The Veilguard Is A Super Divisive Sequel

Today, October 28, reviews went live for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. I reviewed it here at Kotaku, and despite being jaded toward the series for the better part of a decade, I really loved the long-awaited fourth entry. Right now it sits at a strong 84 on review aggregate site Metacritic, which is about in line with where these games typically land. The original Dragon Age: Origins sits at an 86, with Inquisition, the series’ third entry, landing close by at 84. Meanwhile, Dragon Age II, probably the most divisive game in the series, sits at 79. As much as I loved my time with The Veilguard, I knew it would elicit some pretty divergent reactions from folks. There are 10s and there are some more middling scores. You can even find some folks straight-up saying they “do not recommend” the game, like YouTuber Skill Up does while discussing all his problems with BioWare’s latest entry. But what’s the issue? What are folks so split on? Well, everything, it sounds like.

To set a baseline, I’d gone from fan of Dragon Age to detractor over the past 10 years and was doubtful that The Veilguard could bring me back. I loved the games when they came out, then replayed them all for a book club-style podcast I do and soured on them all in their own ways over time, largely due to the series’ handling of continuity and its tendency to hand off protagonists’ stories from one to another. The Veilguard pulled me back in when I could not have been more out. The story was a slow burn, but I was genuinely thrilled by its finale. The new cast of heroes won me over pretty easily and ascended to the upper echelons of my own personal rankings of BioWare’s RPG casts. And though it deviates greatly from the series’ tactical roots, I found the action-based combat a blast to play and experiment with. Overall, it’s a game that feels like it harkens to the studio’s heyday, and is a reminder of what it does best.

Meanwhile, VGC sits at the bottom of the Metacritic spread and came to pretty much the opposite conclusions I did on some of those points, in part because what I viewed as a calculated “back to basics” moment for the team felt, to their critic, somewhat archaic.

“Within the modern action RPG space, Dragon Age: The Veilguard feels fine,” reviewer Jordan Middler wrote. “It’s a game that is never overtly bad, but it’s also only ever very fleetingly amazing. We particularly enjoyed its cast, but the majority of things you’re asked to do with them are disappointingly repetitive. There are moments of spectacle, and longer main missions that show potential, but overall we were left feeling like BioWare hasn’t evolved with the times.”

Though I adored the members of the titular Veilguard, others didn’t find the new characters quite so endearing, with Sports Illustrated drawing a critical parallel to the writing in the MCU.

“A lot of the dialogue in Veilguard has that same, sarcastic, quippy tone of the Marvel movies,” Kirk McKeand wrote. “It’s like someone crunching an ice pop in your ear. There are rare moments where excellent writing reaches through the screen and makes you consider your mortality, but it’s inconsistent. Compelling conversations about religion, history, and the interpretations of both are juxtaposed against voice lines where people say things like “watch out, these guys GO HARD”, “were they… doing it?”, or “taking the p*ss”. It pulls you right out of the fantasy setting. These characters definitely know what TikTok is.”

There’s been a lot of pre-release discussion around whether or not The Veilguard feels “like a Dragon Age game.” Skill Up’s video touches on this in the most damning review I’ve seen thus far. It starts off going real hard on The Veilguard’s tone, saying it doesn’t match the same dark tone some have come to expect in previous games, while also just broadly saying the writing is not up to snuff.

“The writing is, frankly, terminal.” Skill Up says. “It lacks any nuance or wit or wisdom. It cannot communicate ideas except to say them aloud to the camera. It manufactures petty, unbelievable tension because it doesn’t know how to create anything more real and it’s too scared to ever be truly confronting or dark for fear that it might make the audience uncomfortable. Every interaction between the companions feels like HR is in the room and every interaction led by the main character Rook sounds like he’s addressing an under-12 soccer team before a semi-final or teaching toddlers how to properly share toys.”

Ouch. By contrast, while I wouldn’t defend every line BioWare wrote, as I do think there’s some merit to the MCU comparison, I didn’t feel like the game was compromising on the series’ typical dark fantasy trappings. Sure, the world doesn’t look as gnarly as it did back in Origins because The Veilguard presents it in a more Pixar-esque art style (and with cinematography to match), but there’s still some high stakes and some pretty horrifying lore drops in stories like that of Davrin, the Grey Warden who discovers hidden truths in the faction’s history, or in the big reveals tied to Solas, the Inquisition party-member turned antagonist of The Veilguard.

But what about the folks on the higher end of the scale? Eurogamer gave The Veilguard a whopping five stars out of five. While the pivot to action RPG combat has been a contentious point for those who want to see the series return to its tactical roots, it’s landing for folks who want something more evocative of BioWare’s Mass Effect.

“…there’s a lot more other stuff going on in The Veilguard combat than has been in Dragon Age games before,” Robert Purchese wrote. “It’s an action game, really, a boundary the series has been pushing towards but never quite passed, always emotionally shackled, as it was, by its CRPG roots. But now it’s stepped over, taking Mass Effect’s lead as an example, and it’s discovered something new and very successful as a result.”

Another controversial decision that the game’s developers made is just how it implements choice and consequence. Impactful choices have been a big part of BioWare’s portfolio over the years, and when it was confirmed that The Veilguard would only import three choices from previous games (all of which are from 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition), there was a fear that the game would feel detached from the past. IGN’s 9/10 review touches on this, saying The Veilguard feels like a soft reboot of sorts, even as it includes the protagonist from the previous game and a conflict that should, in theory, feature them frequently.

“If you were expecting decisions from previous games in the series to carry over, I’m sorry to say they’ve never mattered less,” Leana Hafer wrote. “[…] things like who you chose to make head of the Chantry at the end of Inquisition never come up. There’s no sign of the Warden from Origins, even though you visit the stronghold of their order. Hawke gets only a passing mention. There are some other cameos from both Origins and Dragon Age 2, but those characters conspicuously don’t reference any important choices you may have made in their presence. This story feels like both a send-off and a soft reboot, in a way, which was paradoxically a bit refreshing and disappointing at the same time.”

I was of two minds on this in my review. Over the years, I think I’ve learned it’s more important to me that my old choices are not contradicted in future games, rather than that they have some huge effect on the events of sequels. Given that BioWare wasn’t going to do all the admittedly costly and time-consuming work of reflecting your many choices from earlier games in this one, seeing them carefully write around the past was preferable to them making a definitive call about those events that may have contradicted my experience. The Veilguard takes place in lands far removed from those old choices, so it makes some sense that it wouldn’t be constantly referencing the past. However, I couldn’t get behind The Veilguard’s portrayal of the previous game’s protagonist, the Inquisitor, in their brief appearances.

“Perhaps the Inquisitor’s minimal presence gave me the space to grow attached to Rook and fill in how he would be different from my last Dragon Age character,” I said in Kotaku’s review. “But every time I met up with the Inquisitor, I was reminded that the character who, ten years ago, I imagined would be facing Solas was just a puppet dragged out of a closet, a half-assed fulfillment of an obligation BioWare seems unwilling to completely make good on.”

While the decision to only have a few choices carry over is iffy, GamesRadar+ argues that as a whole, The Veilguard manages to be comprehensible to newcomers through clarity in its writing, while also catering to long-time fans by delivering on so many major mysteries they’ve been pondering for over a decade.

“Dragon Age: The Veilguard is about as approachable as it can be for both new players and those that have previously thanked the Maker,” Rollin Bishop wrote. “Appropriate context is given when proper nouns are brought up, going some way to avoid being impenetrable and making it as fine a point of entry as any to dive into. But it also answers many questions that longtime players have had over the years… while introducing even more tantalizing hints at what might come next. My only hope is that we don’t have to wait another 10 years to find out more.”

From the sound of it, where you’ll land on The Veilguard largely seems to depend on what you come to it looking for. Its action slant has impressed some, while others are still jonesing for a tactical game like Origins. If you want a continuation of your choices from old games you might be disappointed, but if you want a conclusion to years-long threads, The Veilguard offers those in spades. There are a lot of little nuances that might tip a prospective player to one side or the other, or you might just find yourself falling somewhere in the middle like VG24/7, who acknowledged that the ways in which people have diverged will make The Veilguard an interesting game to talk about.

“I expect the divided discourse to be as interesting as – and more varied than – the game,” Alex Donaldson wrote. “One thing that I think is inarguable, though, is that it showcases a BioWare on steadier feet than at any point in the last decade. Where that firmer stance has been planted just means one’s mileage really is going to vary more than the norm, depending on your predilections and tolerances.”