For a year, on and off, I’ve been thinking about Dragon Age: The Veilguard. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about my Dragon Age: The Veilguard review – the five-star review I wrote for Eurogamer. It plagues me. Because to be blunt, I’m not happy with how it sits. I don’t think The Veilguard is a five-star game and definitely don’t think it’s BioWare’s best game. To have suggested such a thing has haunted me for 12 months, particularly as new information about Veilguard’s troubled development has arisen and we’ve learned how a Mass Effect team commandeered the project in order to rescue it, overriding the Dragon Age team at its core.
Nevertheless, the project was rescued and three attempts later – including one live-service near-miss – BioWare managed to turn out a single-player role-playing game, which in itself is a remarkable thing. And I enjoyed it an awful lot – I’m not here to discredit my review entirely. Nor am I here to say we’re altering our original review, because that’s not something we do – our reviews are an encapsulation of how we felt about something at a specific moment in time. But is Veilguard the legacy to remember the troubled Dragon Age series by? That I’m not so sure about.
To help me pick through this, I’ve enlisted the help of Alex Donaldson, who I remember speaking to while I was reviewing Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and who had differing opinions to mine – a view borne out in his Dragon Age: The Veilguard review for VG247. I was delighted by the game and he was disappointed. We were and perhaps are at two opposing sides of the opinion surrounding what was a very divisive game. Together here and now, though, I hope to come to a new consensus.
Alex I want to start by asking if you’ve ever changed your mind about a game after a review, and if you have, have you ever actually gone back and changed – or addressed – what you wrote or said about it? Are critics allowed to do that?
Alex: Oh, yeah. If you want to get all inside baseball on it right off the bat, a piece of advice I always give to younger critics when I’m editing or mentoring is that if I’m torn between two scores, I have never regretted going low on that wavering, but I have regretted going high multiple times. I’d never publicly cop to which games, as that’s not fair, but in short – yes!
A challenge in games criticism is often the review process and timeline are quite short, and if a game comes in ‘hot’, close to release, you might not have the optimum amount of time to let a game ‘settle’ in your mind. Often you finish it, and you write your review almost straight away – not much percolation time. Mind you, I always make this argument to the people responsible for getting games in our hands for review – when that acknowledgement is combined with a policy of going low when torn, it is only ever better for publishers to give us more time. I’m meandering now. But I’ve regretted loads, yes.
I think as well, things are tougher for us in a five-star system. I do like how clear-cut five stars are, but it’s complicated in other ways. Five stars is ‘full marks’ but is definitively not perfect, right? And less perfect than a 10 in a 10-point system, by design. So I look at my Dragon Age review on VG247 and feel three stars at a glance reads a little harshly – though if you read the text I think it’s justified, obviously. But the truth is, three stars reads a little tough because The Veilguard is truly a 7/10-ass 7/10. But it’s the lower end of a seven, so it gets three stars, but three stars translates on the aggregation sites to 60/100, or 6/10, which definitely looks harsher. See the complexity?
On the topic of The Veilguard more specifically, do you remember the preview event, Bertie? We were both there – I was there doing double duty for VG247 and RPG Site (which, under a different critic, did give it a 7!). But I recall us sitting at the hotel breakfast the day after the hands-on and discussing it, and the funny thing is our opinions at preview, differing as they were, ended up matching exactly to our opinions at review. Or at least, all the nagging doubts I had at preview (and you always give the benefit of the doubt at preview, and assume such doubts will be addressed/fixed by launch) ended up manifesting as I’d feared in the final. But you felt pretty good at the preview, right?
Attribution
Bertie: That’s right, I did, and I remember the overriding feeling I had that Veilguard felt like Mass Effect 2, and much more streamlined and action-focused than the game it was following – in this case Dragon Age: Inquisition. But that to me wasn’t a bad thing – how could being like Mass Effect 2 be a bad thing? I’d found Inquisition a bit of a slog to play, and the general consensus seems to be that Mass Effect 2 is BioWare’s best game. The style seemed to fit. Veilguard’s combat had pace and heft, the traversal felt lively and engaging, and the art style really clicked with me. I was impressed.
What concerned me back then was breadth – how broad Veilguard would be and how much of an RPG it would be. I’m one of those people who thinks Mass Effect 2 wasn’t as RPG as Mass Effect 1, so I was determined to keep a close eye on it in the review. And what I saw there gave me enough reassurance that Veilguard was an RPG. But looking back on it now… That’s a thought that’s changed. The game does give you big decisions to make, such as saving Treviso or Minrathous, and there are decisions and actions that result in companions living or dying (most of mine died, which is a bravery I like to see in games). But in hindsight these feel more like railroaded, scripted things. ‘Hey it’s make a choice time!’ rather than ‘Oh the game remembered that I did that’. Quite a lot about Veilguard felt railroaded, as though the train was moving and all you were really doing was climbing aboard. Veilguard felt a little thin.
I’m veering off a bit here and I meant to ask: how did you feel when you previewed the game? What were your concerns?
Alex: I thought you could just tell that it had been stitched together from what was basically a handful of disparate projects. They were all ultimately Dragon Age 4 in some form or another – trad RPGs, live service games – but late in the game th is incredible top-end creative team swept in and had to pull something together from all those pieces in short order. Based on what I know of its development, I think it’s a miracle this game shipped at all, and the people who shipped it deserve bloody medals.
But you can only work with the ingredients you have, and I guess part of The Veilguard’s problem, from my perspective, is that it’s like someone turning up on Ready Steady Cook with a bag of incompatible ingredients. You can get there and get a meal eventually, but the chances of it tasting as good as or better than a meal where all the ingredients are harmonious is pretty low.
And that was what I got at preview. Oftentimes this stuff is just a vibe, right? And I just got the vibe of a game that had been stitched together. It’s tough to describe. I remember similar vibes… even playing it four months out, you could tell Andromeda was going to be a mess, I thought. It had the vibe. You could tell after 20 minutes that as lavishly produced as Avengers was, it didn’t have a market. Again, vibe. I felt like the preview just radiated a solid game made under really tough circumstances that’d invariably lead to it perhaps not stitching together 100 percent.
I tell you what, though, some of it is tone, too. I wrote a piece for VG247 where the thesis was that everybody in The Veilguard is lovely, and I hated it. Dragon Age has always been loved for its characters and sweet relationships, but I felt it almost became… too cosy?
Bertie: I liked that piece you wrote and you have a point. Harding in particular I found cloyingly sweet, and Bellara, and Neve – the earlier characters – but it improved as other characters came along. Still, there was an ‘everyone’s a winner’ kind of mentality to the crew, and to the game, and any narrative or personal obstacles seemed to be overcome fairly easily. There wasn’t much friction. There was no inter-party conflict, either, no antagonistic pals – no Sten, no Oghren, no Anders, no Blackwall or Iron Bull or Cole. It’s telling, actually, a year on, which characters have stuck in mind. Emmrich, the Vincent Price necromancer, certainly; maybe Spanish heartthrob Lucanis; but the others? I don’t know. I was a fan of Taash at the time but I haven’t thought about them since. They also symbolised some of the on-the-nose writing in the game, which I think characterised a game that didn’t want to let things build slowly, so it just dolled everything out – themes and secrets – like rapidly cooling porridge. Some of the mega-revelations that came in Veilguard arrived so abruptly they gave me whiplash.
But the sweetness you mentioned: I was there for it at the time, which teases a bigger topic I’ve been thinking about, which is how much opinion varies depending upon personal headspace at the time. Veilguard provided me with a dose of hope that I needed last year. It lifted me up, and I’m sure there were many other people like me who needed the same. Similarly, those rapid-fire narrative revelations: I wolfed them down. I dug deep into the Dragon Age lore before playing the game so I was primed and hungry for lore drops come the review. I remember actually squealing at one point when something big was revealed. And at the time I thought this was a strength.
I realise now, in retrospect, what I liked about Veilguard was created by Inquisition. Without that game you don’t have Veilguard, really. Inquisition did all the devising and the heavy narrative lifting. Veilguard really just reaped the rewards. To borrow your Ready Steady Cook analogy, which was inspired by the way, Inquisition was the game that planned the feast.
Attribution
To come back to another point you made about feeling the abandoned live-service Dragon Age idea in Veilguard: you absolutely can, particularly in the factions hub areas and their reputation rewards. Some of the scenery there was magnificent, though – testament, perhaps, to how long the game had been in development one way or another. The game’s art book documents a lot of this – I think more art was created for the Dragon Age 4 project that would eventually become Veilguard, than for the entire three earlier Dragon Age games combined. Oh and game director Corinne Busche told me there was a lot we’d recognise Veilguard from the live-service days.
There’ll never be another Dragon Age project like this, which spends 10 years in development; maybe there’ll never be another Dragon Age game at all. And like you, given where the game once was, I marvel that a decent single-player RPG came out of it at all.
Alex: Decent is the word, right? I think you could look at this, look at our reviews, and see you and I at opposite ends of a chasmous spectrum. Truth is, though, I really enjoyed my time with Veilguard – I just think it’s sort of less than the sum of its parts, to deploy a cloying cliche. At the same time, my respect for the people who made it was great to begin with and has only rocketed as I’ve learned more about its development.
I think there’s a greater problem, which Mass Effect now faces, which is that the way EA is set up means that it is almost the antithesis of the sort of environment that can foster games like this. It’s geared towards iterative sports and multinational development of behemoths – and you’re never going to see them put Battlefield-level investment into a single-player RPG. It’s the same reason why we’re unlikely to see them revisit Command & Conquer. I don’t have an enormous amount of hope for anything owned by EA that isn’t sports or Battlefield, really. But I hope Mass Effect can power through to a last-chance-saloon release, and then can do the numbers required to change that thinking. Or maybe, if EA takes on a mountain of debt, these less ‘useful’ IPs and studios end up for sale.
My feelings on the game haven’t changed much from that three-star review. I enjoyed my time with it, but I don’t have any real desire to revisit it (though I still keep thinking about returning to Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which I feel says it all). What about you, though? You’re the one who really liked it – has your opinion shifted heavily? Would you score it differently now?
Bertie: Yes, I would score it differently now. I think I’d probably land on four stars, although my hedging there is telling. But to sit and reappraise in the cold light of a year’s worth of reflection is also to overlook the passion I felt for the game when I reviewed it. I loved it – at the time I was certain of that. It gave me emotional highs and lows and some incredible set-pieces. And I don’t want to discredit the excitement I felt by tutting at my past self now, because to feel excited by a game is the best magic they can offer.
I remember, during the review, considering giving it five stars if the game could rise again in its finale, which it did – and spectacularly so. But that ending wasn’t really Veilguard’s idea, it was Mass Effect 2’s – and within that realisation lies so much of how I feel about Veilguard. It did a lot of things well but they were all things other BioWare games had done before. This was a design-by-BioWare-numbers job, really, or a salvage-by-BioWare-numbers job. It was deliberately made – as we now know – to feel like Mass Effect 2, because everyone likes Mass Effect 2. Whereas other Dragon Age projects had carefully laid their own original and ambitious ideas, by the time this one became Veilguard, it had one primary concern: completion. Remarkably, it wasn’t a mess. Veilguard remains one of the most entertaining Dragon Age experiences I’ve had, and as an action-packed epilogue to Inquisition it works marvellously. But it is not the game to hang the Dragon Age team’s legacy on.