Dragon Age: The Veilguard released on Oct. 31 and after a weekend and some change with the game, players are beginning to level heavy criticism on the writing and narrative elements of the game.
While posts have permeated social media, perhaps the loudest voice comes from an article in Forbes, entitled “Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Clumsy, Preachy Political Messaging Does More Harm Than Good.” Erik Kain’s great piece points out a lot of the issues with the game, and the harm its tone does.
These sentiments were in-turn echoed on a thread about the article the PC Gaming subreddit, where players cosigned the feeling that poor writing and a preachy attitude was harming the game. Their criticism pointed to a notorious “push-up” scene, Marvel-movie quality dialogue, and accusations that the game infantilizes players.
Image Credit: Bioware
A lot of the criticism also circles around calling out more ‘woke’ elements of the game. I don’t think it’s valid to level any critique on a game due to content that supports LGBTQ+ people, especially when fantasy as a genre usually exists to tackle social and political ills in a more manageable way. But the core issues appear to be centered on the quality of the portrayals, rather than the portrayal itself.
But unfortunately, narrative quality overall feels like a bizarre angle to critique, as while the Bioware games (Mass Effect, Dragon Age, etc.) are celebrated, I never saw them more than just decent cover shooters and RPGs with a dating simulator tacked on (and at least Dragon Age: The Veilguard continues that with its romance options). Expecting excellence from them is like picking up random fantasy novels from the book store and expecting something on par with The Lord of The Rings trilogy. They’re some of the best RPGs out there… but narratively they’re still nothing to write home about.
Especially when a more valid criticism would be the dubious scores the game is getting from outlets. One thing that doesn’t sit right is the Creative Director, John Epler saying in a notable tweet that “I want to see the phrase ‘a triumphant return to form for bioware’ in at least one review” and then dozens of reviews saying just that. Even if it’s an honest review, the fact the creative director is issuing edicts about what he wants in the reviews should mean any reputable outlet should avoid that descriptor to diffuse any doubt about their integrity.
Still, the stilted dialog, the bizarre cutscenes, the weird writing (that should have at least warranted a lower score than an 8 aggregate score for Dragon Age: The Veilguard), seems like an odd complaint point.
Image Credit: Bioware
Perhaps the issue is that while many gamers have matured (at least in the physical sense), the narratives in gaming really haven’t. This is a problem throughout gaming, where the technical leaps and bounds that have seen the medium regularly create sprawling AAA titles that are, narratively, not any more developed or nuanced than what came before it. While there are exceptions (something like Disco Elysium springs to mind), the vast majority of video games just aren’t very narratively complex or high quality.
Compare this to other entertainment mediums – literature, cinema, comics, television – where we’ve had hundreds of years, or at least decades of development of narrative quality. It took over 100 years for film to develop the modern blockbuster. Games, which often borrow heavily from film in their narrative endeavors, have had a comparatively tiny amount of time to develop anything resembling a coherent story-telling language.
This is perhaps not helped by the unfortunate tropes and methods that gaming has developed to tell its stories. Quick-time events and cutscenes are seen as the default… but are in-fact as limited and potentially obsolete as a narrative device as something like a soliloquy in theater or the full-page spread in comics.
Which is all to say that Dragon Age: The Veilguard has ended up falling into all the pitfalls and traps of the modern RPG video game writing: Overly ambitious and thinking it’s a more important piece of media, only to clumsily swipe at social issues without much nuance or grace. Gaming as a whole just hasn’t reached the point where it can handle these topics well. Sometimes a game just needs to present itself and allow its players, as a media savvy and mature audience, to come to their own conclusions. Just put the elves in the game buddy, we can figure it out on our own.