The Main Thing ‘Dragon Age: The Veilguard’ Gets Wrong

I liked Dragon Age: The Veilguard quite a bit. I gave it an 8.5/10 and was engaged enough to now run second playthrough with a new class, because I mainly want to see how combat would evolve. What I’m not expecting? Is seeing the story evolve in new ways, simply because it…can’t, not to any great extent, it seems.

I have one major problem with Dragon Age: The Veilguard and no, it has nothing to do with the endless culture wars surrounding the game. Rather I think they played it way too safe with the tone. This is a game with close to zero edge to it. A lack of conflict, a lack of truly tough choices and a lack of letting your Rook be anything close to ruthless, if not actually sort of evil, which is of course possible in many RPGs, and past Dragon Age games allowed for more grey areas than what we see here.

I do not mind the more cartoony art style of Veilguard that has been pushed back against by some. You kind of get used to it, and it’s not an issue at all with say, your Rook design, given that this is one of the best character creators I can remember using (that hair!). But I do not think the tone of the game needed to match that less-broody art style, and it very much does.

This is an M-rated game that very much plays and acts and sounds like a T-for-Teen rated game. Yes, here and there you’ll hear an f-bomb or see a boob (mainly in the character creator only?). But there’s little bloody violence and the entire thing just feels like it’s aimed at a much younger crowd.

It’s just all too happy-go-lucky. Yes, I do really like my team and most of the questlines and the overall story and lore. But it feels bizarre that your Rook cannot be anything but mildly blunt, and there are few, if any, real conflicts that last for more than a two minutes, whether it’s between you and your team, your team members with each other, or more than a handful of snooty authority figures you encounter along the way. The “worst” thing I ever did was punch an annoying guy. This is not “bad writing” in terms of the literal lines of dialogue, I’d argue it’s a problem with story structure and character arcs.

The game will sometimes give you a “hard” decision in a way that is cheating, like an early no-win call about (spoilers follow) which city you will abandon to be blighted by a dragon. There’s no real answer there. The game does introduce a somewhat interesting mechanic here with a “hardened” teammate who will no longer buff you and their anger makes their aggressive moves ever, but this system is barely used outside of its initial context. Despite some “disapproval” from teammates, it is actively difficult to piss any of them off to any degree.

This is an M-rated game and I really don’t understand why they didn’t insert more conflict, more actual violence, more sex (a big part of BioWare games, frankly!). The tone is all wrong, all the edges have been totally sanded down.

You can end the game with mass tragedy, but it’s just so obvious how to avoid it, as (again, spoilers) the final mission is just a Mass Effect suicide run where your team will survive if you’ve done their loyalty quests and match their skills to the task at hand. There are not any actually hard decisions to be found there, either.

I love gameplay, the world, the actual characters, but this aspect of the game bothered me, and was more or less the entire reason for my point deduction. They played it too safe, and you can see that in almost every conversation or story decision.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.