Key Takeaways
- According to fans, Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s writing lacks subtlety.
- Characters are written to be adorable and inoffensive and can be grating as a result.
- There are a couple of characters where this works, as with Emmrich.
There’s a lot to love about Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Our long-awaited return to Thedas reconnected us with the lore and world-building we had grown to love over the last decade-and-a-half. The gameplay is engrossing and playing Dragon Age is rarely a boring time. That being said, one aspect of the game that has come under intense scrutiny since its release is the writing.
The Veilguard’s writing has been criticised for many things, including hand-waving past tensions, eliminating nuanced interactions, and writing every character to be inoffensive and morally correct. In a similar vein, a recent thread on Reddit from VisibleExcitement criticised how “adorable” the writing is, softening up every character.
An Adorable Bunch
“Manfred is supposed to be adorable, Assan is supposed to be adorable, Harding and Bellara are supposed to be adorable, and often Taash as well. Additionally, anybody else sharing scenes with them often gets to be adorable by association,” the post begins. “In my opinion, it feels kind of forced and comes across as vapid and slightly juvenile most of the time. Don’t get me wrong, things are allowed to be adorable, but it feels like a large portion of this game’s writing is ham-fistedly making that its “thing” without any finesse or subtlety.”
It’s a fairly salient point, Dragon Age: The Veilguard has not been written with subtlety in mind. The “found family” theme of the eponymous Veilguard’s relationships is something that you’re repeatedly bashed over the head with, as every character treats one another like they all read the same book on how to make friends. The “adorable” aspect the original poster is railing against is highly visible in the game, as BioWare seems to want the player to soften their heart towards these characters, and Rook isn’t allowed to be mean, as a result.
Commenters have pointed to Emmrich as a character whose adorable nature flows naturally through his other personality traits, giving him an endearing quality that isn’t forced. With other characters, like Bellara, her ‘quirky’ nature is so immediately apparent that it serves to annoy rather than endear, and her character suffers because of it.
“They made the literal aspect of Spite, cutesy, and demanding like a bratty little kid. Of all the overly uwu-ified things in this game, that was the most perplexing to me,” writes rracoons. Indeed, despite being a mage-slaying assassin possessed by a malevolent being, Lucanis’ main personality trait is a coffee addiction. The fact that BioWare decided to draw more attention to that aspect of his character is representative of some of the writing decisions in The Veilguard, where more mature topics are discarded in favour of what people in the real world may find ‘relatable’.
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.