Dragon Age: The Veilguard Review

If you had told me years ago that a new Dragon Age game would disappoint more than Anthem, I wouldn't have believed it. Anthem was BioWare stepping outside its comfort zone—a sci-fi looter-shooter was never what the studio built its reputation on. But Dragon Age? BioWare has no excuse for the game turning out like this, considering they used to be the premier studio for RPG titles.

It doesn’t help that some of the development time of Dragon Age: The Veilguard was wasted trying to make it into a live service title, even though there was no pressure from EA from doing so. Though they came to their senses and veered away from this approach, it makes me wonder if that time was spent on the writing itself, would the game have turned out to be better. Dragon Age: The Veilguard completely misses the mark in nearly every way that made the previous titles so good.

After a decade since the Inquisition, Dragon Age: The Veilguard picks up a story that left players on a tantalizing cliffhanger. Solas, an old ally, is now revealed as an ancient Elven god who plots to destroy the Veil and unleash demonic chaos. This setup is oozing with potential, but what about the execution? Painfully superficial.

The storyline of Dragon Age: The Veilguard is shallow, its characters hollow, and the emotional weight that should underpin the game is absent. It is a soulless shadow of what a Dragon Age game should be, with dated mechanics and none of the trademark heart that BioWare is known for. I went in expecting to enjoy this game, but what I found was an experience so devoid of joy and substance that the few things Dragon Age: The Veilguard does right are overshadowed by its numerous flaws.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard simply replicates the flimsiest aspects of a BioWare game, with no attempt to update the now-outdated formula. It lacks the characterization and inventiveness that distinguished its previous games. The writing is blatantly superficial, devoid of depth and nuance.

It's a clunky story that is lacking in subtlety, wit, and insight, able to convey its ideas only through loud vocalization to the camera. It constructs trite, unbelievable tension as if it doesn't know how to create anything more authentic and is too cowardly to be really confronting or dark for fear of making the audience uncomfortable.

Every interaction between the characters feels like HR is constantly at their throats, 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 share toys correctly. It just does not match the vibe or the seriousness of the story at all.

The way you develop relationships with the other characters in the story feels awfully out of date. You are given to do long quests that do not feel connected to the main plot at all, villains who you have no doubt will be beaten, and the same old settings and enemies you’re used to seeing in other fantasy RPG worlds.

The romance system of Dragon Age: The Veilguard feels as bad as the character writing. They go hand in hand, really. It feels a little too simple to get cozy with a character because of how shallow the dialogue options are. Plus, there are no supporting systems to make your romance decisions feel believable or consequential.

I find the world design in Dragon Age: The Veilguard so bizarre. I have never seen worlds like this before. They feel more like Overwatch maps than actual explorable environments. The puzzles are so mind-numbingly simple that I genuinely question how little BioWare thinks about our ability to solve them.

The combat is painfully shallow, suffering from an acute lack of enemy variety and sponginess and limited control over party members, rendering it mindless and breathtakingly repetitive. I know how brutal that all sounds, and let me be clear; I desperately wanted things to be different. I really, truly did. I know what the stakes of this game are, and I know what they mean for BioWare's future.

I had a lot of hope before playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Despite the art choices not being to my liking, I thought if maybe the writing was classic BioWare enough, I would be able to look past it. But I can't say any of that because, aside from a few extremely rare moments, there wasn't a single aspect of Dragon Age: The Veilguard that I liked. That is true for very few of the games I play.

Of course, this game has a character creation section when you start the game. It's flexible in that there are a lot of options and sliders, but all of those are ultimately limited by the one central constraint of the game's very stylized aesthetic. The characters look more like Pixar or DreamWorks characters than people.

It's clearly a BioWare decision for the characters to look like this. You don't get characters like this by accident. I do admire it because they really went for something unique here. It was at least a decent try, but how they turned out is a complete miss.

It was an attempt at standing out, but in the end, I really don't like the look of these characters. I don't like it, and I really think that it's a big step down from what this series has given in the past. For instance, if you look at the latest Morrigan, compare him to how he looked in the past. If you've never played Dragon Age, this may not mean much to you; however, if you have, this version will look strange.

These character designs are distracting and undermine the game's ability to convey emotional moments. I don't believe characters must be realistic for you to feel a strong connection to them—millions of games demonstrate this.

But this uncanny valley thing, this half-human, half-cartoon look, grabs your attention in the same way that an off-note does. It's difficult not to be distracted by how strange everyone appears in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and in the more intense emotional scenes, I found that their fake, plastic faces made it harder for me to buy into whatever emotional distress they were selling.

This is exacerbated by BioWare's approach to facial animations, which is extremely out of date in 2024—particularly for a game where you spend so much time looking at characters' faces. When compared to more recent games such as Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and Guardians of the Galaxy, it's clear that BioWare was great with facial animations nearly a decade ago—a criticism that unfortunately applies to nearly every aspect of Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Despite my reservations about the layout and what goes on within these environments, the visual design of those worlds is hard to criticize. The worlds you see range from cityscapes to forests, dark swamps, and old hollowed-out Grey Warden fortresses.

They are all breathtakingly beautiful in their own way, style, and color that allows one to strongly feel the space and a sense of place. As I have said many times before, I never particularly enjoyed being in them, but it was always nice to look at them.

In terms of graphics and performance, however, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a good reminder of how much more important art direction is than just technological feats. This game has been Steam Deck verified since launch, and while that handheld isn’t the most powerful, the game looks decent even there.

Sure, the environments of Dragon Age: The Veilguard are pretty, and yes, the game runs well, but the whole point of a BioWare game is to tell a good story with believable characters, and that is where this game fails. The strange, stylized, waxy appearance of these characters is off-putting. When combined with how stiff and unresponsive their faces are, Veilguard has immediately hampered its ability to deliver on the promise of a BioWare game. This promise is then completely broken when we look at the writing underpinning all of this.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a huge disappointment for BioWare, in large part because of the studio's long history with the franchise. Storywise, this fizzles out and squanders a decade's worth of build-up and character development in favor of shallow dialogue and out-of-date mechanics that feel like they were plucked from the early 2010s. Combat is shallow, interactions with companions feel forced, and romance is stale.

Even visuals can create some amazing environments on occasion, but everything else falls flat, most notably the characters themselves, who appear more like amiibos or action figures than actual characters. Worst of all, the game had potential and could have been something more; it is pretty apparent that BioWare passed up the chance to rekindle the fire that was Dragon Age.

As a long-time fan, I was really hoping Dragon Age: The Veilguard would be the big, satisfying comeback that would remind us why BioWare was once an RPG powerhouse. But it just doesn’t make the cut. Instead, it makes me wonder if BioWare can still create games like the Mass Effect trilogy and the early Dragon Age titles as they did. If this is what the future of Dragon Age looks like, maybe it’s time to give the series a break.