The gameplay reveal for The Veilguard feels like it hardly wants to be a Dragon Age game at all.
Five minutes before the gameplay reveal for Dragon Age: The Veilguard I still had hope I would love it. Despite the rumored internal reboots, the BioWare layoffs, the Dreadwolf name change, and the off-pitch reveal trailer, I was officially the last clown sitting in the car on a PC Gamer team full of disaffected Dragon Age fans. Now that we’ve seen 20 minutes of action combat and theatrical cutscenes, I’m finally willing to admit that BioWare just isn’t interested in making the Dragon Age game I want to play anymore.
My fellow RPG liker Joshua Wolens got an in-person look at a longer version of the introduction sequence that BioWare debuted today and said: Dragon Age becomes what it was probably always destined to be: A Mass Effect game.
As the party fought through the demon and Venatori cultist-infested streets of Minrathous to confront Solas, custom protagonist Rook vaulted, backflipped, and tactically rolled through combat in what seems like a newer take on Dragon Age 2’s not particularly well-received pivot to action combat 13 years ago.
Veilguard is more action-RPG than the series has ever been. Though you can give orders to your party mid-combat, you can no longer control them directly, which feels like a real loss in a party-based series. Heck, it has a timed prompt to « quick recover » from being knocked down in combat and an actual reticle for shooting a bow.
It wasn’t just the combat in that gameplay trailer that bummed me out. The mood of the entire sequence felt uncanny. « Don’t worry; scouting’s my specialty, » says Harding, whose title is Scout Harding.
