Dragon Age: The Veilguard is my third-favorite game of the year, and I don't care who knows

I can't remember a single game that has polarized the PC Gamer team as much as Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Even pre-launch, opinions were mixed, and now that it's been out for some time, we've congealed into three camps: Anti-Veilguardites Robin and Fraser, Radical Veilguard Centrists Harvey and Lauren (who wrote our review), and The People's Revolutionary Council of Revisionist Veilguard-Likers, which consists of Jody and yours truly.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is not my personal game of the year, that's gotta be Shadow of the Erdtree. It's also not my second favorite game of the year⁠—that title belongs to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. But by God, Veilguard is 100% my third favorite game of 2024. While not perfect, I think it's a heartening return to form for BioWare, and one whose finer qualities have been eclipsed by both valid critiques of its storytelling, as well as far less acceptable "antiwoke" bellyaching. I really dug this game, and I want to give it its flowers before the year is through.

Even as BioWare struggled with everything else during its wilderness years of the late 2010s, it's only been getting better at making action-RPGs, and Veilguard is no exception. I love tactical RPGs, but that hasn't been BioWare's bag for a long time, and while I could take or leave some of the ways Veilguard smooths away the last remnants of CRPG-adjacent rough edges from Inquisition, a lot of the team's decisions here were pretty inspired.

I appreciate the way Veilguard curbed loot inflation, as well as Inquisition's tedious and unbalanced item crafting, with a unique, upgrade-centric system that incentivizes finding duplicate copies of the same weapon. The one-two punch of making all player armors usable by all classes while companions get their own bespoke gear erodes some of the distinction of the class fantasies (why's my rogue running around in plate mail!), but it also eliminates finding dud gear you just can't use, and simplifies the process of balancing all that loot.

Veilguard definitely has a reverse difficulty curve, and its fights are starting to feel samey as I approach the 60-hour mark, but that's an issue I've found with all of BioWare's games to date, and the core of Veilguard's combat and character building is fun enough to carry the day for me. I'm always a rogue first in Dragon Age, and here I opted for the classico dual swords edgelord "Duelist" specialization. The "Thousand Cuts" subclass-specific ability feels so good, I don't mind that every fight consists of me building up enough Rogue Pointz™ to just start spamming it⁠—my qunari rogue adopts an "en garde, my liege" stance before launching into a flurry of AOE anime slashes, trailing poison with every strike.

Veilguard's level design, meanwhile, is unambiguously BioWare's most interesting and complex in over 20 years, at least since Neverwinter Nights in 2002. I'd seen Veilguard's levels derisively compared to Overwatch maps, with simple layouts and pretty skyboxes, but that sells Veilguard short, and I think it's in a whole other league compared to the Mass Effect games. Don't get me wrong⁠, I love Mass Effect⁠, but its levels were exclusively linear shooting galleries with maybe a short side path or two to a weapon upgrade if you're lucky, while its non-combat hubs were the tiniest Disneyland suggestions of real places.

The Veilguard's levels are videogamey⁠—they don't immerse me or feel like real places in the same way Elden Ring or Indiana Jones managed⁠—but they are also fun, twisty, and visually striking, with Metroidesque shortcuts and switchbacks, as well as enough hidden loot and secret areas that I felt genuinely rewarded for exploring both in missions and during free roam of the hubs. A word of advice though: I definitely recommend taking Fraser's cue and toning down Veilguard's aggressively handholding objective markers. I went one step further, completely disabling both them and the minimap, and I haven't regretted it once.

Would that you could do the same to Veilguard's little choice explainer pop-ups. Every time something in The Veilguard transpires because of your previous actions, a little tooltip shows up like Microsoft Clippy to remind you why: "Remember when you spat in this guy's soup? He doesn't like you now." There's a genuinely difficult choice early in the game where you have to consign one of two hub zones to a stinky natural disaster, and I loved this moment, but the magic dulled a bit as the game just kept reminding me of it. Veilguard undermines its genuinely impressive reactivity by constantly explaining it to you like you're a toddler.

But that's just an annoyance, while the story being told is genuinely good fun. Thedas is definitely tamer, friendlier, and less politically fraught than it's ever been⁠—I was more amused than annoyed that the infamous Antivan Crows assassin guild from games past is more or less a confederation of plucky, crime-flavored freedom fighters now⁠—but it still feels like Thedas, and I didn't realize how much I missed this setting until I dove back in.

Veilguard has a solid crew of companions to hang with. If Mass Effect Andromeda was a resounding F and Dragon Age Origins has an S-tier crew, then Veilguard's cast gets a B. Neve, Harding, and Taash are sub-replacement level for me⁠—I found them by turns aggravating and boring⁠—but Lucanis kind of won me over. Under that edgy cool guy assassin exterior, he's basically just Carth from KotOR or Kaidan from Mass Effect, and I have a well-documented affection for that archetype.

Plucky archeologist Bellara, Grey Warden hardass Davrin, and friendly neighborhood necromancer Emmerich carry the cast for me. I was worried that Bellara would just be a worse version of Talli from Mass Effect or Merrill from Dragon Age 2, but after a poor first impression, I found her to be a winning, layered character with a great arc. Davrin brings a nice edge to the sword-and-board knight sort of guy, and I really dug how things played out between him and pet griffon Assan⁠—there's a bit of a Lone Wolf and Cub, "step dad who stepped up" thing going on, and I found that much more fun and palatable as one aspect of one member of an ensemble as opposed to The Plot of Every Console Triple-A Game For A While. Emmerich, meanwhile, is just a nice guy, a sweetheart⁠—he reminds me most of Gale from Baldur's Gate 3⁠—but the contrast of his chirpy attitude with his grimdark necromancer profession and aesthetics really charmed me.

It took us 10 years to get a new Dragon Age game, but it wasn't a linear process of toil on a singular vision. What would become The Veilguard saw one hard reboot and the departure of numerous longtime BioWare developers, including writers David Gaider and Mary Kirby, as well as directors Mike Laidlaw and Mark Darrah (Darrah did return as a consultant). The game then went through some kind of soft reboot from a live service multiplayer orientation back into a singleplayer game.

That's development hell, and somehow, The Veilguard escaped it. With a backstory like that, you might expect the finished result to be a mess, a cross-section of competing visions and stratified eras of development that's simply unfit for prime time.

But that's not what we got at all. The Veilguard is a fun, well put-together, and engrossing action-RPG that's had me hooked for 60 hours and counting. I know it's a good RPG because I indulged in my favorite vice and rerolled my guy after 20 hours to make a slightly different guy, and I didn't mind experiencing the first act of the game again⁠—I even cranked the difficulty up to the "tough customers only" Nightmare setting to spice things up. BioWare actually managed to do the thing with Veilguard despite all the factors working against it, and I'm proud to call Dragon Age: The Veilguard my third-favorite game of 2024.