From the biased reviews, Dragon Age: The Veilguard seems to be a phenomenal game, the best project of the year, almost a perfect RPG, but fans of the series are disappointed from head to toe. Although many independent publications have heavily criticized Dragon Age: The Veilguard (quite deservedly), the game has some nice moments, which we will definitely mention in this cold-blooded review-analysis of the expected sequel to the legendary RPG.
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While Dragon Age: The Veilguard runs stably, looks good, and plays smoothly on consoles, computers, as always, are not so easy. This game will divide PC fans into two camps, as some will be quite satisfied with the game’s performance, while others will look at their $3000-5000 system units with tears in their eyes, which cannot provide high frame rates.
The game was developed for consoles (like most modern AAA titles), but looking ahead, the port for Windows computers turned out to be quite good in terms of stability. We tested the Steam version of Dragon Age: The Veilguard on a computer with AMD Ryzen 9 7900 and AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX with a wide 21:9 monitor in resolutions of 2560×1080, 3440×1440, 5120×2160, 7680×3240 pixels with different graphics settings.
During the first launch, the player will face a long shader compilation. Owners of 7-8 year old mid-range processors can go for a walk for 20-30 minutes until the process is complete, as it took almost 10 minutes for the 12-core AMD Ryzen 9 7900.
The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX has enough power to play in 4K, 5K, 6K, 7K, 8K, but be sure to use an aggressive Intel XeSS or AMD FSR preset, at least Balanced, and preferably Performance.
RT on:
RT off:
There are problems with ray tracing, especially when there is a lot of water on the screen. For example, in 2560x1080p resolution, we get 30-40 FPS near a waterfall with maximum graphics without upscaling
In battles, you won’t be able to keep 60+ FPS with these graphics settings either, and it’s only slightly more than Full HD with the RX 7900 XTX. Ultra HD monitors will have a real slideshow.
Turn off RT and you get 130-150+ FPS, and lowering the graphics settings allows you to play even on weak PCs.
Textures can be very high quality, and sometimes terrible. Environment objects are drawn well, with good detail. The fire looks terrible, primitive, like a game from 2005.
The faces of the non-story NPCs are poorly rendered, lazy, and of low quality, as are most of the background textures. The key characters look good, though unrealistic. You can feel a certain Disney style. There is a lack of detail on the face – the same problem exists in Starfield Let’s compare the detail in The Callisto Protocol, Starfield, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard. As you can see from the screenshots, the difference is enormous
In some cutscenes, due to the strange lighting, there is too much «soap», although we were playing with the maximum possible graphics
Ray tracing works well, FPS losses in light locations are small, but in battles with a lot of bright epileptic effects, the frame rate will drop dramatically, so it’s better to turn off RT altogether.
The overall optimization of Dragon Age: The Veilguard is average and the system requirements are in line with what Steam says. The game can’t be called bad technically, because it still looks adequate with low-medium graphics settings and will run smoothly on weak PCs. But the higher the settings, the less sense they make and the greater the FPS loss
It still won’t make the graphics look realistic in the style of Apex Legends or Overwatch, but it does hit performance, especially with ray tracing in some scenes. The owner of a typical gaming PC (weaker than the PS5) will definitely not complain about the frame rate. Let’s make sure once again that ultra graphics is not needed in almost all games.
Technically, Dragon Age: The Veilguard can be rated 6.5/10No less, but this is a merit of the back-end part of the game, because the graphical style is still weak for a flagship AAA RPG of 2024. That’s great, the game is probably interesting and of high quality not only in this regard, right? Not at all, because the biggest problems start deep inside the game during the passage, but let’s take things in order
The character creation reflects the developers’ considerable efforts to please all ethnic diasporas and sexual minorities – in the game you can choose the gender of the hero, which is not actually tied to his or her sex. For example, to make a big «woman» in the body of a man who calls himself They/Them and has a rough voice.
There are also many ready-made presets: who does the player want to create? There is a wide range of options: Indian, Pakistani, Zimbabwean, Somali, Sudanese, ancient Aztec, Native American, Chinese, Tibetan, Korean, Japanese, Mexican, Eskimo, Algerian?
No, you can also create a white man or woman, but for the most part, the game offers representatives of such nationalities on the main race selection screen. A direct hint at the real percentage of people by nationality in the world? DEI The system (diversity, equity, and inclusion) is working at full throttle, literally running through the gaming industry in sixth gear.
There are four races (kunari, humans, dwarves, elves) and three classes. There seems to be a variety, but the standard set «Warrior, Assassin, Mage» could have been expanded after a 10-year break. There are six factions: Antivan’s Ravens, Sorrow’s Watch, Lords of Fortune, Shadow Dragons, Veiled Wanderers, and Gray Wardens
The appearance will not affect the style of the game and the development of the plot, as well as the characteristics of the hero, but the choice of faction or class has a direct impact on the gameplay.
The editor has a lot of options, although most of them are completely unnecessary or too limited. For example, it’s simply impossible to make a slim, curvy woman with a sexy physique (who does 900 squats in the gym every day). The difference between the minimum and maximum possible buttocks sizes is incredibly small – moving the slider changes almost nothing!
If you want bigger breasts and wider hips, please make the character look like a barrel. You can also make your character disgusting, literally. The developers have taken the time to add a variety of skin diseases, rashes, scars from sex reassignment surgeries, and more. You can also make a woman with a bald spot or a male voice.
By the way, the voices of female characters are mostly unpleasant for some reason. The voice of the hero I created was more or less adequate, but almost every third female NPC speaks in a strange smoky voice.
After 20 minutes of research, the editor decided to create Elena Bekirova:
A heterosexual Ukrainian woman with Tatar roots, born in Crimea in 1994, 170 centimeters tall, 45 kilograms, natural dark hair, no tattoos, minimal makeup (only eyes), physically healthy, athletic, no bad habits or skin diseases, calm, balanced character, above-average intelligence, a magician by profession, knows how to cook in the kitchen (not a feminist).
A large part of the plot information in Dragon Age: The Veilguard is presented through the narrator’s monologue against the background of animated images (saving on full-fledged cutscenes), and it is with this style of storytelling that the storyline begins.
About 10 years after the events of Dragon Age: Inquisition known from the previous installments, the elf Solas decided to destroy the Veil (Veil, Barrier), the consequences of which threaten all living things. The power, potential, and instability of the Veil were discussed in the third part of Dragon Age, although for new players, short informational introductions will not be enough to fully understand.
Ruk (the protagonist) and his team try to stop this process, and they seem to succeed, but something has gone wrong. The world seems to have been saved, but two elven gods have been set free, and they have not very peaceful plans. Varik is badly wounded, and Solas has taken up residence in the head of Ruk, and the player will have to find answers to many questions.
What kind of threat to the unleashed gods pose, can Solas’ words be trusted, and how can they avoid another end of the world that has only been delayed, not stopped? No problem, because the brave female team will save everyone while the weak men cry into their pillows!
For newcomers to Dragon Age, some aspects of the plot will not be very clear, but if you understand the game’s universe and listen carefully to the numerous dialogues/monologues, everything falls into place. The more you play, the clearer everything becomes. The main thing is not to miss cutscenes.
The game’s lore is large, there is a lot of information about everything and everyone, dialogues take up to 50% of the total time, and for those who like to explore the game’s universe in detail, there is additional information in various records scattered around the locations.
The storyline features familiar characters from the previous Dragon Age installments, as well as completely new ones. The player is dealing with the consequences of recent events, and between missions, he tries to find answers to important questions in dialogues with Solas, whom he does not really want to trust.
A nice female team:
So, Rook sets off again to save the world, assembling a team of heroes along the way. Looking ahead, the new heroes are tasteless, lazily made, with aggressively imposed feminism, but more on that in a separate section.
In total, the game has three acts, 44 missions, and additional quests. According to various estimates, it will take at least 20–25 hours of gameplay to complete the storyline without any side quests. This seems to be true because it took me 10 hours to complete the first act, and I didn’t linger on any bosses. A full playthrough of Dragon Age: The Veilguard will take 50 to 100 hours to complete.
Opinions about online gambling are very divided. Major publications praise the game, while independent reviewers trample it into the ground, saying that it is the worst thing that has come out in the last 20 years. Let’s be honest, the truth is somewhere in the middle, so let’s try to find it If we consider Dragon Age: The Veilguard as a standalone game that has nothing to do with the previous installments, it’s fine for a one-time playthrough, but fans will hate the new product, especially those who loved the first installment.
This is another RPG with a very positive world, bright, light, friendly, rainbow. There are definitely unicorns and ponies jumping around. In short, Dragon Age: The Veilguard has no dark fantasy atmosphere at all — it’s a completely new game that doesn’t give a damn about canons It seems that BioWare (and not only them) have undertaken to re-educate an entire generation of gamers. Well, let’s see what happens
From the first minutes of gameplay, the developer feeds the player feminism in all its glory and continues to do so throughout the campaign. The principles of creating such a plot are very simple: women are strong, brave, determined, ready to go into battle, and men are weak, worthless, crybabies
After being wounded, Varick asks for rest. He is shown tired, exhausted, unable to fight, admitting his weakness and asking for rest in bed, while Harding in the cutscenes behaves quite the opposite: «I’m strong, I’m a woman, I’m a warrior, I have no time to rest, I can go to battle, I’m the best!». Of course, a male dwarf can lie down, but a female dwarf is an invincible conqueror of worlds, enduring pain rather than whining like representatives of the «strong» gender.
Initiative, strength, confidence, and leadership in Dragon Age: The Veilguard can be felt in the characters, but not the male ones. Almost all of them (and there are few of them) in this universe are shown to be weak, especially those of European appearance. In the process of clearing the village of evil spirits, we come across a white man who looks like a German-blond.
It turns out that he sold his village for money and allowed such a grief to happen. People died because of this man’s greed. His fate falls into the hands of women, and they can take pity on him, give life to a worthless, weak, soulless white man who almost cries for it from the strong saviors of the world, or kill him. Of course, it could not be someone of another color because that would be rude and disrespectful to other cultures.
Is it an isolated case? No, this is just the beginning of a trend and an indication of the moral and ethical direction in which the player is being led in the future. «The farther into the forest, the more firewood», i.e., as we move through the story, we see more and more of this. The game teaches us that «women save the world, while men conditionally wash toilets, cook in the kitchen and cry quietly into their pillows, especially men of European appearance because «men of color» still have much more strong qualities».
It’s subjective, but male teammates are also of little use in the game itself. Lukanis and Darwin’s abilities seemed too weak, and it was much easier to play with 100% female teams, especially against bosses.
The world is filled with humans, elves, dwarves, and kunari who have moved to the Dragon Age universe from India, Somalia, Mexico, Vietnam, Tibet, Algeria, Congo, Cuba, Argentina, Nigeria, Chile, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Sudan.
The problem with the game is not racial diversity, but the fact that it is literally impossible to find people of European appearance in some locations, although according to the canons it should be associated with this fantasy games in a medieval setting (hay, straw, castle, arrow, dragon, sword, magic). Everything here is according to the canons and rules DEIIt’s nothing personal.
But this is all trivial compared to how lazy the developers are in revealing the characters and how tightly they put the player in the box. Dragon Age: The Veilguard doesn’t allow you to be bad, because it’s a universe of perfectly positive characters who wouldn’t dare to offend each other, under any circumstances
A player can’t be a bad guy at all. The most negative answers are seasoned with a good dose of tolerance and still sound very positive. Our character can be either good or very good. It’s nice to have a choice.
The dialogues are primitive, predictable, and lazy. The characters have no charisma, cannot defend their point of view, and are ready to beat themselves with physical exercises for making a mistake with their gender Taash (this will definitely become a meme), because she asks to be addressed as They/Them! The player may ask why they have to do push-ups for such a trifle, can’t they just apologize? And then we start to read the mores and institutions of far-left propaganda
This can only be viewed positively, or very positively, and there is no bad answer. It’s just an RPG game in a fantasy world. Is it really necessary to clog up the already boring cutscenes with such unnecessary dialogues?
In fact, such direct and super aggressive propaganda ARGB+ not as much as you might think from this example. The game is more about feminism and the equality of everything and everyone, and it makes it an absolute. It is because of the desire to make everyone neutral that the characters do not have something unique, the charisma and what would make the player feel worried about their favorite character has disappeared.
Male interlocutors in Dragon Age: The Veilguard are almost entirely devoid of masculine character traits, and the female characters are not feminine. The game’s world is bright and colorful, but the characters are tasteless, monotonous, predictable, boring, and similar to each other in conversation.
To be objective and cold-blooded, this is the main drawback of the game, not the presence of sexual minorities or excessive racial diversity. Dragon Age: The Veilguard — is no longer Dragon Age, but some other game in a parallel universe that does not belong to the canon, just as none of the fans consider episodes 7-9 of Star Wars to be canon.
The game world looks pretty good (for its style), but you can only interact with boxes/barrels, where you can occasionally find loot. Some fire is just a decoration, while others do damage.
Most objects in the world do not have any interaction:
In the city, you can pet a cat or a dog, or chat with a random NPC. You can’t knock down a tree, break any stone or wall, or kill an NPC. Even killing forest animals has no animation – they literally evaporate after being destroyed. Motion animations are sometimes choppy, especially if you turn the character left and right, you don’t feel the character’s inertia. Sand leaves unrealistic traces, and interaction with vegetation is minimal.
In Dragon Age: The Veilguard, you can’t jump, but the character automatically climbs to higher ground when you move. The collision is not perfect: invisible walls and surfaces are present, but not in small quantities, and even then, if you look hard enough. Usually, characters bend their legs realistically, resting their boots on the surface, although the heroine simply levitates on the couch.
There are no platforming elements, or rather, everything is very simplified. Moving along the narrow planks is automatic — it is impossible to fall off the crossbar. In other places, it is still possible to move off the edge of the map if you do it on purpose, but there will be no punishment for this, instead, an instant respawn without loading the game.
I didn’t have a single death in eight hours of playing on medium difficulty. It’s easy to get used to the mechanics, and the game teaches you as you go, gradually increasing the difficulty of the enemies. There will always be a lot of hints and tips on the screen, and the levels are literally littered with bottles for health regeneration.
You can silence anyone with the left mouse button and the space bar:
Subjectively, the game is incredibly easy, but it is possible to increase the difficulty manually through the main menu. This will have a significant impact on those who play as ranged characters, like me because aiming will become much harder (without automatic aiming).
This will provide a bit of hardcore for those who like difficulty, and casuals will be able to play with one hand and eat chips with the other. Of course, playing on the lowest difficulty is not fun at all because the character becomes almost immortal, and the opponents seem to be made of glass.
It’s especially easy to fight bosses with a mage, that is, when there is one big target, and not many small ones scattered around the arena. It’s so easy to concentrate and press the space bar in time to dodge, and then shoot a helpless enemy with your wand. If you get used to this style and try a little harder, you can beat bosses without taking damage.
The protagonist and his assistants have basic abilities and an ultimatum with a wide development tree and three main directions. A detailed description and visualization of skills will help you decide what to pump right now and what can wait. In addition to abilities, there are special attack boosts for hitting an area, blocking combinations, and more.
The leveling is quite fast by the standards of single-player RPGs. In parallel with your character, you need to strengthen your allies, as well as dress them in equipment, which also needs to be improved for various resources scattered around the game locations
The player’s partners are immortal, have useful abilities that deal damage, give a positive effect to our character, heal, slow down time, weaken the enemy, and so on. The game always tells you if you can combine certain abilities of our assistants to enhance the effect. The tactical mode on the Tab key gives your hands a break and allows you to think about which enemies to target with your abilities.
If you don’t play on the maximum difficulty, almost all of your allies’ skills are useless because it’s enough to spam healing: with infinite «health kits» every 15-20 seconds, you can confidently go after most enemies without worrying about your health.
I took two support characters with healing abilities to the team, and it was with this set of characters that it was easiest to beat the bosses. It allows you to go for the breakthrough, be brazen, make mistakes almost an unlimited number of times, healing your wounds each time.
Another interesting thing is that the game seems to give in when the player has little health: the enemy always leaves a tiny amount of health so that you can heal. For example, the boss takes 40-45% of the hero’s maximum health with a combination of blows, but we only have 25% now. During the attack, he does not kill the character, but leaves him barely breathing.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard could have been a cool RPG game if the developers had paid more attention to the mechanics and what makes the game interesting to play through, possibly repeatedly. There’s potential for a second playthrough with a different class, but with a boring world and ultra-tolerant characters with no charisma, it’s unlikely to be worth it
It turned out to be relatively weak, but not terrible, just not according to the Dragon Age canons: fast gameplay, dependent on the player’s reaction, simple and clear leveling, low entry threshold, and a selection of difficulty for absolutely all kinds of gamers
BioWare developers took a tricky path, fearing real criticism from independent publications. Almost all «mainstream media» praised the game, called it the game of the year, kissed it from head to toe, writing out beautiful epithets, praising everything that gamers hate about DEI games
Despite praise journalists of Dragon Age: The Veilguard received a huge criticism players, and the company immediately began to combat this by buying thousands of positive reviews on Steam. Bot farms began to write good reviews actively according to a clear script. Many of these texts are repeated and translated into different languages. And this is the studio that made a game for a quarter of a billion dollars?
This was not enough, and the whole community of the famous streamer Asmongold was blocked on Reddit due to criticism of the game for its excessive focus on sexual minorities in the storyline and hyper-inclusivity that literally turned into racism against white people with traditional values. Do you disagree with our opinion? Block it immediately!
A few days after the release, the Internet was flooded with a wave of negative reviews and feedback about the game. Some of them exaggerated because the game, although unsuccessful, has its advantages, which were mentioned in the review. Technically, it’s not a failed product that had potential, but there were those who literally threw mud at Dragon Age: The Veilguard where it was not appropriate.
Still, most of the reviews were objective and made it clear that the game definitely doesn’t live up to the rating given by biased journalists. Similarly, the reasoned reviews on Steam are mostly negative. Although the average rating still remains high thanks to thousands of bots, the trend is not in favor of increasing sales — people have learned the truth that can no longer be hidden behind the screen of insincere journalists.
On the website Metacritic The game also received a poor rating of 3.8/10 despite a huge number of 10/10 purchased reviews. If we exclude bot reviews, the score would be no more than 1.5/10. Fans are not just disappointed, they hate it from the bottom of their hearts Dragon Age: The Veilguard. This is a game for completely new gamers who have never touched the original Dragon Age.
Perhaps, if not for the DEI principle, Dragon Age: The Veilguard would have been a great game that would have brought back the past glory of the famous series and honored the memory of the original. Instead of focusing on improving graphics and optimization (the game is still relatively well optimized for PC, though not perfectly), BioWare paid attention to the very things that fans don’t want to see in Dragon Age.
It seems that the failure of the game Concord and many DEI films Marvel with strong, independent, intelligent women and insignificant, weak men (who are almost never on screen, and if they are, they are rather negative characters) means nothing to EA and BioWare.
Controversial reviews and feedback, a brutal censorship of critics and refusal to look at the world without rose-colored glasses, it’s hard to say whether Dragon Age: The Veilguard because the current sales still leave much to be desired, especially against the background of Baldur’s Gate 3, Dragon’s Dogma 2, or Starfield, which also had their own nuances, but at least sold well.
Instead of writing a few more paragraphs of text, which is already too much, we will formulate our conclusions in the form of theses that most accurately convey the current state of the game, its features, advantages, disadvantages, gameplay impressions, and the very essence of everything that happens during the game:
Is it worth playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard on PC? It’s definitely not worth the 1500 UAH on Steam. Probably, when there are serious discounts, you can still buy it, or wait for it to appear on Xbox Game Pass. That way, at least you won’t feel sorry for yourself if you don’t like the game. And console owners are about to be able to buy a used disk for a third to a quarter of the price of disappointed gamers.
Fans of the series are strongly discouraged from getting acquainted with Dragon Age: The Veilguard, but if you want to play a casual, light, unrealistic, but cute RPG with the most concise plot development and clear battle mechanics, this game can still leave at least some positive emotions, of course, if you don’t take its sometimes strange propaganda for granted.
