Dragon Age: The Veilguard | Hands-On Preview

I was flown out to San Fransisco by EA PR to play six hours of Dragon Age: The Veilguard and I fell in love with the series all over again.  Dragon Age has been near and dear to my heart.  I adored Origins, enjoyed 2, and loved Inquisition.  How exactly does Dragon Age: The Veilguard play? That’s the question on everyone’s mind (well it was at least until IGN got to post their preview a full week ahead of everyone else).  From the tactical combat of Origins to the freer flowing of 2, and then the full-on third-person over-the-shoulder fighting in Inquisition the series revels in change.  The Veilguard has gone full on 3rd person action game, but fret not. It has kept that classic Bioware RPG soul, which was glorious to behold. I promise this preview is as spoiler-lite as possible.

The start of our time

If you’ve seen the gameplay demo earlier in the year then you know that the old Dreadwolf himself, Solas, is up to something nutso and his old pal Varric has enlisted you, the Rook, to help stop him.  It’s a bombastic opening sequence that feels, in the developer’s words: “it’s like the beginning of a James Bond film” and that you’re experiencing the end of a story that will catapult you into this game’s narrative.  Before you get into any of this though you’ll be greeted with one of the deeper character creation kits ever built. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a gorgeous video game, and this creation kit was the first thing to wow me.

We were playing on powerful PC rigs that captured footage for us at 1080p resolution via OBS.  The character models, and especially the hair (head & facial) are stunning.  I’m not the biggest fan of spending time crafting a look, so I went through some of their presets and built out both a Warrior and Mage character based on them.  As I started things up I took a look over and the dozens of other people who were there to play the game were deep into sculpting every contour, going through the dozens of hairstyles, and fine-tuning their characters for upwards of an hour.  I’m going to keep story spoilers to a minimum, but I’ll list out the classes and race types at least.  You have Humans, Qunari, Elves, and Dwarves.  They can be one of three classes: Warrior, Rogue, and Mage.

Those three classes didn’t seem like much at first, thankfully the skill trees for each class are enormous.  These subclass choices make playing the three feel more like having upwards of nine distinct playstyles that allow for further customization based on your playstyle and gear choices. Warriors can go sword and board or use some big old two-handers.  Mages get a mix of close and long-ranged attacks that can be single-target or multi-target.  Rogues are your typical dual weapon or ranged bow users and the number of skills you can assign for each is three at a time.  Changing skills up can be done any time you’re out of combat and it felt great to experiment with each of them in the short time we had. The character creator has a few more surprises, but I’ll leave those for you to find.

The Veilguard

When the game was first revealed it was titled Dreadwolf.  I spoke with two members of the game’s dev team and asked them why the change to The Veilguard.  They told me that as the game was going through development it shifted away from being Solas-focused, instead becoming about you and your companions.  You are The Veilguard, and this is the story of your group coming together to fight for something truly epic.  Taking place in northern Thedas this is an area where magic is not only tolerated but a basic part of day-to-day life in a way we haven’t seen before in the series. This allowed for the team to not have to make any of the previous game’s choices canon or not.  They told me you can play through the entirety of The Veilguard feeling like you are in your world from Origins through Inquisition and nothing that happens will take that feeling away.

The first few members of your team are familiar, Varric and Harding.  They are joined by Neve, a powerful mage who has an incredible style both on and off the battlefield.  Early choices led to slightly different outcomes as I played through the opening mission multiple times, making sure to choose B instead of the A I had previously.  I hope none of my fellow previewers spoil the story as what I saw had me hooked. The writing was great, with just enough witty repartee between the team members that they felt familiar but not like a Marvel quip-factory.  This game feels polished, and that comes through in the vision of what you and your team are meant to be.

You are a group of talented and flawed individuals who join forces for good reasons.  The interactions and my choices never felt forced in anything I saw.  We were allowed the chance to play some later areas, a few hours after the opening, and without saying much I’ll just say that I felt satisfied about the RPG side of the title.  BioWare’s devs talked to me about playing to their strengths.  Taking all the positives they’ve learned over the years and focusing on those instead of trying to push into areas they’re less familiar with. This is not an open-world game, either, you choose missions and then go and do them in a linear fashion, for the most part.

The Lighthouse

You will end up, early on, in an area known as the Lighthouse.  It serves as your base hub and itself is full of secrets and inaccessible areas.  How you access said new areas is smart, building up the game’s lore and story in a natural way. Here you can visit your companions and grow relationships with them.  The game features romance, and not only for you but between them as well.  It felt like a natural evolution of the “I’m going to flirt with you 100 times and then we bang” systems of old.  So much of the game feels that way, masters of a craft finally getting the time and focus to go in a direction in which they truly excel.

For any Bioware veteran, you’ll be familiar with the choice wheel during dialogue sections. The tried-and-true system is back and you’ll often see a pop-up on the left when an impactful choice has been made, letting you know that things like “X-character will remember you chose the violent plan”, etc. I enjoyed my respites into The Lighthouse as they jumped us between save files I was able to see how it grew, both due to new party members and various unlock items being found. The Veilguard seems enormous, content-wise, if anything of the six hours we got to play is an indication.  Thankfully, every moment I spent fighting in it was a blast.

The Combat

While the game is an RPG they have not skimped on the combat at all.  This is a culmination of everything Bioware has learned in the last decade.  While you’re not aiming and shooting guns like in Mass Effect: Andromeda or Anthem you can feel the DNA of those excellent shooters in The Veilguard. Playing as a Warrior to start I had X as my light attack and Y for heavy swings.  The right bumper was a parry on tap and block on hold, and with generous timing for the parries. As I unlocked some early abilities I got a shield toss on the right trigger as my ranged ability, and holding the left trigger let me quickly access my eventual three class abilities.

Those abilities are highly customizable, with dozens to choose from as you unlock the various nodes in the gigantic skill tree.  They operated on a mix of rage and cooldowns for the warrior.  The meter built up as I hit things, Diablo Barb style, and moves can either inflict a debuff or explode a debuff.  Which debuff they set, and which did they explode, those are your combos straight out of Anthem.  Making sure your three characters (You as Rook and up to two companions) play well off of each other was key to getting through the tougher fights.  You will find flags planted in the ground during missions that allow you to swap up your companions as well, making it easy to counter certain boss and enemy types if you start to have major issues with them.

Warriors, Rogues, and Mages all play differently enough from each other that I’m fine with having only the three classes. Their unlock choices afford so much customization in how you want to play that I never felt bored even if the fights do find you repeating moves and combos for minutes on end. Another key factor for keeping things feeling good is just how incredible this game looks and sounds.

Utilizing the latest in Frostbite Engine goodness, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a stunning title.  We all played on powerful PC rigs, with no word yet given on what to expect on your Xbox or PlayStation consoles. Knowing the team there and the engine on which they work I’d expect it to look damned pretty on any of the current-gen machines, with various resolution/setting and framerate targets depending on the cost of said console. I know I talked about it earlier, but I have to say it again, the hair in this game is some of the greatest I have ever seen.

It not only looks amazing it behaves nearly flawlessly.  I gave a few of my characters long hair of various shapes and sizes and it flowed around my armor, bounced up and down in battle as I jumped (with the A button) or dodged (with the B button) and it made me feel cool as hell.  Whether I was a warrior with a huge bonker, a rogue dancing around with twin blades, or an ice mage stomping the ground and causing a huge explosion every animation and effect looked top-tier. Bioware utilizes the Sony-Spotlight effect as well, with your character Rook always being perfectly lit by some invisible light source in the environment.  You constantly pop, even in the darkest of caves, and it gives that sense of sheen and polish that Sony’s fans have come to expect in their titles.

Matching the graphical fidelity was the writing, voice acting, and musical score.  The Veilguard feels like people are in a room recording line with each other.  They’ve done the work to give conversations a natural flow, though you can of course go full maniac and skip all the dialogue if you so choose. The writing, again, hit that level of familiarity between characters without devolving into a hokey quip-fest. It’s a tough line to tread and from what I saw they’ve done it well.  It doesn’t hurt that an incredible score was going the entire time during combat and the more energetic cutscenes.

Wrapping Things Up

The only questions I have left after these hours of playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard are about how the story lands, and just how much content is there.  Everything I saw, every fight I took part in, and every decision I made felt impactful and most importantly, fun.  We’ll have a full review of the game closer to its October 31^st launch, so keep an eye on the site until then.  For now, if you’re a fan of Dragon Age or a newcomer, I think you’re going to be in for something special.