Before starting the review, there's something I need to talk about that I saw no reviewer talking about: bias. It's a weird topic to start a review, but I feel it is very important here because, in some sense, some people were expecting this game to fail from the beginning.

The last 2 new games from bioware were a flop (Anthem and ME: Andromeda) and a lot of people were looking at Veilguard as the make or break for Bioware, of course, we, as silly human beings placed our expectations in the game's result before it even came out.

The reality is, DAV was already a flop before the game's release for a lot of people, then you add all the "PrONoumS in MY BiDeO GAmE" gamer tourist and you got yourself a hate mob. You can see that very clearly on their youtube channel, every single video has been bombarded with dislikes, even this trailer from 11 months ago when the game was still called DA: Dreadwolf has a lot of dislikes which shows people were expecting this game to be bad, they were complaining about everything, from the UI to the graphics and when there was nothing to complain, they started making stuff up, not only that, but if you started defending dragon age or giving it a positive review, the mob would dislike the video too and this still happens to this day.

The hate is even spreading to the next game, even though we only have a small trailer from the secret ending, people are already disliking it and saying the next game is gonna be bad.

Also, because of everything I said, sometimes it is very hard to distinguish between constructive criticism and a tourist parroting what they heard from others.

So, you gotta be wondering, what's the point of telling you this? The point is that these expectations affect how we see the game and how we play it, even if you don't notice, I say this because this definetly affect me, those negative reactions got to me, I didn't want to be the person who likes a bad game, I was nitpicking everything and gaslighting myself every time I enjoyed playing it, everytime I started a conversation I had that Skillup's "Every interaction sounds like HR is in the room" phrase in my mind.

In the end, while I wanted to like the game and expect it to succeed, my mind was making me think otherwise and it's very possible it's affecting my review now. Only after realizing what I was doing I was truly able to enjoy the game and give the love it deserves, I believe Dragon Age the Veilguard would be considered to be a good game if it was released under different circumstances.

What I enjoyed about the game:

1. Skill Tree:

Just top notch, I love how much you can change things on the fly, even your specialization. The skills are fun, visually impressive and easy to understand, your playstyle can change a lot as you level and there's a lot of build possibilities. If you like toying with your build (like me), this game's skill tree is a delight, the only thing it's missing is a preset to save different build configurations for it to be perfect.

It is such an upgrade from the rest of the series, my number my number 1 complaint about every Dragon Age game was the skill tree and this fixes everything.

2. Itemization:

Top notch too, idk if Bioware pioneered this system, but it is a landmark for me, I really hope future games learn from this system, the old itemization bioware used (which most games use) is outdated, it bloats your inventory, forces you to do boring inventory management, most of the items are extremely uninteresting stack sticks or with randomized boring effects.

This game's system addresses everything I had a problem with and more and it's such an elegant solution, fewer items but they have interesting effects, all of the items feel unique and have a purpose, no inventory management needed and the upgrade system adding new effects to old items makes upgrading them really fun and treasure hunting more fun.

3. Combat:

(I played on Nightmare btw),

Really, really fun, spongy enemies my ass, the combat is dynamic, enemies have a skillset of abilities you need to learn to dodge/block, different vulnerabilities/resistances and, most importantly, I like how almost every enemy has a weakness you can exploit which forces you to change playstyle and the fact you have multiple weapons and attacks from different ranges is really fun, add the building system being insanely good and this makes DAV's combat the best in the series by far and one of the more fun combat systems I ever played.

I miss being able to control my party in more complex ways, but I do like the new system, I get why they changed it and I enjoyed it more than I expected, Time Warp may be a little too strong compared to other skills IMO.

Also, as always, the dragon battles don't disappoint.

Idk the damage is capped at 9999 though.

4. Companions:

I liked the new companions more than I expected, Emmrich and Bel were a pleasant surprise and I ended up liking every companion at the end, the party banter seems more frequent and more specific - Neve and Bel had a conversation that only happened because Neve was in my party during Bel's quest, which I found lovely. Talking about them, the friendship between Neve and Bel was the highlight of the companions for me, I like changing my party once in a while, but didn't do it often in DAV because I just loved seeing them talking to each other.

Unfortunately, while I liked the companions and their personalities, I didn't like their personal quest very much, the quest felt a bit too disconnected from the main plot, they all were too formulaic with every quest ending with you fighting a boss, Bel's quest lacks some relevant info (she says her brother died, but never elaborates) and all quest played it too safe, even Taash's quest, the tourist complained so much about this one, but I feel her quest was still very surface level.

Also, companions seldom disapprove of your comments, which I don't like and I miss being able to ask questions to them.

For me the companions were a net positive, I didn't find any companion questline to be terrible and I enjoyed some quest (Emmrich's, Davrin's and Harding's), but even though it was good, it was a downgrade from other games and a big downgrade from DAI, which has my favorite companions and companions questlines.

5. Customization:

Hair physics, in a Dragon age game? My friend and I joked about how bad the hair options in the DA series were, we joked how we were expecting DAV to have 3 different bald hairstyles options like every other game and the game has 3 bald hairstyles, plus 80 fucking other hairstyles, which is like double the number of hairs of every other game I played, the customization in this game is a huge step from the other games, from the character creator to transmog, it's really good, I enjoyed playing with it more than I should. I can't way to see what modders will do with it in the future.

6. Technical Performance and Visuals:

It still feels weird to rate technical performance, but a game launching today with very few bugs and good optimization is not a given, I was not expecting to play this game because my current rig is too weak (RX 550), I was surprised I was able to play the game at all (even though I had to set everything to low and overclock) and, the crazy thing is, the game looks beautiful even on lower graphics, I can't believe my current pc can run such a pretty game, the team responsible for the level design did an amazing job at making everything look awesome, I’m currently saving money to buy a better GPU so I can replay this game with proper graphics.

7. ETC:

• Doors opening for you automatically is something I didn't know I wanted, but I love it;
• The movement in this game is really smooth and a big upgrade from other games;
• Fucking love Manfred;
• I enjoyed the new map design, way better having densely packed smaller maps than larger ones with a lot of filler content.

What I didn't enjoy about the game:

1. Previous saves choices:

By far my main complaint about the game, even thinking about it makes me furious, I just cannot believe that all my decisions, all my saves were gone to waste, I was replaying all games in preparation for DAV, I was in the middle of DAI when I was informed that DAV didn't take previous decisions from other games, this made me immediately quit playing DAI, this was what made DA unique to me; it’s one of the things I liked the most about the series, I really hope (or should I say "cope"?) a future patch will address this, even if it is just for the more relevant plot points, I simply can't accept this as it is.

2. Story:

While I do not mind them retconning things, one of the things I didn't like is that they left a lot of questions unanswered from previous games, where's Hawke? Where's my Warden? I always wanted to know Bianca's name story, what happened to Morrigan having a son with the soul of an old god? I was expecting Sandal to appear and explain more about his story and etc. There were so many things I was expecting this game to answer and it answers almost nothing.

Edit: they do explain Bianca's name story and Kieran's god soul, I misremembered things.

3. Writing:

I don't think the writing is bad, it's really bad compared to the rest of the series, but I wouldn't say it's terrible, the writing just feels average, uninspiring and unprovocative, I miss the political stuff a lot and I miss having agency over what's happening, the game also lacks worldbuilding, every other game talked a lot about Tevinter, the Qun and other places and how it's like to live there and their culture, this game doesn't expand on that, I mean, it barely even talks about it. If DAV is your first DA game, you wouldn't even know what the Qun really is besides very surface-level conversations with Taash.

But I do have to add that I enjoyed the final parts of the game.

4. Music:

Big downgrade from inquisition's soundtrack, besides Ghilan’nain’s last fight music, I can't remember any other soundtracks, everything just felt very generic. Every city should have had a music theme for it, just imagine how cool a necropolis theme could sound like, instead, we have this.

5. ETC:

• Enemies respawning in certain locations just don’t make sense to me; it’s really annoying when you’re hunting chests or walking to a quest;
• Not being able to preview armor/clothes is a bummer
• I wish there were a way to change the color of armor/clothes;
• I wish there were a faster way to talk to companions, walking back and forth in the lighthouse to talk to multiple companions is a bit annoying;
• Sidequests were too generic.

Final Thoughts:

Honestly, my biggest takeaway after playing this game is I can't wait for the next one, I hope that instead of doing a big project, they launch the next game in 3~4 years, keep the combat, building and map design with minor improvements and dedicate all the effort to the writing, this new formula they have has so much potential if the writing is good.

Talking about the game itself, the writing was a big letdown, but the combat, building and environment compensated for that for me, the game isn't perfect by any means, but it is better than what people are saying.

As I said at the beginning, I truly believe this game's disapproval has way more to do with what happened around it than the game itself, the team should be proud of what they achieved here even if it was something we didn't expected.

8,5/10

Anyway, that was my review.