Dragon Age: Keeper of the Veil (gosh, I really don’t like this title change) is finally here. After scaring us off with a somewhat confusing first trailer, that gameplay demo calmed a lot of our fears, but can it really escape the shadow of Baldur’s Gate 3?
My take is that it has been… sort of. It’s hard not to think of Larian’s near-perfect RPG whenever the new Dragon Age is mentioned (in fact, I already linked the two games together last year), and yet all the in-depth previews and gameplay demos released to the public suggest that we’re looking at an entirely different type of RPG, one in a league of its own.
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In our hands-on time with the game, Alex has revealed that “Dragon Age: Veilkeeper is going to have a lot of surprises for a lot of people.” I think that sums up the entire unconventional series pretty well. Anyone who claims that Dragon Age hasn’t evolved (or degenerated) with each new game is either lying or desperately needs to revisit Inquisition, as well as Dragon Age 2 and Origins.
The series’ need for reinvention hasn’t always been about pure creative pushes, and Dragon Age 2’s maddening development cycle and end result (which was nonetheless enjoyable) are ample evidence of just how shaky its development process was from the start. As with the more straightforward Mass Effect trilogy, Dragon Age’s shaky DNA is becoming increasingly difficult to deny.
I’ve talked about how Baldur’s Gate 3 (and more recently the Divinity games) have taken up much of the fantasy RPG territory that Dragon Age once occupied, at least in the big-budget leagues. The key difference between the two is that Larian has always stuck closer to the CRPG tradition, while Dragon Age, even in its infancy, pursued a more approachable set of systems and moment-to-moment gameplay that were largely inherited from older BioWare games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
There are common spiritual threads between BioWare and Larian’s work that extend beyond the shared foundations of Baldur’s Gate and Dungeons & Dragons, but the former’s work has been forging new paths for itself for more than a decade. We can attribute many of the new elements and iterations of the combat system in the just-released Wardens of the Veil to the success of Mass Effect before Andromeda; it’s an attempt to capitalize on the now firmly established lineage of ARPGs. However, Wardens of the Veil also seems to be more than just “classic fantasy of Mass Effect” or an action rehash of its predecessors, it also stands alone in its own right.
While I haven’t played The Veilguard myself so far, it looks like we might be getting a new kind of BioWare RPG by the end of 2024. Those unfamiliar with the Dragon Age series but who enjoyed Baldur’s Gate 3 might consider the fourth entry as a stopping point for their next “fantasy dating sim” game before exploring the first three. On the other hand, longtime BioWare followers will either regain lost confidence or double down on the belief that the company has gone too far and no longer resembles the early 2010s editions.
Personally, the reveal of The Veilguard took me by surprise, and the gameplay demo didn’t blow me away, but the developers said the right things in the interviews and Q&As that followed, and I’m starting to think that they may have made the right follow-up to Dragon Age: Inquisition, just not the one many of us were expecting.
