It's been a long 10 years since the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition, the direct prequel and the last playable installment in the Dragon Age world overall. Expectations are high right off the bat, considering the previous game was the Game of the Year winner in 2014 according to The Game Awards. But rather than focusing on its prequel, we're here today to celebrate a new installment in the series and talk about each and every one of its details (and I'll tell you in advance, there are many).
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a complex proposition because it tackles several different design decisions that fit the current standard of big-budget games while trying to stay as faithful as possible to the foundations that have characterized the series for decades. Each of those decisions is reflected throughout the main campaign that can easily take more than 30 hours without side quests.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard's combat system is new, dynamic, different
Yes, I want us to go to the epicenter of the biggest change in the game in terms of the fundamentals to which the saga has accustomed us. The combat system is almost entirely based on action and not so much on the control strategy between the members of your team, the most notable change is that you cannot switch to using the characters that accompany you (although you can tell them to use some skill). Friends will not have a life bar either, so the action focuses on you as the absolute protagonist while the events unfold.
I use the word action with a clear purpose: That's what combat is all about. You will receive constant attacks from enemies that you can dodge with a quick dash, just like in action-RPG games you can do it at a predetermined time and get a longer distance dodge as well as a safer one. You also have a parry that, calculated at the correct time of the attack, gives you an opening to punish your enemy with all your strength.
As a last defensive option, you can block incoming attacks, either with your shield if you are a warrior or a force field if you are a sorcerer, at the cost of reducing your magic points, a lower bar that recharges over time and allows you to use skills depending on your class. You can also recover health using the basic potions, which this time are reduced to just that: healing potions.
The new offensive in Dragon Age
Moving away from the defensive perspective, you'll have multiple attack options. Firstly, each class can handle two weapons that allow you to quickly switch between them with a button in the middle of combat. My experience using an Elf Sorceress allowed me to use a staff to cast spells and a dagger accompanied by an orb that has some special mechanics. You can use different skills that you'll unlock as you level up by adding points to the skill tree.
You will always have one or two companions with six predefined skills, so you can choose just three. You can choose when you want them to use them because they will never do it on their own. The skills generate secondary effects that, by making certain combinations, can create a combo. The combo guarantees extra damage and damage in an area. The game clearly indicates on the tactical pause screen which skills make a combo according to the ones you have equipped.
New implementations to the combat system
You will have a basic attack and a kind of special attack that must be recharged, depending on whether you are running or standing still, the animation and damage will be different. You can recharge that bar by spending your magic points so that it does extra damage when it is at its maximum. Another new mechanic added is the "Stagger", which consists of filling a punishment bar that is above the enemy's life, when you fill it to the maximum you can do a special movement that immediately kills your enemy or causes massive damage if you have a lot of life.
Finally, you have a really strong special ability that does a huge amount of damage compared to the rest of the abilities. This power is recharged by receiving and doing damage, as well as finding blue vases on the map that recover enough of the bar to be able to use it again. The offense focuses on alternating the available combos using the abilities of each companion and your own, while doing normal attacks and trying to minimize the damage received.
A different fight does not mean bad
This is something to be clear about: the combat system is very good, it is very polished so that the intelligence of the enemies can corner you. Taking so many attacks and staying alert is very hectic. You have to constantly dodge and give orders to your teammates to attack different enemies, using an intuitive combat menu that is one of the best I have seen. The main criticism could be the radical change of genre. This game focuses more on direct action and less on the tactics and strategies of your teammates.
The combat system is a mix of mechanics that we have seen growing in trend in other great video games in the industry, such as God of War (which I think was highly inspired by this installment). The stagger system that stuns enemies has been seen in many Final Fantasy games, among other great games. What the new Dragon Age The Veilguard offers is precisely the mix of so many different things taken to a fantasy and RPG level like few other video games.
Its combat is focused on action because it seeks to make you live truly epic moments that are not born so much from strategy but from how visually striking its adventure becomes. The enemies, the animations, the fantasy that surrounds the combat system is what makes it come to life in a spectacular way and does not feel like a clone of other games. It does all this while being fascinatingly fun, each dodge, each power that you mix in a combo trying to do damage while taking care that your life does not reach zero is mind-blowing.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard's story is simple, but with deep details
It is difficult to describe or give a little introduction about the story because practically from the first minute it would be a spoiler, in turn, this works very well to describe that it is a story full of twists and significant details in each dialogue. From the very beginning we will have an introduction to the world of Dragon Age that will be very interesting for those who know the entire context of previous games with hundreds of references designed for that audience, at the same time, those who play a Dragon Age for the first time will need a little more context, but the game does its best to explain itself (at least the minimum necessary).
The events of the beginning unfold a plot that revolves around an entire world divided into large and small levels with many areas to explore and secrets to discover. During your journey through the world you will meet and interact with many tribes seeking to assemble a team to be able to face the evil that corrodes the world. In this line we will get characters that join our team, although they are clearly predefined and mandatory. Although the premise is quite simple, the game goes into great depth about the relationships that each character has with themselves and with the situation.
Along with the adventure, it's not just the characters that will develop with each event, but also the protagonist and the world itself. Discovering new areas in each level thanks to skills that will allow you to continue exploring, completing secondary missions that I found particularly interesting to play, many of the ones I did had subplots or very short stories that hooked you into wanting to do all the tasks requested by the NPC.
Decisions with great impact every minute
The most interesting thing about the story is how events will revolve around what we decide as players; very simple dialogues will allow us to strengthen our ties with one or another member of the team, to obtain new alliances or even cooperation from certain tribes. In addition to this, the story has truly epic moments in which we will have to make very difficult and complex decisions, sometimes without all the information and knowing the damage that choosing one path over the other will cause.
The world changes depending on the decisions we make, and in fighting the evil I mentioned, we will have to deal with the consequences of what we want to do as leaders of the game. That's why it's really interesting to evaluate the amount of details and twists that the story has, there's a lot of weight in what we decide to do and that's quite significant for the course of the campaign because it involves you in it.
The dialogues are equally outstanding, the script is completely absorbing and the exchanges that happen between the characters are written with care. Problems between characters of the same group for things that you decided: friendship, love, and even reflections on gender, everything is possible depending on what you say. There are specific conversations that are probably the most interesting exchange that the game has, this character that I cannot mention will talk to you in multiple interactions that will have you glued to the screen trying to make the decisions that you think are most convenient according to the context that accompanies the story.
His artistic style has it all: Colors and a lot of imagination
Depicting a fantasy always has the artistic difficulty of making it that: Fantastic. In a world of magic, mythical creatures, medieval buildings and endless natural environments, it is a challenge to make it feel real, unique and with its own brilliance. The team at BioWare He achieved it with an ease that looks enviable, he commented during the fight that this fantasy envelops you within the action and it is precisely his art the component that causes this effect.
Enemy design is carefully thought out in every aspect, from those giant enemies that triple your size to the basic ones, the human enemies, the enemies that are creatures: the compendium of characters that you have to fight against is quite wide, depending on the story and in other cases depending on the biome you are in. It is a bit missed that there are no animals to hunt like in previous installments because this brought more life to the world, but they make up for that lack with ample doses of enemies to defeat.
The magic section is mind-blowing, elemental spells of fire, ice or thunder have repercussions on enemies as usual, but the artistic depth that the enemies have in each state leaves you speechless. I loved using ice spells to freeze, the animations of seeing them freeze and how their body took on this appearance of ice and then broke and the fight continued was highly immersive.
Details and details: Everything interacts with each other
The synergy that the game has is amazing, things that are quite unnecessary are there, for example: If you are going to take a relatively insignificant secondary mission from a random NPC in a zone of the map, he will be able to react depending on the members that are with you in the team. If you are in his zone they will call him by his name affectionately as if they know him (which by context they do), if not, they will mention that you have a person from a certain clan that will be very useful for what they are about to ask you. The complexity that it takes to do this is worthy of admiration.
As you play, the characters you're with will have story conversations entirely between themselves. If they find themselves in a disagreement at the time, they'll discuss it in different ways, and if you play with them a lot, they'll become good friends, and it's genuinely fun to see relationships develop naturally in gameplay.
Another highlight is customization, the main character's skill tree is wide and full of things to discover that modify the combat to your liking. The companion tree is small and without much customization, the variety is found when switching between characters and their fighting styles. When starting the adventure, the character editor will allow you to choose predefined faces or customize facial and body features to the maximum, this first screen is a taste of the visual quality that the game will have, the animation of your character's hair or their expressions are very complex and natural.
Music for an adventure and voice acting with personality
Yes, the music that accompanies the game will take you through each area of the map and will intensify the moments of crucial decisions. At the same time, I must say that the game relies heavily on silences, silences to hear the dialogues clearly and silences to focus on exploration. The use of this resource is well achieved and knows when to appear. Along with the silences, the sound effects for magic, swords, shields and everything else from a fantasy world are very representative.
The game features voice acting in multiple languages (none of them Spanish), however, the quality of the English voice actors is quite marked. In a game of dialogue and character relationships, they bring a lot of emotion to everything they say, to all the conversations that happen throughout the easily more than 100 hours of gameplay between main and secondary activities. The game is translated into text and subtitled for a wide variety of languages, Spanish falling into this classification. Its translation is quite complete and well done, nothing of the meaning is lost in the process.
Conclusion of Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a great game that was carefully crafted by its development team. The time it took to create is evident in its strongest components: the art, the gameplay, and the details of the narrative. Using many resources, it is able to create a truly immersive single-player adventure that offers content almost literally for all types of players.
Its most valuable feature is the synergy it creates between each of its strong points; at specific moments in the story, something complex is happening in the middle of an epic battle full of colors and details, a battle that you must face with this action-packed format while making decisions that carry great weight. That mix is quite difficult to achieve and quickly becomes the element that has the most impact on the player.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard makes major changes to its foundations to lean in a new direction, a risky change that largely fulfills what it proposes. Examining the individual value of this work without comparisons with other installments of the saga makes it an essential game for fantasy lovers.
