The Dragon Age franchise is not known for staying exactly the same from game to game. Whether it’s changes in scope, in setting, in who your player character is, or in the mechanics of companion approval, there’s always something new cooking. But the most surprising change Dragon Age: The Veilguard makes from its predecessors?
I’m actually enjoying the combat.
The combat has never been what I come to a BioWare game for — so emphatically that I have been known to scoff at anyone who might consider it vital to the experience. This is the gaming equivalent of insisting on referring to all mainstream sports as “sportsball” and talking about how you only watch the Super Bowl for the commercials. It’s unfair, and I’m not exactly proud of it. But, then again, the selling point of a BioWare game has always been on the narrative side of things.
The company’s bread and butter is in presenting you with intricate world-building, complex characters, and compelling choices. BioWare has built a reputation as a titan of the CRPG genre, of which combat is one aspect — but it’s not, historically, been front and center in that reputation. You’ll never see Mass Effect heralded as a franchise that made its mark in the history of shooters. I can’t believe we ever thought Dragon Age: Origins’ core mechanic of manually tweaking your companions’ AI using a list of a dozen customizable if-then statements was casual fun. Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition were nothing much to write home about, combat-wise — there was nothing they did that wasn’t better in any given dungeon crawler.
The Dragon Age games in particular have consistently moved a step further away from full-blown tactical combat with each installment, so in some ways, Veilguard simply brings that journey to its logical conclusion. That last step has been a big one, though, and has been greeted with a lot of fan skepticism from multiple angles. Some are distinctly disappointed that Dragon Age and Tactical Combat have parted ways. For others, among my own crowd of Dragon Age superfans, it’s not that they miss the old combat, but that they’re apprehensive of the new. They’re not habitual real-time gamers, and they worry they won’t have the reflexes or dexterity for Veilguard, and it’ll ruin a game they’ve been looking forward to for a decade.
Personally, I felt neutral on the change, or at least was maintaining neutrality until I was able to experience it myself. I’ve already written about my initial impressions of Veilguard’s combat, and getting time with the full game only solidified my enjoyment, until one evening I found myself racing around an arena, dodging the attacks of my many larger opponents, kiting them near explosive barrels, and then using my ranged attacks to blow them to smithereens while I emerged completely unscathed. I realized that I was outright cackling in glee.
A quick poll of Polygon writers who got a chance to play Veilguard surfaced a lot of enthusiasm.
“Once I started to be able to do the jump and slam thing and one-shot a bunch of the undead thingies, I started having a blast with that.” —Zoë Hannah
“I loved realizing that mages can really exploit elemental weaknesses — helped me big time against those annoying blight champions.” —Ari Notis
“The boss fight against [REDACTED] as a rogue was incredible. Just constantly flipping back and forth, dancing on the edge of life and death, chipping away at the [REDACTED] with swift strikes.” —Cass Marshall
“I just like doing a combo with my love interest, tbqh.” —Petrana Radulovic
This fall, I completed a preparatory replay of Dragon Age: Inquisition, with difficulty settings emphatically set on easy. And when I replayed Dragon Age: Origins this summer, it was with a whole cadre of quality-of-life mods, including an Extra Easy Mode. I wanted that crunchy 2009 combat to be trivial. I wanted every enemy to go down ASAP, emphasis on the SAP.
Now, I’m actually thinking about increasing the (extremely customizable) difficulty settings I picked when I started Veilguard, because some of these big bad boss enemies are going down too quick! Hey! Don’t die! I was enjoying hitting you! And that’s never happened to me in a BioWare game before!
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