I'm not mad at you Bioware, just disappointed.

If columns collected cobwebs, I'd be brushing them from my poor old Blogspot account in preparation for getting down my thoughts. So much of my outward musing sadly conforms to a character limit nowadays, but I needed some more space to get down my thoughts on the most important event of my year... the release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Some context, if you weren't part of my 2015 and 20218 cohort of friends who had to listen to me ramble incessantly about this game series: Dragon Age is very important to me. Nine years ago I was sweating through another attempt at quitting alcohol and hoping it would stick. A pal gifted me a copy of Dragon Age Inquisition, I think as a congratulations for being made permanent at my retail job. After a drunken reel around my bedroom led to me bringing my television down on top of me, I was lucky to even be in the position to insert the disc. With no prior knowledge of the franchise, I selected New Game and jumped right in.

Dragon Age, without a doubt, helped me get sober. As I shrugged off invitations from drinking buddies, I found myself in Haven with a new purpose: stop the bad guy and save the world. Not original by any means, but the people (sorry, characters) I found in the game quickly became my friends. I stood at the gate discussing cultural differences with a Qunari and broke through the spiky outer shell of one of my war table generals, Cassandra. Each character, with their rich and nuanced life story, became my confidants, and together it felt like we could take on the world. As I suffered through regret, shame, paranoia and trauma in real life... Well, I came to really need Dragon Age to get me through the week. I fell in love, or at least my plucky protagonist did (although admittedly the lines here become blurred) with a templar commander and our dynamic made me see a different way I could act and be treated in a relationship. I quit drinking and it stuck. I'm nine years sober.

Ten years after Inquisition, the fourth game in the series Dragon Age: The Veilguard is finally out in the world. It's a long time coming and a journey beset by studio interference, writer layoffs and a series of stops and starts. Like every fan, I held my breath and hoped for the best.

I've sunk around 70 hours into DATV so far, across two playthroughs. I suppose my overall opinion can be summarised by the fact that I started a second game immediately following the first so I could see if there was a way of playing that would make the game feel... better. 

The Graphics

To start with, DATV is a good-looking game. The environments you're in are lush and filled with stuff; be it the gloomy Hossberg outpost, the creepy halls of the Necropolis or the market streets of Treviso in Antiva. When the trailer for the game was released, it got criticism for appearing too polished and shiny; more Fortnight than Fable. Once I turned the brightness way up (why no torches, Bioware?), this didn't bother me as much as it did other players. I largely like how the game looks. 

The characters in DATV are visually smoother than before but the way they move can be pretty distracting. A lot of work went into creating key cinematic scenes, but oddly the everyday character expressions and animations are largely unchanged from the previous game of a decade ago. Characters emote weirdly, and every cut scene ends with a very stilted I am leaving now physical stutter. It's more puppetry than motion-capture, and doesn't feel like the movie-quality modern day graphics many games provide.

The Voice Acting

Whew, what a mixed bag. It's unfortunate that the character of Neve Gallus is one of the first people you meet, as her flat delivery feels like the actor wasn't given enough context and direction, jusr told to simply read the lines on the page as she saw them. There are some great secondary characters; Riley Carter Millington plays a brilliantly mancunian Shadow Dragon Tarquin and Wardens Evka and Antoine are a delightful married couple facing down darkspawn together. DATV would be nothing without the gravitas of Gareth David Lloyd's Solas, who delivers his lines like he has a real personal stake in the action.     

The protagonist, Rook (you) comes across as stilted and awkward in many scenes, and in my second playthrough I found myself sticking to the "red" dialogue options to avoid the purple-toned jokiness that sucked the seriousness out of every key scene. There is a time and a place for quippy dialogue, and you do not respond to the destruction of everything you hold dear to with "oof".

Your Companions

"I like the companions." A positive declaration, surely? Except what I enjoyed most about previous games is that I didn't like all the characters. Vivienne is rude, Blackwall is a liar, Anders' betrayal of my Hawke made me so upset I had to put the controller down and take a moment. Here, the characters feel like children. Any arguments between each other or Rook are "resolved" with a single click of the dialogue wheel to the point that it feels dismissive. I've reloaded previous saves in the earlier games because I made a statement or decision that Varric or Iron Bull disagreed with and I didn't want to disappoint them; in Veilguard it feels impossible to get anyone to dislike you past mild disagreement.

Perhaps the most egregious oversight is the inability to speak to your companions outside of cut scenes. The lack of "wandering around chatting" that was available in Inquisition; the discussions of Tevinter politics with Dorian in the library and personal questions about Cullen's life in the Templars. The opportunity to see the world through the perspective of each one of your new friends is missing from Veilguard, and everyone comes off extremely one note. Frustratingly, your companions seem to get on quite well with each other - there is even a Book Club! - but your Rook is left out of any onscreen bonding sessions, making you feel like a boss rather than a friend. Your main contribution to the group is to ask your companions how they're doing (the Emotional Support Hero) before immediately dropping the subject altogether.

 

Outside those directly impacted by a few key choices, everyone feels disconnected from the events of the game. Harding and Emmrich decide to go camping in a part of the world reported to be completely decimated by demons and cultists. Harding's mother is a refugee, fleeing from Ferelden, but somehow manages to send her daughter a pie. I love that there are queer characters and a trans/non-binary storyline, but making it one character's entire side-quest when there are Gods and demons and blight occurring throughout northern Thedas feels incredibly jarring; a simplistic made-for-television writing of a character. 

Every character has "A Thing" to deal with, but it's shoehorned into cutscenes with no passive prior build-up, which feels more like Project Management than well fleshed out character writing. It is implicitly stated that at one point in the game that "we can't go into battle until we've sorted out our personal lives". Really? 

The World

When Bioware announced that we would finally get to see the Tevinter Imperium in DATV, I was incredibly excited. Power-hungry magisters, blood magic, a truly reprehensible class system which uses elves as slaves and employs true ruthlessness to maintain superiority. After hours wandering through tiny villages and the countryside in Inquisition, I couldn't wait to see the modern metropolis of Tevinter. But maybe this needed too much work to meet the deadline, because they gave us the... marketplace. Most of Minrathous is almost indistinguishable from another city you visit in the game. The Tevinter here is basically Kirkwall, an impoverished city in DA2, but with better graphics. If you play an elf, you can run around Tevinter unchecked. What a waste.

I've spent hours of real-life time discussing the Mage/Templar conflict with fellow fans and friends. You can play Inquisition thinking that mages are treated abhorrently; locked away in Circles and closely controlled, even having their emotions removed to prevent them turning into abominations. Horrific treatment. And then you'll meet a Templar who saw his family killed when one innocuous young mage invited a demon into their body and turned into a walking bomb, murdering hundreds. Oh, I remember thinking, maybe it's not that simple. 

There's a delicious grey area to most conflicts in the Dragon Age games. Through conversations, codexes and quests, the game challenges your perspective on many in-game issues and character motivations. Should mages be able to live freely and unchecked? Despite being set only a decade after the events of the last game, these issues are largely ignored in The Veilguard. There is no revisiting, apart from the odd codex entry, of the world-changing events of the previous game. There's one decision you make where you get to interrogate which political strategy would be most advantageous in unseating the current government, but it's hidden in an optional quest. The fact that I could ask mulitiple characters their opinion in order to make a somewhat informed decision felt revolutionary in DATV.

And the culture. The rich, detailed culture. The Dalish elves! Do any new players learn anything about the Dalish? There's no culture here, barely a mention of religion (no "Maker's breath!" exclamations in this game) - it feels like anything that could be considered "controversial" has been scrubbed from the game in favour of a "good guys vs bad guys" narrative. The Antivan Crows bought and sold children into servitude, but here they're just scrappy underdogs. The Venatori cultists are Bad, and that's all you need to know. The minute detail to the lore of the world, which to this day provokes the kind of debate and reflection you'd read in academic papers, is missing from this game.  

The Main Story

Dragon Age: The Veilguard feels like a game for people who have never played Dragon Age before. Comparisons to God of War aren't unjustified - it's a linear story with a few "big decisions" that ultimately feel less than consequential. With the exception of the final battle, which I thought was brilliant, the plot is your generic "good vs bad with a bit of trickery to shake things up". The major antagonists are simplified and as a player you travel through the story with the certainly that you're the hero, off to save the world. Fun but generic. 

The game has no real interest in showing you anything, but will tell you what little it thinks you need to know. And it will tell you over and over again, through recaps and dialogue and "party banter". Dragon Age enjoys telling you how to play the game, but not why the game needs to be played.   

I get it - the studio needed to create a game that felt like closure for fans of the previous game whilst appealing to and attracting new players. Many of the original writers and creators no longer work for Bioware, which certainly helped this tricky business decision. The main storyline of Veilguard is "fine", but a couple of too-spoilery-to-mention plot twists feel so incredibly insulting to fans of the previous games that a few people close to me gave up shortly after Act One. 

My Takeaway

I had to work quite hard to set aside my disappointment and enjoy this game for what it is. Much like one would play a game of The Sims, I ended up imposing a lot of inner narrative onto my Rook to compensate for their blank personality. The dialogue wheel gives you the choice of three approaches: Blue (Diplomatic/Helpful, Purple (Humorous/Charming or Red (Aggressive/Direct). A couple of hours into my second playthrough I realised that it doesn't really matter which tone you choose, your responses mostly come out sounding the same. As a roleplaying game, this is a terrible decision by Bioware. 

Dragon Age is often described as a "gay fantasy dating sim", in a joking-not-joking way. I enjoyed my romance with Emmrich, but again - the lacklustre dialogue options made me feel like a creepy boss for most of my interactions with him and my team. No-one seems to really engage with what you say to them. I felt at various points that Rook could be deleted from the game and it would make little difference to my companions, who would surely soldier on without me just fine. I did get to have sex in a coffin though, so in one regard I got exactly what I paid for.

I enjoyed the differences in the two endings I got - a completionist will emerge with most of their party in tact, but if you ignore certain companions throughout the game they may not survive the final battle. There's a hidden end game cut scene that I watched on Youtube that is probably the biggest 'fuck you' to a fanbase I've ever seen in gaming history but I didn't get it the both times I completed the game, so I'm happy to pretend it doesn't exist. It feels unlikely there will ever be a Dragon Age 5 to further ruin the universe. 

To summarise, the release of a new Dragon Age game felt like the relief that comes after holding your breath for too long. Playing the new Dragon Age game feels like searching through a book for one spectacular sentence you remember reading long ago, and being unable to locate it in the pages. But this is what got made, and I'll continue to try to find a way to love it more than I do right now. 

P.S: I did very much appreciate the addition of Photo Mode. Those zipline photoshoots kept me very busy.