Key Takeaways
- Dragon Age: The Veilguard doesn’t explain any of the lore from the previous games to players, introducing characters and events with very little explanation of why they’re important and how they’re tied to the overall story.
- The series’ strength is largely in its rich and intricate worldbuilding, as well as the tensions between different groups. Instead of explaining all of this to players, the game just leaves all of the good stuff out.
- It lacks all the intrigue and tension of previous games, focusing on interpersonal relationships instead of sociopolitical ones. It works as a standalone game, just not a very interesting one.
In the run up to Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s release, much was made about the game being accessible to new players and returning fans alike. According to creative director John Epler, the game would be “respectful and referential to previous games without feeling like you needed to have played Inquisition [or Dragon Age 2, or Dragon Age: Origins] to understand what’s going on”.
The idea was that while there would be references and callbacks to previous entries, the game would tell its own story with a different cast and new characters, you’d be able to appreciate everything on its own terms. Unfortunately, the game isn’t actually all that welcoming to newcomers.
There’s Too Much Lore In Dragon Age
I live in a house full of gamers, which means that when I play games in the living room, I’m basically doing free marketing. My partner decided to play the game after seeing me spend hours on it over the weekend, and he was mostly interested because he thought it looked cool. I’ve played all of Dragon Age: Origins, plus some of some of Dragon Age 2 and Dragon Age: Inquisition, but he’s never played a Dragon Age game before, though he’s watched me play bits of Origins. He’s never even played any BioWare games apart from Knights of the Old Republic.
For this reason, and because I’d already played enough of the game to know he’d be lost when he started it, I insisted that he watch a lore overview on YouTube before he started. Quite frankly, this barely helped – the games have so much history and complex lore that even an hour-long video isn’t enough to cover the series in any kind of meaningful depth.
To say that The Veilguard is accessible to new players is a pretty big stretch. Right from its opening moments, when you’re searching for Solas in Minrathous with Varric by your side, it doesn’t do much to set up who these people are or what their background is.
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The Veilguard Explains Basically Nothing To You
Varric and Lace Harding are familiar to returning players, but the game doesn’t do anything to tell you who they are, what their roles were in previous games, what their histories are, what the Inquisition is, or why the Inquisition even existed. It doesn’t tell you what a Circle or the Chantry are, nor does it make any attempt to even gesture at the complicated sociological relationships between different races, classes, or countries, at least not without players digging into the hefty codex and reading every entry in it, and even these entries lack depth and utility. Nothing useful is written into the dialogue, and you don’t even really get a sense of how the characters have been written in past games because they don’t really speak in the way fans are familiar with.
Varric’s personality is all but gone in The Veilguard. It’s awful.
That’s all background lore that isn’t really addressed in The Veilguard, or at least, I haven’t seen allusions to it in the 15 hours I’ve played. But there are things that are explicitly involved in the plot that are never discussed or explained, either. For example, Morrigan and Flemeth are involved in every game in the series, and therefore play a part in the narrative. When she’s introduced early in the game, absolutely none of this is explained. She’s just a random woman in a cool headpiece.
Then there’s the Antaam, who are a major part of Treviso, having captured the city and forced the Antivan Crows to become freedom fighters, but it’s never explained what the Antaam are or even who the Qunari are. The Veil Jumpers are a Dalish-founded group of explorers, but it’s never explained what the Dalish are, either. What are the Venatori? What’s the Mourn Watch? New players are going off vibes, not actual information, and some of these groups played such minor roles in previous games that even casual fans won’t know what’s happening.
Perhaps most egregiously, the cultures of these various groups are never explained, and I’m convinced that this is less because of negligence and more because so much lore is being thrown out the window in order to make the narrative work better.
Considering that Dragon Age’s strengths are in its characters and its worldbuilding, and both are sorely lacking in this game, The Veilguard works as a standalone game, but isn’t a particularly compelling one. Without all this context, new players are playing a game in a fantasy world that has very little that’s actually interesting about it, because none of it is being explained to new players. Without the juice of the complex, rich Dragon Age setting and lore, what makes Dragon Age worth exploring? Not all that much, it turns out.
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.