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I want to be absolutely clear: I really think Dragon Age: The Veilguard is rather good. It’s also true that it’s a game that is drawn taut between its different ambitions. It wants to reach new fans while satisfying series fans who’ve waited a decade for Inquisition’s cliffhanger to resolve. It wants to be accessible, but it wants to be a full-fat RPG. It wants to depict a world on the edge of a knife, the gentlest breeze enough to tip it into the pit – but it also wants you to have a nice time.
That last bit is the thing that has stuck with me most keenly since finishing The Veilguard as part of the review process – this is a relentlessly nice game. Honestly, I actually find it a little bit tiring.
I know what some are going to say, so let me stop you right there: the real world is in a hell of a mess, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting a bit of escapism from the disaster outside your real life window in the form of a cuddly video game. But let me fire back something: if I really want that, I’ll fire up Stardew Valley, or Animal Crossing. Or I’ll mine the nostalgia from my childhood years with a bit of Sonic 2 or Banjo-Kazooie or something.
But coming into a BioWare game, I sort of want a bit of friction. I want some shades of grey. I want hard decisions. I want a gang of companions who I love, but who don’t necessarily get along. I want the rough and the smooth – and The Veilguard seems practically allergic to the rough.
It’s probably unfair, but I can’t help drawing the comparison back to BioWare’s greatest game, Mass Effect 2. It’s obvious that it formed a hefty inspiration for The Veilguard; you can see it in the structure, the building-a-team narrative, and later acts of the game feel like a mash up of the endings of the second and third Mass Effect entries.
For this point I want to focus on the characters, though. The party you build is the heart of both games – when I talked to people on the Dragon Age team at preview, they described the process of turning the characters into “load-bearing pillars” for the entire experience. This is something BioWare hasn’t strictly done before in the sense that it is a tweak of process – the characters have always been a key part of the structure of these games, but this feels like the first time the characters themselves are the foundation for the story. And yet…
Gosh, I wish this crew had a little more about them in terms of how they interplay and interact with each other besides Rook. I know this is a team that needs to work together for the greater good – but this lot have got nary a thing to disagree over. There’s none of the prickliness of, say, the antagonistic relationship between Jack and Miranda that the player is then forced to mediate. The Veilguard party banter and play-bicker over picnics and living space – all very charming, and the sort of thing also present in Mass Effect – but that’s sort of it.
You recruit a mage and then you recruit a mage killer, and neither really blinks an eye. And it’s okay, anyway, as he’s not really a mage killer in that way. He’s nice, he’s heroic, he’s selfless.
Again, I’m looping back around to Mass Effect 2. I’m thinking about Garrus, and how when you meet him he isn’t a grand hero, but a vigilante with a death wish, having gone off the deep end since the last game. I think about Zaeed, who is a truly disgraceful piece of s**t – but you need him. Or do you? You can, of course, conclude he’s a liability and leave him for dead. I want this sort of thing back – but I’m not even sure that these sorts of stories could exist within the narrative sandbox The Veilguard places itself.
I don’t want to only compare it to Mass Effect, of course, because past Dragon Age titles were also rich with this sort of texture. I think of Alistair and Morrigan back in Origins; prickly bedfellows who ultimately come together in a satisfying way. In The Veilguard, everybody is nice from the jump.
The same is true, to some extent, of the whole world. This is a world with beggars on every street corner, but there’s no real talk of poverty or inequity in the world; none of the introspective world building BioWare contemplates with places like Omega or Kirkwall. Everything is Fine! Thedas is The Good Place, even when rampaging gods on high are threatening to end all of existence.
The intent, I expect, is to not offend the sensibilities of absolutely anybody playing. But story-driven games and role-playing games should challenge the player. Not just with exciting character progression choices and fist-pumping combat – which The Veilguard has – but also with narrative, world, and character. This overwhelming niceness seeps into every aspect of those elements. Ultimately, the niceness is a poison, the very definition of killing with kindness. Bluntly, when everybody is nice, everybody is a little bit boring – and in fantasy, that just doesn’t fly.
Worst of all, it works against those excellent characters, those load-bearing pillars designed to shoulder the weight of the rest of the experience. I like them all, and in fact I think one or two of them are some of the most charismatic BioWare has delivered – but I strongly feel the niceties often stood in the way of me truly getting to know them.
As the saying goes, “The sweet is never as sweet without the sour”. Frustratingly, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is as sickly-sweet as they come.