Dragon Age is a series that took me by complete surprise when I first got Origins for the Xbox 360 back in 2009. It wasn’t until Baldur’s Gate 3 that another such game released that scratched that same itch, as dark fantasy stories with fun chaotic moments have still been relatively rare, at least at the scale of these two titles. Now, after ten years since its last entry Dragon Age: Inquisition, the latest game Dragon Age: The Veilguard has finally released. Is this a title that should have left the veil on, or is this something to be guarded at all costs? Let’s find out.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard opens with an interesting premise: the Veil, a metaphysical barrier meant to keep demons from the Fade out of the physical world, is in trouble. Solas, a character from Dragon Age: Inquisition, is caught trying to dissolve the barrier for some reason, but he won’t explain why because if he did, then the entirety of Veilguard wouldn’t happen since communication is step one in healthy relationships. Your character named Rook alongside Varric from Dragon Age II and a couple of other characters take it upon themselves to stop Solas at all costs because releasing the demons will cause a tremendous loss of life. Unfortunately, your attempt to stop Solas winds up sealing him within the Fade and releasing two eldritch, elven gods who plan to warp or destroy the world in their own pursuit of power and control.
After the events of the prologue, Rook and their companions get thrown into Solas’s old hideout that lets them teleport all over world, and your first step is to acquire companions who might help you fight against those gods before they kill everyone. The story effectively ramps up as you progress, with ever-increasing stakes in the main story, and loads of side quests to complete with varying rewards, but the first act of Veilguard is filled to the brim with exposition as you gather your team in the early moments of the title. Once you have your companions, however, the story is off to the races and you with it.
Exploration, especially at the beginning, is cut off by large, glowing walls with bright red text reading “CURRENTLY INACCESSIBLE.” So, you can’t stray too far off the beaten path at the start, though thankfully things tend to open up significantly more after around 10 hours or so. Once you start getting options in where to go, you can wander around, collect equipment, kill baddies, and earn valuable skill points that let you do more things than hack and slash at your opponents. A good deal of the gear you find will synergize with different builds you can make, and you can respec your character at any time. While you can’t switch classes, you can refund all skill points and experiment with various builds using the class you started as.
The character builds you can do in Dragon Age are also quite varied. Due to having experienced a rogue and mage in previous playthroughs of Origins, Dragon Age II, and Inquisition, I decided I would finally start as a warrior in Veilguard. Finding necrotic weaponry that seemed to work well took practically no time at all, so Rook went down the path of becoming a Reaper over the course of several hours. What occurred was a lot of demons were bashed by a Captain America style shield toss, which dealt copious amounts of necrotic damage and healed up Rook considerably too.
The combat in Veilguard is the best part of it, by far, especially once you’ve been playing long enough that you’ve been able to specialize Rook and perform combos to blow up your enemies with your companions. You’ll attack with your primary weapons and use your skills, which could be casting laser beams, dropkicking enemies off cliffs, or any number of other fun abilities. If your character has a shield, you can block enemy attacks, even parrying them to stagger your attacker if you time the block properly. Holding a button will bring up a menu that has you coordinate skills with your companions, so you can use an ability that will apply a debuff to an opponent and then detonate the debuffed foe for huge amounts of damage. It’s really fun to apply the weakened status to an enemy and then dropkick them into the stratosphere because it detonated the target.
Depending on whether or not you’re a Death Caller mage or a Reaper warrior, you’ll have fairly different approaches to combat as one likes to stay far away from enemies, while the other likes to toss a shield into enemies but can roughhouse with the best of them. Those first 10-15 hours while you’re still collecting skill points and trying to bring together a fun build are positively anemic when it comes to combat, however. Once you suffer through that, Veilguard really opens up and allows you to use your specializations to put the hurt on any foes who stand in your way. Your own skills are important, but as you improve your relationships with companions, they’ll also earn skills points that will improve their primary skills making them more effective in combat for exploding demons or whatever else may stand in your way.
The significantly improved combat, especially in comparison to Inquisition, comes at a cost, however. The dialogue for Dragon Age: The Veilguard takes a few too many notes from young adult movies, especially Marvel films, as most everything in the early game is treated with a kind of smarmy levity that doesn’t really befit the situation the characters are in. You may discover what should be a relatively large revelation about a new party member who just joined you, specifically about their mortality. What is the label for a response your character can give? “Oof!” Which, of course, results in your character saying, “Well, that’s awkward.” It’s puerile dialogue that would fit better in a PG13 movie than a title rated M+ but clearly denotes that Dragon Age is going after a younger crowd with simpler dialogue and mild shift away from the dark(ish) fantasy story established by Origins.
At least, the dialogue is absolutely juvenile at the beginning of Veilguard, when it needs to leave the greatest impact on the player. It almost seems as if the developers had most of the rest of the game finished but quickly scrambled together to provide three games worth of exposition for the first ten hours. After collecting your companions and moving the story along, Veilguard is actually really good. Great, even. Especially the companion quest lines because if you give it a chance to change your mind, you’ll find yourself actually caring about these characters who were nearly speaking in one-liners 10 to 20 hours prior.
There’s very little item management in Veilguard compared to previous Dragon Age titles, as nearly all items you find are either geared specifically for your Rook or one of your companions, or they are “valuables” which exist only to be sold to vendors to improve the shop’s level. Items you can buy from shopkeepers are entirely gated by vendor level, and it takes doing quests for the faction the seller belongs to or selling your trinkets to improve this level. This primarily means that the items vendors sell are gated by how many items you find laying around, and how many side quests you complete.
You can also upgrade your gear with items being upgradeable all the way to legendary for maximum benefit. To add onto this, weapons and armor tend to have locked traits that can be unlocked by finding multiple copies of that same item, which means finding multiples of the same axe and upgrading your original can be very beneficial. You’ll also find powerful unique items throughout the game, as well, which can give you major buffs like increasing your chance to stagger enemies by a whopping 50% and buffing you when you perform a takedown on a staggered enemy.
The third act of Veilguard is where it really ratchets up the stakes, improves the storytelling across the board, and gives the player all the action you could have possibly asked for. As a self-contained title, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a very slow burn that takes considerable time to develop due to the fact that its entire first act is mostly characters spouting exposition at you while trying their best not to wink at the camera.
The only other thing to note regarding the story is that many choices made in previous titles don’t really matter to Veilguard, even many of those made in Inquisition, honestly. Also, a fair amount of Dragon Age lore was recontextualized and not for the better (specifically: the old gods of Tevinter and the purposes of Darkspawn, blight, and the Archdemons).
The visuals of Dragon Age: The Veilguard look pretty outstanding. All of the humanoid characters look great with graphics that wouldn’t be amiss as a new entry of the Fable series. The facial expressions are pretty great across the board, and character hair looks bouncy and amazing. A lot of characters do have exaggerated features, but the returning characters from Inquisition generally all look better in Veilguard, though this is purely a matter of personal opinion. The only downside with the visuals is with the characters with facial hair, like early recruit Lucanis who looks like his beard was made out of injection molded plastic – it’s very uncanny, and he outright looks like a cartoon character that’s out of place when juxtaposed with Lace or Neve. Beyond that, Veilguard looks incredible in motion.
Veilguard, in spite of all of these flaws, is still incredibly fun. The cohesion of the story elements and poor early dialogue really don’t help the fact that the first act is pretty dull with the player being railroaded, going one place to another without much need for exploration. After gathering your companions, the story ramps up quite a bit and a lot of the issues with dialogue get improved upon as Veilguard focuses on its major story arcs.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard may not have been what I specifically wanted from Dragon Age 4, but it’s remarkably solid in its own right once you get past the first 8-10 hours or so, which is a shame because it’s very likely people dropped it at that point.
Of course, it’s not justified that it takes 10 or more hours to get to the good part of Veilguard, but there is some fun to have if you give it the chance. If you enjoy action combat with simpler RPG elements, you’ll likely have several dozen hours of fun exploring Dragon Age: The Veilguard. If you can’t handle poor dialogue or dialogue options in an RPG, or if you don’t like action in your RPGs at all, then you’ll want to stay far away from Veilguard and may instead want to install some new mods and do another run of Baldur’s Gate 3 instead.