malvasia bianca

For much of its development, I really was not optimistic about the game that eventually got the name Dragon Age: The Veilguard. I thought Mass Effect: Andromeda was a pretty clear step down from prior games in that series (and for that matter there were aspects of Dragon Age: Inquisition that I wasn’t 100% thrilled about); and it seemed like the development of the next Dragon Age game was in real turmoil. It got rebooted a couple of times, and every time I heard new information about the game’s development, that news was paired with more people leaving BioWare; I was worried that the game wouldn’t be well done along traditional evaluation axes, but I was much much more worried that it simply wouldn’t feel like a BioWare game at all because there might not be enough people around who knew how to do that.

Fortunately, as I started plaing the game, that worry started to disappear. Veilguard did indeed feel like a Dragon Age game: the world, the characters, the interactions, the ongoing broader story were all there.

And, actually, there were some ways in which I thought Veilguard was an improvement over other recent Dragon Age games. I liked how Veilguard handled its open world nature: there weren’t any overwhelming areas like Inquisition’s Hinterlands, and they did a good job of having you frequently return to the larger areas to make them feel at home while giving you missions that focus you on a specific subset of a given larger area, along with a pleasant amount of missions that had you go into one-off spaces in the world.

Item gathering and management has generally been an issue with Dragon Age games, and I thought that Veilguard did well in that regard, too. And did well compared to other RPGs in general: there’s the question of what to do about weapon/armor power curves, and the general solution of “have your character constantly find / buy weapons that are appropriately leveled” just isn’t that satisfactory. What Veilguard did instead was have a limited set of possible weapons, with different weapons generally of comparable power: the attributes that they differ in are instead related to damage types and other attributes that make them more powerful in some contexts and less powerful in other contexts.

So you equip a set of weapons / armor on your character whose characteristics combo together well with each other and that enable a play style that you enjoy; and, as you gather more weapons, you’ve got a richer set of options for combos available. Each individual weapon / armor can level up (usually with three upgrades over the course of the game); even those level ups are as much about increasing the capability space / ability to combo as about strictly increasing the power. And then there are these legendary weapons / armors that have one extreme characteristic: they’re not overpowered, they’re just an invitation to go deep into one corner of the design space.

So that’s all good, right? The problem is that, as I was playing, I realized that the game just wasn’t grabbing me the way I expect a BioWare game to. I honestly don’t know 100% exactly what’s missing, but my best guess is that the main issue is that the characters didn’t quite get their hooks into me in the way that the best BioWare characters do. They weren’t bad or anything, and any individual one would have been fine; but I just didn’t quite care about them enough.

And maybe that’s where the loss of staff showed itself? It’s not that the people working on the game didn’t know how to make a good RPG in general, and it’s not that they didn’t care about BioWare games. I’m quite willing to believe that the developers were extremely familiar with Dragon Age lore and prior games in the series, and loved those games as much or more than I do. But I certainly don’t know how the magic of those prior games came together; I’m sure Veilguard’s developers have a better idea about that than I do, but maybe not enough?

Also, the overall plot didn’t sit right with me. That, honestly, might be a me problem rather than a Veilguard problem, because the seeds are all there in Inquisition: coming out of Inquisition, you know you’re going to be trying to save the world at a massive scale, and you also know that the dividing line between gods and regular people isn’t as clear as you’d think. And a game like that is just going to not leave as much space for mystery as I’d like, and will contain way too much wish fulfillment power fantasy for me.

Of course, the end of that sentence describes a lot of other RPGs out there, it’s probably much more the norm than not! I’m just one of those weirdos who thought that Dragon Age II was by far the best game in the series: the plot was at a much more human and local level, and the party members (and their interactions!) were the best. That’s where Veilguard fell down the most; but Inquisition’s plot was way too grandiose, too. So: unfortunate, but at least part of that is me not quite being the target audience for the game.

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed Veilguard, there was never any chance that I wasn’t going to finish the game, and I think it was a better game than Andromeda. Also, I’m playing Metaphor: ReFantazio right now, and while I’m enjoying that game as well, I far prefer the rhythms of Veilguard to the overwhelming presence of dungeon slogs in Metaphor.

But also, my assumption is that Veilguard will be the last Dragon Age game, and I’m fine with that. Written speculative fiction has an unfortunate tendency to turn into series and for those series to go on too long and to lose the magic as that happens. And that’s happening with Dragon Age in the game space as well. The existing games are there and they’re wonderful; and sure, it’s a rich enough world that I’m sure that there’s space for more excellent games within that world. But if what we want is something that feels as special as earlier Dragon Age games and other games from BioWare in its prime, then I think that’s more likely to happen in a new setting. And, given the turnover that’s happened within BioWare and the fact that it’s a part of a massive, risk-adverse company, I’d expect it to happen elsewhere. I’m hearing a ton of buzz right now about Clair Obscur, for example; I haven’t played it yet, and so I don’t know how it will hit for me, but at the very least it’s yet another reminder that we shouldn’t pin our hopes on existing studios, there are tons of people experimenting out there and some of those experiments will hit.