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Minor spoilers for the first few hours of Veilguard and heavy spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3
For all the things I ended up enjoying about Dragon Age: The Veilguard, it isn’t much of an RPG. What little roleplaying it does offer revolves around what flavour of supportive hero you prefer, and you can count the number of impactful dialogue decisions on a three-fingered hand. This might sound utterly damning in the wake of Baldur’s Gate 3’s incredible reactivity, and if I approached games as some sort of tedious comparative intellectual exercise rather than just, y’know, seeing how I felt about them, then I suppose it would be. Weirdly, though, the recent memory of Baldur’s Gate 3 didn’t diminish my time with Veilguard at all. It was actually the opposite: it freed Dragon Age from having to carry the torch for a certain period in Bioware’s history, and let me enjoy Veilguard for what it was.
To clear this up before getting into it: I’m not saying we shouldn’t ask for better from games, nor lower our standards. There’s a theoretical version of Veilguard that stuck with a more cohesive vision from the start, didn’t have to weather publisher meddling or key talent bleeding from Bioware, and ended up a much more confident and robust RPG. The version of Veilguard we got feels compromised; the product of a messy development cycle fraught with shifting priorities, and full of trends and tonal choices that haven’t aged especially well in the time since that cycle begun.
That all said, Veilguard also did a lot of things I liked, and I was happy to forgive a lot of things I didn’t because Baldur’s Gate 3 had already provided those things with gusto. “Oi! Are you saying I should enjoy bad games because other, better games exist?” Nope! Stop extrapolating specific experiences into general ones! That’s not how art works! Anyone who tells you differently has GenAI stock.
So, Veilguard. One of the points I made early in my review is this: Rook’s a boy scout, and there’s no way around that. There’s an early choice that has you decide whether to leave a mayor to die for selling his town out to the bad elf gods. If you’re a Grey Warden, you can also send him off to fight Darkspawn. It’s such a classic Dragon Age choice in a game almost entirely absent of them that I’m certain it’s a remnant for an earlier build. From here on out, Veilguard constricts, funneling down a linear tunnel both its overarching story and the conversations that Rook can hold with their companions.
Conversely, *gestures at killing Astarion within the first hour of BG3*. Here’s the thing, though: the first time I made camp in Larian’s game, I distinctly remember feeling “Oh shit, this is Dragon Age now. We’ve come full circle!.” BG3 obviously offers a lot more systemic reactivity that either Shadows of Amn or Dragon Age: Origins even attempted, but as far as the relationships you build with your team go, I’d already had my Dragon Age 4 moment. I like Thedas a lot, but I’ve always been more interested in the shape of Dragon Age than its lore specifics. Baldur’s Gate 3 felt like everything I wanted from Bioware, plus everything I wanted from Larian. By the time I got around to playing Veilguard, I didn’t really have any expectations: I was just curious.
But I also found that Veilguard’s linearity does work for it in certain ways, letting it do things that might not be ‘better,’ but maybe feel more successful in terms of what it’s trying to offer. While Larian’s writing is much stronger in terms of characters and dialogue, I actually felt the overall plot fumbled quite spectacularly toward the latter third. I’ve replayed Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows Of Amn several times, and so the memory of how intimidating, eldritch, and unknowable-feeling the Mind Flayers in the sewers are clashed pretty strongly with the spectacularly goofy “what if there was a good Mindflayer who talked and you could also bone?” bit, which shattered my suspension of disbelief so hard it never recovered. There are parts within BG3’s finale I like, but I think it shows how – even with such good writing – it’s supremely difficult to pull a satisfying ending with so many variables.
That Veilguard’s ending works so well is partly because it isn’t especially ambitious. It’s a series of action film goodies vs. baddies set pieces. Hard to fumble, but also hard to sell convincingly if you aren’t invested in the fates of the characters involved, which I very much was by that point. And this measured ambition has advantages when playing Veilguard, too: it lets you actually relax. Any given map in Baldur’s Gate 3 is utter marvel of creativity, and utterly exhausting to clear if you’re intent on scouring every inch of it. Nearly every combat encounter also feels tailored and deliberate, with environmental factors and enemy abilities meaning each one becomes its own puzzle. In Veilguard, you may simply bonk. This bonk for blue shields, this bonk for yellow shields. Bonk bonk. It’s simple enough that it does wear out its welcome eventually, but it also keeps everything flowing at a steady clip that suits the escalating story stakes.
That modern Bioware are no longer the best example of custodians of their own legacy is disappointing. I can, to some extent, understand how Veilguard is emblematic of something justifiably missed, and so has become somewhat of a sin eater. Anthem is almost exempt from being quite as disappointing, since it didn’t even try to recreate the things so many love about Bioware’s heyday. But I’ll take what I feel is an honest attempt with flaws over something cynical. To me, Veilguard isn’t a return to form – but it does suggest that Bioware understand what made that form special, and could return to it, time and circumstance allowing. Until then, as Larian’s publishing head put it , it’s no bad thing to have some Netflix to switch off to in the downtime between seasons of prestige telly – even if I’d feel a lot less charitable if Netflix is all we had.