Games
After a decade-long wait, the latest instalment of the Dragon Age franchise answers a lot of questions – maybe even too many – about this rich and complex world. By Katherine Cross.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
The fiercest enemy you fight in Dragon Age: The Veilguard is your own nostalgia.
If you’re a longstanding fan of the 15-year-old Dragon Age franchise, your mind will reel with thoughts about what makes Veilguard different from its three predecessors, and you will find yourself pining for that old feeling of wonder, perhaps a decade or more gone, that haunted your first steps into the dark world of Thedas.
Thedas has no right to be this good, after all – least of all because the setting’s name is literally derived from “The DAS”, or “the Dragon Age setting”, which was a placeholder name that lived on BioWare whiteboards in the mid-2000s before the acronym became a proper noun as legendary as Toril, Middle Earth or Westeros. This world of dark mysticism, darker politics and deep theology wowed from the first with elaborations of magic, might and mystery that felt fresh in 2009. So, after a 10-year wait, does Veilguard bring you back to this place?
Sort of. This is a game that needs to stand on its own terms and faces an impossible mandate: pleasing old fans like me and neophytes who might be playing a DA game for the first time. It should be both sequel and reboot. It certainly succeeds in opening vast new realms for the franchise, with gorgeously realised characters and vistas in parts of Thedas we only read about in previous games. But it also lacks aspects of the soul that made Dragon Age so effective as a franchise, with a particularly strange allergy to delving deep into its own theology. It’s an absence made all the more glaring by the nature of the plot.
You pick up where Dragon Age: Inquisition left off. The ancient elven mage Solas, having revealed himself to be the elven trickster god Fen’Harel, is off on a mad scheme to tear down the veil separating Thedas from the world of dreams and spirits. In his mind, this will right an old wrong and restore the gloriously magical world of ancient elves that he had to destroy. And you do stop him. Kind of. His ritual goes awry and you accidentally unleash two of the evil elven gods he’d sealed away, Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain, who begin to raise up armies of darkspawn to blight the world. You, and the eponymous Veilguard, have to stop them all.
This kicks off a globe-spanning RPG adventure where you at last get to travel through the network of eluvians – ancient elven mirrors that act as portals – hopping from one kingdom to the next, solving problems and chasing your enemies. On the way you gain a reputation with various factions across Northern Thedas – whether old, like the darkspawn-slaying Grey Wardens or the suave assassins among the Antivan Crows, or new, like the treasure-hunting Lords of Fortune, led by an old friend in whom Dragon Age fans will surely revel. Taken together, it’s compelling stuff. Fast-paced combat, pleasurable RPG mechanics and snappy dialogue combine to make this an experience that feels like Dragon Age.
The characters are the heart and soul of this game. Like so much else in Veilguard, they start slow, but when they and their stories come to a boil it’s hard to imagine that even sceptical players won’t have a favourite by the end. From the noir private investigator mage Neve and the charming Vincent Price-like Emmerich to fan favourite Dwarven scout Harding being promoted to a full and romanceable companion, the characters and their plot-relevant tales are all incredible.
This game most closely resembles Dragon Age II and Mass Effect 2 in structure. You have to get to know your companions and finish their quest arcs in order to ensure that they’re maximally effective in this game’s pulse-pounding finale, which will wrench tears from you no matter how perfectly you’ve set everything up. Even something I’d initially chalked up to weak writing turned out to be a set-up for a late game twist that moved me to a beautiful grief. The characters take up residence in the deepest places of your heart without you realising it, much as they build floating homes for themselves in the game’s base, the Lighthouse.
But... you knew there was a “but” coming.
As with Mass Effect: Andromeda, it takes a while for the game to truly find its footing, and it’s a lot to ask to play five to 10 hours before “it gets good”. More importantly, this is a game that is about gods and their depredations. For better or worse, it answers some of the biggest questions about the Dragon Age mythos and in so doing shatters the sense of mystery that made the game’s world feel so rich and vast.
DA’s theology was lavish precisely because it was a fantasy version of our own world, where divinity is not self-evident and faith is required in order to believe at all. Contrast this with worlds such as Dungeons & Dragons, where the existence of gods is an objective fact. The three previous games, especially Inquisition, embraced this mystery. Even your world-historical Inquisitor, with all her power and her ability to walk where few mortals dare to tread, found only questions instead of answers about the world’s cosmology.
Veilguard proposes to give you answers. These are often interesting and wind through the best parts of the game’s story – engaging with Solas and his tragic history of war crimes in aid of a rebellion – but no one seems to wrestle with them. In your party you have two Dalish elves who were raised to believe in gods such as Ghilan’nain and Elgar’nan as paragons of virtue, yet no one has a dark night of the soul about their revelation as mad, cackling villains. The Catholic-like Chantry, meanwhile, is almost nowhere to be seen in this game, despite frequent visits to one of the setting’s holiest cities.
Chantry believers worship the Maker, whose provable absence should be worrying to the faithful. If only we could hear from them. The revelations of the elven gods, meanwhile, call the most basic Chantry beliefs into question – and no one seems to notice or care. The grey, horned Qunari, meanwhile, named for the collectivist Qun philosophy, are represented copiously, but almost none are believers in the Qun. It’s a glaring absence when a plot point involves a civil war among the Qunari, with the better part of their military breaking away from the Qun. How do Qun believers feel about this? We don’t hear from them.
In previous Dragon Age games, the silence of the gods could be beautiful pauses in a cosmic symphony. In Veilguard the silence of believers is dissonant.
Not every question needs an answer. To that end, is Veilguard an excellent game? That’s actually proved to be a fun mystery to wrestle with – I don’t regret the struggle at all. I find myself hoping that any sequels to Veilguard rediscover the beauty of such unanswerable questions.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is available for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 12, 2024 as "Hits and myths".
For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.
All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.
There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.
Subscriber exclusive
Send this article to a friend for free.
Share this subscriber exclusive article with a friend or family member using share credits.
