I can’t begin to tell you how often I was ready for Dragon Age: The Veilguard to make a colossal misstep. I’d spend hours upon hours completing optional and mandatory quests, expecting cracks to show and BioWare to disappoint again. But that moment never came. The truth is that the more time you spend with The Veilguard, the more obvious it is that things are only getting better. And, despite some incredibly nitpicky issues with some aspects of the game’s design, it’s easily BioWare’s best game in over a decade. In fact, I’d even go as far as to say it’s maybe even the best Dragon Age game, pulling the best of each game into a focused experience that’s nothing short of incredible.
The Veilguard comes to us a decade after Inquisition , mirroring the time that has passed in the game world with the real world. You play as Rook, a customisable protagonist hired by Varric Tethras to track the Dread Wolf, an elven god who reared his unexpected presence towards the end of Inquisition’s final chapters. Veilguard opens quickly, with Varric and Rook meeting with your first companion to stop Dread Wolf’s plan of tearing down the border between the realms. A whole bunch of stuff happens that ostensibly makes things worse, and it’s up to Rook to assemble a team of companions to help him (or her) fix it.
The story is just the start of what The Vanguard gets so right, adding a lot of depth and richness to the already well-realised world of Thedas BioWare started cultivating almost two decades ago. It’s a great adventure so I won’t spoil anything, but just know that it builds up and concludes incredibly satisfyingly, providing answers to theories that fans have exchanged since Inquisition ended. While I will always miss the grimier, darker fantasy vibe that the original Dragon Age employed, The Veilguard strikes a sensible balance. A balance between strong storytelling rooted in mature themes and some much-needed levity between the team during the downtime. It’s the most “alive” story I’ve experienced in a BioWare game, heck, any game, for a long time.
That’s owing to how much your choice matters in Veilguard. Some are minor – a character you might help will appear on the sidelines later to help or hinder you. Others take the story in a slightly different direction, physically altering the world and how others interact with you. This all starts at the beginning of the game, where you can select a custom origin story, class and race for your version of Rook. But the ramifications of your choices and their consequences are felt for the entirety of Veilguard’s runtime. I’d, once again, love to go into more detail about how the game weaves an intricate web of choice and related consequences, but Veilguard’s surprises are best experienced fresh.
Your choices permeate so many aspects of your time with Veilguard, too. After completing a side mission, you’ll hear your companions talking about how that quest played out. Even if a mission happens where said companion wasn’t present, they’ll still ask about it as if they’ve heard it around the home base. You can even see them, sometimes, catching up separately from you whenever you run through your base. It’s a unique aspect of The Veilguard that I really enjoyed – to have the people around me constantly commenting on what’s going on in the past or even in the present in relation to the past is pretty impressive. It really feels like the BioWare formula is hitting its peak here.
But so much of Veilguard’s achievement is in its confidence in itself, drawing from the strengths of the games that came before but still offering up an experience that is its own. While it’s not as open as Inquisition, the worlds you’ll explore are denser, with many things to discover. The sense of time and its effect on each place is similar to Kirkwall from the second game. And finally, how locations are handled for main quests feels incredibly reminiscent of Dragon Age: Origins. It’s an effective and honed mix of each game’s greatest aspects and helps Veilguard stand out from other RPGs.
Where things begin to deviate significantly from the other games is the combat, which veers more into Mass Effect territory than anything else. Veilguard’s combat is fast and snappy, encouraging you to find the perfect synergy between yourself and your teammates. I was concerned that this new combat system’s limitations – namely that you can only take three skills into battle – would make Veilguard feel like a gross oversimplification. But the flow of combat combined with the variety of encounters you come up against more than makes up for it. It’s an understandable concern, given how many spells you could use at any given time in previous games, but the more time I spent with Veilguard, the quicker my concerns would melt away.
That’s partly owing to the fact that each of the three classes you can pick – Warrior, Mage or Rogue – are a joy to play. Each has little quirks that make it unique from its previous iterations, pushing the boundaries of what you’d expect from these typical classes. I spent some time with all of them but ultimately selected the Mage for my playthrough. It’s phenomenal what BioWare has done with the Mage now – employing a clever mix of distant and melee combat that never gets old. Whether you prefer fighting from a distance or getting up close to your enemies, between the three classes and nine specialisations, there’s bound to be something for everyone in Veilguard.
Each class has its own skill tree, with each node having fairly typical stat bonuses and abilities you’d expect from an RPG like this. You have a lot of freedom and flexibility in approaching your build in Veilguard, being able to respect your or your teammate’s skill trees at no cost. It lets you get a feel for each of the three specialisations available for your class without incessantly grinding. That being said, I loved all three Mage specialisations, so I’d have appreciated some kind of loadout system to switch between them quickly without having to redo my entire tree. I guess that’s a testament to my indecisive nature, but it’s one of the very minor issues I have with Veilguard that’s probably only just my own.
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How the game handles its equipment and gear is much more ingenious. Every item you find in The Veilguard will have several perks attached to it, usually locked. Whenever you find a duplicate piece of equipment in Veilguard, rather than just having two of the same piece of gear, the rarity of that gear you already own will upgrade. Usually, that’ll unlock a perk for that piece of gear, too. It’s an ingenious way to hone the pool of equipment available to you and, when combined with the game’s already robust skill tree AND other optional enchantments, really helps you build a perfect build for yourself.
The other key element in building your perfect build is with your companions. They behave in combat similarly to those in the Mass Effect games, each having three to five unique abilities. You can pull them off with either hotkeys or a pause menu tied to the shoulder buttons, and layering the right combination of skills or spells will lead to a detonation that does more damage. While incredibly Mass Effect-like, it’s a simple but effective system that makes you think about who you’ll take and where. Companions are also levelled up through completing quests or speaking to them in downtime, which is a nice little way to subtly gamify the way you strengthen them, which ties into the narrative realistically too.
And you’ll want to take them all with you on every quest you do, too. The quality of the quests in The Veilguard is consistently strong throughout. Whether playing through a bombastic main story quest or some of the lower-key but still engaging companion or faction quests, they all feel good. There was rarely a moment where anything in Veilguard felt like the typical side content you’d find in an RPG of this size. There are still some minor quests, many of which have you fetching something or moving from A to B, but they aren’t incessantly repeated to the point of tedium and are still engaging.
And that really says something because I never got bored for the entirety of my time with The Veilguard, which well exceeded seventy hours. And while the notion of a game this large might be off-putting to you, know that Veilguard is dense with strong, quality tests that easily eclipse the variety seen in Inquisition. If you’re not keen on doing everything or immersing yourself in the world that BioWare has built here, I’d estimate you could easily get through the story in around thirty to forty hours, which feels well-paced. Given the variety of choices on offer and the sheer difference in combat styles between the three classes, you could also have as much fun on a repeat playthrough.
The game’s presentation is the big fat cherry on top of The Veilguard’s already delectable package. Easily showing off some of the best visuals we’ve seen from the now infamous Frostbite engine, Veilguard, quite simply, looks phenomenal. It’s always exciting to see which exotic locales the team at BioWare will whisk us away to with each Dragon Age game, and Veilguard does not disappoint. I had tangible excitement when moving to a new area for the first time, knowing that it would be a densely packed and lively locale framed by some series-best vistas. This rendition of Thedas is easily the best that Dragon Age has ever looked.
But from a technical standpoint, it’s not as clear-cut a victory for Veilguard. On consoles, the game offers two graphics modes – Fidelity and Performance. Fidelity and Performance both have great framerates, being locked at 30fps and 60fps respectively. But the picture quality in Performance mode is notably softer than in Fidelity, more noticeable than it is usually with games that offer both modes. If you’re playing Veilguard on a PC or even the PS5 Pro next month, this will presumably be a moot point, though it bears mentioning. Regardless, Veilguard is still a looker no matter where you play – the game uses everything it can, whether lighting, HDR, or other visual effects, to present what I’ve already said is Thedas looking at its best.
This is complemented by an incredible soundtrack composed by Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe. All of the tracks throughout Veilguard’s lengthy adventure are perfectly matched and help raise the emotional stakes in key moments. On a similar note, the voice performances from the entirety of the cast are nothing short of excellent. They all turn in some fantastic performances, especially for both types of Rook. They have some great performances and are easily some of BioWare’s best, helping to solidify this cast as one of my favourites from their many games. I can’t remember the last RPG where I liked the entire cast this much.
And that really speaks to the strength of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Despite my constant insistence that Mass Effect was always the better of their two massive epics, Veilguard is easily one of my favourites from the developer. It’s a perfect and heady mix of fast, frenetic combat paired with an incredible story riddled with equal parts choice and consequence that I cannot fault. It feels so good to say this, but it truly feels like BioWare is finally back. And I couldn’t be happier.
