Dragon Age Veilguard: A Review

[Jubal]

Dragon Age: Veilguard - a review by Jubal

Game Type: AAA
Genre: RPG

Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1845910/Dragon_Age_The_Veilguard/

So, I figured I'd write a proper review of one of the most bizarrely argued over games of this year. I played it, and I enjoyed it. Fundamentally, Veilguard is a good game that has a few annoying flaws. I'm probably going to write more about the flaws than the successes, because it's easier to rant about a frustration than give positives in detail, but overall I'm glad I played it despite the issues.

The basics first: it's an actiony RPG, moving even further away from the tactical combat of early games to a two companion system that prioritises combination attacks and doesn't let you directly fight or explore as your companions. The story is more linear than in Inquisition, but there are plenty of periods during the game when you get to bounce between different areas doing sidequests, especially in the midgame.

In terms of the basic plot pitch, the player is dealing with the problems set up in Dragon Age: Inquistion's Trespasser DLC: the ancient elf and god-level mage Solas is seeking to rebuild the world that he destroyed aeons ago at the expense of the Thedas the player inhabits, and the player in stopping him unleashes a potentially even greater threat, leaving a complex mix of alliance, mistrust, and regret. Whilst the name of the game did get changed to Veilguard, in truth this is Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, its earlier name. Solas hangs over the game neither quite as antagonist or protagonist, and is by far its best written character, with the huge quantity of additional lore the player discovers revealing the truths of his past and offering the player a chance to think their way around a figure remembered as the god of lies and trickery.

I don't tend to write much about graphics, mechanics etc when reviewing RPG games, but it's important to state that on this side the game is brilliantly put together. The overall game is extremely technically robust, very pretty indeed, and the locations are wonderfully rendered. Some of the faces look a bit overly smoothed for my taste, but the diversity of locations and exploration was very good fun and I enjoyed poking around new parts of Thedas a lot.

Characters and Dialogues

The writing and plot development in Veilguard, however, have some issues. The largest of these is an over-smoothing of the Veilguard companions and their personalities in the early and mid game, and an equal smoothing of the player's dialogue options with them. For the player, the jokey options are often just slightly lighter, and the grumpy options slightly flatter, versions of essentially the same sentiment: more variation and more consequent impacts on companion approval would have been very helpful for the game to feel more impactful.

The companion characters meanwhile are often overly reasonable, and their problems are overcome often in single dialogues where the player, in their team leadership role of group therapist, points out that, say, difference is helpful when working out problems, and the characters just immediately nod along, something that noticeably isn't how humans tend to react to having the flaws in their thinking pointed out. The Veilguard are a well-drilled, effective team who resolve all their problems very swiftly due to excellent management, which is a good thing in real-world teams but not ideal for writing a sitcom let alone a drama.

That's not to say these are bad characters. Conceptually it's a brilliantly put together team, and the delivery of the endgame (on which more later) pays off a lot of their concepts very well indeed. But the writing's lack of spiky moments - people rarely shout, arguments disappear fast, - risks ending up trivialising some of what the characters are dealing with. Therapy doesn't solve problems by reasoning people through in a single conversation: anger and pain do mess people up for more than about a week. For a game whose core narrative themes are grief and regret, Veilguard repeatedly shies away from showing the messier, more raw and human sides of those emotions, and that's a genuine pity.

World-Building

The third main problem element, besides, is a lack of guts in the world-building. I'm not someone who wants Dragon Age to be grimdark in the true sense, but one thing Dragon Age has always involved is questions of moral compromise, and they just don't arise in Veilguard in most places, in part because the setting has been massaged to avoid them. Some of worst victims of these are the Lords of Fortune, a pirate & treasure-hunter band whose "for gold and glory" motto is set aside when it comes to "cultural stuff" which is sent back to its native cultures after being assessed by a specialist. This (and here I can briefly wear my hat as someone for whom cultural heritage is a major element of my work) isn't a good way to write these issues: it avoids rather than embraces thinking about these problems, about culture and who might be hurt by different choices, in favour of an "it's fine someone's dealing with it". Having a companion struggle with how to honour who they are would have been much more meaningful Like with the companions' emotional states, the writing can come off as glib.

The setting's existing lore also causes some problems with this over-smoothed world-building. Tevinter is a slave society, as has been well established, but in Dock Town despite you hanging out with the setting's anti-slavery faction the actual realities of slavery are barely on screen. The Antivan Crows, a group of brutal assassins who have been established to kill rather than accept failure on the part of their members and to engage in human trafficking or kidnapping potential joinees, have been sanitised beyond recognition to the point where they don't even give you the option of killing literal traitors to their own cause, let alone getting involved in anything that could be as grim as an actual paid assassination. The Crows should be at best uneasy allies for a good character, not just cool caped rooftop-crawling cartoon characters: and it's ironic that a game that has a lot of dialogue about owning up to and then building from one's past isn't interested in doing the work in engaging with its own.

This isn't to say that there's "nothing dark" in the game as some people have alleged. The game doesn't always pull its punches, and there are some pretty horrifying elements. The more alive version of the blight visible in the game is particularly horrible, though it getting locked into a few too many puzzle-game elements does slightly decrease the efficacy of that. The problem is not the lack of darkness but the simplification of it: the Antaam becoming developed into a mere warband to avoid the complexity of the Qun as a stabilising but aggressively invading force, the lack of engagement with the status quo slave society of the Tevinter magisterium in favour of just showing the mad cultic zealots of the Venatori - these things make the player a strange sort of hero, one who can both proclaim that they're saving the world without needing at any point to engage with how broken the world that they're protecting actually is.

On the more positive side, there really is a lot good to be said about the deeper world building in the core plot. The build-up and payoff of the lore around Solas and his ancient foes, the Evanuris, is really well played, and unfolds as a deeply personal, painful story of tragedy that the player witnesses and acts parts in rather than just as a dry lore-dump. It's really rare that the good bit of a game is the bit that goes "well let's look at what happened thousands of years ago before the dawn of this world", and Veilguard is an absolute class in how to pull off using that sort of deep lore in game writing in a way that keeps it feeling fresh and present. The better of the companions' quest lines, especially Harding's, link into this very effectively.

The exploration side of the game is also wonderful and I've enjoyed it a great deal. Seeing Minrathous, Treviso, Arlathan, and other areas in northern Thedas is great. I'd have liked more of course, especially a bit more non-urban content in Tevinter, Nevarra and Antiva: countries either get a city or a non-city area. And I'd also have liked more continual access to some Deep Roads areas, which only appear for occasional missions. But those are just "I'd like more game in my game" which in and of itself is a sign that the game is doing soething right.

My final less positive note for this section, on the other hand, is that I was frustrated at some choices that boxed off important elements from past games or cut off potential for the future. The game only accounts for three choices from previous games: the fate of the inquisition, the inquisitor's approach to Solas, and the inquisitor's romance. This would not be a problem if it was leaving the choices from those games alone for future use, but it doesn't: in a game focused on Solas, not taking into account the Well of Sorrows choice from Inquisition makes that major element useless in future, not to mention the potential god-child Morrigan may have made in Dragon Age: Origins who we may have met in DAI. Both have been heavily telegraphed as potentially important throughout the series, and Veilguard not only passes them by but makes it exceedingly difficult for a future writer to ever come back to them.

Core plot

Veilguard flips the script compared to other Dragon Age titles, which had a plot but where you played for the companions: Veilguard has companions, but its soul as a game is in the core plot and that is by and large where all of its best writing is focused. As I said at the start, Solas looms over the core plot as he should do, with important supporting roles for several other characters. After Veilguard, whatever its failings, Solas at least should be laid out a a character among the absolute top tier of computer RPG antagonists: clever, powerfully effective, and yet hamstrung by his character flaws. In a world of simplifications, he remains a Shakespearian tragic figure and the game is much richer for it.

The main regular villain antagonists are big, scenery chewing, and fun. Their abilities and tactical nous are to say the least a little bit variable: my hero was good, but the final standup fight against a "powerful enough to randomly shuffle celestial bodies" level opponent was nonetheless significantly less weighted against me than it might have been. Thematically, though, they work really well together and their flaws as villains and people are engaged with properly when it comes to their defeats. They manage to both be absurd overpowered scenery chewing monstrosities and also be more human than a Corypheus or Urthemiel.

And then there's the ending. Which is great. Whatever my feelings on the middle of Veilguard, I will absolutely hand to it that it has the best end-run section of a Dragon Age game. The gear-shift is stark. From the slow, warm, sometimes stilted plots of bits of the main game, the ends of companion quests add a little sharpness, but then when the final mission run begins the game starts delivering the sort of punches it hadn't been clear it was capable of until that point. For a 70 hour game, it packs a lot into the last three or four hours: the last few missions are emotionally hard-hitting, well designed in their encounters, and pay off the earlier parts of the game very effectively indeed.

Overall thoughts

Veilguard is a really good game. For me it's probably the weakest of the Dragon Age series, but it's still both a very good game and solid Dragon Age entry. I enjoyed playing it, and I'd recommend it to others. Overall it's - unsurprisingly - a lot better than its shoutiest detractors will tell you, and equally unsurprisingly not as good as its most vociferous defenders will tell you. In my view it's worth playing especially for the core plot, and I enjoyed it myself, but it's worth noting that it's both a bit weak on some things other Dragon Age titles have been strong on and really quite strong in areas where some previous titles were a bit lacking.