of these things bothered me, but I understand the criticism and I don't think it's unfounded. I simply didn't feel tension with these things.

While there are more items on the less-than-good list, they do not trump or overshadow what's good about the game. What is good is also consistent throughout and is inextricable from the fabric of the game itself. Love is a lot of things, nitpicking being one of them. There is nothing about this game that could turn me against it. Even if it were not the victim of a clickbait-driven outrage campaign being waged by internet bigots, I would still feel the affinity for this gem that I do.

All in all, Veilguard isn't perfect, but it knocked my socks off and it was all I could think about for the better part of a month. I'll be rabidly consuming content around it for the foreseeable future, discussing with others who played in good faith, and pouring over the official artbook released for it. I also can't wait to see what else is in store for this world. I hope we don't have to wait for another ten years to get a follow-up which feels certain given the post-credits scene. I'll take spin-off novels, comics, whatever - just give me more Thedas.

Taash is bae. Shakra toh ebra, motherfucker.

I have no qualms in saying I didn’t particularly care for Dragon Age: Inquisition. Between its bland story & even blander combat, it didn’t win me over on the franchise. Granted, since I last played Inquisition, I’ve gotten more into D&D and, while still not my favorite genre, gained an appreciation for the high fantasy genre. Still, had Veilguard not been a free PS Plus game a few months back, there’s a chance I'd’ve never played it. I was surprised to see it end up as a free monthly game so quickly after release. Usually, bigger games only show up as a monthly freebie after a few years, or when they’ve got a sequel coming out. I don’t know if it was Sony’s attempt to make their subscription plan more alluring or if EA considered Veilguard a write-off because it didn’t meet an arbitrary sales goal. However it happened, it gave me a chance to try out Inquisition’s sequel.

My biggest gripe about DA: Inquisition was the MMORPG style combat, and if Veilguard had similar combat, I would’ve ditched it before the end of the 1st act. Thankfully, Veilguard has much more active combat gameplay. It plays similar to something like the modern Assassin’s Creed games in that you have a light and heavy attack that you can build simply combos with. There’s also a ranged attack and block. It may be a basic combat system, but I’ll take it over Inquisition any day. It felt like my skill and timing was more important. The tactics view from DA: I is gone, and instead your companions play more like Mass Effect companions. You have a wheel to set targets for them or use their abilities. I don’t think they have health to worry about. In all of the fights I had, I don’t recall them ever getting downed. That does take out some of the challenge and thrill out of fights. I don’t have to worry about keeping my mage alive, she’s just there to drop an ice bomb on occasion. I can’t remember off the top my head, but I thought companions in Mass Effect could get downed for a short time.

There’s a fun system where companions have abilities that play off certain other companions to deal massive damage. That with different enemy resistances, encourages you to mix up who you take with you for each mission. Unfortunately, enemies can be very sword spongy. You can use timed counterattacks and takedowns to take out chunks of health, but there’s still a lot of just beating on bigger enemies until they die. The special attacks your character can do seemed to be weak, but I may’ve had my character spec’d wrong too. Enemies have different colors of paint, but usually fall into either ranged mage, sword fodder, or big boys categories. The big enemies swing at you and throw AOE attacks, but again, it’s just a long fight of whacking on them with my sword and occasionally staggering them. There were times I was in the groove and blocking attacks, dodging projectiles, and dropping baddies and the combat felt fun, but towards the end, it got a bit monotonous. There were also times where I got ganked by enemies because when you get surrounded the lock-on camera can get a bit unwieldy, especially with enemies that can break your lock.

With combat being more fun, I was ready to soldier on through the game. It really starts to pick up around the 1st dragon fight. By then you’ve set up most of your expositional stuff, have a few companions, and leveled up your combat skill enough. The skills are all combat focused, usually either new attacks or stat increases. There’re too many skills to get all in one run, you have to choose which path you want to follow. Much like Mass Effect, Dragon Age leans more into the ‘Action’ side of “Action RPG”. There’s no social skills or base player stats to select at start up. You can select what guild you belong to, which does have small effects on the story, but I would’ve preferred a bit more of the RPG side to show up. There’s the classic BioWare dialogue wheel where you can respond in a polite, flippant, scared, or tough way, but it doesn’t seem to effect more than your character’s dialogue and occasionally a companion’s opinion of you.

Inquisition was my first introduction to the Dragon Age world, and I found it to be a stock standard fantasy setting. Knowing now that Dragon Age is basically BioWare’s answer to losing the D&D license, it makes a lot of sense. I can see the similarities between the worlds of Dragon Age & something like Baldur’s Gate 3. I do think BG3 did the ‘fighting evil gods’ storyline better. The world of Veilguard does feel a bit... “theme parky”? I don’t know, just, you meet a lot of factions in the game, but they are either good or bad, no real shades of grey. The thing that tipped me off to it was the Lords of Fortune. I chose them as my starting faction because they were treasure hunters. When I met them, they were more along the lines of pirates than Indiana Joneses. Their whole schtick is they are opportunists chasing gold and glory. But we quickly learn if they come across a culturally important relic for, let’s say, the elves. They won’t sell it, they’ll donate it to the proper authorities. I get that repatriating artifacts to their rightful homes is a real-world issue we deal with, but it takes away the teeth of this rabble-rousing raider faction & robs the story of any drama or character conflict. And that toothless feeling extends to almost everyone in Veilguard. They’re all polite and ineffectual. It makes it feel like Veilguard is just one big game of pretend, a theme park. The drama is reserved only for the main plotline.

Like modern D&D, the world of Veilguard isn’t strictly medieval fantasy and instead is a mix of several eras, with Treviso being a Rennaissance Italy & the Necropolis looking like a Victorian Gothic cemetery on steroids. The Rivian Coast has an old pirate fort vibe while the Swamplands have the most medieval feeling. You bounce between these locations throughout the game and the variety of their designs do keep things from getting too stale.

Another thing that adds to the ‘theme park’ feel is the clothing design. I wasn’t a fan of a lot of the armors for Rook. There’s a lot of very bright colors, high shoulder pads, & busy layers. I’m not saying we need to go back to the era of everything being brown & grey, but the colors verge on garish. And the textures they gave some of these armors make them look like the cheap, “fantasy” armor you’d buy at a Ren Faire. The Crows armors are the worst about this. They look like they’re made out of cheap pleather. I found the Grey Warden stuff to be more of my taste as it felt like practical fantasy armors without the wild shoulder pads.

And I realize that while I enjoy a grittier, moral grey world, this is a fantasy game and they don’t all have to be as depressing as the Witcher’s world. One of the factions that I really like BioWare’s new take on is the necromancers. Necromancers are usually one note weirdos trying to raise the dead for nefarious purposes. In Veilguard you meet the Mourn Watchers, a necromancy group that approaches their roles more as advocates for the dead. They tend to the graves with the demeanor of a funeral parlor director. It’s a unique approach, with the only oddity being that they still use reanimated corpses for menial labor, which seems a bit manipulative and at odds with their overall mission goals. If the Lords of Fortune were set up more as an explorer’s guild of rogue academics, it would make their ideas on cultural relics more appropriate.

Your character and the companions suffer similar issues as the main factions. You play as Rook, a blank slate character you build. The downside with any blank slate character is they don’t have a strong personality. You can flavor their personality a bit with the dialogue choices, but for scenes where you don’t make choices, they go back to being a blank slate. Depending on your choices, Rook can be one of those people with golden retriever energy, inoffensive but eager to help. His dialogue, along with some of the companions, feels like I’m watching the “Saturday Morning Learning Pals”. When they talk to companions about being self-confident, believing in the good in people, or opening up about your feelings, it feels like it was written to teach these concepts to young kids.

DA: V is built around your companions, even more so than other BioWare games. Each one has a quest with a unique bad guy they’re tackling that gets introduced in a cutscene after their intro mission. It can be a bit overwhelming at first with game setting up 7 mini plotlines. These then come to fruition in the 2nd act. Usually all of their issues are sorted out in about 1 or two missions, so no one story feels like it’s dragging on too long. And a lot of the main story missions are all hands on deck affairs, where the whole team is on the mission, just doing other things. It's a nice change from older BioWare games, where most the team sits around the base for 80% of the game.

Of all the companions, I did find Emmerich the necromancer to be one of my favorites. With him & Gale from BG3, I’m becoming a fan of the wizard buddy who is your voice of reason in these games. He’s an academic type & a necromancer who struggles with the idea of death. It’s a strikingly real topic for a fantasy game to go into. We’ve all had those fears about death, and Emmerich is figuring out how to cheat death, that’s where the fantasy setting comes in as he tries to become a lich.

Davrin is the Grey Warden companion, he’s a typical “career soldier” who has been thrust into raising a griffon cub, so he has to learn how to be a caretaker. I inadvertently referred to him Wyll several times. Lucian is the group’s assassin, he would be played by Antonio Banderas in a movie version of Veilguard. He’s a tortured soul who’s haunted by a demon. They don’t really capitalize on any of that and for the most part, and he’s distilled down to one note, which is just that he really likes gourmet coffee. Taash was a companion I didn’t like at first, but they evened out later on. When you first meet them, they have that personality where you feel like you have to walk on eggshells around them because anything could set them off. We learn later on they’re an angsty teenager who was raised by a very domineering mother. Taash’s story is about them learning they are non-binary. I’m no expert on the subject, but I feel BioWare handled it well. That being said, I do have to admit it is a bit surreal to see these fantasy characters go from talking about world ending magic to discussing gender identities like they’re in a modern coming of age film.

As with most BioWare games, you can romance one or your companions, and unlike most BioWare games, I couldn’t decide who I wanted to pursue in this game. There usually feels like there’s the ‘expected romance option’ (usually one of the poster children of the franchise), like Liara or Cassandra. I was torn between Harding, a return character from Inquisition. She’s a redhead with a girl next door charm and a can-do attitude. She gets the power to control stones and has to come to terms with the history of the dwarves. Then there’s Neve, who is a jaded private detective with a cynical sense of humor. Her story arc shows her learning to believe in the good in the world and not be so dour. And last is Bellara. She’s an elven historian/researcher, but is also a bit of a scatterbrain. She lost her brother in one of their expeditions only for him to come back working for an evil spirit. As she grapples with the fact that she may have to kill her brother, she gains some confidence in herself. I ended up going with Harding.

Now the plot, and spoilers to follow. Solas, an elven god of trickery, from Inquisition has decided to destroy the veil between worlds to correct his mistakes. Varric and Rook are able to stop him but not before two other elven gods, Algernon & Gilgamesh, are released. They are much worse than Solas, as they plan to use the Blight, a nasty substance that creates flesh tentacles and zombies, to conquer the world. Solas ends up trapped in oblivion and can only communicate with Rook through dreams. He tries to help, but is working his own angle too. The conversations between the two are higher points of the story as they debate philosophical concepts. With his help, and the help of a wounded Varric, you assemble your team to kill the gods. The Veilguard isn’t a government organization like the Inquisition & the heroes aren’t tied together like Baldur’s Gate 3’s heroes, so it feels odd they all agree to see this through and become the leading authority on stopping the gods.

Speaking of the Inquisition, the Inquisitor does play a supporting role in this story. You can choose what choices you made in Inquisition at the beginning of the game, like the Witcher 3, but for the most part the only thing it affected was some dialogue. As you help your companions, you also ingratiate yourself to the local factions, enlisting their help for the final fight. The Wardens & Crows seem to play the biggest role, with the Jumpers, Dragons, & Mourn Watch playing a smaller role, and the Lords of Fortune being almost an afterthought for most the story. The Veilguard takes on Gilgamesh first and during this mission, you send one of your companions, either Darvrin or Harding, to lead a distraction team. I chose Davrin since I kept Harding as a regular companion. During the boss fight, Davrin sacrifices himself to stop the god, it’s unavoidable. I’m of two minds about it, on a narrative level it does help illustrate the fact this is a real war with real consequences, something this game usually lacks. On a gameplay level, you basically just make a binary choice of who to send to their death.

After that, Rook is sent into the shadow realm with Solas, who does some kinda magic to trade places with Rook. Here Rook learns to accept Davrin’s death and realized that Varric actually died when he first confronted Solas, & Rook’s been hallucinating him ever since. Rook makes peace with his regrets and leaves the shadow realm just in time to join the rest of the party in a final assault on the city Algernon took over. All of the factions you help show up to help and there’s a good “here comes the cavalry” scene & defeat Algernon. I will never not be a sucker for that trope. Then you have to deal with Solas. If you’ve completed a couple important side quests the game rewards you by giving you an additional option to deal with him.

All in all, I enjoyed Veilguard much more than Inquisition, partly due to the new combat system. While I still find the Dragon Age world to be a bit dull, I found the world design here to be fun. The story keeps up at a good pace with no real lulls. If you are a fan of BioWare games or action RPGs, I can recommend this game.

I played it with little hope of anything interesting. Was it boring? No. Was it very good? No either. For me it was worth it, because, maybe, it was last chance to visit the world of Dragon Age, which I like and have good memories of it.

Good:

• It was another Dragon Age game and world of Thedas.
• The game was playable, without errors, and not boring.
• The final missions were interesting, both from a story and gameplay perspective.

Bad:

• Purely from a combat perspective, the previous Dragon Age games were much better, any tactical aspect from it has disappeared. The only point of the companions is unlimited healing and special actions. I played on the second most difficult level. Opponents are bullet sponges, fights are long, but not hard. The only difficulties were in the battles, where the companions could not participate all time (the possibility of unlimited healing disappeared) or where the boss could regenerate health and did it faster, than my damage output. Skill developement was mess. Inventory - primitive.
• Conversations were boring. All the action takes place in a dark world, but the dialogues for the main character, companions and all the NPC were like from a children's fairy tale world. Everything was sterile positive. In conversations you can mostly give three not much different good and politically correct answers. A lot of gay and trans topics, but in a world where there should be a discrimination against them, everyone treats them as politically correct as possible. Tevinter - nothing indicates slavery and blood magic. Crows was like a friendly Italian or Spanish commune, where everyone is patriot and defender of the local area.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard may have hit a few big stumbles along its path to release, but ultimately manages to deliver an innovative and fully-realized take on the series' world, exploration, and combat. The role-playing aspect has taken a minor hit in the process, but the game still boasts one of the best casts its studio has ever created, an engaging plot, and answers to many long-held questions, in addition to the best battle system in BioWare history.

I enjoyed the game. That's up front. But one thing must be clear: This isn't the Bioware that created masterpieces like Dragon Age Origin or Mass Effect 2. Otherwise, I like this game. The gameplay is already there, enjoyable, and very relaxing for casual play. You'll find energy to put into builds or strategy. The exploration was incredibly good. I'd say the world is one of the most beautiful and strongest in the game. Each location has its own flair. Overall, I'd describe it more as a feel-good game. A hero who defies evil with his group, experiences adventures, discovers secrets, explores locations, and tries to save the world.

Here's a tidbits of my own opinions:

• Gameplay wise - a bit easy and very repetitive, but still decent.
• The story felt a bit meh in the beginning but it picked up quite nicely.
• The game isn't padded with pointless fetch quests which is nice.
• Music - does the work. Not a masterpiece, but was good.

I have been a fan of DA since the beginning when it was basically just their console take on Baldur's Gate. The second one was rough and had like six tiny zones they kept repeating and this feels like maybe what they were going for.

It is also an evolution of DA:I and a true sequel. The Mass Effect-ication is complete!

I love how EVERYTHING you do is reflected all the way from how you are treated and spoken to, down to the little background quips by randos.

Map-wise this reminded me of those legacy boardgames where by the end the board is MUCH different than when you started because of what you did and the choices you made. It felt much more visually connected to the story than DA:I did.

Speaking of story, it felt so satifying start to finish. I can stomach the occasionally clunky or corny or cheesy moment-to-moment dialog because overall I was really invested in what was going on.

The gameplay is interesting enough action-adventure slop. Basically Mass Effect with magic. Weirdly, running from battle to battle as quickly as possible kind of reminded me of Gears Of War sometimes but in an intangable way that I cannot justify.

Last thing, the finale, which I will consider the point where the "no going back until the end" pop up hits, was SO LONG but genuinely emotional and engaging and reflective of the game I had played and all the choices I had made to that point. It reminded me of the first time I played the finale of Mass Effect 2 but it was so much more GOOD!

Anyway, my favourite game I have played in a long time. A rare game that I did not mind churning over a hundred hours on. I just played it a few years late!

When I don't know what to cook for dinner I often default to "refrigerator burrito". Just toss in the pan whatever veggies and mushrooms I have in the fridge, add cheese and humus, wrap it in bread and done. Dragon Age: Veilguard feels like the game equivalent of a refrigerator burrito, where the only available ingredients were leftovers of previous refrigerator burritos.

Now I could complain about the simplistic combat that barely evolves after the first two hours, or the tepid, non-commital characters that don't have any bite, tension or conflict. Or I could highlight how game successfully makes Solas into such a complex antagonist with a nuanced relationship with the player. I could also congratulate the writing team for including a enby character with a relatable journey of self-discovery at the same time that stomps all that was interesting and unique in the Qunary people.

But besides that apophasis, I won't. Instead I will scream into the void about how is it possible that executives that are so obviously oblivious to how to make good games can still be employed and getting bonuses while the developers and writers that actually do the good work get sacked. Honestly, any idiot with two working neurons could've tell them that forcing the Dragon Age team to develop a live-service game is idiotic, and then pivoting into a single-player RPG without giving more time will naturally result in this uneven mess. How fucked up is the incentive structure in the videogame industry that intentionally messing up your games and then firing developers is a viable management strategy?

The whole thing is specially damning considering the Dragon Age 2 debacle.