From November of 2014 til October 2024, the Dragon Age franchise did not release a single game. In that span of time, there were still books and other in universe media released, but the fabled Dragon Age: Dreadwolf died a thousand deaths and lived a thousand lives in that time span. The most disgusting form it took was of a live service game with no doubt several forms of currency that you needed a flowchart to keep track of. This too, was scrapped, and so was Dreadwolf. Instead, the game became Dragon Age: The Veilguard, slated for release at last in 2024, becoming one of the year's biggest disappointments in the gaming space for yours truly, for which there was surprisingly fierce competition. There is something darkly amusing about multiple game series I love returning after a hiatus and disappointing me on some level, but nothing wounded me quite as viscerally as Dragon Age: The Veilguard did.
No game in the Dragon Age series has ever looked or played like its predecessor did. Each game functions as a sort of time capsule for RPG movements, from the CRPG system of Origins to the extremely streamlined combat of Dragon Age 2 and the bloated open world of Dragon Age Inquisition, so it stood to reason that Veilguard would not look the same as Inquisition. (No, I am not including the article. That renaming was dumb as hell and had NOTHING to do with the game.) The business of making these games is another matter, and the atrocious and non-unionized working conditions under Bioware and a lesser extent EA led to a bleeding of talent. What I consider to be the heart and soul of the Dragon Age writing team, David Gaider, left Bioware shortly after Inquisition released; dozens of talented animators and writers have been fired or left for other jobs. The laundry list of every Bioware vet who left in some fashion equates to decades of lost experience and knowledge, and that is extremely evident when you play Veilguard. The worst sin of Veilguard, is the utter lack of world choices that you can upload to the game. Nothing you did in the prior games apparently mattered, because the only choices you could make involved the prior protagonist of the last game, who they romanced, and some ultimately meaningless flavor choice about Eggboy, the Dreadwolf, Solas, your Bioware mage traitor companion. This was a game made for and by the people who wanted to fuck an arrogant bald elf and everyone else just had to sit there and suffer. The writers of Veilguard did not cover themselves in glory here, either. Criticism of the world choice decisions was met with disdain and deflection, claiming that those of us who were hopping mad about the world states would be getting with said world state was crumbs. I want those crumbs. Those crumbs are important to me. Fantasy games are spent half in game, half in a codex reading those crumbs. If you want to sell people on a vision of a connected series, of the illusion that anything they did in a previous game mattered, you need world those crumbs. As a personal example, I once spent three days in 2014 fixing a wrong email address just so I could get the world state where my Dalish warden survived Dragon Age Origins. Because if you didn't use the online service that Bioware wanted for exactly one game, you got the automatic bad ending for the first game. The solution that Veilguard came up with was to wipe the slate clean and introduce several large scale disasters in the south of the continent where all the prior games in the series took place. Where's the warden, the protagonist of the first game? Who cares. Is the protagonist of the second game, Hawke, even alive? Who knows. Veilguard doesn't and does not care to tell you. Because the game will not let you import these 'crumbs' from prior games, the game cannot tell you who runs Orlais, the most important country in the world, who leads Ferelden, or Kirkwall, and so on and so forth. The game hamstrings its world from the very beginning. They brought Varric back from his retirement just to kill him, so that's something, I suppose.
For me, fantasy games are three components: story, gameplay, and companions. Of the three components, only the gameplay has any merit. It's light, it's fun to play in combat until it ends and you're left with the story and the lackluster companions the game gives you. They could be interesting companions in the hands of better writers. Old Bioware was amazing at making compelling companions, people who had loves and hates which extended to other companions. You could hear this in the banter and in their own personal quests. Varric, you deserve so much better than what happened to you in Veilguard and in love. You felt as if you made a character that grew to be these companions' friend over the course of the game and that you were present in the fabric of the overall story. I can not overstate how much Veilguard does not do this. I did not care for any of the companions, even the callback companion to the Inquisition who also cannot tell you anything about what those companions from the game are up to because of the 'crumbs'. Turning Nevarra from a intriguing Prussia style country to a goofy necromantic Victorian society was, uh, inspired, as was the companion you recruited from there. Who, I should point out, did not share the accent of the companion from that country who was a member of the Nevarran royal family. Continuity? Never heard of her. You have the poorly written non-binary character, the Warden, the detective mage, the possessed assassin, and the elf who uses a bow for magic. Additionally, the elf with bow for magic does not have the same accent as all of the other Dalish elves had for the last two games. Nor is the persistent series' racism against elves shown in any way in this game. I am not asking for discrimination to be shown viscerally, but continuity matters when you are playing a supposed sequel in a series. My character did not feel involved in these companions' stories or even the story of the main game. The persistent criticism of the game which I must echo here, is that you feel like a fantasy HR manager. In your little secret base, companions have conversations that stop when you approach. No conflict between companions exists or is even allowed to exist. You can never be truly, actually mean to someone, and you can't really express any actual anger or stress about anything either. You feel so unnaturally restrained in every single conversation you have. I did not care about these characters because the game did not bother to sell these characters and their stories to me. It seemed that the game expected me to care about them all simply because they showed up. There are some interesting nuggets of lore buried in their companion quests, but their lack of personality kept me from caring about these quests beyond a checkmark in the journal.
I have yet to touch on the main story. David Gaider said that when he was at Bioware he felt that the studio was trying to actively spend less and prioritize less on the writing side of the studio, the main selling point for Bioware games. That the writing was a drag on the rest of the studio. These dorks won, and the result is Veilguard, and what passes for its lackluster main story. They kill Varric in the prologue, (and don't let you play an origin story), pull the trick where you think he's alive but he actually isn't, and make you chase after the remaining evil elven gods who get released all evil looking from an ancient prison for the remainder of the game. Yet for all of its faults, Veilguard does have amazing set-pieces. Weisshaupt is one of the best boss scenes and fights I've ever played through, and the final mission is a good enough callback to the Suicide Mission from Mass Effect 2. But. The connective tissue simply isn't there. No one calls you on the Varric delusion, you give Solas far too many chances a la Lucy with the football, and the whole time I just felt as if my character was disconnected from everything that's going on. There is a sequel teaser at the end of everything, but no actual epilogue slides. Given how little the game sold, it seems an open question at best if this series continues. They wiped the south of Thedas, broke apart the militaristic sect of the dogmatic Qunari, and sort of ended the whole reason for the Grey Wardens' existence. The lore reveals were in line with what had been teased in prior games. It was always the elves, which begs the question, what the hell are humans? We probably won't ever get the answer to that question due to the bad sales but that was maybe the only good hook that came out of this game. The fact that this game was not simply a direct sequel to Inquisition is a failure of imagination and writing. (Lore dump: the Inquisitor lost their arm at the end of the previous game. Being unable to write a protagonist with a disability is both ableism and a lack of talent. Characters shine most when they have to overcome difficulties whether external or internal! This is writing 101!) You find out that the whole magical force (AKA the Veil) keeping the world of dreams from overwhelming the waking world is tied to the evil elven gods life force, so after they eat it, the whole thing would come tumbling down. All according to Solas' grand plan to restore the ancient world he lost by putting the veil up in the first place thousands of years ago. You have to get Solas to maintain the Veil by hook or by crook. If you decided to fuck the egg boy, your protagonist from Inquisition follows him beyond the Veil. If you get the good ending. The bad ending everyone dies and you drag this motherfucker into the Veil with your bare hands, which would have been the only time in the game you were allowed to show any extreme emotion.
The opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference and apathy. So it goes that the opposite of a good game isn't a bad game, but rather a boring game. To me, that is the ultimate sin of Veilguard. The game is simply boring, and looks too pretty and plays too well to be this boring. You get to see a dead Titan the size of a mountain! The game shows you the fabled city of Kal-Sharok, teased for three games straight, but it only puts one mission in it and absolutely refuses to expand on the questions surrounding the dwarven city. I tried to do another playthrough immediately after I completed my first, and I was unable to get through the prologue, my disinterest was just too high. I spent a decade patiently waiting for this game to release. In the time between games in this series, I graduated high school, college, grad school, began my transition and legally changed my name to a character from this series (Morrigan, my beloved). I dropped everything to play this game through the instant it dropped, and all I felt when those credits rolled, was a immense sense of disappointment. In trying to find new fans, the writers of Dragon Age alienated the old ones and delivered a underwhelming experience that is less of a sequel to Dragon Age Inquisition and more of a game set in the Dragon Age series. The writers were so successful in alienating old fans that the series is at best on life support, and support for the game has already ended, five months later. To that end, I am disappointed and sad by what I perceive to be the demise of a series I have devoted thousands of hours of my life to. I am disappointed that I waited a decade for a game that threw away everything that drew me to its world, that had the emotional strength of a wet paper bag, and a main character who was forgettable as soon as the computer turned off. A bad game is a world unto itself, with its own attendant issues and unintentional comedy; boring games sting so much more. That is Veilguard's worst sin: it took a fantastical world and compelling people, and it made everything and everyone boring.
Comments