The Veilguard Is The First Dragon Age Game To Make Me Drop The Difficulty

I’m incredibly basic when it comes to Dragon Age. I choose human, I choose Warrior, I button mash through every combat encounter. My poor companions better bring their healing A-game as I won’t even try to avoid incoming attacks.

For years, my whack things until they die strategy has worked wonders. Sure, there might be the odd battle or two where I have to strategise a bit more in order to emerge victorious, but for the most part, it’s wham, bam, thank you, mam. But not with The Veilguard.

Related

Are The Companions In Dragon Age: The Veilguard Too Nice?

Players seem to miss party members with a mean streak.  What do you think?

I was pre-warned ahead of launch by our very own Eric Switzer that The Veilguard’s combat was different from previous Dragon Age titles. In particular, it had more of a focus on timing with blocks and parries, things that I have sucked at historically. I try, but I’m terrible with timing. More often than not, I simply forget to bother and just fall into the pattern of thinking it’s ok to eat a few hits. It’s really not, though. While trash enemies are fine to deal with, anything that remotely resembles a boss battle is painful.

I smash through my three potions in no time and then find myself down to a slither of health while I roll around the arena, waiting for my companion’s heal to become available again. While I realise this is entirely a skill issue of my own making and the result of years of ingrained laziness, it’s just not fun to play this way.

After struggling through a few boss battles while my companions did the heavy lifting, I decided it was time to face the music. No, I wasn’t suddenly going to learn to ‘git gud’. I dropped the difficulty down instead.

I’ve never had to lower the difficulty in a Dragon Age game before, so it feels like I’ve lost my edge a little. Even in past games when I decided to run a mage or something else for a specific achievement, or to shake things up on a subsequent playthrough, I don’t ever remember failing this hard nor this consistently.

There’s this weird shame associated with dropping difficulty sometimes, as if you should feel embarrassed that you want to be able to enjoy the game more by making it a little easier. It’s a hang up many of us have, but the older I get, the less it bothers me. You should be able to play however you want to play, and for me, that meant dropping the difficulty so I didn’t spend half a battle rolling around achieving nothing. More importantly, I could go back to smashing things without a care in the world. For the most part anyway.

It can still get dicey depending on the battle, but I don’t bother blocking anything. The combat is too easy now really, most enemies are down on the ground before they can even yell at me and my companions. But I’d rather do this than get frustrated because I’m finding it too hard.

Veilguard’s combat is proving to be a sticking point for many returning fans, but it definitely grows on you. Maybe not enough to like it, but enough to suck less at it. I’m not progressing as quickly through the game as I’d like, but the more skills I unlock, the easier I’m finding it to get into the groove

Perhaps after a while I’ll be able to bump the difficulty up once I’ve found my perfect Rook and companion setup. Still not blocking, but doing better at everything else to compensate for that shortfall. In the meantime, I’ll just keep bashing away, taking all the hits, and not apologising to my companions for the amount of potions and healing skills I burn through. You signed up to the Veilguard people, you have to heal me.

Released

October 31, 2024

ESRB

M For Mature 17+ // Blood, Nudity, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Violence