It would be the euphemism of the year to say that for BioWare, a lot is riding on Dragon Age: The Veilguard. The once revered maker of roleplaying games like Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age has stumbled severely with its last two games, Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem.
The latest installment in the sci-fi franchise wasn't bad, but it wasn't great, either, and it didn't sell as well as BioWare's parent company, Electronic Arts, wanted. The real catastrophe was Anthem, though. The new intellectual property was designed as a live service game that would be updated for ten years post-launch, but it ended up getting only a couple of patches before the overwhelmingly negative reception from critics and fans alike essentially halted that content roadmap. For a while, BioWare attempted to concoct a major overhaul (dubbed Anthem Next) that could resurrect Anthem, but EA ultimately chose to abandon the project and let the studio focus on its core franchises: Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
Anthem also had a big influence on the fourth Dragon Age game. At some point, the idea was to make another live service game with coop, and reporter Jason Schreier even said the developers internally referred to it as 'Anthem with dragons.' Luckily, the magnitude of Anthem's failure, combined with the success of Respawn's Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, proved to Electronic Arts that single player games could still be financially successful, convincing the publisher to allow BioWare to focus solely on the campaign and drop multiplayer altogether.
By mere syllogism, one could say that Respawn's Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order has effectively saved the beloved Canadian studio. Many fans feared a third unsuccessful game could persuade Electronic Arts to either sell BioWare or shut it down altogether, and with 2024 proving a terrible year for layoffs and studio closures, this was a concrete possibility. Of course, what Respawn's game actually did was give BioWare a chance, which they could still have squandered. I'm happy to share, though, that they did not. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a great ride that any fan of the studio's games will be able to enjoy.
The key part is that the developers successfully invested in their own strengths rather than trying to follow the latest trends even if they were out of their expertise. I'm referring specifically to the decision to abandon the open world-like zones of Dragon Age: Inquisition (and Mass Effect Andromeda) in favor of a more old-school approach, reminiscent of the earlier installments in those franchises. Nowadays, it's getting harder and harder to find games that do not offer open world design. Even indie developers, thanks to game-making tools like Epic's Unreal Engine, can do it relatively easily, and many publishers think of it as a definite plus for any upcoming game.
It must have taken BioWare a considerable amount of convincing to get EA to approve the idea, but they did it, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard is definitely better off like this. I have to admit I was skeptical at first, as I am a big advocate of open-world games in general; however, this game proved to me that there's a place for mission-based Western RPGs going forward. For one thing, it goes a long way toward ensuring the game does not overstay its welcome, as everything is more or less connected to the story and the characters.
It was not so in Inquisition, and content bloat is indeed an issue in many open world games save for the very best ones (and even those do have some side content that is just not on the same level as the rest, which developers are forced to add just to populate all the world). That is not to say Dragon Age: The Veilguard doesn't have relatively straightforward quests, but they are still grounded in the same narrative tissue, making them feel like part of one cohesive story.
Following the few initial missions, the player navigates Thedas by accessing the world map and traveling with the Eluvians, the magical mirrors made by ancient elves that allow long-distance travel. Access to the Eluvians may come and go depending on progress (you'll have to unlock some) and story (in some cases, you must head to a specific area just for one mission, and the game will unlock the Eluvian for you). Still, some options remain available for most of the game, allowing players to revisit the same zone multiple times.
It's a good thing, too, because there's actually a fair amount of exploration in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Make no mistake, this is no Elder Scrolls, and you won't find NPCs going on about their lives as in an open world game that simulates real life. Rather, BioWare chose the old-school approach first popularized by the Metroidvania genre: there's a ton of loot and secrets hidden behind puzzles and companion abilities, so you will have plenty of reason to return to exploration regions like the Arlathan Forest, Minrathous, Rivain, the Necropolis Halls, Treviso, the Hossberg Wetlands, and the Crossroads beyond just quests. If you want to make the most out of that exploration feeling, it might be a good idea to remove the mini-map, which is one of several tweaks allowed within the accessibility options.
Would I have preferred more expansive zones? Sure, but they may have come at the cost of something else. Given the quality of the final game, I'm happy with the tradeoff. By the way, prepare yourselves to open countless chests and collect innumerable resources lying around, even in the most linear missions, up to the very final one. And remember: break any box or vase you see in the environments, because they will yield resources that can be used or sold to vendors. Those elements may be a bit trite, but there's a reason they have worked for decades: they make the player feel good, and that's still true to this day. Pretty much the same happens in some of the most acclaimed games of the recent past, such as Sony Santa Monica's God of War Norse saga.
Overall, I finished all the missions in the game (save for two particularly challenging puzzles) in 78 and a half hours, not far at all from the 80-hour mark BioWare promised in the review guide. I would say it's almost perfect for a mission-based RPG: quite meaty but about half as long as the gargantuan Baldur's Gate 3, which perhaps will make it more replayable. Granted, if you wish to complete it quicker, you can absolutely do it - the main path is said to be around 35 to 40 hours.
One of the main areas of innovation for Dragon Age: The Veilguard is in its combat system. Whereas the previous titles featured a larger party of four companions and allowed players to take direct control of the companions, this one sticks to a party of three and only lets you move around as the player character, just like in the Mass Effect series. Moreover, players have to choose three active abilities and an ultimate for their character plus three abilities per companion, whereas Inquisition featured way more selectable abilities in combat. This caused concerns among fans that the franchise's trademark tactical element would be lost or diminished.
However, that's not the case at all. First and foremost, as the developers had already disclosed prior to launch, several abilities have been baked into the core moveset of each class (Warrior, Mage, and Rogue) and do not count toward that same pool of abilities. For example, the Mage can side-step attacks or Fade-step for a longer dodge by double tapping the same button; they can perform a sprint attack or a jump attack with both light and heavy attack buttons; they can charge light attacks, heavy attacks, and ranged attacks by holding the respective buttons.
There are also different mechanics based on the weapon you're using, which can be switched at all times in combat: while the staff lets you create a defensive shield that is maintained as long as you have mana, the dagger and orb are more geared toward a melee type of character who must parry at the right time to be effective. Dagger and orb also have unique mechanics called Arcane Marks, which are applied to the enemy with light attacks; once you get to three hits, you apply an Arcane Bomb, which can be triggered with a heavy attack for heavy damage.
This is just the very basics. Most of these attacks and moves can be augmented through gear and talents; for example, the Greater Passive downfall turns every jump attack on knocked-down foes into a critical hit. The Trait Fade Strike lets you perform a powerful follow-up attack after Fade-stepping; Imbued Defense provides the Shocking Weapons buff (+25% weapon damage) after performing a Perfect Defense, while Return Fire lets you perform a quick counterattack after the aforementioned Perfect Defense. And this is just for the core moveset; there are as many traits and passives that work on the active abilities and other aspects of your build.
On that note, did I say there are also Runes? You can equip three of those at a time (though activating one sets off a shared cooldown) and they can be extremely useful depending on the situation. Examples include freezing or knocking down all nearby enemies, losing all mana to get a big heal, instantly refreshing your or your companion's ability cooldowns, greatly enhancing the efficacy of your next ability, and more. I unlocked twenty-four runes during my time with the game, and each comes with a passive and an active effect to trigger at the right time.
As someone whose favorite genre is RPGs (and MMORPGs), I can safely state that Dragon Age: The Veilguard offers an impressive amount of depth in its build creation. Best of all, skill points can be refunded for free whenever outside of combat, allowing users free reign to tinker around and create their favorite build synergies with a great many options at their disposal. That includes companions, by the way, who are still very important - far more than in any Mass Effect game, I'd say, when it comes to combat. While their skill trees are not as extensive, they still offer several options that players would be wise to carefully evaluate depending on their play style. There are so many buffs and debuffs to consider, not to mention each enemy's vulnerability and resistances, which you can check at any time in combat by pausing the action and bringing up the ability wheel. That's where you can tell each companion what to do against which target, largely preserving the core tactical element of Dragon Age.
It may be different on the lower difficulties, but when playing on Underdog (the second-toughest difficulty after Nightmare, which, however, locks you into that difficulty when beginning a playthrough), pausing the action to think about what to do and properly order the companions around was instrumental to say the least, especially to set up the detonation combos, which work by applying and then triggering an effect like Weakened, Sundered, or Overwhelmed on a target. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is no Dark Souls, but its encounter design is excellent and it offers a worthy challenge even to experienced action and RPG players. There are some fantastic boss fights in the game, both in terms of spectacle and mechanics, forcing you to grow your character and perhaps change your build a bit, as well as learn how to counter the boss's moves as in any great action game.
There is a bit of a catch in that companions do not actually take damage - they are effectively invulnerable in combat. That said, enemies do attack them from time to time, and two of them offer specific taunt abilities to get the attention off you (there's also a Rune that diverts enemies to the rest of the party for a short while). This may irk those who yearn for realistic fights, but in practice, it did not bother me at all. The game was clearly designed around this limitation (probably because they wanted to avoid the issue where they died all the time and forced the player to revive them over and over again) and I did not feel it negatively impacted Veilguard.
In fact, the changes made compared to Inquisition's middling combat are almost entirely for the better. Dragon Age: The Veilguard has an outstanding combat system that finds the perfect balance between action and tactics, giving it a unique identity in the RPG genre.
BioWare's games have always been narrative-driven, and this one is no exception. The game follows directly on the events seen in Inquisition and its Trespasser DLC with a ten-year gap (just like in real life), and it can be considered the culmination of storylines that have been in motion for a long time in the series. Dragon Age lore aficionados will find several earth-shattering revelations that answer some long-standing questions. Effectively, this game closes one chapter of the overarching world narrative, and the next installment will inevitably have to be centered around different themes and characters.
For this reason, those who played previous installments and know about the lore will get the most enjoyment, although it is not a barrier to newcomers. While creating the player character (the character creator is very robust, although not the most complex I've seen in a game), the game also lets you create the Inquisitor, the protagonist of the previous game, and choose how a few key events from Inquisition unfolded.
Having choices and consequences reverberate throughout their games has also characterized the studio's previous work, especially in Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Again, Veilguard does not disappoint in this area, either. Early on, there will be a major decision to make: the villains are attacking two cities at once, and you cannot be there for both. Each city is tied to one of the companions, and the 'forgotten' city and companion will be transformed in a way. The companion will become ineligible for some time as they deal with the fallout, and when they come back, they will be 'hardened', empowering their damage abilities while closing down their healing ones as they are now hellbent on vengeance.
This is an interesting system, both narratively and mechanically, so it's a shame that it does not seem to apply to the other companions as well. Other than that, you will guide the companions in their personal quests through harrowing times of acceptance and personal struggles, with companion quests ranging from relaxed hangouts to sprawling missions that lead to complex boss fights. Seeing a companion through the entire personal quest is not only fulfilling from a storyline perspective, it will also allow you to maximize the bond with them, level them up, and elevate them to Hero of the Veilguard, a status that empowers their abilities and makes them more likely to survive the final fight.
That's really where most of the choices and efforts made throughout the whole game come to fruition. Allowing each of the companions to solve their conflicts and each of the factions to be as strong as possible is a big factor in attaining the best possible ending, although there are some choices to make even in the final fight, such as sending the right companion to accomplish a certain task.
Overall, the writing in Dragon Age: The Veilguard is great, and the voiceover and tech improvements (mainly facial animations, eyes, and the amazing hair) also help a great deal with the presentation. Just do not expect to act as a villain or even just drive away companions. While in some instances a certain dialogue option led to a companion disapproving, those were so far and few between to not actually matter. This is not that kind of RPG - you're supposed to be a hero.
Companions can be befriended and romanced, as in most previous BioWare titles. In my experience, the romance was a slow but steady buildup, though that may depend on the character, and it's fine by itself since it felt good when it finally happened. There's practically no nudity to speak of, anyway, so if you were hoping for steamy sex scenes like in Baldur's Gate 3, you're out of luck.
Also, a minor criticism regarding cutscenes is that most of the time, companions do not intervene when talking to other NPCs, even when it would be entirely appropriate for them to do so (for instance, when talking with the leaders of the resistance of their city of provenance). Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield, on the other hand, featured a lot of instances where companions interjected, making conversations feel more lively and realistic. Granted, there's still a lot of great banter between companions themselves, and you won't miss on any of that just because you've suddenly entered combat - they are now smart enough to resume that talk once things have settled down.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard runs on the Frostbite engine, just like the last three games made by the studio. Much has been written on the hardships encountered by the BioWare developers as they attempted to tame an engine originally made for shooter games.
In the lead-up to the release, the developers mentioned that they had finally learned how to best use Frostbite. That may be the case, but the performance is honestly underwhelming. I played on a PC with nearly the best combination of CPU and GPU one money can buy (an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090), and yet I had to deal with considerable stuttering throughout it all. That's even with DLSS Super Resolution set to Performance mode (upscaling from 1080p to 4K) and DLSS Frame Generation enabled, not to mention the optimized Game Ready driver installed. The only way to reduce those stutters was to essentially remove ray tracing, or rather, switch to the 'RT Selective' option, which only applies ray traced reflections and ambient occlusion to specific areas of the game that best showcase the respective effects. Even so, they were not eliminated and occurred regularly.
Those were not shader stutters, by the way. The game compiles shaders the first time you launch it, recompiles them if you change drivers, and verifies them anyway each time before loading the menu. They had to be traversal stutters, as we're used to seeing with Unreal Engine games. However, while Dragon Age: The Veilguard looks good, it doesn't compare to the latest triple-A Unreal Engine releases. Honestly, it might be worth it for EA to allow BioWare to use Unreal Engine, just like Respawn, going forward. I also had to contend with a bug for my whole playthrough: when launching the game with HDR enabled and DLSS Frame Generation enabled, there were flickering skies until I turned off and then on again DLSS FG. On the upside, HDR was well implemented, which is unfortunately rare.
From a visual standpoint, the game succeeds in providing many different biomes to explore as the party treks across Northern Thedas, fulfilling BioWare's promise to bring players to more locations than ever before. The environments generally look great, while the characters are a bit more of a hit-and-miss in that some are almost photorealistic and others look more stylized. In that regard, more uniformity would have been ideal.
Reviewed on PC (code provided by the publisher).
