The colder months of the year always summon up plenty of video game releases, ensuring that it’s my favorite time of the year. There’s no reason not to snuggle up and enjoy a few video games once the temperatures get into the negatives and for that reason, I preordered Dragon Age: Veilguard in hopes that I’d have a game to enjoy during the months of minimal sunlight.
I leveraged a few gift cards and purchased the physical version through Best Buy because I still believe that physical media is important and I simply enjoy collecting another game for the shelf. Besides, who wants to miss out on the next iteration of Dragon Age?
Fast forward to my birthday, October 31st, 2024. (And the release of Dragon Age: Veilguard)
Best Buy managed to deliver the game on time, which is apparently a miracle these days. I always love over the box art and the overall design of the physical experience. One thing stood out to me almost instantly. It seemed like Bioware didn’t have a lot to say on the back of their latest release. Why is that I wonder? I went ahead and booted up the game, ready to get things started.
Characters
Dragon Age games are all about the characters. Big small, mighty, and scared. They all play a part in the Bioware universe, exerting how they are experience whatever crisis is afoot. Of course, I need to start with the one you’ll spend the most time with, Rook. If you’re not careful, you may invest more love and care into the creation of your character than Bioware did in actually developing how your character interacts with the world.
Rook lacks the ability to appropriate react to any situation through facial expression.
People be dying?
Rook doesn’t mind, he is happy as a bee! Someone’s city is completely decimated? Rook doesn’t mind, all good here. The inability to do so pulls you out of the cutscene and tension. There’s also the story element of Varic being injured, forcing you into the limelight. This seems like a lazy way to introduce someone into the story. Why would anyone listen to you within the group, much less those you are trying to influence?
Hours and hours of gameplay will pass you by and yet Varic will be in his room saying, “I’m so sorry to have made you do this, Rook. I’ll be recovered and able to take over soon. How would that make any sense at this point in the journey? Will there be a moment where the group needs to decide on whether Varic or Rook should be the leader of the group?
Otherwise, Rook is pretty unremarkable in every way other than the fact that you are controlling them.
Companions
There is improvement among the companions you’ll discover along the way. From an assassin apart of the Crow’s Clan to a member of the Rift Jumpers, Dragon Age Veilguard creates a group of cohorts that are unique to their own, some more interesting than others. My personal favorite is Neve, a mage with an iron leg. You’ll find yourself taking a liking to certain companions but will be forced to only use certain ones in your party to be most effective in combat.
The entire free flow of this game is inadequate and this is nevermore apparent than with the companion quests. The pacing and rate in which dialogue options are opened with your various companions is jaunted and harsh on your ability to enjoy the game. One minute you’ll be confessing your love for a specific character, as you always do in a Bioware game. The next, you’ll be heading over to that character’s room to have a chat, with little to no recollection of the very intimate moment you just had with them. In order to maximize your connection with your companions, you’ll need to finish their questlines. There are far too many disconnects with these quests, with all of them forcing you to return to the lighthouse just to have them request you tag along on another “mission” together which lasts several minutes. This could’ve just been connected to the other mission you literally just completed.
Having this change of pace knocks you from the slumber the narrative may try and cast on you, for you’ll need to return to each companion over and over again to reach maximum loyalty.
Most of their final missions do not have any emotional impact at all, beyond Davrin’s and Emmirich, with both of these companions having their own little guy in the fight. I’d already level up to 48 for many of these fights and most of the boss fights were anti-climatic due to the ease I experienced while fighting them. Some bosses and enemies were far below my level while some were just above and there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason why this was. I don’t think the mission was available to me earlier so I couldn’t have even completed it at level 38 which forced me to do each final companion mission one after the other. This did have an impact on the overall enjoyment of the adventures with your new friends.
Open World
Dragon Age Veilguard boasts a massive open world that is filled with exciting adventures and things to explore. From my experience, the world is not exactly brimming with things to do and what is actually there, leaves something to be desired.
If you’re expecting a Witcher level of open world where you can traverse the open lands and stumble upon interesting objectives, quests, and people, you’d be quite wrong. Every quest requires you to speak with an NPC to find the location of your objective and with many quests, the starting point is a floating circle.
Of course, there’s plenty of resources and currencies to discover across the lands and the monsters continue to respawn whenever you leave and area only to return. This would be beneficial if you had any reason to kill them at all, yet you do not. Instead, you’ll find yourself leveraging the fast travel points almost exclusively, removing the need to run anywhere.
There are various types of puzzles to solve in all of the areas, with many of them being quite easy. They all supply you with new loot, but it never seems to be the loot that you actually need.
Each location does have a faction meter that goes up if you demonstrate your loyalty and commitment to them by finishing quests in that region. This score naturally accumulates while you complete other objectives throughout the campaign but if you want to properly prepare for the final boss mission, you’ll need to grind some fetch quests to improve your faction reputation.
Combat
The detonate system attempts to create an interesting play on the dynamic damage in the game. Unfortunately, the system forces the combat to feel a little stale at time and limits exactly who you’ll be bringing along with you on all your adventures.
Not only that, you’ll probably only be using one spell of theirs.
The combat system devolves into the detonation system. Everything you do in combat will be in relevance to the detonate system. The detonate system is when you apply an affect to an enemy for another companion, or yourself, to detonate the affect on. There’s a large circle that appears and that enemy is stunned for the duration of the spell. A portion of AOE damage will be applied to those around it.
This system appears to be an attempt to create an interesting play on the dynamic damage within the game. Unfortunately, the system forces the combat to feel somewhat stale and limits who exactly you’ll be bringing on your adventures.
Not only that, but you’ll most likely only be using one of their spells since only select spells detonate the affect.
With this system in place, the entire combat loop was focused on the detonation aspect of the abilities. Otherwise, you would not be applying any sort of meaningful damage to enemies. Early on, I found items that would cause me to be invulnerable for a short period of time. Once I found these items, I didn’t let go.
Loot
Rarity Increase
You’ll be reading these two words in infamy many times during Dragon Age Veilguard. Through the twists and turns of the story, you’ll be pitted against demons, dragons, and ancient stones that have come to life only to be rewarded with a rarity increase at random. That’s right, the rarity increase does not focus on any particular item in your inventory, not even those you have equipped! Over and over again will you see random items from your inventory upgraded. For what reason? I’m not entirely sure.
Why would I, a frost mage want to upgrade my arcane orb? Surely there must’ve been a reason to this that I’m not privy to. This among many of aspects of the experience, force looting to be the most mundane, experience ever. I have plenty of gear that I need to upgrade or replace, yet the most useless items in my inventory continue to be upgraded instead.
It wasn’t until THE FINAL MISSION where I found my main glacial staff upgraded to legendary status. I didn’t get to enjoy it all that much.
You also have the option of upgrading your equipment through the Caretaker which also requires you to upgrade said Caretaker by finding a specific currency in the world. You can apply the upgrades to your own gear along with your companions. I was somewhat of a hoarder with my resources in my Dragon Age Veilguard playthrough, where I was nowhere near running out of any currency anytime. The upgrades do of course cost various currencies and I thought for sure that the game would force me into using them all at some point so I was selective with my upgrades.
Yet, I found myself aimlessly hitting the upgrade button over and over shortly before starting the last mission, carelessly asking the Caretaker to upgrade my friend’s gear to apply more bleed damage, types of damage strength, and more. If you’ve played the game, you know this will have literally no impact on the game and it seemed kind of silly. I completed every single quest for every companion and even collected Mythal’s essence, I was pretty powerful at the end.
Overall, this Dragon Age experience doesn’t live up to the others but it was somewhat entertaining to tool around in its world with a set of other characters. Your romance choice had almost no impact on the game and there were few actual difficulty choices to make. Although, if you don’t max out your characters, there may be an opportunity for failure or sadness during the final mission where the game does in fact ask you to make seemingly difficult choices. The game is very pretty at times and there were moments of enjoyment during my experience. Bioware had the opportunity to leverage the companion specific questlines to spice things up through my 50 hour experience yet most fall short.
Without a doubt, there are worse games that you could decide to play on this day. Just know, you won’t have the most riveting experience with Bioware’s latest release. If you’re interested in reading some of the other words that I’ve aligned in the somewhat correct order, click below.
- The Last Frontier, a lackluster attempt at spicing up Apple TV, only to add another cool dud to the platform.
- What Call of Duty Players Don’t Understand About Battlefield
- Industry
- Dragon Age: Veilguard Review
- Halo Infinite Deserves Some Recognition
Geoff W - A Space To Myself 