Todd Harper
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Writing For
PolygonLatest Reviews
Dragon Age fans will already have made up their mind to get Veilguard, I’m sure. I can reassure those series fans, however, that I think they’ll enjoy the game. It corrects a number of the mistakes that plagued the otherwise enjoyable Dragon Age: Inquisition, while retaining the elements of the series that make it what it is in the first place. For newcomers, starting this late in the series is not without complications. Veilguard takes place far away from the southern part of the game’s world, where the other games in the series were set, but Dragon Age is a series with a tremendous amount of lore and official material on the periphery. I think it’s possible to enjoy Veilguard on its own merits — there’s no need to know series minutiae to get what’s going on — but many of the Big Plot Reveals™ will feel more impactful if you know the DA universe well enough to understand their implications. Either way, don’t let the slow start fool you. The game’s cast of lovable weirdos will give you what you’re looking for.
What I think the continual march of the genre has made clear, though, is that “living” anywhere is often a repetition of boring daily tasks: going to work, doing the laundry, cooking dinner. I don’t think I want to be “immersed” (whatever that means) in an open world anymore; I want to have a nice, tailored experience that lets me do something new and fresh. I think if Massive had built a tighter, more focused adventure and stepped away from the current model of open-world games, the studio would have made a defining Star Wars game. The elements of something great are all here. As it is now, the result is a game that tries to do so much that it simply doesn’t have the time, energy, or resources to fully succeed at any of it.