The Veilguard Launches to Excellent Player Reviews

Key Takeaways

• Dragon Age: The Veilguard launched on October 31 to excellent user scores.
• Early player impressions range from a 77.82% recommendation rate on Steam to 4.58- and 4.4-star ratings on the PlayStation and Xbox Stores, respectively.
• This positive buzz matches Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s strong critical reception.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is here, and its early player impressions range from largely favorable to overwhelmingly positive, depending on the platform. This turn of events bodes well for BioWare, suggesting that Dragon Age: The Veilguard will be a return to form for the studio.

While it can be argued that the critically acclaimed Mass Effect Legendary Edition had already signaled that BioWare was back to making widely beloved games in 2021, that release was merely a remaster. As far as its original works go, the company’s latest two titles preceding The Veilguard were Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda, neither of which set the world on fire.

But the new Dragon Age game, which hit digital and physical store shelves on October 31, is looking like it might, not least because early player impressions of this Halloween release are excellent across all platforms. Specifically, Dragon Age: The Veilguard presently boasts “Mostly Positive” reviews on Steam, based on over 4,100 player impressions, 77.82% of which end with a recommendation. Over on the PlayStation Store, the game has so far amassed more than 1,500 reviews with an average rating of 4.58 stars. Its 4.4-star Xbox Store rating is almost as impressive, though it’s based on a smaller sample size of just over 400 reviews.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard Players Praise Combat, Performance, and More

Since the game has barely been out for half a day as of this writing, its current crop of user reviews is obviously focused on things that can be gleaned from early impressions. E.g., many players have opined that Dragon Age: The Veilguard‘s combat is super fun and polished, even if some of them still say they’d have preferred a more traditional CRPG experience in the vein of DA: Origins. In terms of Steam reviews in particular, a lot of them praise the game’s PC performance as nothing short of stellar, saying that the RPG runs well even on older hardware. Quite a few users on Valve’s storefront also appear elated that The Veilguard is the first EA game in a long time that doesn’t require its launcher and just boots straight from Steam.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard Early Player Reviews Roundup

These early player impressions match Dragon Age: The Veilguard‘s critical reception, which is reflected in its “Strong” rating on OpenCritic, derived from an aggregate score of 82 and a 76% reviewer recommendation rate. Time will tell whether this positive buzz translates to sales, but as things stand right now, the game seems to be off to a decent commercial start, having peaked at 70,414 concurrent players on Steam alone.

Since it was a mid-week release, it’s likely that Dragon Age: The Veilguard will further improve upon this figure over the weekend. For some added context, Metaphor: ReFantazio is another recent semi-linear RPG that had a similar peak of just under 86,000 Steam players following its October 11 debut and sold 1 million copies across all platforms in its first 24 hours on the market.