Dat Antivan Veil

Checking in on Dragon Age Veilguard. I hit a pretty solid story beat recently; I think I'm probably out of Act I, assuming that is a thing for this game. I've finally assembled what seems to be my entire party, have some big story goals to pursue and a whole bunch of side-quests. So I wanted to write another little-ish post to capture my thoughts thus far, hoping to avoid writing too long of a novel after finally beating the game.

 

 

Let's start out with some purely mechanical notes.

 

 

The control scheme for exploration is pretty much the same as for Dragon Age Inquisition. It's been so many years since I've played that, and I'm abruptly reminded of how funny and mildly frustrating it is that "jump" and "use" are bound to the same key. Rook runs up to someone and hops up in the air when he wants to talk. Comes across a treasure chest and does a happy little hop. Comes across a door: do you pick the lock? Bash it down? Turn the knob? Nope: just jump straight up!

 

 

I do really appreciate the simplified inventory system. Armor just comes in complete sets, not individual pieces. New armor equipment drops from large treasure chests (marked on the map) or after clearing a stage; you can preview the equipment compared to your current piece and decide whether to swap or not. Each companion has their own separate gear, so you never need to sort through hand-me-downs. Equipment (armor, weapons, rings, runes) are never sold. You do sell miscellaneous items you pick up in the world, which in previous games were labeled "junk" or "trash". They are exactly the same in this game, except they've been rebranded as "valuables".

 

 

One mild annoyance is that there is an optimal way to sell the "valuables". Certain items are favored by particular vendors, so you're better off selling to them; you could also sell to other vendors for far less benefit. The only way to discover this is to travel around six different zones (with long loading times each) before selling to anyone, or else to pull up this Google Sheet and have it in front of you while you're deciding what to sell.

On the plus side, there's no carry limit for quantity or encumbrance, so you can skip past my absolute least favorite RPG activity; instead, just focus on playing the game, and sell the trash-er-I-mean-valuables when you need the cash.

None of this is remotely realistic, of course. Even less realistic is how finding a duplicate piece of equipment will upgrade the rarity of the existing piece you have: by definition, wouldn't it become less rare after you find two? But as a system it works great. Your gear keeps advancing: when you upgrade the level of one piece, every other piece in the category advances as well; and when you find a new piece, even if it isn't one you plan to use, it removes that from the pool and increases the odds of finding a piece you do want.

 

 

The world is pretty cool, although I've been spoiled by Elden Ring and to a lesser extent Baldur's Gate 3. DA:V feels like Inquisition, with large zones rather than an "open world". Each has its own unique atmosphere, whether a dripping gloomy swamp or a bright sunlit forest or a bustling dockside neighborhood. They do feel a bit generic fantasy-y, not as striking and original as Elden Ring... but that's okay, there is comfort in familiarity.

 

 

I do like how exploring pushes out the world as you uncover more of a zone's map but also connects earlier parts as well. You'll open doors that were locked on the other side, push down a tree to cross the canyon to where you originally came from. This makes subsequent travels through the area quicker and easier. It reminds me a lot of Elden Ring dungeon design, which eliminated back-tracking by providing shortcuts back to the start. But in Elden Ring it tended to be for one-time travel after finishing a dungeon or a streamlining the path to the boss. In DAV the entire world is linked like this, letting you cross-cross and move through the map more quickly and easily as the result of your previous exploration work.

 

 

There are a lot of different types of puzzles in the game. The rules seem inconsistent - when holding an arcane cube you can't jump. The types of puzzles tend to cluster by areas: arcane beams around fade portals, blight boils in blighted areas, wisps in the necropolis. The puzzles are fine, probably more enjoyable than the stand-alone puzzles like astrolobes in DAI. One thing that's a little annoying (as with navigation in general) is that it isn't clear when a particular puzzle can't be solved yet, you'll need to leave the area and come back after opening another door or something. 

 

 

Non-systemic puzzles have been good, nothing earth-shattering but also nothing too frustrating or difficult. Like one where you needed to make three statues point a certain way, and if you explore around the area you'll find miniature statues pointing the way you want. I did really enjoy a companion conversation back at the base where we griped about needing to solve puzzles to get loot - I think my Rook said something is, "I dislike random puzzles. There has to be some sort of a purpose!" Dragon Age has had some really good lampshading in the past, and this is right up there: we're playing in a universe where people are obsessed with putting annoying puzzles in their dungeons to thwart adventurers.

 

 

Combat also... I was going to say that it's like Inquisition, but it isn't. What is like Inquisition is enemy placement: there's a regular trickle of "trash fights," infinitely respawning low-to-mid-level enemies. You can get small amounts of XP and gold or trinkets from killing them. But they end up serving as resources in level progress. In Inquisition you could build up stuff like Guard from low-level fights and carry that into a boss fight. Similarly, in Veilguard you can get Momentum or power up your Ultimate from those trash fights, and enter the boss fight with a much stronger punch than if you had just entered directly from the quick-travel spawn-in point. 

 

 

Having played this some more, I really get now why people compare it with Mass Effect: it's basically exactly like that. You have two companions with you. They can never die. They fight on autopilot, but you can order their targets, and command them to use their special abilities on cooldown. You want to plan cross-team builds to use primers and detonators. I'm not complaining - Mass Effect combat was fun - but it is a shift from the previous Dragon Age games (which, to be fair, were each radically different from one another).

 

 

That said, for party composition I've mostly ignored companion builds or synergy. At first I prioritized bringing the people I liked. Then I started bringing people most relevant to the area. Now I'm also bringing the lowest-bonded to get their relation meter up; I think this advances when they complete a side-quest with you. I'll sometimes bring a strong and synergistic team if I'm specifically expecting a big fight and not exploration.

 

 

A quick note on the save system: after dealing with sparse and limited save points in Elden Ring, it has felt really refreshing to be able to save anywhere at any time (at least outside of combat). That said, it isn't a true save: previously-defeated non-boss enemies usually come back after loading a save, and if you've, say, burst three of five Blight boils, save and quit for the night, when you reload the next day you'll need to burst all five again. That hasn't been a big annoyance, and I'll still take it over Elden Ring style saves, but I've also started to make sure my end-of-day saves are at the end of a section and not in the middle when I can help it.

MINI SPOILERS

Early in the game, I was a bit struck by the casual language; in particular, some characters like Bellara have speech patterns closer to a modern teen than the standard faux-received-pronounciation generally associated with fantasy. Casual dialogue (with lots of modern swears!) has always been a part of the series but feels more pronounced now. Though, that also may be my reaction playing this game in my 40s vs playing Origins in my 20s; the characters here feel young but they're probably around the same age as people in Origins and Dragon Age 2. (Well, other than Wynn!)

 

 

Steam says I've played for 34 hours, which seems about right. I've spent a bit of time in the menus but not a ridiculous amount. I'm doing my standard RPG thing of trying to exhaust all side-quests before proceeding with the main game. Giving a slightly spoilery rundown of my game so far (mega spoilers for Inquisition):

 

 

My Rook is a male Qunari Rogue, somewhat recently taking the Veil Ranger specialization to focus on archery. He was a Shadow Dragon in Tevinter, and sees himself as a warrior defending the oppressed from the powerful, particularly breaking up slaving rings but more broadly anyone misusing their influence or authority. He would theoretically have some sympathy for Solas's crusade against the Elven gods, but is fixated on Solas's willingness to sacrifice innocent human life to tear down the veil, and as a result is consistently hostile to Solas in all our communications.

 

 

I think I mentioned earlier that Rook left the Mayor to deal with the consequences of the Blight, seeing it as a way to punish the putative leader for sacrificing his people. When the Evunaris attacked the cities, Rook opted to defend Minrathous first, mostly because of his affinity with the Shadow Dragons; once he could reach Antiva, though, he focused on clearing all the Blight possible.

 

 

I've recruited all companions, just recently getting Taash on board. I like all of them; Davrin is probably the one who has surprised me the most by how quickly he's growing on me, at first he seemed like a pretty generic Gray Warden but he has a really great personality, and I strongly relate to his bond with his griffin, which is a mix of affection, exasperation, humor and worry. I'm mostly flirting with Harding and Bellara, though I haven't committed to anyone yet.

 

 

The last major story thing was fighting Ghilan'nain and her dragon during the Siege of Weishaupt, which was a nicely epic sequence. I really loved how the companions you didn't bring in the party participated in the assault, which felt a bit like the action in Mass Effect Citadel. The boss fight was hard and fun; some annoying camera issues where a dragon's neck fills the screen so you can't see any of the dozen other enemies running around, and there's a recurring issue where you can get knocked into the water and insta-die-and-respawn, but even with those glitches I had a blast.

 

 

I continue to understand why reviewers compare this game to Mass Effect, and right now I'm particularly getting a Mass Effect 2 vibe: we've assembled this team of People With Particular Skills, and the explicit goal now is to Help People Solve Their Personal Problems so they can Focus On The Bad Guy. I'm not complaining! Mass Effect 2 was great, I'm already enjoying the Veilguard companions and expect to like them even more as I get to know them better.

 

 

Oh, and before I forget, I was a little bummed that so little of the world state from the first three games comes forward into this one, but it was fun to see the Inquisitor pop back up again. I kind of wish I had spent more time designing her; I decided that my first PC Aztar Cadash will be my canonical Inquisitor for this game, and she is a dwarf with darkish skin and short reddish hair, but really doesn't look much like my original one. I'm wondering now if a fan will ever build a tool to extract the Inquisition sliders (either from a save file or the Keep) and give steps on rebuilding them in Veilguard. But (a) the fact this game takes place a decade later does give at least some plausibility to looking different, and (b) having (who I think is) the original voice actor(s) back is hugely convincing.

 

 

More broadly, I am legitimately enjoying seeing (literally) old faces popping back up again. I was surprised to see Isabella make another appearance, I think she was MIA in Inquisition, other than maybe a War Table mission or two? She is visibly aged, which I honestly enjoy, it helps the world feel grounded and real. And somewhat similarly, seeing Morrigan appear was fantastic; she has not visibly aged, which makes a lot of sense given she is (a) a witch, and (b) Flemeth's child. But her style has changed (arguably more so than Isabella's), which gives the same sense of growth, that each person is the star of their own story and we get to see these stretches where we intersect.

 

 

 

 

END SPOILERS

So yeah, I'm definitely enjoying this game; it's too early to weigh in on how this compares with the earlier ones, at first it wasn't gripping me as strongly as I'd hoped but now that I have the team together and the main story has kicked in I'm getting a kick out of it. I'm looking forward to playing more and writing more about it!

The Somewhere Book

I'm a big fan of China Mieville, so it's a bit surprising that I first heard about his latest novel on The Colbert Report. It's an interesting book, co-written with the actor Keanu Reeves. Some years ago Reeves wrote a comic called BRZRKR, and more recently he and Mieville have collaborated on a novel "The Book of Elsewhere" that builds on the comic.

 

I haven't read BRZRKR, and I'm a little curious about the intended audience for TBoE, whether they assume that most readers are already familiar with the world and characters, or that they are not, or if they try to account for both. I honestly found the book a little hard to get into and struggled for the first hundred pages or so; I mildly suspect that, if I was already invested in the characters or familiar with their background, I might have gotten hooked earlier. I'm glad I stuck with it, as around the midpoint it started to click with me, and by the end I was really enjoying the ride.

MINI SPOILERS

One of the very few things I knew about BRZRKR heading into this novel is that it's a pretty gory comic. The main character, who variously goes by "B" or "Unute", is an ancient, immortal fighter. When he gets angry, he enters a sort of fugue state and becomes a whirling dervish of death. He's stronger than anyone on the planet and can take on entire squadrons of armed soldiers without serious injury; when he does get hurt, he rapidly heals; and even when he does die, as has happened many many times over tens of thousands of years, he is reborn again, with all his memories intact and ready to fight again.

The book mostly takes place in the present day, where B is the focus of a secretive special-ops agency of the US government: he's a one-man wrecking crew, but has an entire organization backing him up, giving him direction and support. A lot of the early book was referring back to previous events, including some deaths of soldiers attached to the unit, and I suspect but don't know that those are callbacks to the comics.

While the main plot unfolds in the present, there are a lot of chapters and sections that flash back to previous events in B's life, sometimes from his perspective and sometimes from the perspective of a mortal: a kid he encountered on a trans-oceanic voyage, or the woman he was married to for several decades, or an adversary. Mieville really unpacks and unspools the implications of B's life: how would someone's mind work if they had 60,000 years of memories to sift through? Would anything be able to surprise them? Would anything feel significant? Many of these flash-back events felt like one-off issues of a comic, where you take a break between big arcs and explore some backstory or a side character. In many cases, though, these end up directly tying into the main plot by the end.

By the end of the book, I concluded that Mieville was the perfect person to write this novel, in large part due to his mastery of the macabre. While this setting is very different from Bas-Lag, a lot of the description and imagery feels right out of Perdido Street Station: lots of blood that oozes and crusts and snags and snaps, eggs that are coated with slimy mucous membranes, bones that snap and tear into flesh. He'll tell the tale of a bullet as it passes through a body, the damage done within and the explosive mess it leaves as it exits. Fights are raw, brutal, physical, tolling. I've long thought of Mieville as a visceral author, in the sense of "filled with viscera," and this book is an exemplar of that aspect of him.

I should say that I don't, generally, enjoy those kind of books! I'm perfectly fine with glossing over the "gross bits" or leaving them out of the story entirely. That said, I think Mieville is extremely talented at that mode of writing.

Oh! And before I forget, I should say that I can't help but read B/Unute's lines in my head with Keanu Reeve's voice. It's pretty fun! Glancing at some art from the comic now, it seems clear that B is modeled after Keanu, so that's cool. (There's a character named "Keever" who I had also thought was based on him, just because of the name, but I think that's just me thinking that.)

MEGA SPOILERS

The plot takes a while to click in, and this ended up being one of those books where I got nervous near the end since it seemed like there was too much story left to go and too few pages. He does end up wrapping up everything in a satisfying way, though. I'll sum up my understanding of the overall story here, though most of the oldest stuff isn't made clear until near the very end of the book.

There are, broadly speaking, two primal forces in the universe, which B identifies as "Change" and "Entropy"; it feels a bit like a life/death or an order/chaos dichotomy, but is fundamentally different, as chaos and death can also be forms of change.

These forces have avatars, personalities, agendas. The "Change" force was likely responsible for the creation of life millennia ago. At some, rare points in the past, the "Change" force entered the body of females who had called upon it in times of great distress, and the women bear children: demigods, of whom B is one example. We know of a couple of humans, and one pig; there may be more. These beings all share immortality but otherwise are different.

The Entropy force wishes to end the Change force, and really all the dynamism of the universe. This will ultimately mean ending life, but one early step on the way is ending B.

Over the years B gets to know the big, as well as a half-sister, Vayn. B is identified with Death, while Vayn identifies with Life: she can make inanimate objects gain consciousness and move around, or bring back life to people who have died. Vayn tricks B into entering her church, binds him and tortures and kills him thousands upon thousands of times, before eventually realizing that they area actually the same: his ending of life is as essential as her creation of life. (Vayn tries to tell B this, but he refuses to let his raging fugue state lapse for long enough to listen.)

Many many years later, an agent of entropy, also known as Thowless, learns about B's activity in the Unit. Taking on the persona of Doctor Shur, a warm-hearted therapist, she becomes a trusted member of the Unit and builds bonds with the various soldiers, scientists and bureaucrats composing it. When one soldier dies at the hands of B, she subtly steers his lover into a supposed support group called the Life Project. While ostensibly a 12-step-style support group for grievers, it is actually a powerful cult run by Alam, a biological descendent of Vayn. Alam is guided by Shur, and grows to believe that by killing B, the avatar of Death, he can end Death itself and grant life to all people.

The infiltration into the Unit enables some funky things to happen, including what's basically a flesh golem going on a rampage, along with mysterious assassination attempts by super-fast invisible bugs. In the middle of this is Caldwell, a deep agent for what I think is yet another cult or secret society, who is turned by Alam and crew, and eventually traps B. Rather than fight, B agrees to surrender, and eventually reveals the situation to Alam. Shur is revealed, some people die, B emerges with a much better understanding of his place in the universe, and feeling much less alone.

I'm leaving out a whole bunch of plot there, but that's the main through-line as I understand it!

END SPOILERS

This did end up being a really enjoyable read. I'm still not really planning to pick up BRZRKR, but if I ever happen to run across the collection at the library or something I may check it out. It's one of those things that isn't really for me, but it is a very well-made example of what it is. I'm glad to have gotten to experience a slice of the genre, from one of my favorite authors no less!