Jun 142024
When Dragon Age: The Veilguard was shown as part of the Xbox Games Showcase, I was not exactly thrilled.
In fact, I was pretty worried.
I’ve been worried about the next Dragon Age game for a while now, between the years of getting tiny teasers with no actual footage shown and all the people who have left BioWare since it’s been in development. I’m not crazy about the name change from “Dreadwolf” to “The Veilguard,” either.
(Also, I keep calling it Dragon Age: Veilguard by mistake since that sounds smoother to me.)
So when it finally got a full trailer, and the tone just didn’t feel like Dragon Age at all, the only thing I had left to cling to was the hope that it was just a bad trailer.
At least I didn’t have long to wonder. On Tuesday, they followed up the trailer with a 20-minute gameplay reveal.
Note: due to the nature of Veilguard’s story, the footage spoils a major reveal from Dragon Age Inquisition’s DLC.
The combat looks a bit more faster-paced even though in Inquisition, with a skill wheel to pull up for special abilities and no way to directly control party members. According to the official blog post about the gameplay reveal, the combat has “tactical depth” not shown in the video.
But what had bothered me the most in that trailer was the tone, and the tone in the gameplay reveal feels much more suitable for Dragon Age.
So this essentially restored me to my “nervous, yet cautiously optimistic” mindset.
Now, in an interview with IGN, BioWare confirmed that Veilguard is “a mission-based game,” with curated areas that do sometimes open up for “alternate branching paths, mysterious, secrets, optional content.”
One of my biggest criticisms when I played Inquisition was that it felt to me like the open world areas were entirely separate from the main quest. This sounds like it should avoid that. I’m hoping that its mission-based approach won’t go in the opposite direction and make it too linear, because I’d like to have a good amount of exploration along the way.
My other criticisms of Inquisition were related to the story, and that’s impossible to judge this early.
Once, a new Dragon Age game would have been one of my most hotly-anticipated titles. Now I’m just holding my breath hoping it doesn’t disappoint. At least my initial worries from the trailer have been calmed. But what do you think of what we’ve seen so far from Dragon Age: The Veilguard?
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Hard pass from me. There’s nothing about any of this that inspires trust. The least they could do is make it look like a DA game.
I’d be less worried if there weren’t so many people who left BioWare while it was being made.