Dragon Age: Veilguard – The Dreadwolfening

Dragon Age is a series that over the past two decades has transformed itself with every entry, and Dragon Age: Veilguard is no exception. The combat is a lot more action-oriented, continuing to stray even farther from the turn-based mechanics and deep storyline from the original Dragon Age: Origins. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it was a disappointment to fans that longed for the return of the mechanics of the old Dragon Age games.

The mechanics in Veilguard weren’t the only departure from the last games, however. The Qun, a race of large humanoids with large horns sticking out of their head, are still large but are significantly smaller in size than their previous iterations. It doesn’t bother me necessarily, but I do think that the much larger Qun from the previous games is a much better design choice. In Veilguard, the Qun are essentially muscular humans with horns and a large, protruding forehead.

A few characters were brought forward from the previous game like Lace Harding, Varric, Morrigan, Solas and the inquisitor even makes an appearance a few times within the story. You start off the game with Varric, who quickly gets injured and spends the rest of the game bedridden and unable to join you in your quest which I found to be kind of an odd decision. I could understand for story reasons keeping him locked away for a while, but the whole game? It was a missed opportunity to sideline one of the more interesting characters that the player may have a long history with if they had played the previous entries.

The only new character to make any kind of impression on me was Emmrich, a lighthearted necromancer and his lovable skeleton companion, Manfred. While Emmrich is a somewhat silly character, his personal storyline was one that I found to have the most interesting choice for its resolution. None of the other companions’ personal storylines had quite a massive impact on the character like Emmrich’s did.

Solas, the Dreadwolf and main villain of the game, was by far the most interesting character with the best written dialogue in the game. Unfortunately, you only interact with him within the main storyline, and he is always standing in one spot seemingly always waiting for our character to come visit him. I would have liked to see more involvement from him, but with him being a antagonist, I understand why he wasn’t treated like a companion.

It took me around 80 hours to complete Veilguard and I did every single quest possible and stopped short of getting a platinum for it. I played on PS5, since I’m paying a subscription to Gamefly and went into the game with a suspicion that I wouldn’t fully enjoy it (many Reviews had already come out at this point). To say that I didn’t enjoy Veilguard would be a lie, but I did find it to be an overall forgettable experience. None of the stories stood out to me as particularly well written and many of the stories were silly and lighthearted in a way that I wasn’t personally looking for in a Dragon Age game.

I played a Mage throughout the entire game but there are 3 subclasses to choose from within the spiderweb of perks and, best of all, you can swap out perks at any time without cost. This allowed me to change through all 3 subclasses whenever I wanted, but once you specialize in the Death Caller subclass, you’re likely not going to want to leave. Spellblade and evoker were both cool subclasses that fit their overall theme well, but I found Death Caller to be incredibly powerful in comparison to the other two. Most of the time all I needed to do was point my laser beam ability at anything and it would melt them. This did trivialize combat quite a bit though, even when I increased the difficulty to play on Underdog..

Veilguard often felt like it had some good ideas that were cut or half-implemented that could have been something cool but the developers either ran out of time or couldn’t implement it properly. One example of this is the Crossroad which starts off as mostly barren except for portals and the gloomy spirit rowing the boat between fragmented sky islands. As you unlock more of the crossroads, you start to discover ghost NPC’s inhabiting areas that were previously empty, and they come with their own gear vendors. It was a neat touch, but the only thing that ultimately unlocks are the gear vendors. The rest are cosmetic, and they only inhabit one area at the center of the Crossroads. It would have been nice to see more ghosts inhabiting the crossroads as you clear it out and maybe add a quest or two.

Dragon Age Veilguard is a hard sell at full price, but if you can catch it on sale and don’t expect deep storylines or dark themes then there’s a lot of enjoyment to be had with it. The combat is enjoyable but can feel repetitive especially with how much damage enemies can take at some points. I don’t see myself ever going back to it, but I didn’t regret the time I spent with it.

6/10