Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s press preview gave me the reassurance I was looking for

Dragon Age: The Veilguard entered manufacturing solely a yr after the discharge of its blockbuster predecessor, Dragon Age: Inquisition, however when it comes out this Halloween, it is going to miss Inquisition’s tenth anniversary by a mere 17 days. It has really been an age between Dragon Age video games, and that age has really dragged o— Ow! All proper, I deserved that, but it surely’s been a really very long time since Dragon Age followers, and even BioWare followers, had stable excellent news.

2017’s Mass Impact: Andromeda and 2019’s Anthem debuted as expensive letdowns, all whereas manufacturing on Veilguard stopped, began, and restarted. Over the previous decade, BioWare has additionally misplaced an alarming variety of Dragon Age’s founding names and inventive stars, like lead designer and inventive director Mike Laidlaw (resigned in 2017), producer Mark Darrah (resigned in 2020, returned in 2023 as a guide), and author Mary Kirby (laid off in 2023).

If you happen to’re a Dragon Age fan approaching The Veilguard with wariness, nobody may blame you. It’s a tough assortment of reports for any upcoming online game, not to mention a franchise as relationship-focused, lore-dense, thematically wealthy, and narratively sophisticated as Dragon Age. However this month, epicgamejourney had an opportunity to sit down down and play Veilguard at Digital Arts’ Redwood Metropolis headquarters.

And the sport appears to be like good. Sure, even the real-time fight.

BioWare’s occasion furnished journalists with PC variations of the sport, operating on the corporate’s {hardware}, showcasing 5 totally different sections of gameplay from the primary “act” of the sport. We have been in a position to play by way of the introductory sequence, the invention of the Lighthouse (the titular Veilguard’s HQ), introductory quest strains for 2 companion characters, a basic BioWare “wide selection and penalties” sequence, a extra open part that included a companion’s Act 1 private quest, and eventually the concluding mission of Act 1, utilizing personal customized Rook (the alias of Veilguard’s participant character) and a alternative of three premade Rooks for every character class.

It was rather a lot to play, and assembled employees — together with sport director Corinne Busche, producer Jen Cheverie, and inventive director John Epler — appeared excited to point out it off. There have been laughs across the room as Busche, realizing the core Dragon Age viewers, cautioned friends to not spend greater than half an hour within the character creator.

BioWare had already introduced that Veilguard’s character creator has the least binary gender selections of any Dragon Age sport earlier than it, and Busche’s delight is just not undeserved. Veilguard is the primary Dragon Age sport to permit gamers to tweak their PC’s dimensions under the neckline, and the primary to characteristic hairstyles that fall under the chin.

There are additionally some welcome quality-of-life updates. Gamers of Inquisition, which shrouded its character screens in murky inexperienced mild, will probably be blissful to see buttons in Veilguard’s character creator that toggle between three separate lighting environments. And you probably have the expertise of hitting that first cutscene and instantly regretting your selections, the now practically ubiquitous RPG Mirror of Oops My PC Seems to be Unhealthy Truly turns into obtainable nearly instantaneously.

Naturally, my demon of the perverse wished to push these instruments at their restrict. I picked an elf (who, in Dragon Age, aren’t a lot “supermodel skinny” as they’re “scarecrow skinny”), selected the thickest base physique kind, after which flipped all of the sliders to extensive.

My Rook seemed again at me, a lady with spherical, spherical thighs, a curved, gentle abdomen, and hips that, like mine, would discover these dumb metallic Ikea chairs that each restaurant in New York appears to have proper now infuriatingly uncomfortable. She seemed like an adventurer who might need gotten into the life after having a child or two, and she or he additionally seemed scorching. She didn’t appear like she simply had a wider set of muscle groups.

Then I picked her hair: a mane of unfastened 3A to 3B curls that fell to mid-back and swayed along with her motion. Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s character creator has practically 90 hairstyles to select from, and each certainly one of any size, from brief locs to lengthy straight lengths, is physics-enabled.

Enjoying on BioWare’s PC {hardware}, at the least, Veilguard appears to be like spectacular. My Rook dodged, ran, fell, and leapt, and she or he seemed good doing it. The closest I got here to noticing a seam was her hand clipping by way of a little bit of layered clothes on her thigh in a single shot of a cutscene. Her hair remained impeccable the entire time, bouncing and sliding with motion however staying out of her face for close-ups.

The sights didn’t cease on the technical wizardry behind a head of real-time-rendered curls. The traditional arcano-mechanical guards have been draped in cobwebs that swayed within the forest breeze. I trotted by way of a market within the Fade itself, staffed and patronized by spirits. I fought cultists in a repurposed undersea spoil the place shimmering magical drive fields held again tens of millions of tons of water and swam with runes and rainbows once I drew shut.

Particularly, I fought cultists utilizing Veilguard’s real-time fight system, which has been greeted with not-insignificant apprehension. A 2023 leak of gameplay that described it as being within the type of the God of Conflict reboot despatched the fandom right into a minor tailspin. The priority is comprehensible: Whereas it’s true that Dragon Age has by no means been a turn-based franchise, you’ve by no means been in a position to block, dodge, or parry on command in a Dragon Age sport, both. However this author discovered the fight didn’t really feel as unfamiliar as you may anticipate.

And this author… Look, I’m sure there are individuals on the market for whom the fight system of a BioWare sport is a major draw. However that merely couldn’t be me. So take that as context once I say that I’m replaying Dragon Age: Inquisition on its lowest issue setting in the meanwhile, and I might swap it out for Veilguard’s fight, on regular issue, in a heartbeat.

Veilguard’s three-sided system of synergistic, cross-character skill interactions (slap a debuff in your goal with one character, set off a harm explosion with a synergizing skill from one other) is paying homage to Inquisition’s comparable rock-paper-scissors-style association of debuffs and harm triggers. However the distance between the 2 is stark. Inquisition’s debuffs and triggers are minimally referenced within the fight UI, with the precise clarification of the system tucked away in a single codex entry. And as synergizing skills have been restricted to just some of the eight skill slots every of your 10 characters had, it was by no means one thing I felt the necessity to memorize and even take note of.

This synergy system is the important thing to Veilguard’s fight, and BioWare’s workforce has stepped as much as make it possible for mastering it’s straightforward and enjoyable. The normal four-person Dragon Age celebration (your PC and three companions) has been pruned to a few, and whereas I do mourn the lack of three-way celebration banter, the trade-off is straight away apparent. Veilguard is shifting the scope of the participant’s management from 4 equally advanced celebration members to at least one well-oiled, party-wide interface.

Fight is a mixture of fundamental assaults and guards from Rook, punctuated by a pause display screen/skill bar that permits you to survey the battlefield at your individual tempo and select from 9 character skills (three from every character, together with Rook) to dunk in your enemies. The characters’ synergy skills are clearly marked within the fight UI with a connecting line of huge yellow chyrons that seems on mouseover, and the sport does an excellent job of alerting you when skills are able to undergo a various array of voice barks particular to every companion. The system efficiently makes you are feeling like a workforce, reasonably than a participant character and three charismatic bots.

With this deal with one menu in your complete celebration’s suite of skills, there’s a thought-about hole between the complexity of Rook’s techniques and people of the companions you may select to deliver on every mission. In Veilguard, your seven companions have fewer merchandise slots and less complicated talent timber than Rook. That may sound like a downer, however once more, I’m presently replaying Dragon Age: Inquisition, wherein all 9 companions are simply as advanced as your principal PC in abilities and equipment. To me, Veilguard’s model seems like a aid — aid from having to do 20-40 minutes of Dragon Age Menu Homework simply to get again to truly taking part in the sport.

I like Dragon Age: Inquisition, regardless of its half-dozen separate gear customization menus which are one way or the other all three layers deep. However what strikes me, after getting a glance underneath Veilguard’s hood, is that none of Inquisition’s gear customization really adjustments the best way I play the fight — it’s simply so my numbers will keep larger than the dangerous man numbers.

BioWare reps have taken pains to emphasise that Veilguard’s fight system is designed to offer gamers of any type an possibility that works for them, and with seven hours of play underneath my belt, I believe they could have performed it. The second of realization got here, sarcastically, once I began to get actually pissed off with my progress by way of a collection of adverse enemies.

I used to be pissed off as a result of I used to be on a time restrict, making an attempt to make it to the ultimate sequence of the demo earlier than the top of the occasion. And I used to be pissed off as a result of I knew what the issue was: The celebration I’d chosen didn’t have sufficient synergizing skills, and the pre-built warrior Rook I’d opted for was specced with a parry-based play type. If I hadn’t been on the clock, I might have taken a break, reloaded, chosen totally different companions (or respecced them, which is free), and reworked Rook’s talent tree (additionally free) to one thing I discovered smoother to play.

In earlier sections of the sport, I’d experimented with a melee mage, utilizing an orb of uncooked magic in a single hand to cost up the lengthy dagger I held within the different, and a rogue with daggers and a bow. To me it felt nice to zip and dodge across the battlefield, needling at my foes shut up and, if that grew to become an excessive amount of, retreating, swapping to my alternate weapon set, and blasting them from vary. Being up within the melee combine with these tough enemies and this parry warrior construct would definitely be exhilarating for some, however for me, on my time crunch, it bordered on overwhelming: sifting by way of twitchy UI indications of which assaults could possibly be blocked and which needed to be dodged, and making an attempt to get my very own hits in on the facet.

In contrast to another Dragon Age sport I’ve performed, Veilguard’s fight was a puzzle I really wished to unravel. I knew there was a strategy to do it that may work higher for me, if I simply had the time to seek out it. Even within the restricted hours we needed to play, the sport had already proven me the solutions, and I knew my subsequent steps.

Right here’s what I don’t know: what The Veilguard is definitely about. However it is a Dragon Age sport, and actually, that’s precisely the place I need to be.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is in an attention-grabbing place because the fourth sport in a collection recognized for altering its scale and scope with every installment. These adjustments have solely highlighted the ways in which every earlier Dragon Age sport has rhymed with the others, and makes one wonder if Veilguard will select to proceed these patterns or subvert them. For instance, all three earlier Dragon Age video games have included some sort of Act 1 twist that radically alters the scope of the sport or your character’s place in its story.

Which is simply to say that when BioWare’s representatives advised us we’d solely be taking part in sequences from Act 1, I assumed, Aha. Yeah, I will probably be making no onerous assumptions on the plot. So what do I consider the story of Dragon Age: The Veilguard up to now? I received’t point out specifics from what I noticed, as a result of no person really needs to listen to them, however I’ll discuss in regards to the generalities that appear, to me, to be telling.

The BioWare staffers who spoke on the preview occasion burdened that their aim in Veilguard was to create a contained RPG expertise. Dragon Age 2 allowed gamers to load a Dragon Age: Origins save to play their very own customized world state. For Inquisition, the Dragon Age Hold web site allowed gamers to manually tweak dozens of world state selections earlier than connecting them to a playthrough. However in Veilguard, the “Hold” is true there within the character creator. After I requested Busche in regards to the motivation behind that evolution, she responded, “If something, […] our dedication to having a single-player, full, offline RPG — that’s what led us to actually need to have every thing throughout the sport be self-contained.”

After I requested if there have been any Veilguard DLC plans within the works, Busche additionally cited this notion of contained completeness. “Earlier we mentioned that we wished to make this probably the most feature-complete, genuine BioWare sport that we’ve seen within the final 10 years. That’s utterly our focus proper now. […] Who is aware of what the longer term holds, however proper now, it’s all about delivering the most effective sport we are able to.”

BioWare reps additionally burdened “remorse” because the narrative theme of the sport, embodied by two returning franchise NPCs — Varric Tethras, the dwarven adventurer and novelist, and Solas, the traditional elf mage whose exploits have been warped by retelling till he grew to become worshipped as a god. They usually additionally burdened the seven companion characters, significantly the depth of their tales and the way interwoven they have been with the primary plot of the sport, most of them belonging to certainly one of six factions with which Rook will work together.

All of it makes me surprise if Veilguard may set one other sample for Dragon Age: that of a massively expansive story wherein the participant can decide the destiny of countries (Origins, Inquisition), adopted by a extra private, character-focused, darkish journey. It wouldn’t be the primary time that Dragon Age has responded to stress by rooting itself in character and narrative.

Dragon Age 2, coming in scorching just one and a half years after the large breadth of Dragon Age: Origins, is infamous for its scope concessions (and crunch time). However it’s additionally beloved for its distinctive, trope-subverting storyline, and a set of companion characters with out a single weak hyperlink. Working example: Varric Tethras, created and written by Mary Kirby, served because the narrator of Dragon Age 2 and continues to be going robust as a voice of the franchise over a decade later.

There’s any person studying this who’s going, “Veilguard is contained like Dragon Age 2? That sport befell in just one metropolis! It had like 5 property! Oh no!” So let me be clear: What I’m questioning about is whether or not Rook’s story might prioritize navigating the non-public motivations of a set of compelling companions and antagonists (like Dragon Age 2) over navigating fantasy politics and prejudices (like Origins and Inquisition). Veilguard, make no bones about it, feels large from the beginning.

Whereas a lot of what I noticed have been contained missions, Busche and Cheverie characterised Veilguard as having a mixture of closed sections — the place, Busche mentioned, “we’ve probably the most salient narrative beats the place we are able to inform the most effective tales” — and exploratory, self-directed environments.

Referencing her personal playthroughs, Busche mentioned, “There’s been a number of occasions the place I’ve picked up a quest, I’ve tracked it, I’m off to Arlathan Forest, and alongside the best way I’ll see Taash [Veilguard’s Qunari companion] there like, Hey, I assumed we have been going to fulfill up. I’ve been ready for you. And subsequent factor, I’m becoming a member of Taash, we’re on one other journey, and lo and behold, I come throughout a puzzle adjoining to this path that Taash has taken me on, and I find yourself doing one thing actually satisfying and shocking.”

I felt that pull in my very own time with the sport, which was stuffed with issues I need to reexamine at a slower tempo, to seek out extra secrets and techniques and even sit and chill with (the second that I reached over to urgently poke the pal taking part in subsequent to me was when I discovered a stray cat, mendacity in a metropolis road, that Rook may pet). Even within the six hours obtainable to play, I ventured from a darkish metropolis the place mages dominated, to the dream realm of the Fade, to a lush forest marked by the fallout of a magical catastrophe, to a metropolis of trendy assassins, to a repurposed undersea spoil, to an historical fortress underneath siege.

Previous to the press occasion, if you happen to’d requested me to explain Dragon Age’s core attributes, I most likely would have known as it a “low-magic fantasy setting.” I wouldn’t do this anymore. Dragon Age lore has all the time contained the concept that there are areas on this planet the place mages and magic are a lot much less restricted than they’re within the ones wherein Origins, 2, and Inquisition have been set. Veilguard takes gamers to these locations for the primary time, and the distinction is straight away — understandably — noticeable.

After all, new gamers received’t ping to that in any respect — particularly not those who’ve spent the final yr or so exploring, say, Faerûn. And although it’s tough for me to place myself within the footwear of somebody for whom Veilguard is their first Dragon Age sport — to roll again the years I’ve spent marinating within the dank, red-yarn-crazy-board-strewn depths of Dragon Age lore — I believe what I noticed was an exhilarating, and useful, on-ramp.

For brand spanking new gamers, I can inform you that after the prologue sequence proven off at Summer time Sport Fest, which does an excellent job of establishing the stakes, you’ll be tossed straight right into a quest line that helpfully underscores all this details about historical elven gods by linking it on to a gaggle of NPCs, their targets, and the brand new location you’re exploring. Veilguard continues Inquisition’s custom of an exposition-collecting codex geared up with attractive tarot-inspired artwork, and (the primary I believe I’ve ever seen in a CRPG) a separate glossary for all these new fantasy-ass nouns you’ll be listening to.

For Dragon Age veterans, whose eyebrows may go up at merely the point out of Shartan, or Kal-Sharok, or the Executors, I can inform you (with out spoilers!) that there’s heaps to get enthusiastic about. With Rook, you’ll be capable to discover recollections from Solas’ historical previous, after which sit down for a goss sesh with all of your companions to select by way of the most recent soiled laundry of Dragon Age’s most controversial or beloved (beloversial?) frenemy. The dialogue wheel is as soon as once more labeled in your choose of heroic, sarcastic, or aggressive tone, like in Dragon Age 2. In case your companions have new issues to say, the lanterns exterior their room in your headquarters will probably be illuminated, so that you don’t need to test each in flip and get actually bored of their default dialogue. Get together banter will pause after which resume if you happen to set off a cutscene or fight in the midst of it — no extra screeching to a halt to be sure you don’t miss a superb line.

Maybe most devastatingly of all, BioWare has picked up one of the highly effective instruments of its narrative sport rivals: Alerting you instantly after an un-flagged dialogue alternative that it was secretly, one way or the other, a major one. Sure, Dragon Age has discovered from “Clementine will keep in mind this,” and now we’re all in bother.

9 years and 11 days in the past, BioWare launched Dragon Age: Inquisition’s last DLC, Trespasser, and pointed on the stands like Babe Ruth. As a dramatic rating pounded, the Inquisitor actually stabbed a knife right into a map of Tevinter, a rustic beforehand unseen in any Dragon Age sport, and spelled out a selected setting, a selected antagonist, and even a selected set of characters to observe (i.e., brand-new ones) within the sport’s sequel.

Over the period in-between, and following the numerous hurdles Veilguard vaulted to get right here, I’d way back launched any expectations I had that the sport’s plot would observe straight from that known as shot. Out of kindness, if nothing else, it appeared an excessive amount of to anticipate the inventive people behind the franchise to leash themselves so carefully to Inquisition after a lot time, turnover, and tribulation.

However I got here out of my time with Veilguard nursing the miraculous-seeming hunch, “Mythal’enaste, I believe these loopy fuckers may simply have performed it.” Possibly I’m flawed. Possibly I’m proper. Possibly I’ll become proper, however solely after the first-act rug pull. However both means, to my private aid, I’m actually wanting ahead to discovering out.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard will probably be launched Oct. 31 on PlayStation 5, Home windows PC, and Xbox Collection X.

Disclosure: This text relies on a preview occasion held by writer EA in Redwood Metropolis, California, on Sept. 5. EA supplied epicgamejourney’s journey and lodging for the occasion. Yow will discover further details about epicgamejourney’s ethics coverage right here.