Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Strong Characters and Combat Make Its Flaws Easy to Overlook

Dragons spewing fire, lightning, and ice have been unleashed over Thedas, as armies of mages and horned warriors march on major cities. Two evil gods have unleashed a plague that threatens to cover the world in corrupted flesh. Raw magic runs rampant, tearing holes in the fabric of reality and sundering the land. But for all its high fantasy drama and world-shaking action, some of my favorite moments in Dragon Age: The Veilguard were spent sitting on the couch with my party, chatting about the latest demon attack like we were having the world’s grimmest sleepover.

The stakes couldn’t be higher for The Veilguard, both in its narrative and in expectations for the game itself. BioWare’s beloved RPG series changed a lot over its three previous games, but the latest feels the riskiest, fully committing to real-time combat for the first time and exploring lands never seen before in the series while still clinging to the story established in the previous game. Fortunately for fans who’ve been waiting over a decade for it, The Veilguard mostly succeeds in both heading in a new direction and showing the climax of what’s come before, even if the growing pains of its new combat system and an uneven story keep it from being truly great.

A decade has passed since Dragon Age: Inquisition, but that 2014 RPG still haunts The Veilguard. The political struggle between mages and templars, the dominating religion of the Chantry, and even the locations where previous games were set have been left behind, but The Veilguard directly continues the story of Solas, one of Inquisition’s most important characters. In the game’s opening moments, Solas attempts to tear down the Veil that separates the physical world from the spiritual realm of the Fade, only to unleash two tyrannical elven gods in the process when your party stops him. From there, your mission switches from stopping Solas to assembling a crew to defeat the gods.

The Heat of Battle

The biggest departure from earlier Dragon Age games is that The Veilguard is a real-time action game with only the faintest vestiges of the series’ tactical roots. You can tell your two party members which targets to attack and order them to use one of the three skills they can carry at once, but otherwise, you’re hacking and slashing with your custom character, Rook.

Each playable class has a suite of ranged and melee attacks on top of special abilities that use resources and have cooldowns, plus a parry mechanic. I went with the Warrior so I could see what The Veilguard’s real-time combat felt like on the front lines — and because I already knew I wanted the sarcastic mage Neve in my party. Combat controls feel sluggish at first, particularly the timing of the parry, but once I got used to it, I found it engaging, if a bit repetitive. There’s enough variety in your moves to make each individual encounter fun, but it becomes apparent over time that there’s not much variation from one battle to the next, with little in the way of interesting encounter design to set fights apart. Battles against massive beasts like dragons are a particular highlight, but against large groups of enemies, there can be so much on screen at once that it’s almost impossible to tell what’s even happening.

While it’s more focused on reactive combat than tactics, strategy isn’t completely absent. Some attacks are better at destroying armor while others excel at crushing magical shields. Your allies are underachievers when left to their own devices, but micromanaging their skill use and choosing their targets makes them way more effective and combat is more fun as a result.

Having clear indications for which attack you should use at any time means you’ll never feel at a loss for what to do, but it reinforces how similar individual battles are. Most abilities in the game apply debuffs to enemies they hit, or “detonate” those debuffs to cause massive damage in an area. Where your choice of standard attacks tends to change based on your enemies, causing detonations is almost always the best use of your abilities. Every party member has unique abilities that might shred armor or freeze enemies, but you’re encouraged to build a party around pulling off detonations, and that near-necessity erodes the distinctions between individual characters.

Exacerbating that problem is the fact that every enemy is weak against one element and resistant to another. Since each party member only uses one element, those weaknesses become the most important factor in choosing your companions. It all adds up to the feeling that despite all the choices available to you, there’s a correct way to approach every fight, and a correct party composition for it.

Team Bonding

In the leadup to The Veilguard, BioWare emphasized how it’s really a game about the characters that make up your party. While they don’t really feel like individuals in combat, they come alive much more off the battlefield. Every character has a personal questline where they confront both some external enemy and a personal struggle. Whether they’re grappling with feelings of guilt, seeking revenge, or exploring their gender identity, every character has more going on under the surface than they initially appear to. These character-focused quests are the best-written and most narratively engaging parts of the game by a long shot.

However, these character arcs expose the weakness of The Veilguard’s model of player choice. Even in moments of personal growth for the characters, your protagonist Rook is always pulling the strings. With a single binary choice, you can determine what shape a character’s self-actualization takes, from which parts of their identity they embrace to how they feel about their duty to others. For all The Veilguard’s focus on its characters, they remain in many ways dolls for the player to pose by making telegraphed choices in specific moments.

But aside from making life-changing decisions for your party members, you have very little influence over how they actually feel about you. The Veilguard is packed with dialogue choices in just about every conversation, but surprisingly few of them feel consequential. They’re mostly about tone, determining whether you deliver a line with snark or stoicism. Everyone gets along a bit too well, and you rarely get the chance to tell a party member off, start an argument, or even disagree about tactics.

The clearest example of this friction-free approach to characters might be in how The Veilguard handles romance. Smooching your party members has always been one of Dragon Age’s main draws, and it’s back here, but suffers from the same limitations as the rest of your conversations. All you need to romance a character is to continually choose the flirty dialogue option with the heart icon, and the final decision to start a romantic relationship or cut one off happens with a single choice. There’s no way to carry on multiple relationships, and even if you go right up to the line of starting one and then back down, there will be no acknowledgment of what just happened the next time you meet.

The Weight of the World

The Veilguard’s approach to choice feels extremely odd as a result. You can reshape a character’s idea of self in an instant, but your day-to-day interactions have almost no bearing on them whatsoever. The same is true of decisions that change the larger state of the world. You might decide the fate of a city with a single sentence, but the world is otherwise unreactive to your choices. I don’t think it’s inherently a bad thing to limit player agency in this way — I’d rather play through a well-crafted, static narrative than have a hand in authoring a less impactful one. But The Veilguard goes out of its way to present you with choices at every turn, and very few of them add up to anything, which feels more frustrating than not having made those choices at all.

Where your combat strategy and narrative choices feel constrained, exploring the world in The Veilguard offers an enticing freedom. For its first few hours, the game is largely on rails, with unsatisfying pacing that shuttles you between conversations and linear quests with little room to breathe. But once the world opens up, there are a staggering number of ways to approach what to do next. You can focus on character stories, dive into regional quests for your group’s many allied factions, or just explore the world’s gorgeous environments.

Here, too, The Veilguard is torn. Making your way through levels when you’re on a mission can be as repetitive as its combat, as you’ll frequently be stopped to slot some magical key into the lock that opens your way in a process so simple it can’t really be called a puzzle. But outside of structured missions, navigating the world is far more exciting. Hidden puzzles are scattered about, offering rewards in the form of new gear and, more importantly, a sense of accomplishment. With far less guidance and more ability to choose how you proceed, wandering the world between quests can be just as fulfilling as saving it. It helps that The Veilguard is full of staggering beautiful vistas no matter where you find yourself in its sprawling setting.

For all the ways it frustrated me, I came away from The Veilguard with mostly positive feelings about it. Despite its quirks, combat is fun on a gut level, and building your character from the game’s massive skill tree offers multiple interesting playstyles no matter how you approach it. Though the narrative hands too much power to Rook in big choices and not enough in small ones, it’s full of great character moments with a compelling central cast. The series I fell in love with in the 2009 tactical RPG Dragon Age: Origins is hardly recognizable anymore, but what’s replaced it is still a solid blockbuster action game with plenty of reasons to recommend it.

7/10

Dragon Age: The Veilguard launches on October 31 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Inverse was provided with a PS5 copy for this review.

INVERSE VIDEO GAME REVIEW ETHOS: Every Inverse video game review answers two questions: Is this game worth your time? Are you getting what you pay for? We have no tolerance for endless fetch quests, clunky mechanics, or bugs that dilute the experience. We care deeply about a game’s design, world-building, character arcs, and storytelling come together. Inverse will never punch down, but we aren’t afraid to punch up. We love magic and science-fiction in equal measure, and as much as we love experiencing rich stories and worlds through games, we won’t ignore the real-world context in which those games are made.