Initial Veilguard Thoughts // 2024-12-01

If anyone from Bioware asks, I hated Veilguard. They bearded my dwarf!! Two whole games of beardless dwarf jokes and they fucking bearded him!!!!

In short I'm very pleased with the game structure being more like the first two games and not continuing down the path of Inquisition. The devs aren't hiding the fact that they are just picking and choosing what lore is included, so expect to be a bit annoyed every so often.

I'm sorry to any Inquisition players who didn't know that most of the time your choices and protagonist don't matter. The writers are trying to move the story forward and they will pick and choose what lore moves forward. Hawke was probably the happiest medium between the player and writers, since they were their own character with some influence from their player. They dropped Hawke pretty quickly even in Inquisition, so I guess they didn't like the protagonist to their 14 month dev period game that much.

I would suggest reading two books in the DA universe for this game:

Tevinter Nights

Last Flight

Tevinter Nights is an intro to quite a few companions and side characters! It's a collection of short stories, so it should be more approachable and lets you jump around! Last Flight is more specific to the revival of griffins. Doesn't drag in any main game characters, but does include a historical Vael from the exalted age. I've been burned by Asunder killing Wynne, so I'm always kind of spooked about returning characters especially if they're from older content.

I finished Veilguard in ~70 hours with all of the quests completed, and only missing about 4 codexes without trying too hard. I haven't immediately started a new play through because I'm 99% sure I will just romance Lucanis again but as a different class and background. Not to suggest the other characters aren't appealing, I spent most of my first play through flirting with everyone. His romance is just paced out well with the story and his character arch, and the romantic scenes are 10/10. I also romanced Fenris who doesn't talk to you for 3 years so....

Not going to go in depth on if the combat and writing is super good or not yet since I've only played once. I will say, so far, I wouldn't mind a remake of the older games with this current combat system. They streamlined the different class weapon types and allowed you to change your ability points any time for free. This really lets you experiment and lets you change up your party more often. You can customize your party for any situation, but I did roll with Lucanis and Emmerich the most.

I did encounter a couple of persistent issues that did slow me down. The classic player character reverting to CC base model was pretty frequent and did lead me to reloading my game like 10 times at least twice. The game also took a while to update enemies or quests, so I would stand around until something attacked me or whatever the quest marker was attached to loaded in. I'm going to play with my settings a bit and which drive the game is installed on before I include these in my official review or influence my future dragon age shrine on this site.

I don't want to spoil too much about the game, but I did have one really funny glitch that I couldn't catch until it was too late. My beautiful Adaar was presented as Lavellan. Luckily it also cleared out my romance choice so it defaulted to Solas! Giving me this beautiful image. The weird racism that we just put up with Inquisition with Cullen and Solas is now over and I can say I have the most progressive Solas.