Original Release: Oct. 31, 2024 for PC, Playstation 5, XBox Series X/S. Version Reviewed: Playstation 5, 2024.
THE PLOT:
It's been ten years since Solas, the elven apostate advising the Inquisition, revealed himself to be the fabled Dread Wolf, Fen'Harel. Solas has spent that time preparing a ritual to tear down the Veil between the human world and The Fade. If completed, his ritual will unleash demons and destruction on the world!
Varric and Harding, also formerly of the Inquisition, have tracked Solas to Minrathous, the capital city of the Tevinter Imperium. With the aid of his companion, Rook, and a local detective, Neve, Varric pushes through the demons already unleashed to find Solas. He confronts his old friend, begging him to stop, but his pleas fall on deaf ears. Rook is able to disrupt the ritual, at least. Solas is pulled into the Fade and the breach sealed behind him, though Varric is badly injured in the process.
Solas may be defeated, but the crisis is just beginning. Solas forges a link to Rook and explains that he created the Veil specifically to imprison the old elven gods, who had become power-mad and corrupt. The ritual was disrupted at a key moment, freeing the gods Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain - and the Blight that they created along with them. With Varric out of action, it falls to Rook to assemble a team to face the gods. Fortunately, Solas is still on hand to provide advice when Rook sleeps.
But it's not as if Solas, or anything he says, can be trusted...
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| Rook's team meets to discuss strategy. Almost all of these characters are more interesting in outline form than they end up being in the actual game. |
CHARACTERS:
The characters are interesting in outline form: a mage detective working against the Venatori in Tevinter; an elven tinkerer with a traumatic past who has spent her life alternately repairing or disarming magical objects; an assassin seeking revenge against the Venatori cultist who fused him with an angry demon; a necromancer who nurses a crippling fear of death; a Grey Warden who seems to be actively seeking a hero's death; a dragon hunter, Qu'nari by birth but never raised within the Qun, grappling with questions of identity in more ways than one. In sketch form, this should rank among the best central groups for a Dragon Age game.
Unfortunately, the characters rarely move beyond those sketches. I liked all of them well enough. Out of the bunch, though, I only truly connected with Emmerich, the necromancer, who seemed to get the best character writing in the game. The others all get enjoyable party banter as you run about the various maps, and they even strike up relationships with each other. But everyone ends up being so... pleasant. Even brief bits of friction are papered over quickly and easily (with onscreen text reassuring you that differences have been resolved). And much like amiable work colleagues, I never found myself believing that the group was bound together by anything more than mutual affability.
I don't want to overstate this as a problem. By average video game standards, these are fine characters. But compared to the character writing in Bioware's earlier Dragon Age II or Inquisition - or, frankly, even Mass Effect: Andromeda - this felt a whole lot shallower.
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| The game's combat emphasizes fast-paced action. |
COMBAT:
The combat is completely different in style than that of previous Dragon Age titles. It more closely resembles Mass Effect. You are limited to two companions rather than three, and you cannot directly control party members. Instead, you use radial menus to issue commands, telling your companions which skills to use and which enemies to attack.
Though it's different than earlier entries in the series, I still had fun with it. In constrast to what some detractors insist, there's plenty of opportunity for strategy (indeed, optional boss enemy "The Scarecrow" requires a level of strategy to defeat), but the emphasis is on keeping fights energetic, with rapid movement, momentum, and combo attacks.
I enjoyed it, probably more than I've enjoyed combat in previous series entries. Still, I will acknowledge that the combat is a sign of how this game de-emphasizes RPG elements. Veilguard is technically an action RPG, but the "action" part of that is consistently valued above the "role-playing."
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| Rook battles two blighted dragons. I found this to be genuinely a lot of fun. |
A BIZARRE RECEPTION - ON BOTH SIDES:
Veilguard released to all but rapturous reviews from professional game journalists. Gamespot scored it 8/10; IGN, 9/10. Meanwhile, a lot of Internet content creators flocked to the opposite extreme, with scores of "3" and below, a few even rating it at "0."
The thing is... I don't see how you can get to either extreme from the game that was released. There's too much that doesn't work for me to even rate this as a "7," let alone a "9." At the same time, it's a well-made, thoroughly competent product with many enjoyable elements. I can absolutely comprehend disappointment, but a lot of the venom was ridiculously over-the-top.
I largely enjoyed my time with this game. I had fun with the combat, and I was reasonably interested in the story. There were individual moments and elements that I thought were very good, including a few bits that I thought were outstanding. But for everything that worked for me, there was something else that didn't.
In this review, I'm going to mostly start with the things I didn't like and then move to the things I did, which will allow the review to close on a high note.
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| Dragon hunter Taash struggles with questions of identity, both in terms of culture and gender. Naturally, parts of the Internet responded by going insane. |
TAASH AND MODERN INTERNET DISCOURSE
Though I mostly try to avoid discussing this in my reviews, it does seem like almost all online discourse around genre releases in any medium is now complicated by bad faith culture warriors. One of Veilguard's companions, Taash, is non-binary. When Inquisition was released in 2014, complete with trans supporting character Krem (who was a well-written character), the gaming world mostly didn't care. The game was good, and that was all that most players cared about. With the culture war revival of the 2020s, however, Taash's mere presence was enough to draw a giant target over Veilguard.
Though you'd scarce know it from the discourse, Veilguard is not "The Taash Simulator." I didn't even meet the character until roughly 30 hours into my playthrough. Their companion questline occupies maybe a little over two hours total of a 100-hour game, and as much of that material centers around cultural identity (Qu'nari vs. Rivaini) as gender issues.
Now, Taash was neither my favorite companion (Emmerich) nor my least favorite (Bellara). Like most of the group, I found Taash to be baseline likable but not much more than that. But even if you utterly despise the character, there's nothing stopping you from doing what I do with Jacob Taylor every time I replay Mass Effect 2: namely, bench them and ignore them. Both the character and the gender issues have been insanely overblown by people exploiting outrage for easily monetized clicks.
That said... I don't really think that the Professionally Aggrieved are responsible for the financial failure of Veilguard. I've seen little evidence that individual titles' success or failure is particularly driven by the gripes of online trolls who can't go two sentences without screaming about "wokeness." It's notable that the same outrage merchants attacked Assassins Creed: Shadows - if anything, even more vigorously - and yet that game appears to have performed well and to have mostly satisfied its audience.
Veilguard isn't a bad game, but I can't deny that it's flawed - and it doesn't help that its worst stretch comes right at the start...
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| Varric and Rook fight their way through demons in Minrathous. This prologue should be better than it is. |
UNEVEN WRITING AND A VERY BAD START:
Veilguard opens poorly.
As with the characters, in outline form the tutorial level sounds good: an action-oriented opening, with Rook and Varric fighting their way through demons in the streets of Minrathous while searching for Solas. It follows up on the ending of Inquisition's Trespasser DLC; it reintroduces Varric, Solas, and Harding; it introduces new protagonist Rook and new character Neve; and it gives us a chance to figure out the basic combat mechanics while building up to a boss fight. Conceptually, this should work.
In practice, it just feels... "off."
The story beats are oddly rushed. Instead of gameplay mechanics serving the story, the story more or less stops every time you hit a mob of enemies. Rook - the player character - seems to just be tagging along after Varric rather than having any actual stake in events. Neve is annoyingly self-aware, quipping like she hasn't got a care in the world except for when she grits out groanworthy lines such as, "He's causing trouble in my city!" Thank you, Joe Friday. Oh, and everybody's quipping, in dialogue that seems to be striving for the style of the Marvel Cinematic Universe but ends up landing closer to the Sonyverse.
The early companions are the worst written overall. Though Inquisition holdover Harding is still well characterized, Neve's personality is set to "smug" for basically all of the first Act. Elven tinkerer Bellara, the first companion you'll recruit, all but recites her own backstory during her first companion quest, and I found myself actively wondering if someone had swapped script pages with the character brief.
Later companions are much better-written. Assassin Lucanis wrestles with the demon he's been merged with, and later with issues of self-doubt, and these scenes work nicely. Grey Warden Davrin also has some amusing interactions acting as caretaker and "adopted dad" to a griffon.
I liked almost everything centered around necromancer Emmerich. One of his first quests is a pleasantly subdued stroll shared with Rook amidst the graves of the Necropolis. Emmerich shows respect for the dead while reflecting on his terror of his own mortality. This is a fine scene. It shows the different aspects of Emmerich's character in a way that makes him feel like a complete human being, while at the same time setting up his later arc.
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| Necromancer Emmerich prepares to interrogate a murder victim. |
LEVEL DESIGN - A BIT TOO "GAME-LIKE":
I also had issues with some of the level design. I had fun in solving puzzles to open hidden paths, locate hidden chests, and activate shrines. Still, every setting seems to be laid out in ways that facilitate these elements. Venice-like Treviso is gorgeous... but at ground level, I rarely feel like I'm exploring the city. Instead, I'm constantly figuring out how to climb, jump, or puzzle my way to the next piece of loot - when I'm not destroying every box in my path like a maniac in order to gather crafting materials.
It's not bad design in itself. However, I don't think it's ideal for something as story-driven as Dragon Age. Instead of immersing me within the story, these design choices constantly remind me that I am playing a game.
For all these problems, I still enjoyed Veilguard. There is a lot that's good here - and it features a mid-game set piece that I'd rank among the franchise's best...
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| Grey Warden stronghold Weisshaupt is besieged by elven goddess Ghilan'nain. This entire chapter is breathtaking. |
THE SIEGE OF WEISSHAUPT:
As I mentioned, Veilguard plays more like a third-person action game than like a role-playing game. That said, it's often a rather good action game, and it has some fine set pieces.
The best of these occurs roughly midway through, when Rook's team travels through an Elluvian (magic portal) to the Grey Warden fortress at Weisshaupt. The fortress has come under siege by darkspawn under the control of the elven goddess, Ghilan'nain. The mission that follows, accurately titled "The Siege at Weisshaupt," is simply breathtaking. The team alternately fights through hordes of darkspawn or, where possible, travels through passages to get around them to reach a trap created specifically to deal with archdemons.
The action keeps ramping up throughout, with enemies growing steadily tougher. Visuals and music heighten the tension, with red flashes of blight and flame lighting up the thick fog and darkness. Ghilan'nain is mostly seen as a giant face in the sky. This could be cheesy, but the art direction, color pallette, and character design combine to make her genuinely intimidating. The sequence ends with a well-designed boss fight against a three-headed dragon, after which the plot takes its next major turn.
It's a sequence in which just about everything works, both individually and together. It's the single best chapter in this game, and I'd rank it among the most exciting moments in the series.
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| A young Solas leads a rebellion in flashback missions that show the "Regrets of the Dread Wolf." |
THEMATIC UNITY:
I've already mentioned the uneven dialogue writing, with excellent character exchanges sitting side-by-side with clunky surface-level conversations. Still, there is one aspect of the writing that I have to commend: Thematic unity.
All of the threads in this game coalesce around a strong central theme. The story is ultimately about moving past regret. Each character must accept the mistakes and/or misfortunes of the past and move on from them. Every companion questline returns to this idea. Grey Warden Davrin must learn to live with the questionable actions in the Wardens' past; Harding must come to terms with how the elven gods impacted the development of the dwarves and with the parts of herself that she's tried to hide; Bellara must accept a loss in her own past.
This extends to Rook. A particularly effective late chapter revolves around the player character having to live with decisions that resulted in losses. Rook has to push forward, but can only do so by accepting all that has happened. A direct parallel is drawn between this and Solas, with a handful of flashback missions showing the origins of his long past rebellion against the gods. Regret becomes as much the ultimate enemy as the elven gods themselves, and this reaches a perfectly judged climax in an endgame confrontation between Solas, Rook, and the previous game's Inquisitor.
In a way, Veilguard is less a sequel to Inquisition than to two of its three DLC expansions. It's unsurprising that the story directly follows on from Trespasser. I was shocked, however, that a large portion of this game is rooted in The Descent, a DLC that I had previously dismissed as expendable. The Descent remains my least favorite Inquisition DLC, but this game does retroactively grant it significance.
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| Rook consults with Solas, who is trapped in the Fade in a prison of his own design. |
OVERALL:
When I have trouble putting a review together, it's usually because I didn't really have a strong reaction to the title in question. That is not true of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. My difficulty with reviewing this game wasn't because of the lack of a reaction, but rather because I had such mixed reactions.
For everything in this game that I like, I can find something that disappoints me: characters who should be more interesting than they are, surface-level dialogue, level design that makes me all too conscious that I'm playing a game rather than exploring settings. But the inverse is also true: For everything in this game that disappoints me, I can find something that I really like: Terrific set pieces, fun combat, great individual moments, an effective central theme, and a very strong ending.
In the end, it's the most jumbled mixed bag I think I've come across. The things that don't work for me completely don't work, and the things that do work for me are often terrific.
I had been leaning toward a "5" for most of the game's length - but the final few chapters deliver in a big way, which is enough for me to grant one extra point.
Overall Rating: 6/10.
Preceded by: Dragon Age - Absolution
Previous Game: Dragon Age - Inquisition
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