Dragon Age: The Veilguard

(There are spoilers for this game within, but they're marked ahead of time. You've been warned.)

Bioware did it. They made a fourth Dragon Age game and it's good.

Albany Ingellvar, my Rook.

I've already written about my yearlong mission to revisit this series but I want to reiterate that I absolutely love these games. I think Thedas is a rich setting filled with compelling characters and a lot of history and has interesting questions to be answered.

This new game, then, is a great followup to some of those things, less so for others. There are some questions about the nature of the world that have been there since the start of the series that have finally been answered and, while it is a bit disappointing in some ways that the mystique is gone and the world is somewhat smaller for being a known quantity, I thought it was exhilarating to get those answers.

Trespasser, the last expansion for Inquisition, ended with an exposition dump that promised to get to the heart of certain matters and, boy howdy, this game sure was a sequel to Trespasser. Most of the lore is delivered via discrete "memories" of the past, and each is as dense and significant as that ending conversation from Trespasser. There's very little mystery surrounding the elven gods and their history by the end of this game, and while it's a shame that the tension between Elvhen history and the Chantry is basically a settled matter, the answers given largely feel right for the world. Some of the information given was clearly planned early in the creation of the series and it shows.

Everyone gathers to discuss these "memories". It's cool.

With so many solutions given and doors closed, then, part of this game feels like an end, once and for all. There's a kind of finality to some of the events of this game, with the world facing an even greater threat than the first few games combined and being forever changed as a result. Whatever comes next for this series is going to take place in a radically different world with radically different organizational structures, and that's both invigorating and sad. The world they'd built was enjoyable and rich already, and to see some things torn down in the name of progress is bittersweet.

It's exciting, anyhow. I've got no idea how well this game sold but I hope it was a success. I would love more of this.

That's kind of the heart of what I'm trying to get at, they made something truly great here. I played (and largely enjoyed) Mass Effect: Andromeda, and I've even played some of Anthem, but I agreed with everyone else when it came to the fact that Bioware had, unfortunately, lost a step or two. It wasn't entirely Bioware's fault, as Jason Schreier's articles on the messy development behind Andromeda and Anthem can attest, but I and many others had essentially given up on the idea of there being another truly great Bioware game. This game, then, is proof to the contrary. Bioware has still got, or has rediscovered, it.

While I loved the combat in Andromeda (and liked what little of Anthem I played), even I was skeptical about the switch to a full-on action game. Somehow, though, they made it work. I have my nitpicks with it of course (enemies are almost solely aggroed to you, the player, which means you can't really hang back and pick people off as easily, there are only two companions that come with you instead of three, you can't switch to control your party members, I could go on) but the end result is a game that feels fun to play and I can't fault that. The way you direct action via the radial menu is straight out of Mass Effect, and popping detonations reminds me of those games a great deal. Don't fix what ain't broke, they say, so while they may have ditched Dragon Age's traditional combat they stuck to something else they knew worked.

The combat feels very Mass Effect.

One thing that makes the reduction in party size an issue is that, like most other Bioware games, the characters in this are all compelling and likeable. While I do have favorites and least-favorites, none of them are dull or uninteresting. I enjoyed my time with all of them and only wish I could have had an excuse to take more people with me, so I could hear more of their banter and spend more time with them.

I don't want to give the impression that this game is perfect, or close to it, however. There are issues with it and some of these run deep. For starters, the world feels like some of its rough edges have been sanded off. Tevinter, as described in the earlier games and even some of the ancillary material, is a mage-run state that openly employs slaves and neither of those things were particularly visible in the game. Instead, it's kind of just another Kirkwall. I understand that there isn't a whole lot of nuance to slavery and that it might throw off the tone the game was going for, but when you've been hearing about this boogeyman state up in the north for years, it was kind of disappointing to realize that they weren't going to do it justice. Similarly, the plot simply doesn't care that much about the magisterium, the Archon, or the Black Divine so they just don't get any attention.

Some of the other locations, too, take some getting used to. Nevarra is reduced to a single, whimsical location which, while a lot of fun, doesn't fully mesh with the idea of the place we'd gotten from earlier works. With that being said, getting to see the necropolis, or Rivain, or freaking Weisshaupt at all was great, so I'm ultimately not too upset about some of these changes, but it's worth noting.

On the subject of having rough edges sanded off, there's also very little interpersonal conflict. Rook is (seemingly, I've only played it once) forced into a role of a generally likeable mediator so some of the opportunities to roleplay someone sterner or less kind weren't available. I understand that most people (myself included) would probably pick the "nice" options anyway, but it stood out to me that I was rarely given the opportunity to rock the boat.

Also, my biggest gripe with the game, this game essentially operates independently of the earlier titles. While I had a good time and they found decent workarounds for this, one of the draws to the series for me has always been that choices (and thus some characters) could carry over from one game to the next. While you do get to design an Inquisitor and answer a few very basic questions about said Inquisitor, there's no way for it to address what happened at Adamant Fortress, or what happened to a surviving Hero of Ferelden, or who the Divine is, or any other lingering questions you might have after the earlier games. It's set in a new location where most of that stuff is irrelevant, so maybe none of that would have come up anyway, but it was frankly disappointing to me to realize that something I'd felt was key to the series was abandoned in favor of pushing things forward and starting from a blank slate. If we ever get a fifth game, I hope they go back on this state-of-mind and find a way to incorporate some sort of Keep again.

My Inquisitor grew his hair out in the almost-decade since Trespasser.

Now, for some serious spoilers. I mean it.

(The spoilers will end after a picture of a very precious griffon)

While I've seen movies and read books, and even played smaller games, that dealt with being trans or non-binary, I've never played something of this scale that did so. I've mentioned it on here before, but I'm nonbinary and I never got to say some stuff to my own mother so seeing Taash come to terms with their identity, as well as grapple with the fact that they had unresolved issues with their mother they never got to express, um, resonated with me deeply. Maybe it's jarring to some to see some very modern language surrounding gender(s) and identity stuff, but since this series has always been relatively progressive and this is, well, a work of fiction, I didn't take umbrage with it. I thought they handled all of it very well. I also got to play as an explicitly nonbinary character and it came up periodically in dialogue, which I thought was nice. It's been sad to see so many people online criticize this game for being "woke" because of these things, but ultimately the people making those complaints are dum-dums and I truly don't care what they think.

I found this codex entry amusing.

Now that I've finished it I realize there weren't as many as I'd expected, but this game has some choices that are up there with Bioware's best. When tasked with saving either Treviso or Minrathous I struggled because neither option felt good, and that tension is what I think makes for a great choice. Similarly, choosing who to lead the distraction team near the end was a doozy. I could go on and list other choices, such as the end of Emmrich's quest, for example, but the point I'm making is that most of these don't have "correct" answers, and while the "Mass Effect 2 Suicide Mission"-esque developments at the end can be gotten through without any further casualties, this game offers some delightfully difficult binary choices.

Another thing this game does well are setpieces. The siege on Weisshaupt, any of the dragon fights, the final charge where a freaking kaiju battle happens around you, all of these are cool segments. I don't know that I have a whole lot more to say about it, but the main story missions are all exciting to play through.

On a completely different note, I loved how this game, like Inquisition and even Origins before it, incorporated characters and ideas from the ancillary material released around it. Multiple characters from Tevinter Nights are important, and some people and events from the comics are also significant. Heck, they even show the mysterious elf from The Masked Empire, Felassan, and give some context as to his relationship with Solas. Most prominently, Davrin's personal quest is essentially a followup to The Last Flight, and I was able to predict who the big-bad of his quest was because I read that book. It was fun that they rewarded people who read that stuff without making it necessary, my friend had just as good a time without this prior knowledge.

You're safe to resume reading.

And that's Dragon Age: The Veilguard. It has a number of issues, some of them pretty glaring, but the end result is a game that is fun to play and I'm glad that it exists. Would I have made all of the same decisions they did? No, probably not, but then again I'm not Bioware and the thing they made was still very good and, importantly, still very Dragon Age. 

I deeply enjoyed this game. I hope it sells well enough to warrant a sequel.