Dragon Age: The Veilguard has been a long time coming. After ten years of waiting, BioWare is finally blowing the lid off the fourth entry in its fantasy RPG series. The studio put out a cinematic trailer showcasing the game’s party members during the Xbox Showcase, and released a gameplay trailer that showed off 20-minutes of in-game footage. There’s a lot to sift through, but here are some big takeaways from the past week of Dragon Age: The Veilguard reveals.
Straight up, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the hardest pivot to an action game the series has ever done. While Dragon Age II and Inquisition tried to blend the tactical combat of Origins with real-time action, The Veilguard forgoes any notion of doing that in favor of something that resembles a character action game like God of War. It looks really solid as an action game, at least. But your mileage may vary on if that’s what you’re looking for out of a new Dragon Age game.
While there’s a focus on real-time action this time around, you will still have abilities to use, cooldowns to manage, and a way to pause the action as you sort through which of those you want to use. The Veilguard will have its own equivalent of the Mass Effect combat wheel that lets you stop the fight, pick an ability, aim it at the baddie of your choice, and fire it off. The wheel we saw in the gameplay trailer had nine ability slots, but it appears that you’ll be able to tab over to another wheel similar to previous games.
The first three Dragon Age games let you have three party members with you at all times. That won’t be the case in The Veilguard. In keeping with the aforementioned Mass Effect-ification of things, The Veilguard will only let you have two companions by your side at once. This will naturally affect party composition and strategies, but if The Veilguard keeps the series’ beloved party banter, it will change how those conversations play out as it will often be between only two characters.
Given The Veilguard’s focus on Solas, the party-member-turned-antagonist from Dragon Age: Inquisition, it’s not a surprise that The Inquisitor, the protagonist from the 2014 RPG, will be returning. Players will be able to customize the appearance of The Inquisitor similar to how they did Dragon Age II protagonist Hawke in the last game. We don’t know yet what their role will be, but it’s at least good to know they’ll be around for the conclusion of the story they started ten years ago, even though I would argue they should have been the protagonist of The Veilguard, but I digress.
While BioWare has yet to publicly show The Veilguard’s character creator, Kotaku saw a glimpse of it at Summer Game Fest, and it has some real depth to it. You can play as four races: Human, Dwarf, Elf, and Qunari, and it will have sliders to change your body type. BioWare confirmed that even if you make your Rook a short king, the team has done work to ensure animations fit any character build. You’ll also be able to pick Rook’s pronouns, as well as their origin based on what faction they come from. This includes the Shadow Dragons, Grey Wardens, Antivan Crows, Lords of Fortune, Mourn Watch, and the Veil Jumpers. Each of these orders has a distinct place in Dragon Age lore and whichever one you pick will affect how some characters interact with you and open up new dialogue options. Like Inquisition, The Veilguard will have four voice options, two with British accents and two with American ones.
BioWare has become synonymous with importing choices from old games into new ones, but it’s been ten years since the last Dragon Age. As such, the studio is changing how it’s approaching bringing those choices across games. The Veilguard will allow you to pick what big decisions you made in the old games in its character creator, rather than importing an old save from Inquisition. This also means it won’t draw from Dragon Age Keep, a browser app that lets you craft world states to import into Inquisition.
The Veilguard is bringing back Dragon Age 2s dialogue system, which was tone-based and resulted in its protagonist Hawke falling into one of three different personality states. You have three general tones in a conversation: kind, humorous, or aggressive, with slight variations depending on the situation. This dialogue system was interesting in the 2011 RPG because it would shape Hawke’s personality, even in scenes where you weren’t directly picking a dialogue option. We’ll see how The Veilguard handles it, but I will miss Inquisition’s less codified approach.
BioWare has been adamant that changing this game’s name from Dreadwolf to The Veilguard has been in service of better representing the party-focused story it tells. That shift in messaging has been pretty apparent since the cinematic trailer put a spotlight on all seven companions who will join Rook on their quest. We’ve got a breakdown of what we know about all seven characters right here, and some of them have appeared in other Dragon Age media like books and comics. Each of them embodies one of the possible factions Rook can be part of, with the exception of Scout Harding, who debuted as a side character in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Each of them is pansexual and can be romanced by any variation of Rook.
