I’ve almost finished Dragon Age: The Veilguard. I’ve explored every map, found every chest (well, the ones included in the counts for each map since I’m positive I missed a few of the chests from the special areas you can only access during certain quests), completed all of my companion quests, gotten all of them up to level nine (saving Harding, my Rook’s partner, who is level ten because I take her everywhere with me), and even gotten an hour or so into the final quest. I’m almost finished with my first playthrough, though I suspect I’ll keep playing it through again as the next year passes. There’s a lot I want to explore in the game, still, and while most of the big decisions haven’t felt that consequential yet, I’m interested to see how they all play out anyway. Plus, I still need to romance the other six companions since there isn’t a single one of them that I didn’t fall at least a little in love with during this playthrough. I just, you know, had to stick to Harding in order to fulfil a dream almost a decade in the making (since I couldn’t do more than flirt with her in Inquisition, which was criminal). I’ve been having a lot of fun, even if I do have to admit that I’ve been playing it as much as I have been not because I enjoy it that much (I enjoy it plenty, though, just to be clear), but because I desperately need to escape life right now and don’t really want to leave myself with extra time to think about things. As far as games go, though, I don’t think I’ve played one in a while that drew me in as deeply as this one has.
Like a lot of modern people, I have attention issues and usually meet them by listening to podcasts or music while doing other things since I can’t watch more than one thing (whatever is moving the most and any given time is what catches my attention, so I can’t really do the whole “TV on in the background” thing). I listened to a whole lot of podcasts during Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening and Dragon Age 2, like I do with most games. I listened to podcasts less while playing Dragon Age: Inquisition, but only percentage-wise. My total number of hours is larger since Inquisition took me almost as long as Origins and 2 did combined. With Veilguard, though, I’ve listened to no podcasts. I mean, I’ve had a podcast playing when I sat down at my computer prior to starting the game that continued to play after I launched the game, but I quickly forgot about the podcast and would pause it within five minutes of loading my save file because there would be something I wanted to hear. I didn’t even listen to music at all! The audio of Veilguard is such a treat that I wanted to be able to hear it without interference. I haven’t even done much parallel play with my friends since I don’t want to be risk being distracted when something interesting is happening. I’ll admit to considering turning on a podcast when I was walking around some places, hunting down all those chests or constantly wandering around Dock Town in search of Candlehops, but there was enough background dialogue, good music, and companion banter that I rarely considered it for long. As a result, my podcast backlog has grown significantly, but I honestly don’t know if I can give a more positive endorsement of a game than that. Me, who listens to music and podcasts while doing literally everything else in my life, refuses to listen to anything but Veilguard when I’ve got the game running. I didn’t even give Baldur’s Gate 3 that distinctive honor!
As far as the more active parts of the game go, I have to say that I’m having a great time. Combat can be a little repetitive, but it’s not as ubiquitously present as it is in previous Dragon Age games, so it never becomes actually boring. That, plus the enemy types and damage resistances and vulnerabilities mean that I’m switching up my combat styles enough to keep things at least relatively fresh. Sure, I haven’t gone through my skills and done a complete rebuild like I thought I might do at some point (just to see what being level 50 feels like with each specialization), but I think that’s more because I happened upon the combat style that fits my gameplay style the best on my first try and I’ve only had to make a few minor tweaks to my skills to streamline things. Let me tell you, being able to just shift a few skill points around instead of needing to rebuild my character from the ground up if I wanted to make a minor change is a HUGE improvement. Anyway, I’ve got my super-tanky mid-range mage who heals based either on kills, finishers, or using the Arcane Bombs from the mid-range style. As long as I can keep fighting things, I probably won’t die (though my light armor build that maximizes damage output means that particularly nasty enemy attacks or abilities can take out a HUGE chunk of my health if I’m not quick enough to dodge them) and this style has worked well in every single fight I’ve had save one. A late-game mission had me fighting a spirit possessing a scarecrow and I almost lost that fight before I realized that the reason I seemed to be making no progress was because that enemy was healing itself by damaging me. Being able to endlessly refill my hit points, with the occasional dip into potions and companion healing, was actually working against me since it make me less cautious I would have been if I’d realized I was fighting a boss of that caliber. I was able to slowly chip it down and win when I switched from my usual damage-blitz style to focusing on not taking any damage. It was a frustrating and then refreshing fight to have so late in the game.
As I mentioned above, I’ve fallen at least a little bit in love with each of the companions. Even Davrin, which I found surprising since he’s really not my type at all, but his relationship with Assan changed my initial and middle read on him quite a bit. Neve, though, is exactly my type and while I’m not playing a self-insert character ever (and will have to wait a bit until I eventually roleplay a Rook that will be into someone like her), she’s great to have around. Always something interesting and insightful to say in a way that adds to her three-dimensionality rather than pushing her deeper into the “private eye” trope she frequently brushes up against. Bellara is a delight and so very human in her anxieties and stresses. Lucanis is sweet and thoughtful. Taash very much a young adult in the process of becoming a full adult in a way that makes me feel invested, given that you can see the change happening as you play. Emmrich is a delight, constantly. And then, of course, there’s Harding, my long-awaited romance and a delightful ball of sunshine and warmth, even if she does tend to take an odd hand-on-hip-while-leaning-a-bit-forward position enough that I can’t help but notice how often she takes it. Just like Rook always puts their hands on their hips. Odd. Honestly, the character writing and the game’s choice to fully invest in the companions as a central feature of the game, both narratively and mechanically, is what makes this generally alright game perhaps one of the most memorable things I’ve played this year. I’m so invested that I’m actually anxious about the events of the final missions I’m doing, which is not something I’ve felt in a long time. I wasn’t even that invested in BG3 and that’s with all of that stellar writing and the one hundred thirty hours I put into my one game completion so far (which doesn’t count the 200-ish hours I’ve put into other, not-yet-complete files in the game)!
I’ll have a bigger review written as soon as I’ve finished the game, complete with spoilers and my theories, but I’m probably going to schedule that a week out from when I write it, rather than keep slotting it into whatever day is next as I try to rebuild my bugger, but only so I can stick to my firmly held belief of holding off on open discussion of spoilers before two weeks have passed since the game’s release [editing this, it strikes me as funny that this post is coming out exactly two weeks after the game did, so I actually could just slot my full review into the next open blog post day, which is exactly what’s going to happen since I finished it last night and desperately need to jot down my thoughts about it somewhere]. Even then I’ll still have the post tagged as being full of spoilers since I’ve done that for games that are more than a decade old now. It just feels rude not to, you know? Anyway, I’m champing at the bit to get back into Veilguard and I really need to wrap up this segment of the game’s final mission(s?) so I can stop feeling anxious about what happened right before I forced myself to stop playing for the night yesterday. Especially because writing about it now is making it even worse! I will say, though, that it feels nice to be this invested in a game again. It has been a while since I felt this deeply about a game I’ve played.