Dragon Age: The Veilguard review: a very safe return to form for BioWare

A game’s art can tell a story, and the art of Dragon Age: The Veilguard is very revealing. It features an oddly smooth visual style that makes character models both more cartoonish and painterly rather than ultra-detailed and realistic. This artistic approach has proven divisive, and I find my opinion on the more positive side of the spectrum. It can make some characters look flat and off-kilter, but when BioWare opts for some bespoke lighting and framing for certain conversations and scenes, The Veilguard looks fantastic.

That’s emblematic of The Veilguard as a whole. It’s a smoothed-over AAA RPG. Sometimes, it lacks the depth and filled-in detail I want from a choice-driven RPG in the hopes of being a safe return to form and an approachable entry point into the genre. But there are plenty of times when the game fires on all cylinders and reminds me of the “BioWare magic” seemingly lost with Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a return to form for this once-lauded RPG studio that should satiate Dragon Age fans quite well after a decade-long wait. But returning to form and perfecting form are not the same thing. BioWare has plenty of room to regrow as it gets back on track making the kinds of games RPG fans want them to create.

It’s like Inquisition never ended

Dragon Age: Inquisition came out nearly a decade ago, but The Veilguard is a direct sequel that acts like barely any time has passed. Solas, a companion from Inquisition, turned out to be the elven trickster god Fen’harel. He wants to tear open the Veil, which simultaneously protects the world andprevents elves from being immortal. The Veilguard opens with players stopping Solas, but disrupting his ritual causes two more menacing gods, Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain, to break out.

With Solas trapped in the Fade, he advises players on how to stop Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain. Players then construct an Avengers-like team, the titular Veilguard, to save the world. The Veilguard begins with players creating a character everyone calls Rook and offers up an impressive number of customization options in its vast character creator. Certain choices, like race, background, and class, even influence the flavor of some conversations in-game.

From there, players veil jump all around Northern Thedas on this fantasy journey. The Veilguard isn’t an open-world game; instead, it has several different hubs for players to explore. These can vary in size quite a bit, but BioWare does a great job using almost every inch of each area for different story, companion, faction, and side quests. By the end of the adventure, I was intimately familiar with everywhere, from the streets of Tevinter to the forest of Arlathan.

The Veilguard is very concerned with players not getting lost in exploration or in menus. It clearly points players where to go with waypoint indicators and features many other helpful accessibility, gameplay, and difficulty options. My favorite quality-of-life feature is one that immediately turns any duplicate gear or weapons players pick up into an upgrade for what you already have, meaning inventory-sorting woes were nonexistent.

Because of features like that, I never really got lost in exploring The Veilguard’s RPG systems. That seems to be a very intentional design decision on BioWare’s part, even though RPGs are sometimes at their best when they let players do so to enable emergent character builds and gameplay moments. The Veilguard desperately wants to feel familiar and approachable, which is both a boon and a bane.

Cool companions

From a storytelling perspective, The Veilguard’s plot has much in common with Mass Effect 2, as the meat of the game is about recruiting and befriending a team of skilled warriors to go on what feels like a suicide mission. That approach worked wondrously for Mass Effect 2, and while it feels more derivative a second time around, it’s still effective ensemble storytelling here.

BioWare remains an expert at creating a team of compelling party members I want to get to know more deeply. Companion quests are given as much attention and polish as story quests and feature some of the best writing in the game. Dragon hunter Taash’s journey of coming out as nonbinary to their mother, in particular, is a questline I won’t soon forget. In those moments, I remember why many others and I fell in love with BioWare in the first place.

Unfortunately, I had to dig to find those nuggets of writing gold. Especially early on in the story, The Veilguard does lean into the kind of quippy, woefully unfunny dialogue common in many modern blockbusters. Quips like those feel like a desperate bid to make The Veilguard seem much more approachable from the jump. Games like Baldur’s Gate 3 show that kind of writing isn’t necessary to create a widely beloved RPG, and it implies a lack of confidence in the writing and Dragon Age’s lore on BioWare’s end.

In the future, I hope the studio is more confident in finding its own voice, as the best moments of The Veilguard are the ones where that comes through.

Leaning into action

Dragon Age has become more action-focused with each new game in the series, and The Veilguard tips nearly all the way into real-time action while sprinkling the experience with RPG elements. Players choose to be a Warrior, Mage, or Rogue in character creation. I chose Mage, which is primarily structured around two gameplay styles. One saw me attacking from a distance with a staff, while another had me dealing damage with a spellblade to create “Arcane Bombs” that I could detonate for massive damage with my heavy attack.

I spent about half a game focusing on each Mage playstyle and messing around with all the different skills or specializations in The Veilguard’s vast skill tree. I ultimately had the most fun when I focused on dealing elemental damage on top of the Arcane Bombs with the spellblade. In practice, The Veilguard’s combat plays out like that of most other modern action games, emphasizing smart dodging and blocking to look for openings where you can deal with a flurry of attacks or use special abilities. Two companions can also fight with you; by pressing R1, you can command them to use specific abilities. Companions can also “activate” certain debuffs like “sundered” or “overwhelm” to deal greater damage.

That is the closest The Veilguard gets to its old command-driven CRPG roots during combat. Even then, The Veilguard handholds players to the point of spelling out which abilities they should use in tandem to create a combo every time they open the command menu. This combat system was easy to learn, enabling plenty of satisfying moments and combos in tense battles. But it started getting repetitive by the end of my 40-hour adventure in Northern Thedas in a way that CRPG combat that’s focused more on emergent ability usage does not.

In this way, The Veilguard feels a lot like Final Fantasy XVI. It does all it can to streamline a popular RPG series’ formula into what could be considered a mainstream modern AAA game. It was executed well, but loses a bit of the charm that makes the series special in the first place. If you didn’t mind that shift in Final Fantasy XVI, you won’t mind it here; the opposite is also true.

The choice isn’t yours

The Veilguard’s sidequests are what let me down the most. I’m not talking about the companion- and faction-focused ones that are given the same detail and polish as story ones, but the random regional quests players can find by exploring Thedas. I stand by the fact that a hallmark of a truly great RPG is that the sidequests are outstanding. Games like Baldur’s Gate 3, The Witcher 3, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, or even BioWare’s own Dragon Age: Origins back up my belief.

The Veilguard fails to live up to that standard. If you’re a die-hard Dragon Age fan who knows a lot of the series’ lore, you’ll probably enjoy the little lore nuggets each sidequest offers. If not, the lack of variety is disappointing. On the gameplay front, all sidequests eventually boil down to fighting the same kinds of enemies you’re already fighting plenty of in the main story, which gets tedious.

In general, The Veilguard lacks compelling choices or consequences. Any that do exist are very heavily telegraphed, and as someone who completed every companion and faction quest, I was disappointed by how little they seemed to factor into the game’s ending. There are exceptions, of course. At one point, I punched the leader of the Grey Wardens in the face during a story mission, so I couldn’t save him in a later companion sidequest.

Those moments feel few and far between, unfortunately. That’s a shame, as The Veilguard is a densely packed game that someone could easily play for up to 50 hours or more, yet I don’t feel compelled to play the sidequests I haven’t completed yet or replay it anytime soon. I just don’t think my experience would be much different. Like other parts of the game, it gives off the vibe that BioWare was cautious in returning to this choice-driven RPG formula, playing it safe and ensuring that it could execute variety from a few key choices in a vast RPG before getting more ambitious in the future.

I might just be spoiled coming off Baldur’s Gate 3, but I would like to see BioWare improve the quality of its sidequests and create games with more frequent, impactful choices in the future now that it has played things relatively safe and returned to form. Like its art style, The Veilguard is a smooth and simple RPG. It creates a baseline for a AAA RPG formula that BioWare can build on after the darkest period in the studio’s history.

There’s a lot of positives to look at from that perspective. BioWare games are clearly at their best when they’re focusing on engaging character writing and unabashedly in conversation with their franchise’s lore. Combat feels just as good as any other fantasy action game currently on the market. A bevy of accessibility options and streamlined design ensures anyone interested can begin broaching this complex genre with BioWare’s titles.

A lot has changed at BioWare in the decade since Dragon Age: Inquisition was released, and it’s not quite back at that industry-leading level of quality yet. The studio strayed from its path so far that a quality, streamlined, back-to-basics RPG like The Vielguard is a relief. I expect more than just feeling relieved from BioWare, though. I hope EA and this unforgiving industry allow this studio to continue building on what’s been reestablished here, as this is a solid foundation for future games to build upon.

BioWare is back home. Now, it just needs to start work on some home improvements.

Digital Trends tested Dragon Age: The Veilguard on a PlayStation 5 with code provided by the publisher.