Being a new game with much more modern features, it’s no wonder the DAV has had a few issues during the less than three weeks of its existence. The game is extremely stable, as far as I can see. Especially when compared against releases like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2077, which had issues that effected the vast majority of players, DAV’s oddities seem to be contained to a relatively small percentage of users and are thus much harder to track down, as everyone is complaining about what they can’t do, but nobody is talking about their rigs, or what steps they’ve taken to try and solve the problems on their own.

I’ve had a remarkably stable time of it with Dragon Age: The Veilguard. I will notice that I do experience some video stutter during cut scenes, and even getting ready to watch cut scenes (approaching the meditation spot, for example) if I’ve been running the game for a while. I ran fine on the previous NVIDIA drivers (I’m using an RTX 4060 Ti), updated the drivers and went from GeForce Experience to the new NVIDIA app, and still run fine.

Occasionally, I experiences a fatal DirectX error referencing an unknown GUID, but only if I leave DAV running in the background for a period of time.

Almost all the errors I’ve seen in DAV could be explained by the index of an array or some sort of loop being off by one. On my character and companion screens, I often see the update diamond for a piece of equipment, but on the wrong character’s screen. Currently, my Rook is showing a romance with a character I romanced in my first playthrough rather than the one I’m trying to romance this time around.

I’ve seen players complaining about being unable to load any saved games (referencing some sort of indexing error when the error is referenced at all) at all, being unable to use the game’s dagger to interact with crucial items, and then a lot of complaints about cpu usage/heating issues and crackling audio.

Poor or Broken Audio

I haven’t experienced the issue myself, but a lot of people are complaining about stuttering audio that makes the sound unbearable. Someone on the Steam forums claimed the issue was solved for them by turning off “Spatial Sound” in Windows settings. Aside from the possibility of a new driver update, that seems like a good place to start.

If you’re using speakers, swap for a headset and see if that works, etc. There are minimal audio configuration options inside DAV, but those will advise you that turning off virtual surround processing will be your best bet. With that done, playing around with EQ settings might help.

This is by far the problem I see reported the most in the Steam forums, at least. It still doesn’t appear to affect a majority of players, but that’s no comfort if you’re one of the ones it does effect.

Settings Being Overwritten with Defaults/Previous Choices

I’ve only experienced this once, and I couldn’t say what I’d done to bring it about, but my ultimate ability reset to the default and I didn’t notice until I was in the middle of a large battle. It all worked out, but argh in general.

The ultimate ability resetting is what I see players complaining about the most, but others are seeing default characters in cut scenes rather than their Rook customizations, or a default Inquisitor after having carefully crafted their own. Players claim they can verify their settings in the Lighthouse mirror, so they know their settings are saved.

Again, this could be explained by an indexing error where being off by 1 is causing choices to be pulled in from an earlier campaign, an earlier autosave, or just failing to defaults when an index is out of bounds. But that’s just a guess.

The few times it has felt to me like an equipment change isn’t sticking, I’ve changed that piece of equipment again, then also changed something else, changed screens, changed the second thing back, and verified the first change stuck. Probably an unnecessary step with the second thing, but measure twice…

Another possible culprit to settings being rewritten is permissions on the location where EA stores saved games. Electronic Arts (as I’m sure you’re aware by now) creates a folder under Documents (called “BioWare” in this case), and then sub-folders for each of its titles under that, further subdividing into campaigns and saves themselves. If you’re playing on more than one computer, and are using OneDrive to synchronize your My Documents folder, there’s a good chance you’re re-writing your own settings. Turn it off (at least for the BioWare folder). The cloud saves already take care of cross-device synchronization for you.

Other programs, such as antivirus software, can sometimes prevent what it considers to be intrusive changes to any folder under a user’s account, including “Documents.” If you’ve disabled one drive and checked permissions to that folder (try running the program as administrator once if you have to), then I’d try disabling any AV or malware programs you have running, or at least white-listing the Documents/BioWare/Dragon Age The Veilguard.

Can’t Load Save Files

Like, at all. Players with this problem have to start a new campaign every time they play. It seems like they are completing the save process successfully in-game (else what would there be to load?) but once they exit to menu and try to load one, almost all the saves fail.

Most people playing DAV on the PC aren’t having this problem, but it’s a total showstopper to those who are, and obviously beyond annoying.

Thankfully, I haven’t run across this error myself at all. Based on the number of times I’ve seen the apparent incorrectly indexed array or list, and the number of players reporting errors with the word “indexing” in them, I’m inclined to think there’s an indexing problem at work here, too.

That’s assuming the game is successfully saving the same data to your drive as to the cloud. If it’s a permissions issue, then DAV could just be handling it suboptimally in saving to the cloud without alerting the user the local save failed to complete. That doesn’t seem likely.

If there’s an indexing error, then I don’t know what else to do about it other than to make your computer completely unaware you’ve played DAV on it at all. Use whatever platform you installed to uninstall, then delete the “BioWare/Dragon Age The Veilguard” folder. Reinstall DAV, and hope to heck it’s able to load saves that were stored on the cloud, then let the user save them locally.

If whatever saved games that were stored on the cloud don’t work either, then it looks like another new campaign time. Sadly, your best bet might be to make sure no saved games are stored on the cloud, then starting from scratch with a clean install and only one campaign known to the software.

Can’t Interact with Statues and Unique Chests

The last problem I see is players unable to interact with particular items in the game that either give perks or drop loop. There are a few places in DAV where being unable to interact with a statue would halt progress, but I can’t recall any of these statues requiring use of Solas’ dagger, and that’s the interaction that seems to be causing the problem.

There is a large overlap of people unable to use the dagger on certain objects and people having problems with key bindings either not working or not being present (many left-handed people are complaining the arrow keys won’t function as movement keys, for example). It’s unclear to me if the dagger problem only exists for people who have customized key bindings, but either way the first step in finding a fix seems obvious: do the opposite.

If you have mapped your own bindings, reset to default just to see if the dagger works. If you are set to default, remap that interaction key (“e” by default) to something else.

One thing I’ve noticed with DAV is that you can’t just reaffirm a choice, you actually have to change it and change back. If you see the wrong hat in the game but the right one in the mirror, you’ve likely going to have to change that hat to something else, then change it back. Accepting the changes in between couldn’t hurt.

You might find it’s the same for remapping key bindings. Don’t just verify a key is set to something if it’s not working. Change it to something else, then change it back. If you want a gold star, test it out while it’s mapped to “something else”, then again when you put it back.

Officious or Helpful

I can’t tell which this post it. Hopefully more the second than the first.

Regardless of whether you think BioWare is rushing to solve your particular issue or believes you’re a sucker whose money it has already counted, just take a few minutes to try and solve your own problem. If you hope BioWare solves the issue, the fastest way to do that is to include what steps you’ve taken to reproduce the problem, and what steps you’ve taken trying to fix it. Even in a forum. Maybe someone else will respond with “Hey! Me too.” And that narrows things down.

Who am I to criticize yelling at the internet? I’m a blogger. Still, if you want your game to run more than you want to yell about it, a good idea is to give the people who can fix it as much information as possible. And, as much as it hurts, you might have to consider that an issue only you and three other people are having isn’t a bug, but a you problem.