I Hate Not Being Able To Yap In Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Key Takeaways
- You can’t interact directly with Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s characters unless you’re in the Lighthouse, in a cutscene, or in a character mission.
- That means you can’t really ask characters questions about themselves, and your interaction with your companions is limited.
- A huge part of Dragon Age’s appeal is getting to know its characters and talking to them whenever, so this is a huge misstep.
I played a lot of Knights of the Old Republic as a kid, and when I remember what it felt like to play those games, it’s the conversations that stand out. I loved talking to these characters so much that I’d check in with them constantly, just to see if they had anything to say about what we were doing, the planet we were on, or the people we’d met.
Very often, they did have something to say – they’d share what they knew with me, tell me what their childhoods were like, or drop delicious nuggets of lore. Beyond just being incredibly fleshed out characters, they taught me about the universe I was in, and the many contradictions and contentions its value systems had for the people who lived there. It made me fall in love with the narrative potential of the Star Wars universe.
To some extent, Dragon Age: Origins was also like this. You could have a brief kiki with your companions whenever you felt like it, even if you were in the middle of a mission to save the world. I had a very long conversation with Sten about Qunari culture in the middle of a spider-infested cave. Why not, right? We’re stuck together, we might as well have a little chat. I could even chat up random people in town, if I wanted to, and we might be able to have a conversation.
You Can’t Randomly Chat With Your Companions In Dragon Age: The Veilguard
You cannot do this in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. There are no yap sessions in the wild. After you recruit a character, you can’t go up to them and ask them questions about themself. This feels like a bizarre oversight considering how much talking there is in other parts of the game – you can talk to them in the Lighthouse, or they might chat amongst themselves as you walk, but you can’t interact with them directly otherwise.
Want to know what being Dalish was like for them? Tough. Want to ask how they got into their line of work? Sucks to be you. If you’ve been trained by BioWare’s previous games to be curious about its characters and want to see everything they have to say, you’re out of luck. You’ll have to wait for companion quests to learn anything about them, or eavesdrop on them as you wander around the Lighthouse.
It might be a little unfair to be comparing The Veilguard to BioWare’s classics, which came out so long ago, but the studio is renowned for its compelling characters. Limiting how much players can interact with those characters feels like a huge misstep. The game is literally named after this cast of characters, but it won’t let me talk to them outside of missions catered specifically to furthering their storylines. I can’t even ask them questions – I’m locked into linear conversations about specific things, with limited dialogue trees.
It is torturous to me that Morrigan is right there and I can’t ask her a damn thing. I have questions! There has to have been a better way to do this.
It doesn’t help that they’re introduced in fairly lacklustre ways. I’m already fairly unimpressed with the game’s writing – the way these characters have been introduced to me didn’t tell me anything about their personalities. If I don’t get to chat to them about potentially inane things, I don’t get to see their personalities shine through, and I can’t bring myself to care about them.
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The Veilguard Has Overcorrected For Inquisition
In a lot of ways, The Veilguard is trying to correct for the unpopular decisions made in the development of Dragon Age: Inquisition. The combat was mid, so BioWare has modernised it and created a surprisingly compelling combat system. Players complained about having to do pointless quests, so it trimmed the fat. People didn’t like the open world design, so it moved towards linearity. It modernised.
But in swinging the pendulum the other way, BioWare has forgotten that Dragon Age fans are in it for the characters. They want to know these characters like they know their friends. They want to indulge their curiosity about the world and the people in it, and they can’t. It’s particularly unfortunate that The Veilguard is releasing now, after Baldur’s Gate 3 reminded people that yeah, actually, the classic RPG era was pretty great, and proved that these novel-length scripts of dialogue and cascading decisions can still be appealing to modern audiences.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a fine game, but it’s taken away a crucial part of the Dragon Age experience by limiting how players interact with characters, and that really sucks. I’ll need to play more of the game to see if this gets better, but knowing that I can’t have organic conversations with my companions is really killing the vibe. I just want to queen out with Bellara.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the long-awaited fourth game in the fantasy RPG series from BioWare formerly known as Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. A direct sequel to Inquisition, it focuses on red lyrium and Solas, the aforementioned Dread Wolf.