After a ten year wait, a very challenging development cycle and multiple reinventions, Bioware’s beloved fantasy series Dragon Age has returned with THE VEILGUARD. The fourth game in the series, it is both the final chapter to a story that first began with 2009’s DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS and a bold blueprint for a new future.
After a ten year wait, a very challenging development cycle and multiple reinventions, Bioware’s beloved fantasy series Dragon Age has finally returned with The Veilguard. The fourth game in the series, it is both the final chapter to a story that first began with 2009’s Dragon Age: Origins and a bold blueprint for a new future.
As a long running fan of both Bioware and the Dragon Age universe, I was worried about this one. 2019’s Anthem was a messy mix of live-service lite combat mechanics in a science fiction universe that felt flat and oddly one-dimensional for a team of developers praised for their combat. 2017’s Mass Effect: Andromeda has not held up for me on replays - an odd mix of busywork and open world shuffling with some of Bioware’s worst writing and characters in recent memory. It’s a mess, I’ve played it 3 times and platinumed it - and I cannot tell you why I gave it so much time.
So here we are. nearly 80 hours and credits rolled later. Did The Veilguard live up to the lofty expectations held for it? Is HR in the writer’s room? Is it still an RPG? The answers for these, might all be yes.
Genre Hopping & Identity Crises
Dragon Age has always had an identity crisis. As a series, its shapeshifted through many guises across its sequels. Origins drew heavy influence from CRPGs like the original Baldur’s Gate, offering the ability to zoom out to a tactical camera, issue orders and control your team members who relied on dice-rolls & long cooldowns for their damage output. Tonally, it drew inspiration from the bleak gritty fantasy of A Song Of Ice & Fire. This was a world of political backstabbing, gritty murders, characters being bucketed with copious blood effects after combat, cringe-inducing sex scenes and a now very camp ‘edgy’ late 2000s marketing campaign.
With each successive sequel, the series has shifted and redefined itself, focusing more on action combat, adding tighter constraints on roleplaying through the introduction of the Bioware ‘dialogue’ wheel and dropping the worst of the grimdark fantasy cliches into the bin on the way. It’s a direction for the franchise that some have not enjoyed, but the writing for Dragon Age’s destination has been on the wall since 2014.
Veilguard offers the most conceptually fresh of these reinventions. A tight, well designed combat and loot system (more on that later), the best cast oddball misfit heroes in Bioware game in years, and a big helping of intriguing worldbuilding and lore for longtime series fans.
It comes at a cost though; this is the most rigid storytelling of Bioware’s RPGs, main character Rook is a clearly defined person (think V in Cyberpunk, or Geralt in the Witcher) with their own well-defined personality and motivations. Roleplaying instead comes down to defining Rook’s origin, race, background, class and tonally nudging how compassionate, direct, awkward or oddball they’ll handle the circumstances they’re thrusted into.
Despite these concessions, it all really clicks. Rook is one of Bioware’s better protagonists in recent memory, having the swagger and confidence of Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard but enough malleable elements to their background and identity that you can create a Rook that feels quite unique from others.
In the early hours of Veilguard, Rook unpacks their belongings in The Lighthouse (your homebase in a dimensional rift, known as the fade). As Rook looks into a hand mirror, they can reflect on their gender identity, their tattoos, scars or even their own confidence or imposter syndrome. My dwarven grey warden rogue was able to muse on dwarven culture, their bad skills at lockpicking and even reflect on their career as a warden. It’s a great piece of character writing, and Veilguard spends careful time making your character creator decisions matter throughout its runtime.
I chose to play my Rook as non-binary and having multiple options to discuss my gender expression to companions (usually when things began to get romantic between them), felt nuanced, layered and carefully written. It’s a surprise to see this level of care in a big budget game for what only a small portion of players may experience.
It wouldn’t be a Bioware game without a motley cast of characters to befriend, romance and mentor and this particular group of oddballs and misfits really grew on me as the story progressed. Recruiting your squad is the first step in the game’s narrative but the harder part is building yourself into a strong leader and ensuring everyone on the team is ready and equipped emotionally for the struggles ahead of them.
This is done through a combination of conversation and more action-oriented missions, with many of these now integrated into companion adventures out in the wild, rather than static conversations at your base. You’ll go truffle hunting with Dalish Grey Warden Davrin and his gryphon companion Assan, Neve will take you on a tour of the Mithrathous Docks and her favourite fried fish stand and scout Lace Harding’s personal quest will take you deep into the dwarven deep roads.
Not all of these missions hit with the same level of urgency as others, but they help provide important glimpses into the inner workings of Veilguard’s cast, and set the important groundwork of Rook as a mentor, friend and team leader building up a motley squad of good guys.
Building your squad is not just rewarded with punchy narrative sequences - it also directly relates to your companions' power in battle. By spending time with your squad and helping solve their problems, you’ll increase their loyalty rank which unlocks points to spend in their skill trees and may even lead to unlocking unique powers and special gear depending on how you guide them.
Combat is where Veilguard shines the most. This is the best feeling, impactful and high octane combat that Bioware has ever designed. While It jettisons quite a few of the expectations of previous Dragon Age games - what it replaces them with is a masterclass in action RPG design.
Veilguard does away with the traditional RPG-party based combat of previous Dragon Age games and instead plays like a modern action RPG - think God Of War 2018. Active skill abilities in Veilguard have been stripped back to three choices that can be accessed in battle, with the remainder of skill expression instead tied to your weapon selection, button input combos and a very satisfying block/parry/counter/dodge mechanic that rewards skillful play.
Each class has access to multiple fighting styles: the rogue can specialise in fast melee dual wielding attacks or use its bow for a ranged playstyle; warriors can use a sword & board, a chunky two hander or toss their shield from range; and the mage can swap between a slower, long-ranged staff or the speedy and mid-ranged dagger & arcane orb combo.
A ‘rock-paper-scissors’ approach to weapon attacks is also in play, with chunky heavy attacks able to strip protective armour off enemies, ranged attacks receiving a bonus to piercing magical barriers and fast, light hits being extra-strong against the red health bar of enemies.
These attacks can all be enhanced by Veilguard’s sprawling skill tree - a web of interconnected nodes filled with meaningful active and passive ability upgrades. Everything in this tree is multiplicative, with big chunky damage multipliers (this is not a skill tree of small 2-5% damage increases) that can reward skillful buildcraft with very meaningful power increases. It’s boosted by a very strong and intuitive tagging system where every ability in the game is marked into categories (i.e ‘strike’ attacks, or ‘control’ attacks) to allow you to work out what nodes and gear will boost them intuitively.
Gear amplifies your skill tree expression to the next level, with an assortment of inventive items and buffs, from unique items that can completely break the game or unlock entirely new ways to explore your character’s damage potential.
I took my own dwarven rogue down the duelist route, focusing on a melee dagger build that built into necrosis damage and applying potent damage over time poison and bleeding stacks on enemies. My personal twist on the build? Leaning into the effects of a particular set of armour that granted me a stacking 10% damage increase for every unique buff applied to my character. Through manipulating the skill tree to reward me with personal buffs for slaying enemies, parrying attacks, achieving perfect dodges and not being hit, I was able to stack over 90% multiplicative damage to all my attacks in most late-game combat encounters, turning my dwarven rogue into a necrotic blender that melted bosses on nightmare difficulty.
It’s a level of build expression and creativity that’s sorely lacking in other big blockbuster action games (Assassin's creed, God of War, I’d love to see you get this inventive) and scratched a similar itch that games like Path of Exile or Last Epoch provide me.
Companions play an integral role in combat too - while they’re stripped back and no longer can be directly controlled or damaged by opponents, their ability to fire off powerful combo explosions, crowd control entire battlefields or even supercharge Rook’s own resource regeneration makes building and bringing the right squadmates into battle an important consideration.
It wouldn’t be a Dragon Age game without a lot of important decisions to make, world-shattering revelations and big story reveals, and Veilguard does not disappoint here.
Veilguard is a definitive sequel and conclusion to the current arc of the Dragon Age universe, tying off the narrative of Inquisition and placing a clear ending to where the franchise’s story has been building to.
Early on, bioware announced their plans to jettison a lot of the previous game’s reactivity, instead focusing on allowing players to pick three big choices from Inquisition that would shape Veilguard’s story. It was a bold decision, but it works here and instead allows Veilguard’s narrative to focus on the big decisions and reactivity of its own plot as a priority.
Throughout the game you’ll be tasked with some pretty big decisions, some which have some very world-changing impacts on your playthrough, foreshadowed through on-screen prompts that certain characters are taking note of your actions and decisions.
It’s smartly designed, and works as a slow-building ramp of tension which explodes in Veilguard’s final mission sequence, an expansive and exhilarating set piece that responds to all the big choices, decisions and consequences made throughout the entire game.
As thrilling as these moments are - it’s not all not perfect in Veilguard. There are moments of clunkiness that can occasionally rear its head. There are some plot threads that feel rushed or poorly thought out that can muddy some moments and one particular sequence reminded me of a PSA from a mid-90s cartoon.
It’s still not enough to take away from the achievement on display here.
Dragon Age: the Veilguard is a thrilling, ripsnorter of an RPG, with some of the best combat and buildcraft in the genre in years. It takes you on a rollercoaster ride through Thedas, answering and asking new questions about its rich lore and worldbuilding is brought to life by a rich cast of characters and is a rewarding final chapter and bold new blueprint for the series.
