I’ve been playing for seven hours now. Dragon Age: VeilkeeperI think it’s fair to say that the game’s marketing message hasn’t quite lived up to its billing so far.
When I saw the game at Summer Game Fest 2024, I felt like this was an RPG series that had been cut down and truncated to meet the demands of the action game market. But after playing it for a while, that feeling disappeared: There’s much more to Veilguard than EA’s marketing has made clear so far.
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Back in June, I compared the latest Dragon Age game to Final Fantasy 16, another sequel in the series. Quite good indeed But the game also clearly struggled to deal with its series’ legacy and the shadow cast by games like God of War 2018. In reality, though, Guardians of the Veil seems to be navigating these choppy waters with more deftness – and the result is one that I can’t wait to experience in its entirety.
Let me put it this way. Dragon Age Origins was conceived as a spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate. Dragon Age 2 borrowed a lot from the first Mass Effect in terms of structure. Dragon Age: Inquisition offered an open world for the post-Skyrim, pre-Witcher 3 world.
Veilguard’s biggest inspiration, at least structurally, seems to be Mass Effect 2 and 3. Those are BioWare’s best games, so that’s no bad thing – but layered on top of that is a much deeper, more faithful D&D RPG progression offering.
First let’s talk about the overall game structure. This is still very much BioWare territory. This time around, your version of Normandy or Skyhold is called the Beacon. Here you’ll hang out with your companions, develop your relationships, craft items, take inventory, and generally exercise your leadership skills as a “Rook” (the de facto leader of the Veilguard). So far, it’s all very familiar.
Once you exit the lighthouse, you’ll be dropped into one of two types of areas. The first are linear stages that advance the story (most of which are action-driven, but I played at least one that focused more on grim atmosphere), while the second are functionally secondary hubs (think Mass Effect’s Citadel or Omega) that are home to various friendly faces, shops, side quests, and battles.
The developers don’t want to make any actual numbers-size comparisons between The Veilguard and Inquisition, but broadly speaking, it’s realistic to say that while Inquisition had a small number of truly huge areas, The Veilguard veers towards smaller, carefully curated areas – but there are a lot of them.
In my day with the game, I saw quite a few areas that seemed to be from the first act or so of the game. I should also point out that I did see some cleverly reused areas–one city started out as a thriving peaceful town as a leisure center, then was revisited in the form of a linear action stage after one of my choices laid siege to it. And then, later on, as a broken town trying to rebuild. There’s a clever asset economy here, though the way it’s deployed isn’t cheap.
You can sense that the developers didn’t want the more linear action stages to be just an onslaught of enemies–they implemented a lot of that through visual storytelling, making each stage a more vivid experience. In one mission, the characters go into a kind of magical bubble underwater to explore flooded ruins (oddly enough, I also saw this in Expedition 33 at Gamescom). Outside the barrier, fish and aquatic plants shimmered in the mist. In some places, the magical barrier holding back the sea is on the verge of collapse, and water drips dangerously through cracks in the surface.
In addition to combat, areas like this are interspersed with little puzzles. You know the types of puzzles: destroy a crystal to unlock a door, or you need to escort another type of crystal to charge up some kind of magical device to open up the next location you need to advance to. Maybe some kind of vicious blight needs to be destroyed to open a path, or a ballista needs to be used to blast a hole in a wall. These are simple things, but it keeps you busy and breaks up combat. This is the flow of many action-adventure games – but what’s different about BioWare’s offerings is that it all dovetails with getting to know a group of characters and making the story truly your own.
Like I said, all of this feels a lot like the second and third Mass Effect games. But there’s one thing that sets this fourth Dragon Age apart: the detail in its refined, satisfying role-playing systems. In short, there’s a lot here. At times, it can have the feel of a full-blown action game; at times it can even seem a bit Devil May CryThe action feels authentic and satisfying, too. That being said, underneath this game is an all-around solid RPG with a lot of grit.
I probably should have thought of this earlier. When I spoke with the director of The Veilguard earlier this summer, she compared what they had built to the beloved sphere and license grid setup of Final Fantasy 10 and Final Fantasy 12. When we spoke again at this preview event, we ended up talking about XenosagaShe’s awesome. But seeing her RPG tendencies in action in person is one thing compared to just hearing about them. She’s real, and she’s there – and she offers new possibilities for every combat encounter or “linear” action phase.
The mage’s skill grid, for example, has over a hundred skills spread across six subsections – and that’s not counting the three mutually exclusive class specialization trees that sit at the extreme ends of the different build directions you can go in. Which path you strike out on through the tree’s interconnected web of abilities, which specialization you choose, and what kind of combat experience you want to have is all up to you.
A Mage can focus on skills that let you take control of the battlefield, blocking the movement of your enemies to trap them. Or you can become a Spellblade, pairing your magic staff with an enchanted dagger for close-range attacks, combining melee and magic. The options are varied. The three classes (Warrior, Mage, and Rogue) are similar in breadth – so players have three large and unique character skill trees to use over multiple games.
It’s not earth-shattering innovation – we’ve seen this stuff before. That being said, it’s a level of mechanical depth rarely seen in RPGs that builds the rest of the game in a more approachable, shorter, action-adventure way. Often the baby of mechanical RPG depth gets thrown out with the bathwater – but that’s not the case here.
Crucially, this kind of RPG system has enough depth that you should be able to crack the game open like an egg. You don’t have to, of course – but for the min/maxers among you, this is certainly the kind of game where you can carefully build a game-breaking setup between the skill trees and the gear on offer. It’s the kind of game where a new piece of armor you find might have some bonus that pushes you to make an entirely new build to maximize its bonus. Veilguard is built for this, too – making it simple and unrestricted to reallocate and refund skill points encourages wild experimentation.
So, the story is still worth watching. Don’t let the trailers that focus on playful, sexy characters that you want to romance and intense battles fool you. The style is there, yes. But so is the content.
When I call these things style, I want to be clear: style isn’t all skin deep. The characters, the world, the story—they’re all substantive, too. First, it’s brave to take the series into new territory. There’s some gentle shaving off of some of the sharp edges—sometimes in the form of lovely quality-of-life changes, like an in-game map that makes it clear when a companion has something new to say, but other times in the form of slightly controversial streamlining, like the fact that dialogue options now basically always boil down to being friendly, sarcastic, or tough.
Of course, some things can’t be judged by just one day of hands-on experience. The developers said they were proud to have built the game around companions this time around – they called companions the “weight-bearing pillars” of the entire experience. The logic, it was explained, was that BioWare very good Making companions – so why not build the entire game specifically around them? It makes sense. Can’t be judged on just one part of the game – but regardless, after a day of playing with them, I do start to feel like this is probably the best Dragon Age package yet. The story also kept me very interested.
However, the highlight of the game is the gameplay. The combat feels good – the thief RidiculousThe RPG system has a surprising amount of depth. The entire game exceeded my expectations.
In fact, the biggest issue with the game right now is that the jump and interact buttons are the same – my biggest pet peeve. But I can forgive that. Especially if the rest of the experience matches up to the first extended hands-on. Let’s wait and see in October.
Dragon Age: Keeper of the Veil will be released on PS5, Xbox Series, and PC on October 31. It will cost $69.99/£69.99 on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and $59.99/£49.99 on PC, with various special editions available.
