This is a write-up of my experience with Dragon Age: Veilguard
As I mentioned above, it took me 89 hours to 100% Veilguard. Overall, it's a B+ game turned into a very low C- by some very bad decisions and a bunch of minor ones that really weigh quite heavily on the quality of the game and its gameplay. It just barely stays above a D+ rating as a result of the last 2 hours of the game, which are quite good. This will include my prior criticisms of this game that are interspersed throughout this thread. This contains spoilers, so you are forewarned.
The Good -
The environments were quite beautiful.
Best hair physics ever in a game (despite a few glitches).
Despite weapons being limited by your chosen class you can wear any armor or accessories you want, none of it is restricted by class. So, if you want to play a Spellblade mage (a crappier version of an Arcane Warrior) you can equip heavy armor than will allow you to take more punishment.
You can pet most of the cats and dogs that you meet, and the cats purr. This is a nice feature.
If you get the city of Minrathous to a certain point one of the crime syndicates actually open up a DA style cat cafe, which I think was a nice touch.
The way the story was presented to the player was engaging once it gets going.
I was able to create a character that I thought fit what I had in mind quite well and the voice acting for the player character was quite good in my opinion.
The game wrapped up the DA saga well (even if one considers the secret ending, and all the retconning they did) so there is a good chance they won't make another one, which, given how this one went, is absolutely for the better.
The Bad -
They clearly dropped the number of companions down to two because of how tight the space is where common fights occur throughout the game. Not to mention that also allows them to limit the number of enemy combatants so they can further save on VRAM and GPU strain. They set invisible boundaries with no obvious indication for each battle that if you cross them it says "Leaving the battle area" and your enemies disengage and start regenerating, which is bullshit. You should be able to have a battle across a city if it happens that way. Why have artificial boundaries?
The game is very poorly optimized regarding CPU and VRAM usage. My CPU sat at 3-6% the entire time, they clearly didn't offload enough of the physics and other calculations to the CPU, further burdening the GPU. The amount of VRAM needed to play is massively mismatched compared to the GPU power needed to use various graphics settings. Despite having a 3060 with 8 GB of RAM you can't play it on higher than medium settings across the board because you will get an Out Of Memory error since it easily chews through 8 GB of VRAM. However, medium only ran my GPU at ~50%. By using a feature of my video card that allow me to pool in system RAM rather than experience an OoM error I was finally able to properly max out my GPU on a mix of High/Ultra settings with no Raytracing. However, it had to spill over into more than 2 GB of system memory. Most people do not have a GPU with 10+ GB of VRAM.
Your companions only have 5 power moves they can develop, regardless of class, and you can only assign 3 for them for use in combat at any given time. It is extremely limited. They also don't use any of their power moves unless you direct them to by using a menu that pauses the combat and allows you to issue a single command for a power move.
You can't "ping" for items like you could in Inquisition. You can enable it to show important chests on your map with approximate position, and "ding" when you are close, but that is less useful than it sounds since the trigger area is quite large and it doesn't respect your level relative to where the treasure is. It also will "Ding" treasures that you are unable to access at that time. Why the hell would you have treasures "Ding" if you can't actually get them? You just end up wondering if you missed getting that treasure (since a very small number of them are quite tricky) or you are meant to go back for it. The important chests are also only the highest level of chest, there are 3 tiers of chests/items below that where you can't ping or get an idea of where they are, you just have to look in every single possible space to find stuff. The other tiers of loot can also be hidden by random destructible crap, like crates and barrels. It is very annoying.
The voice acting is quite flat and rather inferior to previous entries in the series.
You can clip right through all character models. Companions and random NPC's, they might as well not be present, unless they are setup to act as a barrier. You can't step through crates and barrels, but people? no problem. It is jarring, and pulls you right out of the game. It's the kind of crap you used to be able to do in early 3D games 20 years ago because collision in 3D environments was difficult to do back in those days.
Unlike in inquisition, you can't interact with any of the flora or fauna. You shoot a Nug with an arrow? It just passes right through it, and you can't get close to them since they either "burrow" into the ground or just dissolve into a bunch of particles. No Nug meat or skin for you!
You can't leave arbitrary markings on your map. You can mark certain objects the game thinks are important, like a higher level chest when you get within a certain proximity to it, but that's it. This is the exact opposite of what you could do in Inquisition and it is very annoying. This is a common and expected feature these days.
You can gain access to skills with skill points, but you have absolutely no control over your attributes which removes a key element that was present in all previous Dragon Age games. They also do nothing to explain how your attack and defense are calculated.
If your character dies in combat, it's game over unless you have a "Revive" since you can't play as any of your companions. In previous DA games if you fucked up and died, your control was transferred to another one of your companions, and you could either continue on or bring your main character back to life. Not in this game. That completely changes the risk/reward ratio in a very bad way for playing higher difficulty levels.
A number of aspects of the character creator seem to involve arbitrary input instead of picking from a predefined look, which can be frustrating when you are not sure what you are looking for. Sliders are all well and good, but when you have 20 of them for one feature, screwing around with them to get what you want can take forever and some of us don't want to spend literally hours in the character creator. However, sliders are still better than some of the other choices where they just give you a point on a space and sets of coordinates you are supposed to figure out how the hell they work together.
Most areas of the game scale with your level, but then there are also areas with enemies that have fixed levels, and there is no way to predict what an area will be. It is an extremely bad implementation of enemy interactions. Either have all areas scale, or have fixed levels for enemies for certain areas, but don't just randomly mix them. The approach they took makes the game and enemy strength feel extremely inconsistent.
The lack of respect for the lore and previous entries in the series was frustrating, as was the retconning of large parts of the overall saga and story. It's one thing to make necessary small changes over time, it's another to just pull a bunch of stuff out of one's ass and then say "here's your lore now!"
They really needed to do a better job of not making the "traitor" for one part of the story so damn obvious. I knew who it was after a single sentence when it all started.
The lip synch rendering of the voice lines of the various characters is awful. It reminds me of a poor 90's anime. I have no idea why this is a problem, but it has been reported by many people. I know it isn't my setup since my FPS are solid with no major lag spikes in frame rendering. They did a much better job in previous DA games, it should never have regressed.
The gestures the player character makes with his hands (more than once) when talking to companions were awful, just completely out of place. I don't know what they were thinking including such obviously modern conversational gestures in a conversation between people in a settings of swords and magic.
The boss fights are essentially fighting a damage sponge, which sucked. It made the battles take much, much longer than they should have.
Apparently some evil magic was woven upon all of Thedas so that no woman can have breasts larger than a B cup or an ass that even achieves a handful. My male player character had larger pecs than the breasts of most women in Thedas.
They removed fall damage, but also removed the ability of the player character to fall down to any area you are allowed to walk on from any height. I suspect this is a limitation of the loading of the graphics engine, but it is really frustrating. If I can walk on a given area, I should be able to jump more than 3 stories down to it, instead of having the screen dissolve to black and put me back where I was. It forces you to waste time navigating back to areas you should be able to jump to in 5 seconds.
For some reason the jumping does not work correctly and is incredibly inconsistent. I have had my character fall into a gap between a boat and a dock that is about 12 inches wide and drown because he jumped like a moron. It can make certain jumps in the game extremely frustrating.
The fact that there are ziplines crisscrossing major cities, and in the middle of nowhere wilderness is just ridiculous. Also, there was way, way too many of them. They didn't seem to have this issue in previous DA games, I don't know why they thought ziplines everywhere was a good idea for this entry.
There is no "New Game +" and no post end game save where you are allowed to go back and enjoy the world you just saved. The only thing you can do is go back to the last save you made before activating the end game sequence.
The Incredibly Ugly -
The combat is a complete dumpster fire. I normally play a warrior in DA games, but I was forced to play a mage in this game because of how screwed up the combat is. The enemies completely focus on your player character and pursue you relentlessly, paying no attention to your other companions unless you have one that has the ability to draw their attention, and even then, it is only for a few seconds. The pressure of multiple enemies or a boss constantly in your face makes any kind of decent strategy impossible. This is why melee in particular is trash.
Your companions do what amounts to almost no damage to regular enemies and are like gnats to any boss. It really makes the game feel very stupid. My companion is a Grey Warden, supposedly a hardened warrior against the blight but he can't even defeat the most basic darkspawn by himself? That makes absolutely no sense.
Following in the retarded footsteps of Inquisition, there is still no healing magic. It is still all potion based and has a limited quantity that can be used. You can assign a healing ability to one of the slots of your companions, but they are also potion based, not magic.
The zoom is automated and extremely poorly implemented. You have absolutely no manual control over the zoom in any environment or battle. It is quite common for the zoom to completely screw up and leave you with no idea what the fuck is going on while you get pounded on by enemies. This is a huge step back from the manual zoom in Inquisition.
There are poorly implemented physical barriers that prevent you from going to certain areas on a map. They have an icon of a red lock that says "Currently Inaccessible" No explanation given. It is so incredibly lazy. Rather than create a physical obstacle that can't be currently surmounted, they just block it off with a white opaque wall with a lock icon. In addition to this, it feels like an action game on rails. There is no free exploration of the spaces, you have to follow very specific paths that are extremely obvious on the map. You are absolutely incapable of freely exploring most of the areas you can see on the map. Open world is completely dead. The weird part is that there are many instances where they have physical, magical, or environmental barriers that block access to certain places that make sense in-world, absolutely how it should be done. It is very inconsistent, which is jarring.
They go to retarded lengths to avoid mentioning anything that could possibly be tied to previous choices in previous games. Either outright ignoring them, or dancing around it in the most ridiculous way. It is taken to a level of retarded that was previously uncharted.
The story steering and gatekeeping in this game is fucking awful. There are doors that require orbs from powerful creatures to open. Even if you killed the creature, have the orb, and can access the door, you can't actually activate it until the game says you can, which is fucking ridiculous. If you try to open it it just doesn't do anything. If you check your journal it basically says "This will be accessible later in the game" which is bullshit. A hardcore rule of RPG's is that unless there is a physical or magical barrier that cannot be surmounted as a result of lacking a tool, etc..., if you have everything you need, you can access that area. Even if it's 50 levels above you and you instantly get your ass kicked, if you have the tools to enter, you should be allowed to enter the area. The level of the monsters is supposed to be the barrier, but veteran players always enjoy that kind of thing since they try to find ways around it to get loot that they shouldn't be able to get yet, or if they can somehow find a way to defeat those monsters, etc... For me that kind of thing is literally 1/2 the fun of the game, trying to find a way to play the game that the people that made it never intended.
They drop a huge story altering decision on you without any way to prepare for it or even save before making it, and it literally changes a major portion of the story direction depending on your choice. You just feel ambushed with suddenly having to make this major decision, and it really sucks. There should be a build up to a major decision so you know its coming and can prepare for it, not just have it dropped on you out of nowhere. I almost stopped playing the game over this.
The "relationship" between the player character and the companion you choose to romance is retarded. You flirt with them, and eventually they reciprocate, but there is never any indication of any real relationship with any depth greater than two junior high school students. It's ridiculous. Then, before the last big battle, the companion you romance wants to finally have sex with you (without any other apparent physical contact beforehand, which seems rather odd) and the scene is more chaste than daytime network TV. Previous DA games were much better at demonstrating the relationship and romance between characters. This felt like a huge step backwards. There is also a nudity option in the settings, but somehow there is never any nudity. I'm not sure what that is all about. The limited number of romances for straight male and female player characters is also annoying. This game really pushes the "if you want more options, be a pansexual!" idea hard.
The "non-binary" crap that gets brought up by your one companion is just awful and cringeworthy. It is handled in such an incredibly ham-fisted way you would never believe these are real conversations involving real people. It completely takes you out of the story and makes you actively hate the game and stop playing. They don't bother to try and make it part of the story or the culture of the companion involved in any way, it's like they decided to just throw some current, modern personal issues into this game because they could, despite how incredibly out of place it was. The scene where the one character "misgenders" the non-binary companion and then does this elaborate stunt is clearly just the power fantasy of some tranny writer to force normal people to submit to them. Watching that interaction I literally felt my soul trying to escape my body it was so incredibly cringe. I think this is the first game where I have actually rolled my eyes at the screen and that wasn't the game's intention. There is another NPC that drops a line about being non-binary in a conversation that has nothing to do with that topic. They just drop it like they took a shit on the ground in front of you. It makes no sense and shouldn't be part of the conversation, but there it is. Shoving this crap into various places in the game really just ruins several aspects of it and makes you hate the people that wrote it.
The way they made the Qunari look is physically nauseating. I doubt they could have fucked that up worse if they had actually intended to do so.
The lack of post-launch technical support is appalling. There are some incredibly serious bugs that are being encountered and there is complete silence from EA on what they plan, if anything, to do about it. They managed to release the first patch after a week that addressed some things, but left nearly all of the major bugs, and created some new ones. After that there has been one hotfix that didn't do much of anything. That is all they have done in more than 2 weeks post launch. They have stopped responding to tech support posts and questions. They have made no indications that there will be future patches and they have provided no timeline on how and when they plan to address these truly game breaking bugs. Even by EA's incredibly low standards this is truly awful. Unfortunately it is unlikely the community will be able to fill the gap since they have released no tools for the game, as they have done with previous releases. Also, this particular implementation of the Frostbite engine appears to be quite complex and as such will make patching it quite difficult for the community.
The few choices you can import into the game generally mean dog shit unless you were a female elf that romanced Solas. If you weren't then the choice of who you romanced in Inquisition and whether you vowed to stop or save Solas at the end of Inquisition don't mean diddly squat. The only choice you can import that is actually reflected in the game in a minor way is the fate of the inqusition. If you chose to disband them, or you chose to keep the inquisition together and become a part of the chantry impacts what the Inquisitor says in Veilgaurd when you meet him, and that's it. So, in the end, you have one choice that gets imported, and it doesn't even mean much of anything. A solid flipping of the bird at all the people that have enjoyed DA and the choices they made over the years for their various characters.
If you choose for Davrin to die in the final battle, Assan dies as well by trying to save him. It really fucking sucks. I don't care if Negrolas dies, but why did the griffin have to die as well? That's just bullshit.
The Weird -
For some reason in the character creator they start your male character out with makeup and glitter on. This makes no sense. Do they just want everyone to be a freak by default?
You can't drop the melanin slider below 60%. Despite this, as you can see with my final character, it is possible to create white people, just don't expect to make them look like anyone from Northern Europe or people that are nearly transparent like myself IRL.
To conclude, if there was absolutely any doubt that Mass Effect 5 will be well and truly fucked beyond all hope, it has been completely removed by the release of Veilguard. Just as I would suggest that one think of DA as having concluded with Inquisition, it is truly for the best if you just think of Mass Effect as having concluded with ME3 and just move on to greener pastures. Your sanity will thank you.
