There is a classical Chinese story of the afterlife, in which the goddess Meng Po serves souls a soup that makes them forget all of the memories and details of their previous life, such that they may be reincarnated without the burden of it. I think about this story a lot, as I’m sure other people who feel the weight of their past do.
I played the first Dragon Age game, Dragon Age: Origins, the year it came out, which was my sophomore year of high school. It is difficult for me to talk about that game, and my relationship to it, without talking about who I was and where I was in that time. I have no nostalgia for high school and little for childhood in general; I did not fit in. It is difficult for me to talk about Dragon Age without fundamentally feeling like I am a weird, lonely teenager all over again.
This is the challenege of criticizing art broadly and “franchises” or “IP” more specifically. My response to Origins is a reflection of a speciic time in my life, and my response to subsequent Dragon Age games is informed by an investment in the “franchise” that was formed fifteen years ago. The challenge is being able to say whether or not the thing itself was good.
Is Dragon Age good? Does it matter? I played it and connected to it, powerfully, and for no other reason I bought— and played!— the fourth game in the series, Dragon Age: The Veilguard. I cannot talk about Veilguard and what I see in it and what I experience in it without talking about what I saw in Origins or other Dragons Age. In short, none of this is in a vaccumn.
The copy on the box for Origins asserts that the game is a “Dark Fantasy Epic.” “Dark Fantasy” is kind of “maturity,” in that they are both slippery concepts that are supposed to convey how seriously the audience is supposed to take them. Usually it just means that there’s sex in there, or more specifically, nudity and often rape, and gore. “Fantasy” and “Dark Fantasy” are genres about emotion— about feeling. I love fantasy as a genre because it makes interior truth, interior logic, completely literal.
To me, the ur-example of this is Howl’s Moving Castle, in which the main character’s perception of herself is reflected in her physical appearance. Fundamentally, it is a story about strength and confidence within becoming the apperance without. If fantasy makes literal the interior, there is something specific to dark fantasy that turns personal, interior struggle into global melodrama.
There is so much weird, huge unresolved sadness in my life. This is not special; this is something true of every person. There is some bell in your life that cannot be unrung; an apology you will never make or receive, a fundamental hurt that may scab over or scar but will never be the unrent flesh it was before. And you keep living. To my mind, this unresolved sadness is the distinguishing force between fantasy and dark fantasy, much more than buster swords or demonic piles of quivering tits occasionally birthing new enemies. The inciting incident of Origins makes the player character (makes you) unable to return home; makes you completely socially exterior. This becomes a story about taking on impossible odds, mostly alone and without cooler heads or protecting institutions helping or listening.
There is a real sorrow, a real loneliness to Origins in telling this kind of story, I think best expressed in the camp the player character and party build on the way between dungeons and levels. In the small circle of guttering firelight, you and your party discuss the events of the game. Sometimes your dog licks gore off of you. There is something I find very expressive, very vulnerable to this. You are small, just one jackass and some other jackasses against the end of the world.
The stakes and scope are very clear from the get go. Dragon Age II and Dragon Age: Inquisition both experiment with the shape of this particular story. Dragon Age II is far more about intra-party ideological struggle (one character was a literal slave in a brutal overseas wizardocracy and another character is actively attempting to free wizards from totalizing surveillance) and Inquisition is about building an independent state political apparatus to address the end of the world. The stakes, scope, and scale of these games are all very clear, even as the story goes on and the threats escalate and the player responsibility increases.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard did not escape production with such clarity. This game is a mess, which shouldn’t be surprising given its tortured, ten year development in which essentially the entire writing staff was replaced in production multiple times. This game is a mess, this game is a mess, this game is a mess. It sucks shit to say that, to admit that the game I spent ten years waiting for and purchased a PlayStation 5 to play is a mess but it’s a mess. It is a mess. This game is a mess.
In the ten years between 2014 and 2024, between the release of Inquisition and Veilguard, Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and its sequel, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and FromSoft released their first open-world title in Elden Ring. The idea of what an open-world game could be has changed radically since the release of Inquisition, which was structured as a series of largely free-form locations, dotted with puzzles and quests, and the locations themselves did not ‘gate’ off the player’s access. It was not possible to walk from, say, the Hinterlands to the Free Marches, as you can walk from Raya Lucaria to the Altus Plateau, but the Hinterlands and Free Marches in Inquisition themselves were sprawling, open, and would let you bite off way more than you could chew. To meet the potential of something like Inquisition again (much less a Zelda or Elden Ring!) would require a level of focus in design that the evident tumult at BioWare was not able to furnish.
As a result, the design of Veilguard is far more similar to the design of Origins and II, despite sharing Inquisition‘s structure as a series of locations you can access via quicktravel points on a map. The locations are nominally ‘open,’ but your access is frequently gated, with areas that will become story relevant often sealed behind barriers that fall later. Additionally, there are puzzles that should limit your progress: each of your seven companions have specific skills, and there are places in the level that should necessitate having that specific party member with you. Rocks only Harding can move out of the way, memories of the world only Lucanis’ demon can make briefly real, elven doohickeys only Bellara can troubleshoot: the problem is that the player character (‘Rook’) has a magic knife that can trigger those companion abilities without the companion.
None of this is to say that the environmental puzzles are good. The game is so stuffed with highlight-colored gegaws to press a context-specific button at that it becomes an active impediment to noticing the correct thing. The most persistient feeling I have in traversing the terrain is that I am stupid. I keep having to ask my friends to help me look for things with their ‘gamer eyes’ because I keep missing something obvious, either because I was facing the wrong way to trigger a context-specific button event or because whatever highlight color that was selected blends in with whatever high-fantasy hypersaturation has been selected for a specific area. Additionally, these puzzles operate with inconsistent rules. There are two different kinds of puzzle that use an expiring key which has to be fetched to a specific kind of lock. One of these puzzles requires clicking ‘x’ to pick up the key and ‘x’ to drop it off; another kind has the key follow and leave you automatically. These puzzles are identical in structure, and they even use the same highlight color. Why does one operate with one set of rules and the other operate using another? Again, this is a mess.
With the exception of Neve (who merely works closely with the Shadow Dragons but is not explicitly one herself), every companion has a background that the player character can also start with— Taash is a Lord of Fortune, Lucanis is an Antivan Crow, Emmerich is a Nevarran Necromancer. Each of these characters has a distinct background and a distinct relationship to a city that you can share, and you actually see where all of them are from. If Rook can embody the same background as a companion character and can do the companion character’s abilities, and, indeed, the companion characters are able to manage their health and mana and abilities competently without the player input. You can set up abilities for specific combos, but the ability triggering does not seem to work for me about half of the time, for reasons that are not clear to me. All of this begs the question: why are the companions even there? If everything that makes a companion special can be replaced by one of Rook’s traits, and if everything that makes Rook special can be replaced by a companion’s trait, there is always one party member who is superfluous. If Rook can do everything a companion can do, why even have companions?
The answer of course is that Dragon Age‘s real appeal, real selling point is that it’s a dating sim that isn’t a dating sim. This is the core gameplay of the series, not the combat, and why I kept coming back to these games and why other people do, too. Veilguard is truly tragic for this reason— the writing does not support the central mechanic of the game. There is no member of my party that I want to romance; it feels like it would be a workplace safety issue. I don’t feel like a peer or a brother in arms or a jackass who has stumbled accidentally into power. I feel like their high school football coach: a decidedly unsexy relationship. So much of the writing between Rook and the companion characters is anodyne questions that you can reply vaguely supportively to. Further, there doesn’t seem to be any opportunity to elaborate on your own past. I chose the “Shadow Dragon” background, specifically because it seemed very cool and badass to be militant abolitionist. No one has asked me why I am freeing slaves. I have no idea why Rook frees slaves. No one has asked, and Rook has not said. I feel fundamentally disconnected from the player character, which is not a good feeling in a game where you select each of the player character’s most intimate details.
For whatever reason, the game is written to actively prevent distinct, expressive characterization. This feeling extends to the game’s refusal to embrace intra-party conflict. For example, one of the earliest companions you can recruit is Bellara, who is an elf researching and preserving elven artifacts. Later, you recruit Taash, who is a pirate. Early dialogue between Taash and Bellara reveals, however, that the pirates don’t actually loot. It turns out that anything culturally valuable to either the elves or Qunari are returned to cultural experts and researchers. Bellara is satisfied with this, and an opportunity to explore real tension between characters is extiguished as quickly as the character herself brings up the potential for conflict. This is a spectacular failure, in that it misses the opportunity for characters to express their values (does keeping the elven cultural heritage with elves matter to Bellara? Is Taash bothered by selling off their own cultural heritage buyers?) and it removes an opportunity for the player to develop and express those values within the game.
There is a certain vein of criticism of this game that hinges on an objection to values at all; to be clear I think this is horse shit. It makes sense that the employees at BioWare would like to produce a game that expresses their own values, and the reaction of right-wing shitheads to even the most basic inclusion of trans people in their games proves the necessity of the exercise. Games writing can allow for player agency while also expressing the studio’s values— the decade between Inquisition and Veilguard also saw the release of Disco Elysium, which allows for the player to both make abhorrent choices and experience consequences in-game for those choices. My problem with the writing in Veilguard is not that it is corny. Some of my favorite writing in the game is encountering Lucanis’ upscale, European grocery lists— this is corny! The problem is that the writing is not mature enough to allow for player expression as simple as being wrong. I left home to go to college and had experiences that changed me. Thankfully, I am not the same person I was when I left home. Dragon Age is not the friend from high school you left behind who is exactly the same; Dragon Age has somehow regressed and is incapable of interpersonal engagement more complex than what shows on Sesame Street. Elmo, I can tell you find it upsetting that Lucian is posessed by a demon, but we need to work as a team to save Thedas!
There’s a sequence in Inquisition I think about a lot, where the player character is injured and separated from the rest of base camp and has to hobble alone in the snow. You’re injured, so your run speed is reduced from an easy lope to a panful shuffle. There are multiple minutes of this, with only the wind to keep you company. It’s a moment in which you get to powerfully identify with your character’s suffering, with your character’s vulnerability. It’s a sequence that could be a cutscene, but instead it’s a deeply unfun few minutes of gameplay. It kind of sucks, but it feels very real. In Veilguard, a mid-game mission goes from bad to worse when a second dragon shows up. After defeating the second dragon, the game cuts to a cutscene, with no gameplay, no dialogue trees for the player to play. Do y’all need me here? I guess I can see myself out.
