All right, it finally happened. I played Veilguard. I was blistering in my criticism of its direction prior to launch, but I wanted closure, so with a few years for my feelings to cool a bit and a deep discount on Steam, I decided it was finally time to see how the saga of Solas and the Elven gods ends, for better or worse. I will try to keep this as spoiler free as possible, barring the events of the opening act that were already spoiled by trailers.
Going in, my expectation was that Veilguard would be a decent video game but a bad Dragon Age game, and that expectation was more or less fulfilled. I will say the ending was almost good enough for me to forgive all its other faults.
But they were some very big faults. For me, by far the biggest one still comes down to my original complaint: This was supposed to be the Inquisitor’s story. The personal connection they have with Solas is essential to what makes this conflict compelling. Sidelining the Inquisitor ripped the emotional heart from the story, and my investment never recovered from that.
Yeah, it’s tradition for Dragon Age games to start over with new protagonists, but tradition doesn’t automatically make it a good idea. Hawke and the Warden’s stories were clearly finished by the end of their respective games. The Inquisitor’s wasn’t. The Veilguard writers had to go out of their way to come up with reasons why the Inquisitor isn’t more present. Even they seem to realize the Inquisitor is the obvious person to be leading this fight, but they still pivoted away anyway.
And I just don’t care about Rook. At no point did Veilguard provide anything resembling an argument for why this should be Rook’s story, either from an in-universe or out of universe perspective. They’re a random nobody, and everything that happens in the game is basically just the result of them screwing up monumentally. Never have I cared less about a BioWare protagonist. Even my Lancer in Anthem inspired more investment.
My next biggest complaint would be how the setting’s cultures were handled by Veilguard. It’s insane that a game all about the return of the Elven gods barely involves Elven culture at all. All the Elven characters are just like, “Huh, guess our gods are the source of all evil in the universe. That’s weird. Anyway, what’s for lunch?”
Given how Elves are treated in Thedas, there’s no way some of them wouldn’t sign up with Elgar’nan no matter how bad he is, just for payback. Not even mentioning Solas’ movement of rebel Elves is also a huge missed opportunity.
I also dislike the implications of how Elves, who have always been obvious stand-ins for indigenous people and other oppressed minorities, get to have everything they hold sacred turn out to be lies, while the overtly Western and Christian inspired Chantry gets off with its mythology mostly intact. Since Elves are apparently responsible for pretty much everything bad that’s ever happened in Thedas, it almost feels like Veilguard wants to frame their centuries of oppression as a kind of justice. That is a really gross message considering the real world parallels. I don’t think it was intentional, but that doesn’t excuse it.
We also have to consider the in-universe reactions to these revelations. Given how Elves are viewed at the best of times, the logical conclusion of Veilguard’s story is likely another Exalted March and the final extinction of Elves as a race, but this possibility is all but ignored by the game. The only allusion to any sort of blowback comes from Davrin, the black guy, which feels a bit on the nose.
Also, I hate that they turned the Qunari into Orcs. The Qunari are one of the only genuinely original and creative things about Dragon Age’s world-building, and reducing them to a bunch of mindless “might makes right” brutes is a colossal waste.
Much less of an issue, but I was also disappointed by Rivain. Rivain has long seemed like the most interesting of Thedas’ human cultures due to their unique relationship with spirits, but all we see of them are a bunch of corny pirate stereotypes. At least the Nevarran Necropolis was fun.
Aside from its issues in the context of wider Dragon Age lore, Veilguard does have its own self-contained issues. The dialogue is horrible. From what I understand, it’s largely the same writers as Tresspasser, so I don’t know how things went so wrong. I was cringing so hard at so many lines.
I hate wading into this morass, but I feel I should address Taash. It makes the bile rise in my throat to agree with anti-woke chuds about anything, but I have to admit Taash’s storyline really is terrible. I argued for Krem to be a main cast member in this game, so hopefully it’s clear that I’m not against gender non-conforming characters, but Taash’s story is so hamfisted it feels like something a conservative would write to discredit the nonbinary community. There’s a scene where a character performatively punishes themselves for misgendering Taash, for Pete’s sake.
It also doesn’t help that Taash is just a spectacularly unlikable person, all issues of gender aside. Zero personality traits other than childish, petulant surliness. It’s like having a sullen teenager on your team.
The dialogue choices also feel very railroaded. They really want you to hate Solas, and they really want you to love everyone else. It doesn’t seem to be possible to not be friends with any companions, and believe me I did try in Taash’s case.
Meanwhile the anti-Solas bias is also vexing. Mind you, it makes perfect sense a lot of people in and out of universe would hate him, but sympathizing with his cause is also very understandable and should have been more supported. You can’t make three games depicting Thedas as one of the most horrible dystopian hellholes imaginable and not expect some people to sympathize with the guy who wants to burn it all down and start over.
All that said, despite all my ranting I did mostly enjoy my time with Veilguard. If you don’t think about the broader context of Dragon Age lore and just live in the moment, it’s generally a good ride. Not the best game I’ve ever played, but a mostly satisfying RPG. There’s some great quality of life improvements, like the return of DA2’s conversation notifications.
The characters are weak by BioWare standards, but still decent compared to the average game. Emmerich is an absolute delight. Harding remains charming as ever. Bellara can be very cute.
I wish more developers made this kind of deep, choice rich, character heavy game. Even when it’s executed imperfectly like in Veilguard, there’s a rich immersiveness to it that just sucks you in. Even with all my criticisms, Veilguard had me all but glued to my computer for many days.
It was generally only when I wasn’t playing and started to think about the broader place of Veilguard in the lore that all the frustrations mentioned above started to bubble up. And as I said, the ending does manage to provide a mostly satisfying resolution to things despite it all, for which I am grateful.
The problem with Veilguard isn’t so much that it’s a bad game as that it lives in the shadow of the much better game it could have been.
I just don’t get it. Inquisition was critically and commercially successful. All they needed to do was churn out a direct sequel in a reasonable time frame. They could have kept most of the same characters and gameplay (just make the open world a little less bloated). They could have reused a lot of art assets. Just pick up where Trespasser left off, and you’d have a recipe for an easy hit. Such an easy win fumbled so hard.
As for my choices (still no spoilers), I did the most predictable thing ever and played an Elven Veil Jumper mage. I started out planning to romance Bellara, but then spent most of the game favouring Harding, then decided to go with Bellara after all. I still think I like Harding better, but Bellara was just a more logical fit for the character I was playing. Maybe I’ll do another playthrough to get with Harding. I will say the romance content was incredibly anemic this time around, perhaps due to making every companion romanceable. I swear the NPC romances got more content. That was disappointing.
Similarly, I waffled on party composition a lot, but eventually settled on the most predictable outcome: Bellara and Davrin. Davrin was more of a gameplay choice as I needed someone to detonate weakened (not that I have anything against him as a character). I was a bit concerned doubling up on mages would hobble me in combat, but that was before I realized how OP Bellara’s Galvanic Tear ability is.
I do wish they hadn’t reduced the party size. Bellara’s friendship with Emmerich is so adorable, but going triple mage was just too limiting to do often.
I did find myself getting a little sad as I got to the end. I’ve never been the biggest Dragon Age fan; each game has been deeply flawed in its own way. But still, it’s been a long road to get here. The realization this is probably the last ever Dragon Age did have me getting pretty sentimental.
I wanted to make this a numbered review, but Veilguard is such a bizarrely mixed experience I don’t know how I could put a single number on it. It’s also ironically probably a much better experience if you haven’t played previous Dragon Age games, so the number would be completely different from that perspective.
I’m glad I did finally play it. I’m glad I got closure. But I also think it was the right call to wait for the price to drop and my feelings to simmer down before diving in.
