I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – I hate Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s dialogue wheel. I hate it for the same reasons so many others hate it. It forces you to characterise your protagonist not through what they say or their choice of words, but through a nebulous idea of being ‘funny’ or ‘sentimental’ or ‘stoic’ or whatever. Your character isn’t formed through the things they say, but the reverse – you choose what kind of character they are, and the game decides how you respond through that.
Worse than that, it’s imprecise. What you think you’re saying with a choice on the wheel won’t be what actually gets said. Because of the wheel’s layout, every option is summarised, and often not entirely accurately. Try to say something, and you’ll end up saying something else, causing a totally unintended reaction.
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These issues exist across most games that have dialogue wheels. Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition caught a lot of flack for summarising pretty hostile responses into totally innocuous allusions to the substance of those statements, so it seems like BioWare overcorrected and made every response completely lacking in flavour.
For example, I often go for the funny response, partly because I’m annoying and partly because I think we all need to indulge in a little levity when the world is burning. A little giggle now and then can’t hurt. But every time I do, I’m not laughing. My character isn’t funny, witty, sarcastic, or any synonyms to those words. The funny response is, at best, a little light-hearted.
It’s the same with the tough option, which I pick sometimes when I want my Rook to be a little more aggressive. They’re never actually tough or stern. At best, they’re kind of… resolute? They’ll say something generic like “They’ll never know what’s coming” or “We can handle it”. There’s no flavour, no juice.
It’s not just that every option is lacking in flavour. It’s that every option also broadly says the same thing. For a roleplaying game, The Veilguard doesn’t really let you roleplay that much – you’re going to express the same sentiment no matter which option you pick, just with slightly different phrasing. There’s barely any characterisation to be done through dialogue, and considering that’s really the one avenue where characterisation can be done, The Veilguard is pretty light on the RP part of RPG.
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I hate that special responses and follow up questions are present on a totally different wheel. In Inquisition, the dialogue wheels weren’t quite so rigid – questions, dialogue options, and the like could be around the wheel in any order, and the symbols in the middle would indicate what tone the dialogue would have, if any.
But The Veilguard is different. Every section on the wheel is dedicated to a different tone, which means that responses not falling into these categories are only available when you select the bottom segment of the wheel indicated by the word ‘more’. These additional responses will refer to your faction, or might include questions you might want to ask to get more context or information.
It’s clunky, which is bad enough, but it also means that players can easily miss these extra questions because they have to go out of their way to find them. I’m not mentally assigning segments of the wheel to different tones, I want them to all be on the screen at the same time so I don’t miss things.
The dialogue wheel doesn’t just obfuscate the sameyness of the dialogue, it’s also a bad design choice that adds unnecessary friction for players, and I will complain about it till the end of my days. Down with the dialogue wheel.
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.