The fourth entry in BioWare’s Dragon Age series, which is a popular dystopian fantasy RPG video game featuring heavy horror elements, DRAGON AGE: THE VEILGUARD is a fun, captivating game that manages to do something out of the gate that few big-name games seem capable of: be fully playable without issues from release day.
In my first playthrough, I encountered one brief, funny visual glitch, and no bugs. In my second I had to fight the bug that reset your ultimate to the default every time you upgraded a companion character’s skills. Not only was that merely an annoyance, it’s been patched as of December 4th. Of my 33 friends and acquaintances playing the game, one has had a single bug that blocked them from getting a small chest, and a couple of others have had the ultimate bug issue, and that’s it. When was the last time a game from a major studio was released that could claim anything like that?
On top of that the game is beautiful, in line with the other Dragon Age games, with a compelling set of themes and narratives, and in my opinion, the best set of companions yet. That isn’t to say it’s perfect, which I probably have to note because there’s a small, incredibly loud group of hate brigadiers out there ready to tear this piece apart is mostly due to the fact that Veilguard is progressive for its time. Another big factor is that it’s been ten years since the last Dragon Age game, which means that some people built up impossible expectations and even demands for what this game would have and be.
While BioWare hadn’t stopped working on its next Dragon Age installment, Veilguard only had four years of that ten; the shape and focus of the game was changed twice in there. Knowing that makes the tone shifts incredibly understandable. There’s an optimism and deeper hope running through the party and game that really isn’t there in the other three, but it’s grounded.
The game begins by choosing your character’s class and race be it mage, rogue, or warrior and Human, Dalish/Elf, Dwarf, and the unique to the series: Qunari, as you fight to save the world of Thedas (THE Dragon Age Setting) from ancient gods.
Each Dragon Age game has a different protagonist, and Veilguard’s Rook doesn’t have what the others did to give them an advantage when building a team. Origin’s Hero of Ferelden was one of two survivors of a legendary, respected order that had treaties and agreements backing them up, giving them the authority to storm into throne rooms and argue with leaders. Dragon Age 2’s Hawke was a child of nobility which opened the door for them to establish a reputation and get noticed very quickly by the nation-state they were in. Inquisition’s Inquisitor gets a magic hand that is the only thing able to repair tears between the living world and the world of spirits and therefore is indispensable so a team builds up around them.
Instead, Rook is a nobody. Though a nobody who cares. I find that refreshing that Rook got noticed and added to a team as second in command because of how much Rook cared and put people over politics and objects. It also means that Rook can’t afford to callously agree to the deaths of dozens or hundreds of people the way the Hero and Inquisitor can. Rook can’t risk doing abominable things like selling a companion back to a former slaver owner, the way Hawke could. If Thedas is to survive after the team leader is taken out of commission, Rook must care and work with people.
Rook is a closer reflection of the player than any of the other three will ever be, and yet still has the power fantasy element of saving the world. Not every game needs to allow the player character to be evil. Caring is incredibly important.
It’s reflected throughout the game, but also heavily in the companion who is my personal favorite member of Veilguard’s found family – Professor Emmrich Volkarin. From the moment you recruit him he shows kindness and empathy, taking the time during that mission to kneel down and get on a just-freed slave’s level and assure them that in his country there is no slavery and that someone will come to further help them shortly.
He’s patient and not weak for it. In fact, if you put him in charge of one of the teams in endgame, you get to see this 50-or-60-something guy slide down a sloped surface into an aikido roll and blast an enemy out of the way with magic so casually it’s clearly a walk in the park. Emmrich chooses to be gentle when he could steamroll his way through just about anything.
Speaking of companions, though, must lead into discussing Taash. Dragon Age games are progressive for their time. They’ve always included LGBTQ+ people from the very start. Each time those characters are complained about for ‘pushing an agenda’ and torn into for various reasons, only to have the next game come out and the new ones are torn apart for pushing an agenda and other things while the previous set are held up as examples of representation done right. It’s exhausting.
Taash is the first non-binary companion in a Dragon Age game. Their character arc is about their identity, both with their gender and as the qunari child of a qunari refugee in the mostly human kingdom of Rivain that has been attacked by qunari invaders for Ages. Their mother still follows the religion of the qunari people, the Qun, and Taash is an early 20-something person caught between multiple worlds.
If you don’t live under a rock, you know how political simply existing outside the gender norm has become. If you’re at all in gaming circles you know that every time a game comes out with anything inclusive on that front, people charge in to attack it because hate and rage sells, and they fill the internet with deliberate disinformation. It’s much the same with Taash.
The gender journey that Taash travels in this game is one that is incredibly overdue. I don’t say this because I can point to another game and say ‘yeah, it should have been in there.’ I say it because their journey resonates with me on an incredibly personal level, and if I’d encountered them ten, twenty, or even thirty years ago I would not have struggled as much as I have. They are a demonstration of why representation is important.
Taash knows something bothers them about themself from when you meet them, but they don’t have the terms to start exploring it. They don’t have the exposure to the concept of trans people to realize it’s actually okay to not fit your assigned gender at birth. They meet and talk to other trans people, including the player’s Rook if you chose to make them trans, and finally have the words to understand what’s going on with them.
Taash has a line that’s been taken out of context (actually several of them, but let’s just focus on this one at the moment:) “Nobody likes being a woman.” That parallels how my own journey started many years ago. I discovered that actually, a lot of women do like being women. They don’t like how they’re treated as women a lot of the time, but they are happy as women. I never was, and assumed everyone felt exactly the same way. I started talking to several female friends and discovered to my surprise that I was an outlier, but I didn’t have the terms or exposure to the terms that would fit who I was as a person.
If Taash or someone like them on a similar journey had been in a videogame made a decade ago, it would have saved me a lot of pain and struggle. But they’re here now, and maybe that means other people can be saved time and suffering because here’s them, encapsulated on the screen, with the option of playing through to see where their journey goes.
It’s also incredibly nice, more nice than I had any idea it could be, to finally play a non-binary protagonist in a game. No one is forced into this, no one has to take the early-game option to make being trans relevant to your character, but it’s included and i had no clue how good that would feel. They even could have gotten away with just offering trans options, but choosing to take the trans background option means there are chances to have it come up in the game itself and be relevant. It’s fulfilling. It’s freeing.
Representation matters, because it gives people an opportunity to reach a greater understanding of and empathy for themselves and others.
Also notable is Neve, another companion, for being disabled with a prosthetic leg. No one, not even once, asks if she’s up for the job because of her disability. No one questions her skills or her intelligence. No one even (to the best of my knowledge, I know I still have yet to hear all of the companion conversations and ambient dialogue) asks about the prosthetic. This too is incredibly refreshing, I say as someone who walks with a cane.
I’m questioned constantly about why I have the cane, my capability is doubted, and I’m talked over. It was even worse when I was using a wheelchair. And here’s Neve, confident, supported, and trusted. She’s not BioWare’s first disabled companion, but she’s (to the best of my memory) the first female disabled companion. Further, she’s South-Asian-coded. I say coded because Thedas doesn’t have the same countries as the real world.
Veilguard also includes Bellara, an Asian Dalish Elf companion who is part mad scientist and part constantly putting a brave and happy face on the fact that she’s hurting, and Davrin, a warm, charming Black single dad to a griffon. It’s important to point out that you can hug the griffon regularly, and 50% of the playerbase is apparently made of monsters who have never hugged Assan.
Dragon Age has come a long way since Origin’s companions who were all white except for the rock person and I appreciate it. This group of companions is mostly a triumph, though there is one who is weaker, unfortunately, and she ties into the weaker area of the game in general: legacy and streamlining.
Dragon Age is one of the games where Your Choices Matter, where your world state from previous games is expected to have some influence on the current world. The former head writer of Dragon Age Origins, 2, and Inquisition, David Gaider, recently discussed how every influential choice could make the next game way more complicated. With three games of content and choices to draw from, the 4th entry in the series could easily go way over budget trying to account for the players and their preferences.
Dragon Age Inquisition, the third game, had an elaborate site where you could import dozens of things about your worldstate from Origins and 2. I don’t recall anyone outright saying this was expensive, but that’s the logical conclusion. Inquisition was really strong on the legacy front because of it. That didn’t stop complainers, though, and it’s likely hard to see something you poured incredible amounts of time and money into only get complaints.
Veilguard, in my opinion, overreacted in the other direction. There are only three choices that carry over into Veilguard – who your Inquisitor romanced, what happened to the Inquisition, and how your Inquisitor feels about Solas. With the game focusing on countries we haven’t been to before, that’s mostly understandable but it leaves a few glaring gaps considering where we go and who we see.
Take Hawke for instance. Either the player’s Hawke is trapped in the Fade, the spirit realm you spend a significant amount of time adjacent to, or they’re in Weisshaupt, the fortress that you arrive at as it’s being overrun. Hawke does not appear at all. They are not mentioned at all, despite the presence of two of Hawke’s former companions in the game.
And let’s talk about one of those companions as well, Isabela. Her changes and growth make sense if you stop and think about them, but for anyone without context could be incredibly confusing. She’s a pirate, leading the Lord of Fortune faction, which is basically a pirate group. There’s a conversation between Taash (a member of the Lord of Fortune) and Bellara (a Dalish companion of Rook) where Taash says that they have cultural consultants who make sure that no important artifacts are kept and resold for a profit, shocking Bellara. That’s not the typical pirate way.
In Dragon Age 2, Isabela stole an important cultural relic and a city-state was sacked because of it. Many people died. It’s absolutely logical that she changed and grew, but the game doesn’t mention that. It leaves a weird gap where a single line of dialogue could have helped. If Taash had said anything along the lines of “Yeah. Guess Isabela had something go really wrong when she kept one. Lot of people died. Didn’t want that to happen again,” then you have an in-game explanation of why these pirates are considerate looters that can satisfy newbies and veterans alike, especially as it doesn’t go against any former player choices.
This leads to another faction that seems questionably nice if you don’t extrapolate from past events: the Crows. The Crows are assassins. They murder for money. In Origins, the Hero of Ferelden had a Crow companion named Zevran Arainai from House Arainai who talks at length about how brutal his training was. I won’t go into detail, but imagine the worst that can happen to a child from a minority race being broken into a cold-blooded killer and there you go.
Veilguard has House Dellamorte, who seems kinder to its kid trainees and also gentle for a group of people who are rich from murder. They have morals and standards. Again, on the surface that’s extremely odd. But if Zevran’s alive in your world state, he’s spent the last twenty years killing the worst of the worst of the Crows, which would logically cause some to rethink being excessive with the brutality. If he’s dead there’s still a mysterious person doing that. That alone could create change in the Houses. A mention of a vague someone doing this would again help significantly for newbies and veterans without alienating veteran players.
There’s also implications that House Dellamorte is made up of idealists from a recent AMA hosted by two of the game devs on reddit. Again, this is a place where a little work could have gone a long way in showing that Thedas isn’t being whitewashed into a less dystopian setting. The thought is there, but it wasn’t conveyed well.
And Lace Harding, the returning character, doesn’t help. In Inquisition, she’s competent and nice but aloof. In Veilguard she’s a people-pleaser above everything else, bubbly even after tragedy strikes, and seems to not have regressed into someone younger after ten years of tracking a guy who is determined to basically destroy the world.
The game hasn’t been “disneyfied” as some people have claimed. It’s still dark and grim without thankfully going back to some of its grimdark edginess from Origins, it still has heavy moments and difficult choices, but some things stand out as oddly lightened up like the three examples above and that’s my only real complaint. In (theoretically) trying to cut costs by avoiding some of its complicated legacy, Veilguard was weakened.
My lesser complaint runs parallel to that. There were a lot of opportunities to bring back legacy characters in cameos where it mattered. Merrill, from Origins and 2, was the first to cleans an eluvian of the Blight, something that’s very relevant to Veilguard. Fenris, from 2, is a former slave from Tevinter and we spend a great deal of time in Tevinter. Cole, from Inquisition, is a Compassion spirit with either a little humanity or a lot of humanity depending on your choices, and Veilguard deals heavily with spirits who have fully become fleshy beings. I mentioned Hawke earlier. Yes, these characters could be tricky. Merrill could be dead, Fenrish could have been sold back to slavers, Cole’s nature could be different, and Hawke has three personality type options as well as three class options. But brief cameos from people who opted into them by marking them as alive/free in their worldstate would have made the game feel a lot more connected to the past.
Morrigin’s (Origins) return is great. The return of the queer trio of Dorian (Inquisition,) Maevaris (comics,) and Tarquin (short story,) is fantastic. Isabela (2) and Varric (2, Inquisition) are wonderful familiar faces. And it is very likely incredibly difficult to balance out who should come back and who should not. But there’s a part of me that feels like if you can repeatedly bring back a guy who is assault-levels of creepy and ready for hundreds to be slaughtered in Origins, who is on board with the torture, assault, and eventual killing of hundreds again in 2, and suddenly just this poor misunderstood addict who is deep-down such a competent and great guy in Inquisition, you should maybe consider bringing back characters who have cause to be involved and included in a story.
On the whole I love this game. I didn’t even touch on the combat, which is my favorite out of all of the Dragon Age combat systems, versatile and flexible and fun even if as a mage you do spent a significant amount of time running from the dragons as your companion Lucanis is like “we must close in!” No, Lucanis, you close in. I’m good.
There were also a lot of great quality of life improvements. No longer having to juggle lyrium and healing potions for myself and my party is such a relief. I miss the deep crafting system of Inquisition because yes, I sure did put everyone in plaidweave and found it hilarious, and who doesn’t want to throw bees at their enemies, but what we got was interesting and different enough that I didn’t mind.
Veilguard is a 9/10 for me. I beat it and immediately started another playthrough, something I’ve done with only one game before. I love running around in it, fighting things in it (and thank everything there’s now markers saying that popping that blight bubble on a Treviso rooftop while you’re running a different low-level mission might be a very poor choice,) and exploring. The scenery in this game is stunning and the lack of nomination for art direction from the Video Game Awards is a shock, as is the lack of nomination for any of the phenomenal voice acting.
This game also made me sob like a baby when the revelation of the twist came near the end. I’d known something was off there, but couldn’t put my finger on what was going on. I was expecting to have to sacrifice, not that a sacrifice had already been made.
Dragon Age has had a lot of compelling companions, and this set is overall my favorite, including the so-far-unmentioned skeleson (yes, a skeleton that is your son,) that you can go play rock-paper-scissors with every time you’re back at the base and only 31% of people do, because 69% of you are also monsters.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go back to romancing Emmrich and having complicated feelings about where on the line I am between trans-non-binary and trans-masc because I want to be with him but especially want to be him.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is available on PC, Playstation 5, and Xbox Series S and X.
