The gap between Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dragon Age: The Veilguard is, to be blunt, significant. 10 years – a whole entire decade! – is a long time between franchise entries, especially when the first three came out in roughly half that time. While I have my quibbles with the game, the one and only thing that’s painfully missing… is an official strategy guide. Yes, really.
There are any number of serious shifts that have happened in the games industry during the intervening years like attitudes toward certain narratives, preferred combat mechanics, replayability considerations, and more. These are all certainly reflected in Dragon Age: The Veilguard to one degree or another, but the one change that has impacted me most is the simple fact that official strategy guides have largely gone the way of the dinosaur.
Guiding light
You see, once upon a time, physical strategy guides from publishers like Prima Games or BradyGames would regularly release alongside new video games. For anyone looking to really dive into the particulars of a lengthy video game, and especially RPGs, strategy guides were (are?) worth their weight in gold. Between gear stats, puzzle solutions, build paths, maps, and more, a good strategy guide was a constant companion.
The irony of me writing about this for a website that publishes online digital guides – the natural successor to physical strategy guides – isn’t lost on me. There are absolutely a plethora of guides still being published online, across so very many places, and there even are some boutique publishers still putting out strategy guides physically. But it’s absolutely not at the scope of what it once was back when Dragon Age: Inquisition released in 2014.
Maybe I’m really just old, or maybe it’s my penchant for physical media of all shapes and sizes from books to DVDs, but there’s something to be said for having a giant tome cracked open to a specific page right next to you while you barrel through difficult encounters. You can try to replicate this digitally, of course, and there’s nothing stopping you from simply also having your phone open.
Perhaps it really is just the literal physicality, the tangibleness of a physical official strategy guide, that appeals to me more than anything else. A thing you can hold, peruse, flip through, and shelve. Something you can hand to someone else with weight and heft. It would go a long way towards explaining my own shelves full of official strategy guides for games I’ve never even played like Kartia: The Word of Fate or Radiata Stories.
But if I’m being completely honest with myself, it’s neither of those things. They play their part certainly, but what I really miss is the certainty of an official strategy guide. Having those maps and puzzles in print offers a kind of finality that no online guide can replicate. Websites have to play ball with search engines to one degree or another; a physical book does not. A physical book just… is. And a physical official strategy guide is designed to be one thing and one thing only: helpful. It’s simple and genuine and also apparently an industry that simply can no longer support itself. For now, I’ll simply have to settle for whatever I can find online – even if there was once a better way the world has collectively moved on from.
If Thedas doesn’t do it for you, you can always look to some of the other best RPGs we recommend giving a go.