There’s a popular meme out there where two girls are having what looks like an insane fight, and meanwhile, some kid seems to be smoking a bong and having the time of his life watching the fight happen.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard makes me feel like that kid. I have watched people fight to the death over this game. I know people that I respect who think this is one of the best video games of 2024. I know people who think this is a dreadful mess. While there are many who have come at this game in bad faith, there are plenty of differing opinions from those in good faith as well. Most of the people on both sides of the (good faith) debate have genuine love for the series, and it has been fascinating to see opinion split so dramatically on the new direction the game and the story take.
I came to Veilguard from an incredibly neutral perspective. I played all of the Dragon Age games in the past and enjoyed them all a fair bit, but never enough to really think much about them once I was done. The series never resonated on a Mass Effect type level with me. So after a 10-year gap between games, I came into this barely remembering much about any lore and minimal amounts about past characters. While I did a few Youtube refreshers before starting, I still came at this game with no real expectations about where I thought anything needed to go, and no real memory of what the writing in the first three games felt like.
I think coming at this from that kind of perspective put me in an interesting position to evaluate this game. As is common in these kinds of scenarios, I seemed to come down somewhat in the middle. I think Dragon Age: The Veilguard has issues, but I also think it is rock solid in more than enough ways to be a very good video game. I was almost never completely in love with the game and dying to play more, but it means something that every single time I picked up the controller and played for an hour or two, I ended up having a pretty good time.
Super Smash Dead Island 2: The Veilguard
A lot of the most intense discourse surrounding Veilguard seemed to center around the writing, the characters, and the lore. I’ve noticed a lot less discussion about the actual core gameplay. Perhaps that is because the consensus is that it is pretty damn good. Every time I was doing missions and fighting in this game, I was impressed by how rock solid the combat and exploration were.
I found the combat to be the biggest strength to this game by a fair bit. I played as the warrior class, so I was generally engaged in melee combat. The sound design is excellent, and every blow with your weapon feels impactful. The controls are all responsive, and the frame rate and performance were all incredibly smooth on my Xbox Series X.
Outside of basic attacks, you also have various skills to use, as well as your standard parries and dodges. You can also command your party to use skills. The skills were also a big highlight for me. You get a pretty nice variety to pick from, and you can customize up to three to use at any time. I enjoyed switching my skills around as different scenarios came up in order to fight the most effectively. As a warrior, I was absolutely in love with my dropkick move and almost never let it out of my rotation. Honestly, the entire game almost felt like it was built around everyone having this move in their arsenal. It was surprisingly effective at kicking enemies away, and Veilguard has A LOT of cliffs, pits, and other things that you can kick enemies off of or into. Even though it was a somewhat weaker move from a damage perspective, I was constantly running into scenarios where I could insta-kill enemies by kicking them off a ledge. This might have been the most fun individual move I used in any video game in 2024.
The other most satisfying element of combat was the combo attacks. Depending on attack types, if you hit an enemy with two different moves (generally, one from a party member and one from yourself), a chain explosion of sorts will occur. I always planned out my party members and my own moves to make sure I had opportunities to do these, as they are very effective and feel great to use.
Parries also feel excellent to use. Once again, the sound design is great, and there is a slow motion element to the counterattack after a parry that always made it seem super cool. I do think that a few design decisions held back this element of the combat a bit, which is a shame because the core execution of it is so good. First off, most enemies have some attacks that are unblockable. So you have to dodge instead of block or parry when these attacks happen. Enemies get outlined in red when they are about to use one of these attacks, but especially in a crowded battlefield, it gets really hard to tell when an enemy is using one of these attacks. Most games make it really obvious if an unblockable attack is coming, and Veilguard failed there a bit with its visual cues. It bummed me out, because I really enjoy the parry mechanic, but I found myself dodging a lot more than parrying to be safe because I just couldn’t always tell if I would be able to parry any given enemy attack. Not to mention, it felt like most of the tougher enemies in the game spammed unblockable attacks a bit too often for it to always be an option anyway.
My only other real complaint with combat is that I was actually able to start picking up on which attacks were unblockable because I’d see each attack so damn much. I didn’t think the enemy variety was as strong as it could have been for anyone trying to do a more full playthrough of the game. I logged 50 hours into Veilguard and felt like I easily had every enemy attack pattern down pat without even trying by the end.
When you aren’t in combat, the other main gameplay element of Veilguard is its exploration. Veilguard is a much more massive game than it first appears. You aren’t plopped into one big open world map, but there are tons of “zones” in the game that are big, with lots of winding paths and side trails to go on. Thorough exploration in the game rewards you with lots of loot, as pretty much every dead end or side path in the game contains a treasure chest at the end of some sort. On one hand, I appreciated how much the game rewards you for exploration, but I actually got sick of this the further I went into the game. Veilguard gives you so much loot that it loses its luster the more you play. I found a lot of great loot by exploring, but I found much more loot that I didn’t care about, so I lost a lot of interest in whatever I was finding by the end.
As you are exploring, Veilguard also throws plenty of navigational puzzles at you. Many areas in the game are blocked by blight, which is the poison infecting the land. In these areas, you need to find the sources of the blight in the environment and destroy them in order to progress. Every time you destroy blight, it slowly fades away with an extremely gratifying crackle. This mechanic is Powerwash Simulator levels of satisfying. I never got tired of destroying blight through my entire playthrough, which is impressive because you do a whole lot of it.
The Best Way To Evaluate The Writing In a Video Game Is ALWAYS to Watch 30 Second Game Clips On Twitter
Once you stop “playing” Veilguard and start taking in cutscenes and conversations is when the discourse around this game changes drastically. I think anyone who says that Veilguard’s gameplay isn’t at least competent is probably not discussing the game in good faith, even if it may not be exactly what they want. But I do understand how someone might be turned off by the story or writing, even though I think that it’s fine for the most part.
Your main goal in Veilguard is to stop two crazy Elven gods from destroying the world through the blight (there’s a lot more than that, obviously, but I’m keeping it as spoiler-free as possible). In order to do this, you need to recruit an elite team. The beginnings of the plot are mostly finding this team one by one and recruiting them to the cause.
During this section of the game, I was pretty down on the overall plot of the game. There isn’t much happening in the main plot during the recruiting phase. There are a lot of smaller stories introducing the new characters, but almost none of these were really hitting for me. None of the characters really pulled me in early on either. I think a lot of them felt just a bit too one-dimensional. So when the game centers solely around telling individual stories of each character and their world over focusing on the main plot, it’s not good if I don’t care about any of the characters.
After you get your full crew, a few things start to happen in the main plot that did actually start to pull me in a little bit. There is a giant battle in the middle of the game that absolutely wowed me from both a storytelling and gameplay perspective.
But even when the game builds up plot momentum, it always seems to go back to the characters. There are multiple points in the story where the crew sits down, and it is decided that the best way to fight back against the evil gods is for everyone to handle their own business so that they can be fully devoted to the task at hand. It feels a bit lazy at times.
I don’t mind a story where the main plot gets thrown away for a lot of character arcs instead. I really enjoyed Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth as an example. But the character arcs have to be good. Luckily, after some slow starts, I did get pulled in by more of these stories as the game goes along. The highlight for me ended up being Emmrich’s storyline. Emmrich is a necromancer with a fear of death. His story is something I could relate to, and the themes tackled are not ones I see addressed in video games very often. A few others also won me over, although some of them never quite got off the ground floor for me. I found there to be a pretty sizeable chasm in quality between the different stories told in the game.
Luckily, the main plot does pick up quite a bit in the final act, and a lot of exciting things happen from there. I ended the game with mixed feelings on the story. There are genuinely high highs and some pretty low lows, too. I came away thinking that the story was just good enough to be worthwhile, but not good enough to even be amongst my top 10 stories from 2024, which is certainly a bit disappointing coming from a developer with the pedigree of Bioware. I think many of the thoughts that people have on this game are strongly guided by their relationships with past Dragon Age games and Bioware games. I feel like I came into this without any strong feelings one way or another, and I did not particularly care about past lore vs. current lore, which may have helped me come down on thinking that the story was still a net positive overall.
The other big criticism with Veilguard has come from the writing. Much like the story, I found this to be a mixed bag, though I’m a little lower on the writing than I was on the story itself. The most “cringe” clips are all the ones that were posted all over social media, and I do think there are occasional moments in a very long game that were just a bit off, but I honestly didn’t think it was all that bad overall. My biggest criticism with the writing mostly comes from the main party members. I felt like too much of the cast has a certain character attribute or trope, and it gets leaned in on a little too hard almost all of the time. That is the number one reason why I didn’t feel like a lot of characters had as much depth as I’d like. But I also didn’t think it was offensively bad more than a handful of times.
My bigger issues with the writing came from the player character, “Rook.” Much like any Bioware game, you have a dialogue wheel and are able to choose what to say in almost every conversation in the game. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long to figure out that these choices are mostly pointless. Whether I chose the very nice seeming option or the more aggressive and firm sounding option, the dialogue all seems to come out roughly the same. I didn’t feel like I could make my character quite who I wanted him to be throughout the game, and the constant stops for dialogue choices ended up feeling increasingly pointless the longer I played. This is a problem a lot of games with dialogue options tend to have, so in a vacuum, I wasn’t all that upset by this. But from a Bioware legacy standpoint, I can understand why this may have rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. The game does also offer you some choices that impact the plot, but a few too many of these don’t seem to matter as much as I’d like either (although you still do get some good choices to make in spots).
They Really Devoted A Lot Of Labor To Making Beautiful Vistas And Not Enough Labor On Creating Beautiful Animated Titties. So Woke.
While Veilguard can be frustrating from a choice perspective when it comes to the plot, it certainly is not when it comes to deciding how to best put your character and party together.
Veilguard has a whole lot of RPG elements that you can dive into. You have a massive skill tree with tons of options, although I’d say there are a few too many elements of the skill tree that I didn’t care about. You can also level up your party members, your reputations with factions, and even the various shops in the game. Between all of this and picking your party members and what skills they use, you can customize this game and play in a nice variety of ways. All these RPG elements kept the side quests and combat feeling rewarding for me.
Veilguard also rewards your sights and senses as well. This was easily one of the best-looking games of 2024 in my view. The general art style for the characters is hit or miss, but this has some of the most astounding environments that you will find in video games. I could not stop myself from entering photo mode constantly as I played. The big vistas and beautiful backgrounds made exploring a treat, and there are varied enough landscapes where it never got old throughout my entire time with the game.
Reminder That 7.5s Are Good Games
This all adds up to a very complicated game for me to score. Because the general plot and characters didn’t really pull me in, I rarely had a strong desire to boot up Veilguard on any given day. But without fail, every 2-3 days, I’d play it for 1-2 hours, have a pretty dang good time overall, and then the cycle would repeat itself.
Usually, when I’m having a good time with a game, I’m hungry to keep playing. But even when I had a good time here, I wasn’t desperate for more. Yet, I did consistently come back, I did consistently enjoy it, and I did beat the game, even if it took me something like 3 months to do it.
In the end, I firmly believe your own expectations might be the biggest indicator of how much you enjoy this game. If you are able to come in without much in terms of preconceived notions of what this game should be, I think you will find a very competent and solid action RPG with a story and writing that can be hit or miss at times. That might not be what everyone wanted, but there is certainly enough here where I can say that I had a good time with this game. Now I’ll proceed to take another rhetorical bong hit.
Score: 7.5/10
Big Nerd Gaming 
Leave a comment