I am a noted defender of Mass Effect 3’s ending. I think its final choice is a meaningful reminder that war is not won without sacrifice, and I love how the original, unedited version made no attempts to reassure you that you made the right decision. However, one criticism that has always lingered over the controversial ending since 2012 is that you spend the whole trilogy forming alliances just for it to feel like the specifics of what you’d done don’t matter when the final assault plays out. Now, 12 years later, it feels like BioWare managed to pull a reactive full-scale assault off in a way that feels more tailored to your playthrough in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. The final run of missions is easily the highlight of the game for me, and it feels like a confident second draft of some of BioWare’s greatest hits.
In Mass Effect 3, you spend the whole game accruing War Assets. This amorphous blob of people, resources, and knowledge is funneled into a big number that unlocks different endings if it clears certain thresholds. That’s all well and good, but when it came to actually portraying the specifics of the alliances you’d made and resources you’d gathered, Mass Effect 3’s final assault plays out mostly the same regardless of how you played the game. Some of this was alleviated in the amended ending in the Extended Cut, which made more distinctions between an assault that was going poorly or relatively well depending on your War Assets. But, by and large, Mass Effect 3’s final battle in London shows the same people doing the same shit. There are scenes of non-descript alien soldiers fighting the invading Reaper forces, but the same people are showing up and meeting the same fate regardless of what you’ve done. I still find these scenes effective in a vacuum, but once people started comparing their endings to the ones they saw on YouTube and found them too similar for their liking, this criticism was inevitable.
What makes Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s ending a better iteration of these ideas is that it has more interlocked, moving parts to reflect an individual playthrough. Before you begin the final stretch, The Veilguard warns you that if your companions aren’t ready and you haven’t strengthened your alliances with the six factions across northern Thedas, the next few hours could go poorly. The Veilguard’s final mission will naturally draw comparisons to Mass Effect 2’s suicide mission, as it also requires you to assign the appropriate teammate to a task, and if you choose someone who isn’t suited for the job or hasn’t completed their loyalty mission, there are deadly consequences. But given that The Veilguard’s assault on the city of Minrathous lacks the same team-based gameplay elements, the more accurate comparison is Mass Effect 3’s assault on London.
The Veilguard’s final stretch seems aware that BioWare fans are going in expecting a retread of Mass Effect 2’s suicide mission. Its first act has two decisions in which you pick between two pairs of companions to handle different assignments, only for the person you choose to either sacrifice themselves for the greater good or be captured by the enemy. Not since the original Mass Effect’s Virmire has BioWare made a player actively choose between two party members (no, the killing of one of your twin siblings based on your class in Dragon Age II doesn’t count), so this makes the stakes going into the endgame feel pretty high. When protagonist Rook gathers the remnants of their team to plan the attack on Minrathous, which has been overtaken by the elven god Elgar’nan, they sit at a war table with their team and representatives of the factions they’ve allied themselves with throughout the game. Each decision you make in assigning party members to certain tasks also plays into how powerful your allied forces are going into the fight.
On the ground level, success in The Veilguard’s final battle starts with your seven companions. Each must have achieved a “Hero of the Veilguard” status to be able to properly carry out their assigned jobs in the finale, which is roughly the equivalent of loyalty in the Mass Effect series. This means seeing through their personal questlines so they’re focused and effective in the fight. But their effectiveness isn’t the only thing that matters. Your allied forces must be in top shape to offer support in the struggle.
For those who aren’t completionists, none of these instances rely on one faction to succeed. The Veilguard’s final battle is more forgiving than similar missions in BioWare’s catalog (and maybe a little too hand-holdy for my taste), so, for example, if you struggled to raise support for the Mourn Watch, the Grey Wardens can pick up some slack. Each faction’s capability is measured by its strength ranking, which can reach up to three stars for maximum efficiency. This, like reaching Hero of the Veilguard status, can be achieved by completing questlines associated with each group or their home city, selling them supplies and rare items you find on your journey, or by getting a slight boost depending on which faction your Rook belongs to. By the time you’ve reached the highest faction strength rank, the factions and their leaders feel like extensions of your party, ones who you likely feel just as invested in saving as the friends who have stood beside you all game.
That protectiveness extends to the final mission, as making the wrong decision or coming into the fight unprepared may not end in the death of a companion, but of a faction leader you’ve been supporting throughout the game. Picking the wrong teammate to assist in a certain task can lead to characters like the elven Veil Jumper Strife dying at the hands of the Venatori. Because outcomes are determined by both companion loyalty and faction strength, there are more opportunities to fail, but also a bevy of ways to make up for some deficiencies. All of this comes together to make the outcomes and ending assault more dynamic than the last time BioWare ended a game with a battle in a city.
Overall, The Veilguard’s multiple endings are still about flavor more than anything else. Rook will always kill Elgar’nan and the elven trickster god Solas will be bound the Veil. The final quest will likely not satisfy those who are still waiting for a BioWare game that diverges the plot based on their decisions. But from a systemic level, it’s one of the most reactive endings the studio has put out, as it takes into account relationships both big and small that you’ve nurtured (or not) throughout the game. It’s not merely implied, it’s shown when you see your teammates take up arms with forces you’ve helped strengthen throughout your quest to take down the elven gods, rather than being watered down into a big, meaningless number in one pot. It’s a sign that as BioWare has hopped between its fantasy series and its science fiction one, they’re clearly learning lessons from one another.