Dragon Age games have long faced the same problem as Dragon Age protagonists: the utter impossibility of pleasing everyone simultaneously. Arriving almost exactly a decade after Inquisition, with hopes and expectations as granular as demands for cameos from minor characters and RPG design preferences that go all the way back to 2009's Origins, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is trying to please a lot of people. Like a protagonist playing 'yes man' to every faction, Veilguard has ended up likable, but too broad in its appeal to love like I love clunkier Origins, endearingly messy Dragon Age 2, or overambitious Inquisition.
What is it? An action-RPG where your choices affect the plot.
Release date October 31, 2024
Expect to pay $60/£50
Developer BioWare
Publisher Electronic Arts
Reviewed on RTX 2080, Intel i7-8086k, 32GB RAM
Multiplayer No
Steam Deck Verified
Link Site
The first 10 hours of The Veilguard are disorienting, even for a certified Thedas lore dork. It opens with my hero Rook and series fan-favorite dwarven archer Varric Tethras arriving in the magical city Minrathous at the end of an apparently lengthy search to track down his Inquisition comrade turned elven god Solas. We stop Solas' world-ending ritual to tear down the barrier between the realm of magic and the rest of the world with a bit of action movie guff—knocking a bunch of giant statues over—after which I assumed we would all take a deep breath and get into the real adventure. Wrong.
Veilguard's entire first act carries on at the same breakneck pace, briskly nodding to my chosen backstory and then tossing me into the deep end of a plot to defeat the two elven gods who slipped their prisons when I disrupted Solas' ritual. For several hours I was yanked from magical forest to magical city to assassin city, recruiting seven staple RPG party members almost faster than I could read their resumes. By the time I'd hastily met with a third head of a major world faction and not had a single conversation that
Party
Action
RPG
UPS
Citi
Love
consequences
Lauren Morton