I’ve been thinking and raging and writing my thoughts down in the past few days as they come with the fever of a schizophrenic who has uncovered irrefutable evidence of the existence of his gangstalker. I had written this review with a Recommended but “Eh” rating, went back and changed it, and now I am back again with hours of playthrough/cutscene footage under my belt because I refuse to give this game one more minute of my play time. Regardless, 10 hours was all I needed to immediately clock the problems this game had, and further research into what the game had in store for me via said playthroughs and reports from players who finished the game not only validated my fears, but soured and incensed me even further. No spoilers marked because I don't give a damn.

Before anyone draws conclusions about my reasons for hating this game, I’m going to preface: I’m a member of the “woke mob”. I’m one of those people that certain people think are ruining video games with our insistence on “DEI” and “diversity”. I’m a hardcore lefty. I’m an unapologetic LGBTQ2DVDROM. Now that being said:

This is the most offensively terrible entry to a story-based series I have ever played. Its audacity is eclipsed only by its mediocrity on all possible fronts except performance, and even then people report having issues with frame rates.This game is as devastating to the Dragon Age IP as Lucifer’s fall from the heavens, if he had first slammed his charred angelic body into the Earth and the magnitude of the impact spawned a ruinous crack into which he, broken and battered, tumbled further into a yawning abyss. This is a drop in writing and storytelling quality so profound that it feels like a punishment from God in recompense for my various unrepented sins. This is the unrecognizable mangled corpse of a cult classic IP delivered to us in cellophane direct from the soulless, cynical, artistically bankrupt bowels of 2024 Bioware/EA. For people like me who were holding out, I shall proclaim that this game serves as the unequivocal death knell of Bioware as a narrative-driven RPG maverick.

All trace of artistic flourish, all trace of nuance, thoughtfulness, depth, creativity, and genuine love for the world and its many facets is absent, scrubbed clean and whitewashed in favor of pushing a bland fantasy setting with some vague worldbuilding that remains slapdash and out of focus like clunky reading glasses filled with an inadequate prescription.

This is NOT a game for loyal Dragon Age fans who love the IP for the worldbuilding, the thoughtful and immersive dialogue and conversations, the hard-hitting themes, the gripping interpersonal relationships formed between NPCs or you and NPCs. No, this is a game for Action “RPG” fans whose brains have been rotted by a decade of MCU scripts and TikTok and wish to kill mobs in flashy and run around a bit in pretty but soulless zones while a vague semblance of a plot yammers on in the background, players whose favorite games present their themes with the subtlety of Sesame Street because people these days possess brains so thoroughly cooked by social media and battle passes they can’t find any enjoyment in something more harrowing and narratively complex than Pat the Bunny.


Dragon Age: Origins came out the gate swinging as a dark fantasy. Dragon Age 2, for all its flaws, continued the trend with dark themes. Inquisition, also fair to middling, is absolved of its mediocrity solely for the solidity of its character writing and the weaving of jaw-dropping, world-shifting revelations revealed at the climax of its DLCs. Veilguard takes all of that momentum, all of that precedence in terms of tone, world building, and characterization, and throws it away. Just chucks it in the bin. Worse, Veilguard cynically, cruelly, spitefully, and flippantly writes around or outright nullifies every major choice you made in prior games by either undoing it or failing to incorporate it into this ‘new canon’. At one point in the game it is reported that the Blight has taken over the southern continent, notably—and almost spitefully— striking the places where your previous PCs had the most impact. All of your efforts, the weight of your previous decisions, the character and STORY defining ultimatums in each prior game—undone and rendered futile in the end. It’s the most hack job attempt at giving a clean slate I’ve ever seen. The fact it’s relayed to you in a conversation is even more despicable. This “whole new world going forward” notion falls flat on its ass. I don’t want to have any new adventures in this world when you've demonstrated you can't successfully conclude an epic tale told in the sandbox you yourself built. If this is supposed to be a commentary on how entropy is inevitable, it’s a piss-poor attempt at conveying that. It is cynical, it is disrespectful to all the creative effort by so many talented people in years past who endeavored to craft an interesting setting with unique, memorable characters and lore.

When writing a reboot into a story, it is optimal to do so after the pressing events of the story have reached its climax. With Veilguard, the very lore and world is being erased before your very eyes as you play. Certain facets of the universe—characters, political institutions, cultural markers, universal laws, even locations—are loudly absent, ignored, destroyed, or retconned. It is as if someone is pulling up meters of train tracks as soon as the train passes over them. Examples: No slavery shown in Tevinter; Dalish and city elves are essentially the same people now; the Chantry isn't featured as even a force to deal with; lyrium plays no part in mage abilities in combat; no agents of Fen'Harel (Solas is apparently working entirely alone despite the comics and Tevinter Nights saying he had followers working for him); everyone accepts the Elvhen gods as real and evil at face value; Antivan Crows are apparently good guys now; mages are said to be treated well under the Qun; THE QUNARI HAVE GUNS; being an abomination is apparently totally fine with everybody (Lucanis).

As for your PC: Rook isn’t a Dragon Age protagonist. Rook is designed to be a stand-in for people who never played Dragon Age, don’t care about diving deep into the lore, and aren’t interested in the romance mechanics. Rook is designed to be said bland avatar so that non-DA fans (who for some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ reason decided to pick up and play Dragon Age 4 FIRST) have a pawn to control and navigate through the world in the most superficial and rudimentary manner possible. The rest of the NPCs exist as cardboard cutouts to say embarrassingly unpolished and uninspired BORING dialogue with the depth of a kiddie pool. No one has anything remarkable or engaging to say. Your romances are as stimulating as a virtual GF/BF app.

And the mishandling of Solas as the villain is unforgivable. So much potential, so much THERE, and they sidelined him 20 minutes in and give next to no opportunities to have you as Rook personally interact with him. You are given the opportunity to collect memories of his past, but that is no replacement for talking to the man himself. The worst part is that everything revealed was theorized by fans years ago.

I have never in my life seen something like this occur in a piece of media, skips over perturbing into unsettling before landing into dumbfounding. How could they have possibly thought this was the direction to go after people have waited 10 years for this denouement to a story from a once-beloved household name in the RPG genre?

We know what happened. EA does what it does best, which is destroy good things and fire, lay off, drive off the creative minds that give a damn about presenting people with something quality. Pretty much every original writer of Bioware from its early days of Dragon Age is gone, and clearly all they had to replace them with were raised on a pure diet of Steven Universe and Tumblr Millennial whimsy.

I’ve been thinking and raging and writing my thoughts down in the past few days as they come with the fever of a schizophrenic who has uncovered irrefutable evidence of the existence of his gangstalker. I had written this review with a Recommended but “Eh” rating, went back and changed it, and now I am back again with hours of playthrough/cutscene footage under my belt because I refuse to give this game one more minute of my play time. Regardless, 10 hours was all I needed to immediately clock the problems this game had, and further research into what the game had in store for me via said playthroughs and reports from players who finished the game not only validated my fears, but soured and incensed me even further. No spoilers marked because I don't give a damn. Before anyone draws conclusions about my reasons for hating this game, I’m going to preface: I’m a member of the “woke mob”. I’m one of those people that certain people think are ruining video games with our insistence on “DEI” and “diversity”. I’m a hardcore lefty. I’m an unapologetic LGBTQ2DVDROM. Now that being said: [b]This is the most offensively terrible entry to a story-based series I have ever played[/b]. Its audacity is eclipsed only by its mediocrity on all possible fronts except performance, and even then people report having issues with frame rates.This game is as devastating to the Dragon Age IP as Lucifer’s fall from the heavens, if he had first slammed his charred angelic body into the Earth and the magnitude of the impact spawned a ruinous crack into which he, broken and battered, tumbled further into a yawning abyss. This is a drop in writing and storytelling quality so profound that it feels like a punishment from God in recompense for my various unrepented sins. This is the unrecognizable mangled corpse of a cult classic IP delivered to us in cellophane direct from the soulless, cynical, artistically bankrupt bowels of 2024 Bioware/EA. For people like me who were holding out, I shall proclaim that this game serves as the unequivocal death knell of Bioware as a narrative-driven RPG maverick. All trace of artistic flourish, all trace of nuance, thoughtfulness, depth, creativity, and genuine love for the world and its many facets is absent, scrubbed clean and whitewashed in favor of pushing a bland fantasy setting with some vague worldbuilding that remains slapdash and out of focus like clunky reading glasses filled with an inadequate prescription. This is NOT a game for loyal Dragon Age fans who love the IP for the worldbuilding, the thoughtful and immersive dialogue and conversations, the hard-hitting themes, the gripping interpersonal relationships formed between NPCs or you and NPCs. No, this is a game for Action “RPG” fans whose brains have been rotted by a decade of MCU scripts and TikTok and wish to kill mobs in flashy and run around a bit in pretty but soulless zones while a vague semblance of a plot yammers on in the background, players whose favorite games present their themes with the subtlety of Sesame Street because people these days possess brains so thoroughly cooked by social media and battle passes they can’t find any enjoyment in something more harrowing and narratively complex than Pat the Bunny. Dragon Age: Origins came out the gate swinging as a dark fantasy. Dragon Age 2, for all its flaws, continued the trend with dark themes. Inquisition, also fair to middling, is absolved of its mediocrity solely for the solidity of its character writing and the weaving of jaw-dropping, world-shifting revelations revealed at the climax of its DLCs. Veilguard takes all of that momentum, all of that precedence in terms of tone, world building, and characterization, and throws it away. Just chucks it in the bin. Worse, Veilguard cynically, cruelly, spitefully, and flippantly writes around or outright nullifies every major choice you made in prior games by either undoing it or failing to incorporate it into this ‘new canon’. At one point in the game it is reported that the Blight has taken over the southern continent, notably—and almost spitefully— striking the places where your previous PCs had the most impact. All of your efforts, the weight of your previous decisions, the character and STORY defining ultimatums in each prior game—undone and rendered futile in the end. It’s the most hack job attempt at giving a clean slate I’ve ever seen. The fact it’s relayed to you in a conversation is even more despicable. This “whole new world going forward” notion falls flat on its ass. I don’t want to have any new adventures in this world when you've demonstrated you can't successfully conclude an epic tale told in the sandbox you yourself built. If this is supposed to be a commentary on how entropy is inevitable, it’s a piss-poor attempt at conveying that. It is cynical, it is disrespectful to all the creative effort by so many talented people in years past who endeavored to craft an interesting setting with unique, memorable characters and lore. When writing a reboot into a story, it is optimal to do so after the pressing events of the story have reached its climax. With Veilguard, the very lore and world is being erased before your very eyes as you play. Certain facets of the universe—characters, political institutions, cultural markers, universal laws, even locations—are loudly absent, ignored, destroyed, or retconned. It is as if someone is pulling up meters of train tracks as soon as the train passes over them. Examples: No slavery shown in Tevinter; Dalish and city elves are essentially the same people now; the Chantry isn't featured as even a force to deal with; lyrium plays no part in mage abilities in combat; no agents of Fen'Harel (Solas is apparently working entirely alone despite the comics and Tevinter Nights saying he had followers working for him); everyone accepts the Elvhen gods as real and evil at face value; Antivan Crows are apparently good guys now; mages are said to be treated well under the Qun; THE QUNARI HAVE GUNS; being an abomination is apparently totally fine with everybody (Lucanis). As for your PC: Rook isn’t a Dragon Age protagonist. Rook is designed to be a stand-in for people who never played Dragon Age, don’t care about diving deep into the lore, and aren’t interested in the romance mechanics. Rook is designed to be said bland avatar so that non-DA fans (who for some fucking reason decided to pick up and play Dragon Age 4 FIRST) have a pawn to control and navigate through the world in the most superficial and rudimentary manner possible. The rest of the NPCs exist as cardboard cutouts to say embarrassingly unpolished and uninspired BORING dialogue with the depth of a kiddie pool. No one has anything remarkable or engaging to say. Your romances are as stimulating as a virtual GF/BF app. And the mishandling of Solas as the villain is unforgivable. So much potential, so much THERE, and they sidelined him 20 minutes in and give next to no opportunities to have you as Rook personally interact with him. You are given the opportunity to collect memories of his past, but that is no replacement for talking to the man himself. The worst part is that everything revealed was theorized by fans years ago. I have never in my life seen something like this occur in a piece of media, skips over perturbing into unsettling before landing into dumbfounding. How could they have possibly thought this was the direction to go after people have waited 10 years for this denouement to a story from a once-beloved household name in the RPG genre? We know what happened. EA does what it does best, which is destroy good things and fire, lay off, drive off the creative minds that give a damn about presenting people with something quality. Pretty much every original writer of Bioware from its early days of Dragon Age is gone, and clearly all they had to replace them with were raised on a pure diet of Steven Universe and Tumblr Millennial whimsy.