While I haven’t finished Dragon Age: The Veilguard yet, it’s been difficult to avoid hearing about its ending and what’s required to get the best outcome. I’m not too upset about it, as it’s not really a spoiler per se, more of information that I should have before I try to take on the game’s finale.
What I do know about the ending is that there are four of them – one of which is comparatively bad, two of which are okay, and one of which is ideal. What rubs me wrong about this is that getting the good ending isn’t really contingent on the choices you’ve made up to that point, but more of how much time you’ve spent in the game grinding through quests.
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How Do You Get Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Best Ending?
I won’t spoil what happens in the ending, don’t worry. I’ll just discuss what you need, which is:
- All companions must have maxed out bonds
- All of your faction strength has to be leveled up to at least two stars
- You must complete the Regrets of the Dread Wolf quest
- You must have obtained Mythal’s Essence
- You have to make a specific dialogue choice
Most of these requirements feel fair. I think requiring specific quests to be done, especially when they’re core to the story’s central conceit, makes sense, and I can let the dialogue choice thing slide. Arguably, it’s also fair that companion bonds be taken into account, considering that the ending so heavily hinges on the Veilguard as a group.
But faction strength should never have been a requirement, and the fact that it’s there makes me very annoyed.
Increasing Faction Strength Is A Chore
You can increase faction strength in two ways in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and neither of them are very fun. One is selling valuables to faction merchants. It’s as empty a process as you imagine. You find stuff in the course of your journey, mostly while smashing pots and various other breakable objects, and sell them to shops in different areas.
That’s it. You get better prices and increased faction strength and basically nothing else. It adds very little to the game experience, meaning it’s only a thing I do when I come across a store and remember to do it.
The other way to get faction strength, and the faster way to obtain it, is through doing side quests. This wouldn’t be an issue if the quests all added a ton to the experience, but many don’t. They’re mostly just puzzles or hunting various things (people, objects, monsters) down and returning them or killing them. A couple missions stand out as adding quite a lot of colour to the world – The Snake Nest Deal and The Cabin In The Blight come to mind – but the majority of them are busy work thinly veiled with an extraneous story, or without the veil at all.
Essentially, to get the best ending, you have to spend more time in the game than you might want to, doing quests that aren’t as fun as you would like. Don’t, and the game punishes you by giving you a subpar ending. That doesn’t seem fair.
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A Better Ending
In fact, I find it strange that there’s even a ‘best’ ending in any sense. Previous games in the series have reflected your choices in their endings, letting you know the consequences of the decisions you made, but nothing was ever given a concrete value judgement, and it certainly wasn’t controlled by whether or not you did all the side quests in every region.
But The Veilguard doesn’t really care about your choices in that sense, apart from how many quests you decide to finish. That’s a far cry from the way precious games dealt with ‘endings’, and it’s very in keeping with the way the game has decided to toss the consequences from previous games out the window as well. I just really wish that my choices would matter more and the amount of time I spent in this game (that I don’t even really enjoy) would matter less. Damn, maybe I just want to play Dragon Age: Origins again.
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.