‘Dragon Age: The Veilguard’ Re-Review (Xbox Series X)

I am someone who can only dedicate a relatively modest amount of time to reviewing video games. Usually this is no problem, but in this case, I think it is an issue. If you are playing an arcade game, it is likely your review after 10 hours of playing, will be similar to your review after 50 hours. However, with a modern RPG, there is a lot that can happen between hour 10 and hour 50, and this is my addendum, dear reader, to my review of Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Please consider, despite ploughing dozens our Hours into the game, I am still not at the end. I likely will finish it, but right now my feelings have changed enough to warrant me providing an update.

I am torn. I still like the game. I love the Bioware template of “form team, make decisions, cop off with team, save Universe / World”.

On the one hand, I still feel this is a very good video game. I still feel that is well worth playing, however I also worry people may have bought the game, based on my glowing praise and been disappointed.

The game is huge (which is a large part of why I am writing this) but the game also deliberately hides secrets everywhere, in the multi-tiered, snaking levels. The game gives you a way pointer to follow, to track objectives, and sometimes this is confusing and stressful. When you know the game is huge, we really did not need this extra pace-killing time sink.

We spent time creating our characters and naming them only for our nickname “Rook” to be used throughout without referencing the name we picked for ourselves. The character’s name is “Rook”, just leave it at that and do not give us a false sense of agency.

I always play RPGs as the lawful good saviour type, so I was not put out that this is the only way that you can play the game. If you want your character to be a jerk, play Baldur’s Gate 3.

For whatever reason, we still have to spend the entire game rolling into barrels to destroy them and harvest what comes out. It looks and feels extremely comical, throwing ourselves into barrels, carts and whatever else, for countless hours of heroic world-saving. Walking through a city, swamp, whatever, chatting to our companions, while we endlessly roll around, the hero that we are.

Combat is also fun when you outmatch the enemies, but if you ever get ahead of yourself, the enemies are so aggressive you will just be wailed on. While I am really nitpicking, some of the best music has a sci-fi vibe, not fantasy.

Now, the Elephant in the Room… Dragon Age: The Veilguard also leaves itself completely open to accusations of being “woke”. This doesn’t bother me, but it bears touching on. We build a team, to save the world, which is great. Here is one example of the characters behaving in frustrating ways. Spoiler alert – Our group of Millennials, gets a chance to kill one of the evil gods and fails. The team debrief afterwards leads our team to say “Yeah, well, my heart wasn’t really in stopping the end of the world, as I kinda have my own personal stuff going on”. Some of this personal stuff is “My hometown just got destroyed, and I kinda blame Rook” or “I have suddenly got magic powers, I don’t understand” but also “My Mum doesn’t accept the gender pronouns I want to use for myself”. The game does not just have some very gender-fluid, or LGBT characters, it actively forces the player to give advice to a character asking questions. While I do not mind one bit, I can I understand why this is going to upset some people, who just want to play a fantasy world RPG. I feel there are ways that the game could make liberals happy, without leaving yourself open to the accusation of rubbing it in conservative faces.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard suffers from a serious pacing issue. One minute you are battling a dragon, to save the world (stopping at every corner to smash barrels and search every nook and cranny for hidden items). We then decide that saving the world has to wait until we resolve everyone’s personal problems. The game goes from the odds are literally the end of the world to “our top priority is you spending time with every character individually, lighting candles, coming to dinner with their Mum or just letting me moan about their lives endlessly”, BEFORE we do battle with evil.

As I said, I am torn. I am not upset by the culture wars stuff (I rarely am) but some of the decisions just seem weird. At times the plot and the way that characters behave do not make sense, and this is a problem. In a game, that relies so much on its excellent world-building, characters and story.

Much of the dialogue is superb, and much of the action and set pieces are excellent. The game is, at times thrilling. Which makes it all the stranger that design decisions have devalued what I said was “The best game I have played since Disco Elysium” to “This is a very good game. I understand why some people feel this game is trying to deliberately annoy them” (again, I am not annoyed personally).

Sorry to sound negative, I have fun with the game, I enjoy it, but my initial review was too kind. Mass Effect 2 remains the best Bioware game I have played.

So there we go, popular, good game in 2024, gets caught up in culture wars (at least in part deliberately). If you will excuse me, I am going back to my Atari Lynx.