Warning: This post will contain spoilers for the full Dragon Age franchise to date, including spoilers currently released for The Veilguard.

I’ve had an inconsistent relationship with the Dragon Age franchise. I didn’t enjoy Origins much at all, and if not for a free demo and a deep discount, I’d never have played Dragon Age 2. I liked its story much better, but still didn’t enjoy the combat much.

It wasn’t until Inquisition that I was fully converted to being a fan, and even then I’ll grant Inquisition had plenty of flaws, mostly in the form of way too much filler content. It was really the DLC that impressed me. The Descent was spectacular, but Trespasser was what really rocked my world.

I’m gonna say it: Solas being Fen’harel may well be the “Luke, I am your father”* of gaming in terms of being an iconic plot twist. Virtually no one saw it coming, even though in hindsight there were tonnes of hints, and combined with the focus on character relationships that BioWare does so well, it makes for an incredibly powerful narrative moment.

*(I know that isn’t the actual line, but you get my point.)

Of course a lot of people romanced Solas, which adds a whole new dimension to the dynamic, but even as someone who only had Solas as a friend, this felt like an incredibly personal conflict. My first inquisitor was also an Elf, and she became close friends with Solas. She wants everything he wants: a return of the mystery and magic of the ancient world and to rescue the Elves of today from their miserable fate. She just can’t quite agree with his methods. I can’t think of a single better implementation of this kind of tragic protagonist/antagonist relationship anywhere in fiction.

Trespasser was basically a giant ad for the next Dragon Age game, and I was sold. I’ve had lots of problems with this franchise over the years, but I was 110% invested in the conflict between the inquisitor and Solas, and I was ready to follow wherever that story took us.

I stayed hyped for many, many years, but after nearly a decade of development hell, it’s starting to look like all my hopes were for naught.

Even early on, there were some red flags. It didn’t take them long to start hinting that DA4 would feature a new protagonist. Surely they couldn’t be that foolish, I thought. The personal connection between Solas and the inquisitor is what makes this story special. If you take that away, it loses most of its appeal.

But hey, BioWare has rarely disappointed me. Even Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem were aces in my book, no matter what anyone else says, so my faith remained largely unshaken.

But it didn’t stop there. A few months back we got the bizarre news that the game had been renamed from Dragon Age: Dreadwolf to the awkwardly titled Dragon Age: The Veilguard. It was here that a real chill started to run down my spine, and since then the hits have just kept coming.

The initial trailer was just awful. Its MCU-style quipiness and general camp vibe were a shocking change in direction from the wonderfully moody teaser trailer Dreadwolf had, and while subsequent reveals haven’t looked quite that bad, my impression of the game has never really recovered.

We now have confirmation that both the inquisitor and Solas have been sidelined. The new protagonist is called Rook, and while the story starts with hunting Solas, he is quickly fridged to focus on a new threat in the form of two other returned Elven gods. Which is pretty much my worst fears about this game come to life.

We know Solas will still have a role in the game past that opening sequence, but it sounds like it’s going to be pretty small. He’s barely even mentioned in the marketing. The ads and teasers are all about the other Elven gods.

Under other circumstances, a game about fighting the Evanuris is something I’d be all for, but not if it comes at the cost of the inquisitor versus Solas game I’ve spent a decade waiting for.

The inquisitor looks to be even more irrelevant. I got some hope back when we found out Veilguard’s character creator also allows you to build your inquisitor, and I thought maybe we’d get some kind of dual protagonist twist, but it’s since been confirmed that the inquisitor is not playable, and moreover you can’t even choose their class, so presumably they won’t appear in any scenes where they might have to fight, which limits their potential role severely.

(I also want to say again that sidelining the inquisitor after they lose their arm feels very ableist, especially in a fantasy setting where they could have gotten any number of badass prosthetics. It stands out especially when World of Warcraft has just launched an expansion featuring a one-armed paladin who kicks ass and takes names.)

Even more worrying, the list of choices you can import from past games is extremely short and mostly seems to boil down to whether you disbanded the inquisition and what your inquisitor’s attitude toward Solas was. Even the Well of Sorrows decision isn’t included, and I can’t imagine how they plan to do a game about the Elven pantheon without addressing that.

It’s clear that Solas’ story is no longer the focus, and they just want a fresh start for newcomers to the franchise.

I just can’t get over what an unbelievable waste this is. They had one of the most unique and powerful stories in gaming, and they dropped it in favour of a generic evil gods apocalypse story.

There comes a time when a big franchise needs to reset a little to bring in new fans, but the direct sequel to one of the biggest cliffhangers in gaming history is not that time. Continuing the Star Wars comparison, it’s like if Return of the Jedi had introduced a whole new cast and featured Luke and Vader only in brief cameos.

This reminds me so much of Diablo IV. Both sequels to games that ended on cliffhangers. Both games that are doing their level best to pretend the previous entry in their respective franchises never existed, despite those entries being wildly successful. It’s so frustrating, and so weird.

Even more so in Veilguard’s case. While the blowback to Diablo III didn’t hurt its financial success, I will at least grant it was widespread in online discussions. Inquisition meanwhile may have its haters among the die-hard Origins fans, but it enjoyed widespread favourable reviews from the large majority of the gaming community. Trying to run from that legacy makes no sense.

There’s other things I don’t like about Veilguard, too. The graphics are very poor, for one thing. The characters all look like they’re made of plastic, and their body proportions are all wrong. The hair physics are impressive from a technical standpoint, but I’m not convinced they actually look good. Considering how cartoony everything else looks, the hyper-realistic hair creates a bit of an uncanny valley effect for me.

I’m a little iffy on the combat, too. The early previews looked pretty bad, with constant pausing to use companion abilities, but I’ve seen learned there is an option to command companions in real time, though it looks a bit clunky. I think the combat will probably be good enough, but it’s not looking like it’s going to be a particular strength of the game, either.

It’s funny because action combat and more stylized graphics are both things I’ve wanted from Dragon Age since day one, but bad execution can still ruin good ideas.

It’s a bit of a nitpick, but I’m also surprisingly off-put by the faction choice mechanic that serves as Rook’s backstory. All but one (maybe two if you count the Grey Wardens) are explicitly human organizations heavily tied to human nations and cultures. Veil Rangers seems to be the only valid choice for anyone who wants to play a Dalish Elf, and Dwarves and Qunari seem to have been given no consideration at all.

We’ve also seen the backstory blurbs for each faction, and they’re all pretty much the same. They all establish Rook as a born rebel who defies authority and breaks all the rules but still gets the job done because they’re just that good. It’s a tired trope, and one of my absolute most hated tropes at that.

So between that and their replacing the inquisitor, I’m already at a point where not only do I not care about Rook, but I actively dislike them and resent their presence in the story. That’s not a good starting point.

Finally, I do want to make mention of the prequel audio drama series, Vows and Vengeance. It’s terrible. The writing is awful, and the decision to not have a narrator in a purely audio format is baffling. The action sequences are just thirty seconds of the voice actors grunting with no context, like it’s the world’s worst ASMR video.

To be fair, Vows and Vengeance was contracted out and has different writers than Veilguard, so it isn’t necessarily a reflection of the quality of the game. But on top of everything else, it’s not helping.

About the only good news is that the companion cast still looks promising. That’s the one thing BioWare always gets right, and I have no reason to believe this will be an exception. Bellara and Emmrich in particular look like characters I’d love.

I’m not sure that’s enough on its own, though. I think Veilguard will probably work out to an okay standalone RPG, but it’s looking to be a terrible sequel to Inquistion, and that’s all I really cared about.

I take no pleasure in writing this post. I almost didn’t write it at all. But I wanted to get this all off my chest, and considering all the gushing and hopeful speculation I did on this blog after Trespasser all those years ago, it felt like I needed express how all that hope came crashing down.

It’s possible the marketing for the game has just severely misrepresented it. Maybe it will actually provide a satisfying resolution to the story that started with Inquisition, somehow. But I don’t think I want to pay $80 to find out when it’s just been one red flag after another.

You know, in the darkest depths of my depression, a conclusion to Trespasser has oftentimes been the only thing I had in my future to look forward to. Turns out I didn’t even have that.

This is one of the worst disappointments in my entire thirty years of gaming.