Dragon Age: The Veilguard lets you pet the dog. It really shouldn’t have.
Of all the cynical video game trends that emerged in the 2010s, games letting you pet the dog is undoubtedly the most harmless. Compared to the money-sucking scourges that are loot boxes and battle passes, a game giving you a furry friend to pat on the head isn’t worth getting (ahem) barking mad about. No, petting the dog isn’t that bad. But it’s still the most 2010s video game trend I can think of.
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You Don’t Always Need To Pet The Dog
There’s a few reasons for that. For one, it was kicked into overdrive by a Twitter account — and Twitter being the center for gaming discourse was a truly 2010s phenomenon. Can You Pet the Dog? was started by Tristan Cooper in 2019 in response to The Division 2 including dogs, but not giving players the ability to pet them. Obviously, games have been letting players pet animals for decades, but Cooper’s viral tweets about games that did or did not include this mechanic pushed developers to begin to include pettable animals.
Secondly, it was driven by my generation, Millennials, and is an extension of the performative, Internet-y obsession with dogs that plagued social media in the 2010s. I still hear people say ‘doggo’ on occasion, but if I hear ‘pupper’, ‘woofer’, or ‘floofer’ ever again, it will be too soon. When future generations mock Millennials, the phrase “pupper doggo” will get as much mileage as other cringe-y terms we introduced to the popular lexicon like ‘adulting’ and ‘unf*ck your life’.
Thirdly, and building on the first point, it is the most harmless version of a poisonous dynamic that started to play out between developers and their fans in the 2010s. It goes like this: developers make a cool game. Fans get really invested in it, then start making demands. And in the 2010s, “getting mad” started to mean review bombing and online harassment. So developers acquiesce to those demands and must continue to do so or the fans will get madder.
Some of this is just the nature of game development in an era where games can be consistently updated and developers intend for their games to have a long tail. If fans tell you something sucks and you need them to keep playing in order to keep making money, then you kinda have to change the thing they’re mad about.
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So, when I see pettable animals in a game, I roll my eyes a bit. But, while playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard, my jaw has been on the floor at how half-assed its implementation of dog petting is. It’s so tacked on that I almost can’t believe it’s present at all.
In Minrathous, there are dogs everywhere. As you run through the city streets, you’re frequently passing pooches that are just laying there, unmoving, on the ground. If you stop to pet them, they don’t react at all. Even if they did, the camera is too far out to see what’s happening, and the game doesn’t zoom in to show them nuzzling up to you. They just sit there as Rook pets them and the only way you can actually see them up close is by switching into photo mode.
A Photo Mode Shot Of My Rook Petting A Dog
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a game-sized example of a studio changing course to give the fans what they want. It started life as a live-service game and then, as a result of Anthem‘s disastrous launch, BioWare pivoted back to the single-player RPGs it’s known for. That’s a good thing on its own, but it points to BioWare’s tendency to listen a little too much to the fans, as evidenced further by the Dragon Age Council.
Petting the dog feels like a small example of that ‘give the fans what they want’ ethos. As implemented in Veilguard, it feels purely perfunctory, like BioWare felt it should include the ability to pet the dog, but didn’t have time or resources to do it in any meaningful way. And, in a case like that, why not just… not let me pet the dog?
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