Woo! I've finished Dragon Age: Veilguard. I was debating writing one more post before starting the final mission, and opted to save it for after finishing the game, but now I kind of wish I'd gone ahead: there is a lot that happens in the endgame, both gameplay-wise and story-wise, and I feel now like I'm writing about the last half of the game instead of the last third. That's a good thing, of course: the game gets even more compelling as it rockets to the finish.
Some random notes before dropping onto spoilers:
I love all the companion conversations. There's the traditional ambient banters you hear while wandering around zones, but also a lot more back at the base, both ambient chats you overhear while walking near characters and a surprising number of full cinematic cutscenes between companions. I think that makes sense because of the smaller party size - when you had 3 companions you had 3 possible banter partners while out questing, but with 2 companions there is only 1 possible banter partner. And you're unlikely to have, say, your two warriors in the party at the same time since they don't synergize, so it's much more important to have more character development and bonding back at the base. Anyways, I love this change: you used to have great companion moments as a side-effect of their personal quests, but in Veilguard it's very common to have great companion moments for their own sake.
The economy is really good throughout the entire game, and I think this is probably my favorite economic system of any Dragon Age Game, or really any BioWare game. Money is a bit tight throughout the game, and you want to be strategic about what you spend on. I never bought a single cosmetic (armor or decoration), and just spent on the gear I would personally use (bows, light armor, light vitaars) and gear my companions would actively use. You don't need to spend to be viable since you get a lot of gear through chests and quest rewards, but spending on gear you actually use does make a meaningful difference, unlocking additional abilities and increasing stats. Even at the very end of the game I was turning down nice-to-haves to support my must-haves.
I should note that I had a very completionist playthrough. I think I skipped a few treasure chests and maybe one or two Fen'harel Altars, but as far as I know I took and finished every optional quest in the game. So someone who didn't do all those quests would have found money even tighter. You could probably squeeze out more gold than me since some merchants will buy raw materials, so after upgrading all the shops and my gear I could have liquidated my remaining stash of heartwood, lyrium-infused ore and the like; I'm pretty confident that would have only a relatively limited increase in overall gold, though, I'm pretty sure you couldn't buy everything no matter what.
Along the same lines of being completionist, the game has a hard level cap of 50, and I hit that relatively late in the game but prior to reaching the point of no return. That did make a few quests feel a bit useless since they only rewarded XP, but most quests will also give some gear and gold or faction strength, so they're all still worth doing. I was able to get all of the skills that I wanted; there were a few random upgrades buried deep in other trees that I didn't bother going for.
The game keeps track of your "faction strength" with the various groups in northern Thedas. You increase it by completing quests for that faction (like pushing out the Antaam in Treviso for the Antivan Crows or strengthening defenses in the Anderfels for the Grey Wardens) and by selling them "valuables" (aka junk). As I noted in an earlier post, some but not all valuables have a premium in reputation gain for a specific faction. You can find some spreadsheets online that break it down, but I found it easier to wait until I had a big stock, then visit all the factions in turn, selling off the 15+ reputation items at each shop, then the 8+ rep items, and finally selling all my 3 rep items to my lowest-ranked faction. I was able to get every faction up to its maximum strength by the end of the game; oddly, the last faction to reach it was the Shadow Dragons, which was my PC's background and the group I had most dramatically aided in the game.
I played the game on "Adventurer" difficulty, which is the default; I usually like to play one step above normal, but since Veilguard is more action-y and less tactical I didn't want to push it. It took a while for me to get the swing of combat, but it ended up being pretty fun. Time pauses when you bring up the party menu (R1 on a controller), and I found myself using this like I'd use the spacebar on the old real-time-with-pause BioWare games, looking around the battlefield to locate enemies and see if I was being targeted. This did get slightly annoying late in the game: there are some combat encounters where, in addition to attacking or defending against enemies you also need to destroy Blight Boils or Venatori Crystals or other elements; but you can't lock onto these, so I would often end up accidentally targeting some dumb enemy instead of the Blight boil I actually wanted to destroy.
I was a Veil Ranger rogue, wearing light armor. Once my build came online it felt very powerful. I had significantly increased Momentum generation, especially when targeting weakpoints; I could slow down time while aiming, which cost a little Momentum, but I'd immediately get it back when a shot connected; and I dealt bonus damage based on my current (nearly always full) Momentum. So while in the early game I tended to spend Momentum as it came up with elemental attacks that I could combo with my companions, by the end of the game my companions would just combo with each other while I did an endless series of rapid headshots. It's super effective!
I really like how different each enemy faction feels. They aren't just different skins on the same weak/strong/elite stat blocks. When you're fighting against darkspawn, it feels like hyou're desperately trying to beat back an endless wave of zombbies. Individual darkspawn enemies have very low health and can be taken down in a single headshot, and with AOE you can clear out a whole bunch of Darkspawn at once; but if you let them swam you it gets extremely hard to break free and fight them off. Antaam are kind of the opposite, with a few huge, beefy enemies that all have barriers or armor, as well as Centurions with unbreakable shields. Antaam can stagger you and knock you around the battlefield. They generally move slowly so you have to maintain a careful distance from them, looking for openings to get in a few hits, and repeat the dance until you gradually wear them down. And shades and demons blink and teleport around the battlefield, as they've done since Dragon Age: Origins, which is really disorienting: they're kind of weak like darkspawn, but you need to chase them around or they'll mess you up. Overall darkspawn were probably my most satisfying enemy to fight and Ventari my least favorite, due to how hard it is to hit their assassins; I suspect that different builds and playstyles will fare differently against each faction.
There's some big variance in difficulty throughout the game. A few big boss fights, especially the optional "hidden" bosses and ones in the Crossroads, required optimized loadouts (like swapping out Electric attacks for Necrotic) and multiple retries after long battles. Many other boss fights felt surprisingly trivial, with me easily steamrolling them on the first try. It's possible this is a side-effect of my build, and again, a warrior or rogue might have found these difficulties reversed. The variance in difficulty didn't bother me at all, it was just a little surprising how widely the apparent difficulty varied.
There is a fair amount of map re-use throughout the game, but it feels much better than in Dragon Age 2. In DA2, you had literally the same map, but the game would pretend it was something different: "We're in the Deep Roads!" "We're in the catacombs!" "We're in the bandit lair!" In DAV, you'll have marquee quests that take place in existing zone maps, but fast travel beacons are disabled and some passages are barricaded off. But it narratively makes sense, like there's an army attacking this location or something. And it raises rather than lowers the stakes, because you already are familiar with this place, both narratively and in the gameplay.
It took a while for me to realize it, but companions actually have two separate meters, "approval" and "bond". It seems to be much easier to get approval than disapproval, although that might be the effect of my make-everyone-like-me instincts. You get "bond" by certain story decisions, having someone in your party when you finish a side-quest, and defeating enemies that companion particularly dislikes. "Bond" is the most important from a gameplay perspective, as your companions gain Ability points when they increase their Bond to the next rank.
I spread around my Bond as much as possible, generally bringing along lower-bonded companions when taking random side-quests. Before heading in to the endgame I had a single companion at the maximum Bond of 10 and everyone else was at Bond 9; by the end of the game I had brought two more people up to Bond 10. At Bond 10 you can fully fill out three of their five skill trees, which is effectively the maximum since you can only have three skills equipped at a time. I did frequently re-set their skill points so they would synergize with whoever else was in the party at the moment.
MINI SPOILERS
Completing a companion's personal quest will make them a Hero of the Veilguard, a special status that also unlocks a new passive ability and a Legendary suit of armor. There is a slightly repetitive system to this: near the end of each person's quest you help them choose between one of two paths, and I think the specific ability you get will depend on the choice they make, as well as this ultimately affecting their fate at the end of the game. Davin chooses whether to return the griffons to the service of the Wardens or to release them to the wilds of Arlathan Forest; Bellara chooses whether to continue plumbing the depths of the past with the help of the Archives or to destroy them and release her people from the bonds of history, and so on. I didn't find any of these choices especially hard to make, either one path felt clearly better or the stakes seemed too light to really concern me.
The first person I got to Hero status was Harding, which is appropriate since she was the one I was romancing. It does feel like I may have missed a few story beats. Harding's story seemed like the climax was about her denying her anger... but I don't remember her anger being discussed before then. It makes me wonder if I skipped a conversation along the way, or maybe some content was cut, or maybe it would have made more sense if I'd been following a "friendship" dialogue path instead of my "romance" dialogue path.
Likewise, there's a whole storyline about The Butcher in Antiva. Right before dying he gives a big speech about his motivation which doesn't seem to line up with what we've learned about him up until then: all of a sudden he's talking about how much he loves Antiva and he's willing to become blighted and killed to prove that we love the city as much as he does (!?!?). I kind of feel like each of these kind of quests could have been the basis for their own game, and we ended up getting sort of the Reader's Digest Condensed version of the story.
MEGA SPOILERS
There are repeated, or at least rhyming, story beats. Family loss, for example, is a big part of both Bellara and Taash's storylines. But it's interesting to see the differences between them. Bellara mourns her brother Cyrian as part of a community with its rituals; Taash's mourning of her mother is more lonely but feels at least as powerful. There's also a strong emphasis on cities, especially Treviso and Dock Down, and we hear multiple, but slightly varied, monologues on the value of cities, how despite their faults they are sources of vibrancy and connection.
I really enjoyed the long and complex regional plots, which play out over all three acts and feed into the finale. In Minrathous, there's a street-level story, primarily associated with Neve but not exclusively linked to her, about the corruption of law enforcement and the role of the Threads crime syndicate, which ultimately rolls up into a bigger story about Venatori infiltrating the Magisterium, which leads to a huge choice about whether to make Dorian or Maevaris the new Archon. I opted for Dorian; Maevaris is very cool, I haven't read any of the comics she's in but I do know a bit about her role in Thedas outside of this game, but ultimately Dorian is my bro from Inquisition so I had to go with him. (As my previous post on this blog noted, these days I'm also more in tune with "bring a gun to a gun fight" thinking than "when they go low we go high", which also tilts me more towards Dorian's program for bold action to dismantle corrupt influences than Maevaris's more idealistic campaign of radical transparency.)
As an aside, I don't think any of the subsequent Dragon Age games have yet topped the agonizing moral choices in Origins, like whether to save or destroy Caridin's Forge and whether to support Prince Bhelan or Lord Harrowmont as ruler of Orzammar. I think part of it is that those were all very deeply flawed choices with huge downsides and moral qualms. I like both Dorian and Maevaris, either one would be a huge improvement over the status quo, and I can theorize about how is most likely to succeed or do the most good. That's different from choosing which group of people to damn or embracing murderous authoritarianism in the hopes of securing social rights.
Treviso also had a great story. You think that it's going to be about the occupation of the Antaam, but you eventually learn that The Butcher who leads the Antaam was in cahoots with Governor Ivanici. The criminal Crows are the ones who actually save the city, which both Ivanici and the Antaam would see looted. A lot of the dialogue here referenced my "sacrifice" of Treviso, sneering at my new-found concern for the city's fate after abandoning it to the dragon. I'm pretty sure the same events would have occurred if I'd chosen to save this city instead of Minrathous, just with different dialogue.
While the leadership in Minrathous and Treviso are compromised, the leader of the Grey Wardens is just obstinate and dumb. The First Warden ignroes the significance of the elven gods and refuses to consider that this Blight might be different from the ones that came before. I punched him out, which felt very much like socking the Quarian admiral in Mass Effect, a rare Renegade action in my generally Paragon Rook. Eventually the mid-ranking Wardens rise to lead and rebuild the Order, while we also inspect its past to learn more about the history of the Griffins and of previous Blights. It's kind of amusing to me how way back in Dragon Age Origins we learned the deepest secrets of the Wardens, and our player characters in every game since then have largely been unaware of those secrets.
Other factions are a bit thinner - there aren't the same level of depths to plumb with the Lords of Fortune as there are with Minrathous, for example - and they end up revolving more around companion quests than broader regional quests. That's cool though, there's definitely enough meaty story to go around, and the more bite-sized and stand-alone quests in other areas make for a good change of pace.
While Act 2 is mostly focused on helping your companions resolve their issues, Act 3 is equally concerned with finding allies and making them stronger. As noted above, you can do this by completing their faction quests and selling them stuff. Unlike a lot of games in this series (or RPGs generally), DAV explicitly says that you have "several weeks" to accomplish these things: the big deadline is an eclipse that is arriving in a month or so.
Once you do decide to progress pass the point of no return, though, things abruptly snap into high gear. Elgar'nan uses his immense power to drag the moon into position, firing off an early eclipse and forcing everyone to scramble. The big threat is that Elgar'nan and Ghilanain want to unleash the Blight from within the Fade and use it to infect the world, thus giving them total control. Solas has been opposing them, but his goals are only marginally better: he wants to bring down the Veil that separates our world from the Fade, which will mean unleashing demons throughout the world and killing off most of the living creatures on Thedas. Thanks to your previous regional quests, you have learned that the elven gods have forged a new ritual dagger of red lyrium and will carry out their plan on a particular remote island.
There are a whole bunch of decisions to make during the long final series of missions. The very first one turns out to be the equivalent of the Virmire decision from the original Mass Effect: you pick one person to lead the second squad. The only two choices I had were Harding or Davrin. I was immediately annoyed: Harding was my love interest, and Davrin was my favorite companion; Davrin was also the only person I had gotten to 10 Bond yet. I had been planning on taking the two of them in particular in the final missions, and right off the bat my plan had fallen through. I reluctantly selected Davrin to lead the second squad, preferring to keep Harding close by for any banters.
It isn't immediately obvious what the consequence of this choice will be, and you similarly need to task the remaining members to handle other missions as you approach the Archon's palace: someone to disable the Venatori crystal generating a force field around the gates, someone to assassinate the Venatori commander, someone to take down the gigantic construct guarding the gates. The game gives a few nudges towards which type of person would be effective for each job: someone skilled with magical seals for taking on the crystal, which suggests Neve or Bellara; a close-combat fighter for the assassination, which screams Lucanis. These missions are also backed by particular factions, like the Crows aiding with the assassination and the Veil Jumpers with the crystal. I'm not sure exactly how everything interacts, but I presume that if you choose the wrong companion and/or the associated faction is weak, either the companion or a related NPC will perish. This all feels very Mass Effect 2 suicide-squad-y, which I adore: it's such a smart, good blending together of all the choices made up to this point, the investments you've made in people, and hitting big story beats with a strong system behind it.
This is also the most cinematically thrilling segment of the whole game, long set-pieces filled with hand-to-hand combat, explosions, incredible emotion and heart-pounding tension. The music is suitably epic, driving you forward in the action.
As it turns out, the person you selected to lead the second squad is ultimately killed by Ghilanain; in the case of Davrin, Assan flies in after him, which is extra heartbreaking. I shouldn't be surprised: this is Dragon Age, after all, and it's BioWare, it wouldn't be a BioWare game if they didn't kill someone we loved. It definitely stings, though, both narratively and because I had lost a source of Overwhelmed and Taunt.
Narratively the two main villains of the game are Ghilanain and Elgar'nan, but I always found Ghilanain way more interesting then Elgar'nan: she looks way creepier, with tons of tentacles and a ghastly mask and stuff, while Elgar'nan mostly just looks like a slightly chubby elf. Her backstory is a lot more interesting too: she created the Blight, and has shaped many creatures over the years, endlessly tinkering with living beings like some kind of mad scientist. Elgar'nan's main deal seems to be power: he apparently has stronger raw magical abilities than Ghilanain, and a particularly strong mental force of will; later in the game he starts imposing himself into your thoughts, and more broadly commands the large factions of Venatori, Antaam and others under his thumb. He's more associated with tyranny while Ghilanain is more associated with madness, rot and decay. So it was mildly disappointing that the more interesting villain was killed first; but they do mostly make up for it with Elgar'nan's later visual transformation, growing significantly more creepy-looking as he becomes infused with the Blight.
Like I keep saying, this is a very long finale, which was great: there's time for interior twists and pauses and more and more stakes-raising. One very big twist comes relatively late, when you discover that Varric, who was injured in the opening mission in the game, actually died during that first confrontation with Solas and has been dead this whole time: all the time you've spent having conversations with him have been figments of your imagination. It sounds like this is somewhat due to Solas's influence, but also party due to Rook's own rejection of reality. Nobody else on the team was aware that you were seeing or talking to him. This is one of those things that kind of makes me want to re-play the game and watch prior cut-scenes with Varric with that in mind. It isn't a central twist in the way that Fight Club is, but could add something to those prior events.
The game telegraphs for a while that deciding what to do with Solas will be the final choice, and I was right. We've had chances all along to express our opinions of him, either being sympathetic for his trials and motivations or angry at his actions and lies. My Rook has been consistently anti-Solas; I'd be very curious to see telemetry for how players break down in their opinions, and in particular if there's a split between returning Inquisition players or new Veilguard converts. In my game Bellara was abducted by Elgar'nan and infected with the Blight; during this time she learned that Solas had bound the strength of the Veil into the two gods, so if you kill them, you will accomplish Solas's goal of bringing down the Veil. This especially stings since he had just made of a point of dramatically swearing to protect the Veil in exchange for your cooperation against the gods and vowed "The Veil will never fall by my own hand." Even then I'd doubted him; Solas has become the Benjamin Linus of Thedas, always able to convince you that he's changed and this time is different, but always with a fresh betrayal in the chamber ready to deploy. Anyways, as your team muses over what to do, you come to the conclusion that Solas is the only remaining Elven god, so the only solution is to bind him to the Veil so it can continue to stand after Elgar'nan dies.
You do eventually kill Elgar'nan, and have the final choice about what to do with Solas: fight him to force him to bind with the veil, or trick him into binding with the veil, or, in my case, using the power of Mythal to convince him to sacrifice himself to strengthen the veil. This builds on an optional previous set of quests in the Crossroads that led to finding Mythal's essence and convincing her to aid your cause. (This also culminates one of the oldest plot lines of Dragon Age: Flemeth was the embodied spirit of Mythal, and Morrigan inherited her memories when Flemeth died, but Mythal's power was kept by another spirit in the Fade. In recovering Solas's repressed memories you previously learned how he and Mythal were lovers and allies against the Evunaris, and Mythal ultimately died for his cause, which is his single biggest source of regret.)
I'd been planning to continue my anti-Solas streak, but faced with the final choice, I mused that they all kind of fit that bill. Attacking him or tricking him seemed pretty equivalent, saying more about my methods than my goals. Convincing him was the most diplomatic path, but would presumably have the same final result. At the end of the day I'm a sucker for any secret/unlocked/ultimate ending, so I opted for that path. There is a pretty long and emotional denouement: Morrigan and the Inquisitor get involved, as does the memory of Varric and Mythal. (Earlier, Harding had chewed out Solas for his many many sins in enslaving the Titans and creating the Blight. We get some deep lore reveals in this game: elves are the descendents of spirits from the Fade who chose to become embodied in the world; the Titans were the original inhabitants of the physical plane, lyrium is their blood, and the Blight was created when Solas severed the titans' spirits from their physical forms and trapped them in the Black City.)
I played the conclusion over a couple of weekend days and it was the most compelling part of the game, very cinematic and epic and thrilling. It leveled up my entire appreciation for the game; I started Act 1 pretty unenthused, by the midpoint I was fully digging the game, and by the end I loved and admired it. I should sit with it a bit longer before ranking, and ideally replay at some point, but my gut is that Veilguard is a bit behind Inquisition and Origins and solidly in front of 2.
Oh, other random note: I was pleasantly surprised by just how much the Inquisitor ended up playing a role in this game, it seemed more substantial than Hawke's quest in Inquisition. Like I said before I kind of wish I'd spent more time on the Inquisitor's sliders, as mine vaguely resembled a written description of the Inquisitor but didn't look a whole lot like her; I wonder if anyone will ever write a tool to export sliders from a save game file so you can get a close-to-exact match in Veilguard. One small bummer is that my Inquisitor romanced Sera, and it doesn't seem like that was ever acknowledged in this game; I'm pretty sure that a Solas romance would have a big impact, and I assume that romancing a returner like Dorian would also get a shout-out. It's probably too much to expect a cameo from each of the eight possible romance options, so I do get it.
The actual end of the game is a series of Varric-style narrative vignettes, a la the typical slide show, which is the de-facto way to end an RPG now and fully satisfying. I'd be curious to see what variations are possible here; there are some obvious ones, like Dorian's reign as the new Archon. Rook himself doesn't seem to make much of an impact here, but it's cool to see where others' stories end up.
END SPOILERS
This was a deeply satisfying game to play. It benefits from continuing a story and lore I've been invested in for 15 years, but I think it stands well on its own. The actual combat was less enjoyable to me than Origins or Inquisition, but it did grow on me as the game continued, and I came to really like it and feel decent at it by the end. The signature BioWare storytelling is still alive and well even after some high-profile staff departures, and this game can bring tears and cheers as it hits its story beats.
It sounds like the game didn't sell very well, which is definitely disappointing. While the plot does tie up in a satisfying way at the end, and brings a conclusion to many long-running stories in this universe, it's a world that I want more than ever to explore further. I'll continue to hope against hope that the team can come back together one day and tell another story in this world.
