Anyone looking forward to this? I loved Dragon Age Origins back in the day. I remember liking DA 2 as well. I don’t think I finished Inquisition but I have a beefy PC now so I may jump into this one after getting the RPG bug from BG3. Anyone else looking to get it?
After seeing what they’ve done to the qunari design, I’m not even sure this is the same series anymore;
I never did finish Inquisition - the main plot felt aimless and non-urgent, there were WAAAAAAY too many party members to keep track of, and there was so much cruft and side mechanics that it wound up feeling like an uninteresting World of Warcraft knockoff.
I’ll probably skip this one.
I liked all of the Dragon Ages that I’ve played (Origins, Awakening, II, and Inquisition). I don’t currently have a system that would be capable of playing Veilguard, but I imagine I’ll pick it up in a few years, if and when I have something to play it on.
Supposedly the specs are very modest and it can run on a ten year old system but you’d know better than I would. Only mentioning it in case you just assumed you couldn’t run it.
Loved Origins and have played it through at least five times. Before BG3, it was holding the Most Played hours title in my Steam library. Awakenings I just kind of slogged through; the most amusing part was my 0% retention rate at the end when everyone just quit the Gray Wardens. DA2 just sort of annoyed me and made me feel like my choices didn’t matter much in service of what they decided was a better story (Flemeth returning, Anders returning after he died in my Awakenings playthrough, etc). Then the stupid dialogue wheel which I hated compared to the text options of DA:O. Inquisition was better and I played it 1.5 times, lost steam in the second run.
I wasn’t expecting much from Veilguard to start with. I didn’t really care about Solas in Inquisition and a game centered around him didn’t sound appealing. The switch from Dreadwolf to Veilguard and stated reason (Solas isn’t really the focus, your team is) actually worked a bit on me. Early play reporting seems positive and I think I’ll buy it around launch since it seems like it’ll be a competent fantasy action game if nothing else. I’m not super worried about the Dragon Age fidelity angle at this point – nothing in the franchise has hooked me like DA:O did so I don’t have high expectations for this one from that viewpoint. If the companions are half-interesting and it’s fun to run around and bonk stuff, I’ll likely be satisfied.
I stopped worrying about Qunari after they added horns in DA2 and acted like they always had horns and Sten was just a weirdo mutant – despite you meeting several other Qunari in Awakenings and none of THEM having horns either. Stop gaslighting me, Bioware!
The writer of this article got to play some of it in a preview setting, and compares it positively to Mass Effect 2 in terms of energy and accessibility.
Sounds positive, right? A Dragon Age game that’s actually fun, like ME2? Doesn’t that sound exciting?
Unless you’re me. That whole writeup gives me serious pause.
Why? Because I’m one of the weirdos who thinks ME2 is the weakest of its trilogy. Yeah, it’s certainly the most fun and exciting on a first time play … but it definitely does not hold up to the repeated playthroughs that a good choice-based RPG invites. ME2 sacrifices depth and complexity to give the player a cinematic thrill ride, which, again, is great — once. But the more you try to replay it to explore its nuances, the flatter and shallower it becomes. It’s a cheap rush and it doesn’t sustain the way ME1 does over the long run. And it worries me that the same impulse is driving this new Veilguard title.
Longtime Dragon Age fans play this series specifically because it’s dense and complex and a little old fashioned. It feels like every high-profile game series becomes samey over time because the studios are all chasing the same core gamer audience and imitating one another’s successes, instead of recognizing that different game franchises can have different player bases with different preferences and different gameplay interests.
The best overall DA game, in my view, remains the first, by a wide margin. This is despite its evident age, with clunky graphics and slow combat and a very steep and non-intuituve gameplay learning curve (especially now, when you aren’t buying the physical case with the lengthy instruction book, and you have to figure out the game based solely on what’s on screen). But the thing is, I’m saying this as an RPG purist who’s interested in storytelling complexity and player freedom above all else. The level of depth, the support for choice branching and narrative flexibility, in the first DA is simply astonishing, and still hasn’t been surpassed by any game I’ve played. It’s magnificent.
So when an article basically says “ME1 sucked and ME2 is where it’s at and Veilguard makes me feel like ME2 did,” my immediate reaction is to say — okay, you’re a mainstream gamer who doesn’t have the patience to learn a complex game system or appreciate why others might enjoy it, and you like the dumbed-down action-movie version of the story. Got it.
I remain a huge fan of the Dragon Age world, so I’m sure I’ll pick this up. Maybe won’t be day one, though. And I won’t expect to play it more than once.
And I’ll pour one out for the BioWare that used to be, until they allowed themselves to be pushed aside by a game community that cares more about polygon counts and frame rates than it does about challenging-to-learn but deep and rewarding game systems and carefully paced and thoughtfully designed game stories.
Edit to add, because I forgot to note this:
I gather you didn’t play the Trespasser DLC, which flips the switch on Solas and reveals something astonishing about his backstory which makes his presence in the game make a whole lot more sense. Major shame this revelation was consigned to DLC, but it does explain why this new game was originally being centered on him.
If I could give three pieces of advice to any up-and-coming game studio, it’d be the following;
- Don’t sell to EA
- Don’t go public
- Live services come and go but single-player mode lives forever
Hmm I was kind of hoping for open world…not sure what to make of that review.
I think my computer is at least that old and has integrated graphics, not a separate graphics card. Almost certainly time for an upgrade!
I agree with Cervaise that I found Mass Effect 2 disappointing in some aspects, but I’m glad to hear that they removed some of the open-world aspects of Dragon Age: Inquisition that made it feel like kind of a slog.
P.S. I actually feel like Dragon Age II has the most replayability, even if the story is basically on rails.
I’m on board once I understood it to be Dragon Age: Mass Effect. We’re not lacking to sprawling CRPGs right now so having a high-quality and focused experience sounds like a refreshing change of pace. I feel a need to play through Dragon Age Inquisition first so the tighter experience of Veilguard is likely to be welcome after that game’s bloated MMO-esque zones. That said, I’m expecting to play it through GamePass (and its EA Play subscription) so I don’t have a lot of skin in the game here.
I played it. It didn’t make me care about Solas as a character or an entity. Obviously it sets up a conflict but I didn’t see the Dreadwolf announcement and think “Yay, I get to spend more time with this guy…”
I’m a little put off by the switch to only being able to control the main character. FF16 did this and I had a little trouble engaging with it as a result.
I’ll probably still play it.
Sounds like DA:O, overland map that is made up of smaller location maps.
If that is the case I would be happy.
As long as it’s not Dragon Age: Mass Effect: Andromeda!
(Actually I didn’t mind Mass Effect: Andromeda, but it wasn’t nearly as good as the original trilogy.)
I’ve played every Dragon Age game and I even played the tabletop RPG based on Dragon Age for a number of years. So it’s fair to say I’m a fan.
I’m cautiously optimistic about this entry. I loved Mass Effect, it’s my favorite overall game series ever. Taking a Dragon Age game and trying to recapture the ME2 feel sounds great to me. We’ll see how well it works.
The Qunari thing doesn’t bother me much, because the Qunari have always been a mess. Just read this crap.
I wrote them off as garbage long ago, and they always played a pretty minor role in the games for the most part so they’re easy to ignore.
They’re a race but also a culture, and there are multiple versions of the race with horns or without horns or with different numbers of horns, and so on. It’s like in Star Wars: The Old Republic when they introduced the Sith as a species of alien, even though it’s also an ancient order of Dark Side users, oh and also a political empire ruling a large part of space. It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping!
So meh, I’ll ignore the Screwy-nari as I have in every other entry and enjoy it despite how they don’t fit at all, are confusing, contradictory, and just boring. It’s like pulling pickles off a burger. I’ll still eat it and like it.
Personally, the qunari are my favorite part of the Dragon Age lore and I’d love to see a game with them as the main focus. Their whole militant Confucian-fascist society where individualism is prohibited seems fascinating.
(BTW, qunari being the name of the race is a misconception on the part of the Theodosians - their own name for the species is kossith.)
I mostly agree. I don’t think I’d call them my favorite part of the world* but I do find them deeply fascinating.
I believe there is a clear concept of the Qun on paper behind the scenes, but the contradictions, the messiness we perceive in the stories so far, can be chalked up to our having perceived them at a distance through the eyes of characters and cultures that don’t understand them and have made various unfounded and sometimes ignorant assumptions about who they are and how they work. The closest we’ve come to an “insider” view on the truth of their culture is Iron Bull — but even his perspective is somewhat distanced, and he’s reluctant to get into the nitty-gritty with us. If this franchise ever takes us to their homeland and gives us a clear, up-close view, the way this new game is (apparently) giving us insights into Tevinter, I suspect it’ll be seriously eye-opening.
*That, for me, is the tension inherent in magic as a power that can be harnessed by human users but is also potentially a gateway for malevolent entities, and all the cultural stuff that has grown up around that tension to manage and mitigate its downsides. It feels genuine and organic, and it’s a brilliant foundation for storytelling, providing all kinds of opportunities to explore interests on all sides of the equation. It’s hardly a new idea in fantasy, of course, the push-pull of magic as an ambiguous force with both positives and negatives, but DA’s take on it feels unique and well-considered.
What is funny about these comparisons is I have always since the very beginning put Dragon Age and Mass Effect side by side together and always thought of them as two sides of the same coin (Sci Fi vs Fantasy). I guess because they are both IPs original to Video Games with rich, detailed settings and came out around the same time.
I remember being intrigued by the idea of playing a qunari in DA: Inquisition and then being extremely underwhelmed by the fact that it’s basically just a different skin for your generic player character (except you have to wear crappy face paint instead of a hat).
This is fascinating to me. I also view DA and ME as two sides of the same coin: fun games with decent but not stupendous plots in decent but fairly generic scifi/fantasy settings. Not purely vanilla; maybe cookies and cream.
Reading the Dragon Age universe through an unreliable narrator’s lense would never have occured to me. I always just thought of the qunari as the setting’s mandatory Klingon stand-in, like the krogan (who are, incidentally, maybe my favorite thing in mass effect).