I started seeing complaints about the art direction first. I take gamer forums, especially regarding previews, with a huge grain of salt since the "Cellda" days killed any chance of us getting another Wind Waker style game in a long time. I looked at some screenshots, maybe not my favorite art direction, but I certainly didn't think it looked "child like" or whatever the complaints were. In action, it looks fine.
I saw some stories suggesting that sales were not what EA expected. But as we know, EA and most videogame companies have no idea how to forcast. How many studios have been bought, sold, and closed because some company was like, "The new Resident Raider needs to sell 12 million copies for our share holders" and then they are upset when it sells 8 million copies and still makes money.
But if I, someone that is likely to buy it, didn't even know it was coming this soon, how are others supposed to find it.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard in an uneven adventure. When it cooks, it's great. When it doesn't, the tedium makes it feel forever long.
I was invested in the story immediately. The opening scene of dark spawn dropping in the center of a city, a familiar character doing ... something... to a group of gods, and you flying by the seat of your pants.
I really liked the characters. They made the world feel real. You believed that the assassin's guild and the Gray Wardens existed in the same world. Each had it's own personality. And sometimes the character arks could be a little heavy handed, they all had fairly satisfying conclusions.
They took a bit of the Mass Effect 2 approach where you had a loyalty quest line for each character and I haven't looked into it, but I bet the numbers add up in the background to say who dies and who doesn't.
Some of the environments are pretty confusing to get around until you open them up more. Beginning of the game, I was having issues discerning one place from another because they all felt like mazes with a ton of closed off areas. They all vaguely looked similar. I couldn't remember where the assassin's were vs the Lords of Fortune.
This did get clearer as the game went on. Partly because I started learning more about each area and becoming familiar. Partly because there were more ways to get around.
There are fast travel locations through out the maps, but still, some of the map design really felt like it was trying to pad out the play time, even though I'm sure it was actually hiding textures loading.
Combat gets tedious in the middle of the game. You're overpowered if you've been doing all the side quests, so there's not a huge threat of dying. But the enemies still take time to widdle down. Anytime I saw an open area coming up, I sort of shrugged and knew there would be a fight waiting for me. There were a lot of late missions that brought you through several sections of the map and I sort of rolled my eyes knowing I had a couple battles waiting.
Toward the end, I just started sprinting past enemies until inevitably I'd run up against a story prompt that said I had to finish all the enemies.
The dragons are meant to be epic fights (and they should be, they are dragons) but instead they became arrow sponges. You work their shield down, their life down. They get in a few cheap shots. You knock them over, get in your cheap shots. Then they fly off to some piece of set that is too far for you to continue hammering them, spawn in lesser enemies, and refill their shield.
I killed most of the dragons, but I was at the end of the game, had one side quest that called for me to kill a dragon, (I'm usually a 100% kind of person in these games) I just skipped it.
Ending rocks. It's one of those very satisfying endings where you feel like all loose ends are tied up, you get to see all these characters you've been adventuring with doing cool shit. The epicness of the end isn't hamstrung by a bullet sponge end boss. You just felt very powerful and cool. By the time the credits rolled, I think I added another star onto my review.
Overall, I give Dragon Age: The Veilgaurd a solid 7.5/10.
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