The other game I’ve been freaking out over is Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Full disclosure: I’m a huge Mass Effect fan. Say what you want about Bioware, but they put together a tightly woven, choice and consequences-dependent series of games like nobody else in the business. If you’re familiar with the first three games in the series (bundled together now as the Legendary Edition, which includes all the DLCs and is awesome), then you know that choices – even ones that seemed little at the time – percolated through to the ending of the third game, affecting the outcome. In fact, affecting at times the available outcomes.

I didn’t start playing Dragon Age until after Inquisition had released. (That’s the third in the series for noobs) I’ve gone back to play Origins (DA1) and also Dragon Age 2 (apparently, the marketing department was on holiday), so I don’t have quite the same connection to them as I do with Mass Effect, but I still enjoy the Dragon Age series a great deal.

I have a hard time playing old games with which I’m familiar, if they’ve been replaced with newer stories and better mechanics and graphics. I used to think the original Baldur’s Gate was the #$%^, but now I get bored and walk away to play BG3 after about three minutes of “Hi!” and little blocks of pixels running around the screen.

The point being: almost everything I learned about Dragon Age I learned from Inquisition, with much less time spent in the previous two installments. Another thing to take into consideration is that, unlike a lot of invested Mass Effect fans, I absolutely loved Andromeda.

At any rate, when EA and Bioware first announced that Dragon Age: The Veilguard would not be an open world (you know… for Bioware who loves a gauntlet) game, my first thought was that they were giving Dragon Age the Mass Effect 2 treatment. At least as far as streamlined mechanics and upgrades.

It’s not a stretch. The user interfaces for both have always been remarkably similar. Remove the science fiction versus fantasy context, and you have a galaxy map/war table, party members to train and equip, little puzzles to solve that unlock doors… either you know what I mean or you can take my word for it. They’re very similar.

Part of the reason I love DAV so much is that it met my expectations. Veilguard is much more streamlined than the previous Dragon Age games. The evolution of the game is very much the same: you quest your little heart out to get in tighter with your pool of party members, you increase your favor with various factions, and then you go after the big bad. But there’s much less emphasis on crafting and equipping. Long gone are the 4,000,003 recipes and the need to loot every map extensively go afford making them. Now, it’s just a few base ingredients based on the level and rarity of the equipment.

You can buy or upgrade gear, and that process is made super easy by it being automatic at merchants. Already own a version of what they’re selling? The buy button will be replaced by an upgrade button, and voila! You’re immediately equipped with a better version of what you had previously. It’s just as easy to upgrade companions, and everything (faction merchants and your home base work station) is tiered. All you need to do is upgrade the workstation to be able to upgrade the equipment for all your characters. All you need to do is upgrade your favor with a faction to improve the inventory they offer.

While the context is different, the upgrade process seems much more like performing upgrades to the Normandy in Mass Effect 2. Fewer options, but easy to apply. A lot less running around collecting things…

I mean a LOT less! Bioware rpgs are infamous for the “find 25 of this useless piece of crap… k, now go find 25 more” side quests that offer nothing but mind-numbing tedium to the game. And they’re…. gone!

There are a couple of small collections (so far), but all the quests and side-quests are about fighting or figuring stuff out, not randomly wandering the same countryside over and over in order to stretch out the appearance of playable hours by filling those hours with mindless tasks.

Everything is fun.

So far.

There are the typical Bioware sink or swim moments that you can’t get out of unless you fortuitously knew to save your game first. There are a variety of various characters with different abilities and traits (again, simplified and straight forward like ME2 compared to 1 and 3. And everything has a somewhat steampunkish tinge to it. No one is going to play Veilguard thinking it’s a steampunk game, but there’s more of a Victorian air to Tevinter, and Bioware plays it up.

At first, Veilguard seemed really controlled. Too closed-world and one-way-forward quests. But the game opens up fairly quickly. Veilguard might not have maps as large as Inquisition did, but you can still come and go freely, explore, loot, pick up side quests. All the things you loved to do in previous Dragon Age games.

There are still politics to navigate, conflicting opinions of party members to juggle… all the intricacies to the story are still there, and tie in very well. My one gripe here is that Dragon Age Keep is gone (so far as Veilguard is concerned). Somehow, I had it in my head one would still be able to pull in information from at least completed Inquisition saves but that does not appear to be the case. During the introduction, you get to set some options selected from a default list for the previous Inquisitor. And I played through DAI three extra times to set up three different world states.

Ah, well. Can’t have everything.

Without giving too much away (no spoilers, sweetie), the combat mechanics feel a little sticky to me. Mostly it’s the dodging, which seems to be … inadequate for how often that particular skill is required. Also, the camera is at a particular angle to the character: way off in right field behind the shoulder. You literally get bumped into walls as your character navigates their home base. It’s a little disconcerting, and like turning a car with a very poor turn radius. Once you get used to it, gameplay itself is very smooth and engaging.

I love that Bioware gave us a feature-packed game that simplifies some of the onerous tasks so common in rpgs, while still engaging the player with a lot of story and character development provided it goes somewhere. Without ME1 and ME3, ME2 by itself seems too controlled and directed. Likewise, the first portion of Veilguard had way too many cut scenes and moments where the player was essentially just following along. But once the story and its environs were set up for the player, everything was good again.

Still, I’m wary of games that offer loads of character development that ends up going…nowhere. Either the game’s sequel gets scrapped before it’s out of the gate (like Marvel’s Midnight Suns), or its fatalistic drama the character won’t survive (like Cyberpunk 2077… perhaps, or the original endings to ME3).

It was already enough we gave up some of our favorite long-standing gaming characters in favor of a new generation of strangers (even very good strangers, which they are). We’re already used to not getting a continuous story from game to game, at least as far as the protagonist is concerned (please? Just for me?). Please don’t go all nihilistic “it all ends in a mountain of bones in the darkness” future for Rook. Or for Dragon Age.

I’ve waited almost 9 years for Veilguard, and I’m happy I did. It’s definitely Dragon Age, but like the dev team consulted with the UI team from Hogwarts Legacy and the marketing department behind Marvel’s Midnight Suns. Which sounds awful, but I promise is not.