The Dragon Age franchise isn’t known for staying exactly the same from game to game. Whether it’s changes in scope, setting, your player character’s persona, or companion approval mechanics, there’s always something new. But the most surprising change Dragon Age: The Veil Guardian makes of his predecessors?
I actually enjoy the fight.
Combat has never been what brought me to a BioWare game – so emphatic that I’ve been known to scoff at anyone who might consider it important to the experience. This is the gaming equivalent of insisting on calling all mainstream sports “sportsball” and talking about watching the Super Bowl just for the commercials. It’s unfair and I’m not particularly proud of it. On the other hand, the selling point of a BioWare game has always been on the narrative side.
Image: BioWare/Electronic Arts
The company’s bread and butter is to present you with intricate worlds, complex characters, and compelling choices. BioWare has earned a reputation as a titan of the CRPG genre, which includes combat – but historically it hasn’t been at the center of that reputation. You’ll never see Mass Effect touted as a franchise that has made its mark in shooter history. I can’t believe we ever thought that Dragon Age: OriginsThe core mechanic of manually tweaking your companions’ AI using a list of a dozen customizable if-then statements was casual fun. Dragon Age 2 And inquisition weren’t anything special combat-wise – there was nothing they did that wasn’t better in any dungeon crawler.
The Dragon Age games in particular have moved further and further away from full-blown tactical combat with each installment, so in a way Veil Guardian simply brings this journey to its logical conclusion. However, this latest move was a big step and was met with great skepticism from fans in many quarters. Some are clearly disappointed that Dragon Age and Tactical Combat have separated. For others, among my own Dragon Age superfans, it’s not that they miss the old combat, but that they’re afraid of the new. They are not ordinary real-time players and fear that they lack the reflexes or dexterity for this Veil Guardianand it will ruin a game they’ve been looking forward to for a decade.
Personally, I was neutral about the change, or at least remained neutral until I could experience it myself. I have already written about my first impressions Veil GuardianThe combat and time I had with the full game only increased my enjoyment until one evening when I found myself racing through an arena, dodging the attacks of my many larger opponents, bringing them close to explosive barrels, and then using my ranged attacks to detonate them used her torn to pieces while I escaped completely unscathed. I realized I was being completely honest cackle with joy.
A quick survey of Polygon authors who were allowed to play Veil Guardian brought out a lot of enthusiasm.
“Once I started mastering the jump-and-slam thing and one-shotting some of the undead things, I started to enjoy it.” -Zoë Hannah
“I liked the realization that mages can really exploit elemental weaknesses – it helped me a lot in the fight against those pesky plague champions.” -Ari Notis
Image: BioWare/Electronic Arts
“The boss is fighting against it [REDACTED] as a villain was incredible. Just constantly flipping back and forth, dancing on the edge of life and death, picking at the edge [REDACTED] with quick strokes.” —Cass Marshall
“I just like doing a combo with my lover, tbqh.” —Petrana Radulovic
This fall I completed a preliminary review of Dragon Age: Inquisitionwhere the difficulty level is explicitly set to “easy”. And when I played through it again Dragon Age: Origins This summer saw a slew of quality of life mods, including an Extra Easy mode. I wanted the crunch fight in 2009 to be like that trivial. I wanted every enemy to go down as quickly as possible, with an emphasis on the SAP.
Now I’m actually thinking about it increasingly the (extremely customizable) difficulty settings I selected at the start Veil Guardianbecause some of these big bad bosses go down to fast! Hey! Don’t die! I had fun beating you! And this has never happened to me in a BioWare game!
