Dragon Age: The Veilguard Leans Hard into Companions, Choices, and Consequences | Push Square

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Companions and choices have always been at the heart of Dragon Age, and that looks to be no different in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. In fact, the game recently picked up its new subtitle in order to emphasise how important your party of pals will be during the adventure. From what we saw at Summer Game Fest Play Days — hosted in a strangely ominous back corner of the site — BioWare is leaning into these aspects of its RPG series even more.

We were shown the opening 40 minutes or so, alongside the game's robust character creator system. The theme of choice runs through this early part of the game, of course, allowing you to pick your avatar's lineage and class as well as adjust pronouns, skin tone, and body shape. Furthermore, backstories are in, allowing you to further customise your character with an origin story of sorts. Customising your difficulty is also part of this process; you can leave this alone or fine tune various aspects of the game to suit you.

With the demo proper now underway, we immediately hit a branching dialogue choice — do we get information about the Dread Wolf by talking it over with the barmaid, or fight the entire population of the pub to get what we need? Opting for the latter, the resulting cutscene led into gameplay, where we saw Minrathous, a massive city previously only mentioned in the series. BioWare teases that it's taking players to more locations than ever in The Veilguard.

Thus begins an intense opening sequence, in which a ritual to destroy the Veil is underway, resulting in demonic creatures from the Fade passing into the world. During this linear sequence, the game's visuals really show themselves — magical effects are all around and the bad guys invade the screen in chaotic fashion, resulting in a visually exciting set-piece. It leads into our first glimpse of combat, which is more action-orientated than we've seen in a Dragon Age game before.

Our demo character is a rogue, so attacks with fast strikes and evades with nimble