In the first couple of hours of Dragon Age: The Veilguard there is a scene in which your character, Rook, looks into a mirror and has a moment of reflection asking whether they are really up to the task of taking down the Elven Gods who have invaded Thedas following their release from the Fade. In this scene as well as a few “standard” (I deliberately avoid using the word “normal”) dialogue choices, in which you can say you feel confident, uncertain or worried, you also have the option of choosing something more personal to your Rook. This can be based on scars Rook has, tattoos, or even choosing the option to be transexual.
This is a moment of self-analysis and self-affirmation, where Rook can make it clear that they are proud of who they are and ready to take on the big bad boss of the game… And it’s really quite surprising that a moment of self-reflection like that comes from a game which has absolutely NO IDEA of what it wants to be.
DAMN. What a fucking ZINGER! Let’s fucking go!
Honestly, in a way, I’m quite excited here, because normally when I review a game I spend 2500 words whinging and then give it a 7.5/10. Well, not today bucko! Not to give things away, but let me tell you right now that Veilguard will NOT be scoring well with me and all of the negative press surrounding the game is honestly, largely, quite fair.
And let me be clear, I AGONISED over this review. Legitimately. Because it’s based on an unfinished playthrough. Not only is that a first for me on MMG, but its something I legit had to almost be bullied into by my friends (who, very reasonably insisted that why should I bother spending time doing something which I wasn’t enjoying).
To start with, I want to address an online thing which I’ve seen being touted a lot: “Veilguard is absolutely not a bad game but it’s just a bad Dragon Age game”. Well, allow me to also dissuade you of that particular notion right away as well because I’m pretty sure that’s just fucking heaps of copium from people who are really hoping we get another Dragon Age (and trust me, I am as well, but I don’t want one of THESE Dragon Ages). I say this because Veilguard is NOT JUST a bad Dragon Age game. It’s a BAD GAME.
Man, I haven’t reviewed an actually, legitimately bad game in ages… Like, you don’t understand, A BAD game? How does a triple-A company make a BAD game these days? Let’s find out…
Dragon Age is Bioware’s flagship fantasy RPG series. When they got Star Wars taken away from them, they decided to make their own Star Wars with Mass Effect, so presumably someone at Bioware also then asked if they could make a Lord of the Rings RPG, got told “no” and then did their own version of the setting anyway. Back in the day, it was actually billed as “dark” fantasy, because the Dwarves were kinda dicks, mages had to be locked in towers to prevent them from being possessed and everyone was racist to Elves. It was only like “being mean” sort of racism though, not quite on the same level as The Witcher which showed everyone how to do it right by having humans commit multiple pogroms and atrocities against Elves. Just like the proper old times!
I think they sort of started to drift away from the identity of “dark” fantasy with Inquisition, which I think felt significantly more like “High” Fantasy than anything else. Where there was vague sort of assertions to inequality, but who cares about THAT when we’re fighting an actual Dark Lord?
As an aside here, I actually never reviewed it back in the day but I think genuinely Inquisition might be my favourite Dragon Age (potentially a hot take, with most people preferring Origins or DA2). 2014 was a bit of a bad year for games, but I think Inquisition was genuinely great! We’re talking highly enjoyable writing, largely B-tier companions (solid, dependable but didn’t set me on fire) and characters (with a couple of A-tier ones thrown in), decent combat, decision-making which felt actually impactful on the world and at times quite thought-provoking plus fun Inquisitorial judgement that nobody expects… It was a great game, for all its flaws, despite the fact that it absolutely pales in comparison to the Witcher 3 which came out the year after. So it kinda deserves its spot as Bioware’s best-selling game (how you people haven’t got on board the Mass Effect train baffles me).
The very fact that Inquisition was Bioware’s best-selling game really makes so many of the decisions involved with Veilguard really that much more than just baffling and instead skip straight to outright retarded. Let’s start with them getting rid of Dragon Age Keep. Y’know how people were initially down on Dragon Age Keep because it seemed to reduce all the decisions made in DA1 and 2 to just a handful? It felt like they were simplifying things, reducing the impact you would have on your world state which carried over between saved games. For me personally, I remember playing Inquisition and actually thinking it was pretty cool to have a clear indicator of what decisions you’d made before and were in the process of making! But the important thing is that it was seen as a simplification of a save-transfer system which people really liked about the previous games.
And then Bioware fucking got rid of it! The game immediately afterwards?! You might ask, “oh did they decide it was best to just have save transfers again, because it would allow more depth?” I mean, c’mon, can’t you get the tone of this article already… No they got rid of the whole aspect of save tranfers entirely. Not only was Keep discontinued full-stop, but now NONE of the decisions made in ANY of the past Dragon Age games carried forward.
NONE of them.
Oh, I mean, that’s not totally true. You make three dialogue-based decisions at the start of Veilguard to sum up your world state… Close enough to achieving the same level of depth, right?
I seriously cannot imagine a bigger slap in the face to a community which loved crafting world states with decisions made three games ago impacting things which happen now. Even if the rest of game itself had been incredible, I would still be fucking fuming about this.
Like… Who was this for? I guess maybe they were hoping that without world saves, they would attract a new audience who had perhaps not played any of the previous games and would feel left out otherwise? Maybe forgetting that Inquisition was their BEST SELLING game? Like… They HAD an audience? Why the fuck wouldn’t they just market towards that one?
With that in mind let’s very briefly touch on the troubled development of Veilguard. This is a game which went through at least 10 years of development (assuming they started pre-production some time after Inquisition’s release, and to be frank it’s likely they at least started planning before), which is a LONG bloody time. Even if we ignore the changing hands and the uncertain direction of it, Veilguard was actually rumoured to be going the route of a live-service, multiplayer game like Destiny or Bioware’s other colossal failure Anthem (what an absolutely insane idea that is writing it down). The long story short is that Veilguard went through serious development hell and Bioware’s heads have even more or less admitted that it was a miracle anything got released at all.
So, one has to at least somewhat acknowledge that before we get back to kicking it… It doesn’t absolve anything. But we can at least say “hey, this is probably why!”
So, what else does the game do wrong. Well, aside from absolutely obliterating all past decisions made across 3 games and 10+ years of being a fan, the game also decides to start in a really bizarre fashion.
See, Inquisition tied things up in a very neat bow at the end of its campaign, but then there was the Trespasser DLC. A DLC which honestly might have displayed Inquisition at its absolute best with some insanely good writing. The quick version of this is that a companion from Inquistion, Solas, turns out to be none other than Fen’haral, an ancient Elven God. And not just ANY Elven God, but the “evil” one.
Back in the day, Solas trapped the other Elven Gods for all eternity because they were actually evil and malevolent tyrants. In doing-so, he created a place called the Fade where he trapped them, freeing the elves from their tyranny but simultaneously taking away Elven immortality (along with a whole bunch of side effects including that the Fade itself is a whole parallel realm of sorts filled with demons). And now that he’s seen the poor state of elvendom he wants to undo everything he did, break open the Fade and release the other Gods again, all with the intention of restoring Elven immortality and their rightful place in the world.
It’s a super cool setup because not only does it come with a whole host of earth-shattering consequences and implications (destruction of the Fade, elves becoming immortal again, new Gods, the list goes fucking on) but this is SOLAS. He was your friend! He was alongside the Inquisitor fighting the big bad of Inquisition and it’s pretty abundantly clear that this isn’t some straight-up villainous cartoon plot. It’s deeper and more layered than that…
So, naturally Veilguard DOESN’T have you play as the character who VOWED to hunt Solas down and (save or slay depending on player choice) him, but instead you play as a new side-kick (Rook) of the side-kick (Varric) of that previous main character. Somehow the stakes seem a bit lower already…
Then in the first hour you catch Solas and he is trapped in the Fade, the Elven Gods are released and they become the game’s big bads. All the mystery is gone and now you just fight the evil baddies. Which is what they are, just… Absolutely standard big evil baddies who are bad because the game needs a villain. It’s just… Uninteresting. Or rather, I guess it COULD’VE be cool, of course, but it feels like such a wasted opportunity for something deeper or more intriguing.
As an aside: at times I wonder if the game was supposed to focus more on subterfuge and spycraft more than being an epic adventure. There’s a lot of city locales where your allies tend to be assassins, spies, rebels and other similar underworld-y types, rather than armies or mages and empires. This would absolutely explain why everyone insists on your character “Rook” as well, as a code-name. Because as the “quasi-name” system of Dragon Age goes, Rook is absolutely the worst one… So much worse that the Inquisitor, the Grey Warden and Hawke. In the context of leading a war against invading Gods, calling this random nobody “Rook” feels honestly stupid. If it had been more about intrigue and deception, maybe a code-name would have fit better?
So, despite the fact that the Inquisitor themselves is apparently still out there, when Varric gets hurt at the start of Veilguard it is suddenly on Rook to become the new head of the… What…? The organisation which was hunting down Solas? Which was just Varric and like three others? So what?
Oh, apparently THAT organisation is now in charge of fighting back against the newly released Elven Gods and all of their armies upon armies of evil minions…
Why? Fuck knows. Because it’s a video game I guess? Don’t ask questions! Seriously, the leaps the game makes here absolutely blew my mind. Hunting down Solas, sure I can see that being a the purview of a small “elite” team. But then all of a sudden you end up in a secret magical base and with no apparent discusson its decided that this is where everyone lives now. And while it does make sense that you’d try and figure out what happened to the Elven gods Solas just released, the jump from “we’re investigating this problem” to “we are now the first and last line of defence here” is never discussed and just seems to HAPPEN.
As a quick tangent, supposedly the return of the Elven Gods and their newly established relationship with the Blight (which was basically the long-running “True Enemy” of Dragon Age) is in some way lore breaking. This is something I personally didn’t pick up on, so I don’t have a stance on it precisely. But frankly, given how little care went into everything else, it wouldn’t surprise me if they had written it so that Veilguard literally did break pre-existing lore.
The game as an absolutely terrible habit of doing things like this though. It seems to regularly skip explanations or logic for WHY something is the case and just expects you to be okay with it. It actually also skips over places where I swear there should be cut-scenes. Whole set-ups and introductions are just handwaved out of the way, which again screams either a lack of care or just terrible game design and writing.
Just as a few examples:
1. Right at the very start when Varric is injured, despite the fact that pre-existing Inquisitorial scout Lace Harding is along with him for the ride, it falls to newbie Rook to lead the new fighting force. For no reason, and nobody so much as bats an eye.
2. When you make the journey to Arlathan, the old elven forests, people immediately accept that you are the head of this organisation fighting the elven gods. Actually, they ALSO immediately accept that the elven gods are back and that this is a problem. Even ignoring that it seems insane that people would just immediately accept this explanation there is the additional fact that it’s been previously established that almost all elves believe that the old elven gods were the good guys and Fen’haral was an evil betrayer.
3. In both Artlathan and the following city of Antiva when you arrive in the forest and city, rather than any kind of sweeping and grand introduction to both, you just APPEAR in the middle of each city. Just some totally random location needed for the plot… In particular with Antiva, a somewhat famous location of the previous games which had never been a central locale, this is just a heartbreaking miss in terms of not providing a cool introduction.
Yet another tangent: while I was still in my optimistic first 5 hours I actually thought that MAYBE the game might do something interesting with Antiva. Here where you’re meant to get support for your war, your allies are the Antivan Crows, a guild of assassins who are fighting against an occupying force called the Antaam. I thought “hey that sounds fucking shady… An Assassins Guild sounds like a BAD-GUY guild. Maybe we can choose to actually fuck off the Crows in some way?” But, no. The apparent fucking literal GUILD OF HIRED MURDERERS are Good-Guys(TM) and that’s that…
4. At some point you then go to an underwater prison, which SOUNDS insanely cool but AGAIN, you just “start” the mission and teleport there. One moment a rowboat on the surface and then BOOP (this whole area looked stupid as hell as well). And look, I love fantasy underwater zones. Baldur’s Gate 3 had one! The whole concept of using magic to make an underwater prison is cool! Its just executed and introduced so fucking terribly.
5. There’s several “evil” forces of enemies: the Antaam and Venatori who are both political powers in different countries who just straight-up IMMEDIATELY ally themselves with the Elven Gods. For… “Power”…? Nice. Cool explanation.
6. When you meet Taash (the infamous transexual Qunari who introduces themselves by saying “I’m non-binary”) they go out of their way to tell you to “get out of their way”… And then bring you along anyway… That whole character seems honestly appalling, annoying and stupidly written… I just need to throw that out there. I couldn’t stand whenever they were on screen and they were legitimately the straw that broke the camal’s back for me.
I could seriously just keep going and going and going about these issues. The game NEVER gives you all the information. It never exposits well and never provides nice introductions. What it does do instead is have fucking shit-tonne of absolute F-tier tripe for dialogue which I had to grit my teeth to get through after a while. Or I would have if it didn’t just keep on going and going and going…
So, the writing is an absolute fucking wash. Then there’s the companions. I’ve said before that I will come back to other Bioware games time and again for the companions and it is the companions who carried Baldur’s Gate from great to exceptional… The companions of Veilguard range from tedious to straight-up infuriating. Admittedly, all of Neve, Lace and Lucanis had some interesting shit going on… But somehow none were ever particularly interesting to interact with. Davrin felt a bit too much like a poster boy in a genre where I LOVE poster boys. Taash was the worst character ever written. And then Bellara…
Fuck me, when will the lul-so-random trope for female characters die? Bellara falls into this category of women which I can only assume is meant to be something approaching a Tumblr female autist. Someone who gets visibly (and audibly) distracted by SOMETHING SHINY halfway through every single sentence. Someone who talks incessantly whilst also being a totally shy wallflower and is totally embarrassed that you’re listening and “just stop talking Bellara”… She’s also the only passably hot one.
So, the companions are a wash too, and while we’re on the subject. Godamn I think the character design is ugly. Chunky, chubby, stocky… And that’s the ELVES! The Dwarves might as well be fucking BARRELS. It’s such an absolutely appalling design and I cannot overstate how much I hate it.
This comes with one of the very few bright spots of the game, where this over-the-top cartoon feel might also be why the characters all seem to actually be capable of emoting pretty well now, with genuine expression and expressivity in the animation for their models and faces (always a sticking point for previous Bioware games).
The game also came along with a surprisingly cool character creator… But doesn’t that say I’m really scraping the bottom of the barrel for nice things to say?
Actually, outside of the awful character aesthetic and supremely stupid enemy design as well, the game can actually look very pretty. At least the world and environments can be gorgeous… Even though they are a sprawling mess which are somehow both small but also confusing to navigate and also never seem to have any designs on being “real places” (the cities in particular do not feel like they were remotely meant to seem like “this is actually a city in which people live”).
So, surely the gameplay will at least elevate the game? Rescue it in some form? NOPE!
See, in Inquisition, by the end of the game the combat had become a little bit spammy and a little bit repetitive. It might not have been quite as tactical as DA2 or 1, but I remember it having at least some depth and being fun… In Veilguard spam is the name of the day. It’s the name of the hour, the minute and the Holy Ghost (that metaphor got away from me). You spam attacks from the second you start to the end of days. You spam one of three abilities (never more despite having dozens unlocked) at a time, and also your companion’s abilities (all they are good for in combat now) also triggering explosive effects with each other’s abilities (which all produce the exact same interchangeable effect).
I feel like the game wants you to be more focused on dodging and blocking attacks… But also it feels like you’re punished for not just hammering the attack button constantly. I was bored of it and had seen all it had to offer by the end of the second hour whilst also feeling annoyed that there wasn’t enough weight or variation and that occasionally it felt like it was trying to encourage me to dodge and block and did so by telegraphing attacks really, REALLY poorly.
Even when it comes minor aspects of gameplay and game design, it’s all just so… Ass… For example how there’s absolutely zero tooltips for damage types, leaving you completely in the dark about what certain abilities do, like what the heck is a Charged Attack?
This is a real shame in a quite different way as well in that the skill tree for Veilguard at least LOOKS quite interesting. It feels like they were making an attempt to do something akin to a lighter Path of Exile skill forest where you can multiclass into various different branches. However, given the aforementioned issue of only have 3 spells usable at any one time, a lot of it feels quite superfluous and most of the other passives either do not feel very game-changing or even relevant!
So. What’s left? The combat and gameplay? Sucks.
Writing? Awful, trite, somehow too wordy whilst also never telling you enough.
Dialogue? Tedious.
Companions? The worst of any Bioware game for years.
Visuals? Very, very rare beautiful vistas broken up by nonsensical landscapes and awful character models.
The fucking music? Eh, I dunno. Pass.
All previous lore and decisions? Gone.
All new ones? Baby five-year-old choices.
I’ll say it again. I LOVE(d?) Bioware. I have been a fan of the company and their games for near decades now (jesus, I’m old) and Veilguard and Anthem just feels like ever-increasing proof that they are not the company they once were. This is a company that doesn’t respect its fans or even its own franchises. It’s a company which needs to take a long hard look at what made them great and start doing that again, because if the next Mass Effect also bombs, I don’t think they’re gonna get another shot. Certainly not in my heart anyway…
Rating: 26/100
Verdict: Avoid
| Pros | Cons |
| – Capable of pulling very appealing visual locations out of a hat (even if they don’t really seem to make sense as a “real” location) – Voice actors really doing the absolute best with what they got – Expressive and dynamic character models, and while I’m not a fan of the model aesthetics, it would be amazing if Bioware can learn from them to implement that in other games – God, I dunno, the character creator? | – Absolutely diabolical writing in just about every sense. The overall plot is dumb. The settups are poorly explained. Characters are one-dimensional. – Contrivances upon contrivances. Really just an extension of the above point, but deserves its own bulletpoint. At no point did I feel like the game was following natural and logical decision making. -Awful character models. For all I just said about their expressivity, I hated the aesthetic of the game and its ultra “chunky” feel. – Complete removal of any form of save transfer system is not just disappointing, but outright insulting as a fan. – Combat is repetitive and lacks weight and any form of tactics. Genuinely boring after 2 hours. – World building is extremely one-dimensional (likely as a result of the contrivances) where guilds of Assassins are straight up goodies. – Game takes the super intriguing settup of Trespasser and then just did the most bland thing they possibly could with it. – Bioware considered making it a LIVE SERVICE GAME. I know they didn’t but they still deserve a slap for thinking it. – Man. Just fucking everything… I’m tired bros… Am I allowed to like any series any more without them being ruined? |
MMGaming.net 