As I eagerly awaited the stacked month of February to arrive, I spent some time returning to the backlog of games I left unfinished at the end of 2024. I recently rolled credits on Star Wars Outlaws, and now I’ve got Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Silent Hill 2, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard in my sights.
There are various reasons that I haven’t finished those games. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s narrative lacks momentum, with little real threat behind the party and few compelling hooks pulling you along to the conclusion. I only play horror games when it’s dark out, which has made my trek through Silent Hill 2 slow. And Metaphor: ReFantazio is so gargantuan that I’ve had a hard time committing my attention to it.
Of these four games, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the only one that I’ve avoided returning to because I think it’s straight-up not very good. In fact, after a dozen hours with it, I’ve come to the conclusion that if I had to choose, I’d rather be playing the most maligned game in BioWare‘s catalog: Anthem.
Anthem Wasn’t As Bad As You Think
Now, that may seem unhinged. In 2019, Anthem launched to negative reviews, and BioWare proved unable to keep up with the demand for content inherent in making a live-service game. Development shut down on the game just two years later, in February 2021.
The game wasn’t well-received, but I reviewed it at the time, and landed on the more positive side of the spectrum with a 7/10. In retrospect, I stick by that. It was a game that was fundamentally at odds with itself, but what it did well, it did really well. Soaring through the game’s world was endlessly fun and, though the enemies were bullet sponges, the ability to fight from the ground and the sky was exhilarating. The problem was how BioWare mixed these successful elements into the grind of a live service game, but that core gameplay was good. Dragon Age: The Veilguard has reminded me that I would rather play a game like Anthem that excels at some things and fails at others than a game that has a boring goal, but achieves what it sets out to do.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard doesn’t feel like it’s trying and failing to do something cool, it feels like a polished execution of an incredibly boring kind of game. There are games in the same model that are significantly better — God of War Ragnarok, for example — but Dragon Age feels like it was compromised by its vision, not by its execution.
Anthem Was As Good As Its Foundation Allowed
Anthem, on the other hand, was never a good idea. BioWare, a studio known for character-driven, single-player RPGs, was making a live-service game. That set off alarm bells for fans from the start, but the real problem was that BioWare attempted to imbue its game-as-a-service with the typical stuff you would find in its single-player games. When you were out on a mission — ideally the time you would be shooting the s*** with your friends — the characters were constantly in your ear, chattering away about the mission.
There were a bunch of quests to do back at Tarsis, the home base, and you needed to do them to advance the story, but doing them would mean taking a break from your session with your friends. As annoying as that was, I really enjoyed spending time in the city, which was presented with impressive detail thanks to the switch to a first-person perspective. Though small, this town felt lived in; I’ll always remember noticing that the stone staircases were more worn in the center, indicating long use by Tarsis’ citizens.
I don’t believe anyone lives in The Veilguard’s cities, not humans (who only have uninteresting things to say to you) or animals (which you can pet, and which give zero indication that they’re anything more than a 3D model rooted in place). That’s the biggest problem with the game. Nothing feels alive. Your companions all sound like they were written by ChatGPT. The quests are uninteresting. The combat is the only thing keeping me going, but it isn’t as good as what BioWare managed with Anthem.
Even if Dragon Age: The Veilguard had been better, it would have been a kind of game that we’ve seen many times before. But if BioWare had managed to synthesize character-focused storytelling and a live-service long-tail, it would have been something unique — especially in 2019. It didn’t succeed, obviously, but I respect the effort. Give me a busted game that’s trying stuff over a polished game that has nothing interesting up its sleeve any day of the week. Six years later, Anthem doesn’t look so bad.
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