The Dragon Age franchise is not known to stay exactly the same from game to game. Whether it’s changes in scope, in setting, in who your player character is, or in how your companion is approved, there’s always something new to come up with. But the most surprising change Dragon Age: The Veil Guard makes of its predecessors?
I actually enjoy the battle.
Combat has never been the thing I come to a BioWare game for – so emphatically that I’ve been known to mock anyone who sees it as essential to the experience. This is the gaming equivalent of insisting on referring to all mainstream sports as “sportsball” and talking about how you only watch the Super Bowl because of the commercials. It’s unfair, and I’m not particularly proud of it. Then again, the selling point of a BioWare game has always been the narrative side of things.
The company’s goal is to bring you intricate world-building, complex characters, and compelling choices. BioWare has built a reputation as a titan of the CRPG genre, of which combat is one aspect, but historically it hasn’t been central to that reputation. You’ll never see Mass Effect heralded as a franchise that made its mark in shooter history. I can’t believe we ever thought that Dragon Age: OriginsThe core mechanic of manually adjusting your companions’ AI using a list of a dozen customizable if-then statements was casual fun. Dragon Age 2 And Inquisition weren’t much to write home about in terms of combat – there wasn’t anything they did that wasn’t better in a given dungeon crawler.
The Dragon Age games in particular are moving one step further away from full tactical combat with each installment, so in some ways Veil Guard simply takes that journey to its logical conclusion. However, that last move was a big one and was greeted with a lot of skepticism from fans from various quarters. Some are clearly disappointed that Dragon Age and Tactical Combat have parted ways. For others, among my own group of Dragon Age superfans, it’s not that they miss the old battles, but that they fear the new ones. They are not regular real-time gamers and they fear that they do not have the reflexes or dexterity for that. Veil Guardand it will ruin a game they’ve been looking forward to for a decade.
Personally, I felt neutral about the change, or at least maintained neutrality until I could experience it for myself. I’ve already written about my first impressions of it Veil Guard‘s battle, and getting time for the full game only enhanced my enjoyment, until one night I found myself racing around an arena, dodging the attacks of my many larger opponents, kiting them near explosive barrels and then used my ranged attacks to blow them to smithereens while I emerged completely unscathed. I realized I was being blunt cackling in cheerfulness.
A quick survey of Polygon writers who got the chance to play Veil Guard a lot of enthusiasm.
“Once I was able to jump and punch and shoot a bunch of undead things in one shot, I started having a lot of fun with that.” —Zoe Hannah
“I loved realizing that mages can really exploit elemental weaknesses – it helped me a lot against those pesky blight champions.” —Ari Notis
“The boss fight against (REDACTED) as a villain was incredible. Just constantly jumping back and forth, dancing on the edge of life and death, and cutting away the (REDACTED) with quick strokes. —Cass Marshall
“I just like doing a combo with my love interest, tbqh.” —Petrana Radulovic
This fall I completed a preliminary review of Dragon Age: Inquisitionwhere the difficulty level is emphatically set to easy. And then I played it again Dragon Age: Origins this summer it did so with a slew of quality of life mods, including an Extra Easy mode. I wanted to be that crunchy fight from 2009 trivial. I wanted every enemy to go down as quickly as possible, with an emphasis on the SAP.
Now I’m actually thinking about it increasing the (extremely customizable) difficulty settings I chose when I started Veil Guardbecause some of these big bad boss enemies are going down at quickly! Hi! Don’t die! I enjoyed hitting you! And that’s never happened to me before in a BioWare game!