Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s preview playthrough was promising

Dragon Age: The Veilguard entered production only a year after the release of its blockbuster predecessor, Dragon Age: Inquisition, but when it comes out this Halloween, it will miss Inquisition’s 10th anniversary by a mere 17 days. It has truly been an age between Dragon Age games, and that age has truly dragged o— Ow! All right, I deserved that, but it’s been a very long time since Dragon Age fans, or even BioWare fans, had solid good news.

2017’s Mass Effect: Andromeda and 2019’s Anthem debuted as costly letdowns, all while production on Veilguard stopped, started, and restarted. Over the past decade, BioWare has also lost an alarming number of Dragon Age’s founding names and creative stars, like lead designer and creative director Mike Laidlaw (resigned in 2017), producer Mark Darrah (resigned in 2020, returned in 2023 as a consultant), and writer Mary Kirby (laid off in 2023).

If you’re a Dragon Age fan approaching The Veilguard with wariness, no one could blame you. It’s a rough collection of news for any upcoming video game, let alone a franchise as relationship-focused, lore-dense, thematically rich, and narratively complicated as Dragon Age. But this month, Polygon had a chance to sit down and play Veilguard at Electronic Arts’ Redwood City headquarters.

And the game looks good. Yes, even the real-time combat.

BioWare’s event furnished journalists with PC versions of the game, running on the company’s hardware, showcasing five different sections of gameplay from the first “act” of the game. We were able to play through the introductory sequence, the discovery of the Lighthouse (the titular Veilguard’s HQ), introductory quest lines for two companion characters, a classic BioWare “big choice and consequences” sequence, a more open section that included a companion’s Act 1 personal quest, and finally the concluding mission of Act 1, using own custom Rook (the alias of Veilguard’s player character) and a choice of three premade Rooks for each character class.

It was a lot to play, and assembled staff — including game director Corinne Busche, producer Jen Cheverie, and creative director John Epler — seemed excited to show it off. There were laughs around the room as Busche, knowing the core Dragon Age audience, cautioned guests not to spend more than half an hour in the character creator.

BioWare had already announced that Veilguard’s character creator has the least binary gender choices of any Dragon Age game before it, and Busche’s pride is not undeserved. Veilguard is the first Dragon Age game to allow players to tweak their PC’s dimensions below the neckline, and the first to feature hairstyles that fall below the chin.

There are also some welcome quality-of-life updates. Players of Inquisition, which shrouded its character screens in murky green light, will be happy to see buttons in Veilguard’s character creator that toggle between three separate lighting environments. And if you have the experience of hitting that first cutscene and immediately regretting your choices, the now nearly ubiquitous RPG Mirror of Oops My PC Looks Bad Actually becomes available almost instantaneously.

Naturally, my demon of the perverse wanted to push these tools at their limit. I picked an elf (who, in Dragon Age, aren’t so much “supermodel thin” as they are “scarecrow thin”), chose the thickest base body type, and then flipped all the sliders to wide.

My Rook looked back at me, a woman with round, round thighs, a curved, soft stomach, and hips that, like mine, would find those dumb metal Ikea chairs that every restaurant in New York seems to have right now infuriatingly uncomfortable. She looked like an adventurer who might have gotten into the life after having a kid or two, and she also looked hot. She didn’t look like she just had a wider set of muscles.

Then I picked her hair: a mane of loose 3A to 3B curls that fell to mid-back and swayed with her movement. Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s character creator has nearly 90 hairstyles to choose from, and every one of any length, from short locs to long straight lengths, is physics-enabled.

Playing on BioWare’s PC hardware, at least, Veilguard looks impressive. My Rook dodged, ran, fell, and leapt, and she looked good doing it. The closest I came to noticing a seam was her hand clipping through a bit of layered clothing on her thigh in one shot of a cutscene. Her hair remained impeccable the whole time, bouncing and sliding with movement but staying out of her face for close-ups.

The sights didn’t stop at the technical wizardry behind a head of real-time-rendered curls. The ancient arcano-mechanical guards were draped in cobwebs that swayed in the forest breeze. I trotted through a marketplace in the Fade itself, staffed and patronized by spirits. I fought cultists in a repurposed undersea ruin where shimmering magical force fields held back millions of tons of water and swam with runes and rainbows when I drew close.

Specifically, I fought cultists using Veilguard’s real-time combat system, which has been greeted with not-insignificant apprehension. A 2023 leak of gameplay that described it as being in the style of the God of War reboot sent the fandom into a minor tailspin. The concern is understandable: While it’s true that Dragon Age has never been a turn-based franchise, you’ve never been able to block, dodge, or parry on command in a Dragon Age game, either. But this writer found the combat did not feel as unfamiliar as you might expect.

And this writer… Look, I’m certain there are people out there for whom the combat system of a BioWare game is a significant draw. But that simply couldn’t be me. So take that as context when I say that I’m replaying Dragon Age: Inquisition on its lowest difficulty setting at the moment, and I would swap it out for Veilguard’s combat, on normal difficulty, in a heartbeat.

Veilguard’s three-sided system of synergistic, cross-character ability interactions (slap a debuff on your target with one character, trigger a damage explosion with a synergizing ability from another) is reminiscent of Inquisition’s similar rock-paper-scissors-style arrangement of debuffs and damage triggers. But the distance between the two is stark. Inquisition’s debuffs and triggers are minimally referenced in the combat UI, with the actual explanation of the system tucked away in a single codex entry. And as synergizing abilities were limited to just a few of the eight ability slots each of your 10 characters had, it was never something I felt the need to memorize or even pay attention to.

This synergy system is the key to Veilguard’s combat, and BioWare’s team has stepped up to make sure that mastering it is easy and fun. The traditional four-person Dragon Age party (your PC and three companions) has been pruned to three, and while I do mourn the loss of three-way party banter, the trade-off is immediately obvious. Veilguard is shifting the scope of the player’s control from four equally complex party members to one well-oiled, party-wide interface.

Combat is a mix of basic attacks and guards from Rook, punctuated by a pause screen/ability bar that allows you to survey the battlefield at your own pace and choose from nine character abilities (three from each character, including Rook) to dunk on your enemies. The characters’ synergy abilities are clearly marked in the combat UI with a connecting line of large yellow chyrons that appears on mouseover, and the game does a great job of alerting you when abilities are ready to go through a diverse array of voice barks specific to each companion. The system successfully makes you feel like a team, rather than a player character and three charismatic bots.

With this focus on one menu for your entire party’s suite of abilities, there is a considered gap between the complexity of Rook’s systems and those of the companions you can choose to bring on each mission. In Veilguard, your seven companions have fewer item slots and simpler skill trees than Rook. That might sound like a downer, but again, I’m currently replaying Dragon Age: Inquisition, in which all nine companions are just as complex as your main PC in skills and gear. To me, Veilguard’s version sounds like a relief — relief from having to do 20-40 minutes of Dragon Age Menu Homework just to get back to actually playing the game.

I love Dragon Age: Inquisition, despite its half-dozen separate gear customization menus that are somehow all three layers deep. But what strikes me, after getting a look under Veilguard’s hood, is that none of Inquisition’s gear customization actually changes the way I play the combat — it’s just so my numbers will stay bigger than the bad guy numbers.

BioWare reps have taken pains to emphasize that Veilguard’s combat system is designed to give players of any style an option that works for them, and with seven hours of play under my belt, I think they might have done it. The moment of realization came, ironically, when I started to get really frustrated with my progress through a series of difficult enemies.

I was frustrated because I was on a time limit, trying to make it to the final sequence of the demo before the end of the event. And I was frustrated because I knew what the problem was: The party I’d chosen didn’t have enough synergizing abilities, and the pre-built warrior Rook I’d opted for was specced with a parry-based play style. If I hadn’t been on the clock, I would have taken a break, reloaded, chosen different companions (or respecced them, which is free), and reworked Rook’s skill tree (also free) to something I found smoother to play.

In earlier sections of the game, I’d experimented with a melee mage, using an orb of raw magic in one hand to charge up the long dagger I held in the other, and a rogue with daggers and a bow. To me it felt great to zip and dodge around the battlefield, needling at my foes close up and, if that became too much, retreating, swapping to my alternate weapon set, and blasting them from range. Being up in the melee mix with these tricky enemies and this parry warrior build would certainly be exhilarating for some, but for me, on my time crunch, it bordered on overwhelming: sifting through twitchy UI indications of which attacks could be blocked and which had to be dodged, and trying to get my own hits in on the side.

Unlike any other Dragon Age game I’ve played, Veilguard’s combat was a puzzle I actually wanted to solve. I knew there was a way to do it that would work better for me, if I just had the time to find it. Even in the limited hours we had to play, the game had already shown me the answers, and I knew my next steps.

Here’s what I don’t know: what The Veilguard is actually about. But this is a Dragon Age game, and honestly, that’s exactly where I want to be.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is in an interesting place as the fourth game in a series known for changing its scale and scope with each installment. Those changes have only highlighted the ways that each previous Dragon Age game has rhymed with the others, and makes one wonder whether Veilguard will choose to continue those patterns or subvert them. For example, all three previous Dragon Age games have included some kind of Act 1 twist that radically alters the scope of the game or your character’s place in its story.

Which is just to say that when BioWare’s representatives told us we’d only be playing sequences from Act 1, I thought, Aha. Yeah, I will be making no hard assumptions on the plot. So what do I think of the story of Dragon Age: The Veilguard so far? I won’t mention specifics from what I saw, because nobody actually wants to hear them, but I’ll talk about the generalities that seem, to me, to be telling.

The BioWare staffers who spoke at the preview event stressed that their goal in Veilguard was to create a contained RPG experience. Dragon Age 2 allowed players to load a Dragon Age: Origins save to play their own custom world state. For Inquisition, the Dragon Age Keep website allowed players to manually tweak dozens of world state choices before connecting them to a playthrough. But in Veilguard, the “Keep” is right there in the character creator. When I asked Busche about the motivation behind that evolution, she responded, “If anything, […] our commitment to having a single-player, complete, offline RPG — that’s what led us to really want to have everything within the game be self-contained.”

When I asked if there were any Veilguard DLC plans in the works, Busche also cited this notion of contained completeness. “Earlier we said that we wanted to make this the most feature-complete, authentic BioWare game that we’ve seen in the last 10 years. That is completely our focus right now. […] Who knows what the future holds, but right now, it’s all about delivering the best game we can.”

BioWare reps also stressed “regret” as the narrative theme of the game, embodied by two returning franchise NPCs — Varric Tethras, the dwarven adventurer and novelist, and Solas, the ancient elf mage whose exploits were warped by retelling until he became worshipped as a god. And they also stressed the seven companion characters, particularly the depth of their stories and how interwoven they were with the main plot of the game, most of them belonging to one of six factions with which Rook will interact.

It all makes me wonder if Veilguard might set another pattern for Dragon Age: that of a hugely expansive story in which the player can determine the fate of nations (Origins, Inquisition), followed by a more personal, character-focused, dark adventure. It wouldn’t be the first time that Dragon Age has responded to pressure by rooting itself in character and narrative.

Dragon Age 2, coming in hot only one and a half years after the massive breadth of Dragon Age: Origins, is notorious for its scope concessions (and crunch time). But it’s also beloved for its unique, trope-subverting storyline, and a set of companion characters without a single weak link. Case in point: Varric Tethras, created and written by Mary Kirby, served as the narrator of Dragon Age 2 and is still going strong as a voice of the franchise over a decade later.

There’s somebody reading this who’s going, “Veilguard is contained like Dragon Age 2? That game took place in only one city! It had like five assets! Oh no!” So let me be clear: What I’m wondering about is whether Rook’s story may prioritize navigating the personal motivations of a set of compelling companions and antagonists (like Dragon Age 2) over navigating fantasy politics and prejudices (like Origins and Inquisition). Veilguard, make no bones about it, feels big from the start.

While much of what I saw were contained missions, Busche and Cheverie characterized Veilguard as having a mix of closed sections — where, Busche said, “we have the most salient narrative beats where we can tell the best stories” — and exploratory, self-directed environments.

Referencing her own playthroughs, Busche said, “There’s been several times where I’ve picked up a quest, I’ve tracked it, I’m off to Arlathan Forest, and along the way I’ll see Taash [Veilguard’s Qunari companion] there like, Hey, I thought we were going to meet up. I’ve been waiting for you. And next thing, I’m joining Taash, we’re on another adventure, and lo and behold, I come across a puzzle adjacent to this path that Taash has taken me on, and I end up doing something really satisfying and surprising.”

I felt that pull in my own time with the game, which was full of things I want to reexamine at a slower pace, to find more secrets and even sit and chill with (the moment that I reached over to urgently poke the friend playing next to me was when I found a stray cat, lying in a city street, that Rook could pet). Even in the six hours available to play, I ventured from a dark metropolis where mages ruled, to the dream realm of the Fade, to a lush forest marked by the fallout of a magical disaster, to a city of stylish assassins, to a repurposed undersea ruin, to an ancient fortress under siege.

Prior to the press event, if you’d asked me to describe Dragon Age’s core attributes, I probably would have called it a “low-magic fantasy setting.” I wouldn’t do that anymore. Dragon Age lore has always contained the idea that there are regions in the world where mages and magic are much less restricted than they are in the ones in which Origins, 2, and Inquisition were set. Veilguard takes players to those places for the first time, and the difference is immediately — understandably — noticeable.

Of course, new players won’t ping to that at all — especially not the ones who’ve spent the last year or so exploring, say, Faerûn. And though it’s difficult for me to put myself in the shoes of someone for whom Veilguard is their first Dragon Age game — to roll back the years I’ve spent marinating in the dank, red-yarn-crazy-board-strewn depths of Dragon Age lore — I think what I saw was a thrilling, and helpful, on-ramp.

For new players, I can tell you that after the prologue sequence shown off at Summer Game Fest, which does a great job of setting up the stakes, you’ll be tossed directly into a quest line that helpfully underscores all this information about ancient elven gods by linking it directly to a group of NPCs, their goals, and the new location you’re exploring. Veilguard continues Inquisition’s tradition of an exposition-collecting codex equipped with gorgeous tarot-inspired art, and (the first I think I’ve ever seen in a CRPG) a separate glossary for all those new fantasy-ass nouns you’ll be hearing.

For Dragon Age veterans, whose eyebrows might go up at merely the mention of Shartan, or Kal-Sharok, or the Executors, I can tell you (without spoilers!) that there’s lots to get excited about. With Rook, you’ll be able to find memories from Solas’ ancient past, and then sit down for a goss sesh with all your companions to pick through the latest dirty laundry of Dragon Age’s most controversial or beloved (beloversial?) frenemy. The dialogue wheel is once again labeled for your pick of heroic, sarcastic, or aggressive tone, like in Dragon Age 2. If your companions have new things to say, the lanterns outside their room in your headquarters will be illuminated, so you don’t have to check each one in turn and get really bored of their default dialogue. Party banter will pause and then resume if you trigger a cutscene or combat in the middle of it — no more screeching to a halt to make sure you don’t miss a good line.

Perhaps most devastatingly of all, BioWare has picked up one of the most powerful tools of its narrative game competitors: Alerting you immediately after an un-flagged dialogue choice that it was secretly, somehow, a significant one. Yes, Dragon Age has learned from “Clementine will remember this,” and now we’re all in trouble.

Nine years and 11 days ago, BioWare released Dragon Age: Inquisition’s final DLC, Trespasser, and pointed at the stands like Babe Ruth. As a dramatic score pounded, the Inquisitor literally stabbed a knife into a map of Tevinter, a country previously unseen in any Dragon Age game, and spelled out a specific setting, a specific antagonist, and even a specific set of characters to follow (i.e., brand-new ones) in the game’s sequel.

Over the intervening time, and following the many hurdles Veilguard vaulted to get here, I’d long ago released any expectations I had that the game’s plot would follow directly from that called shot. Out of kindness, if nothing else, it seemed too much to expect the creative folks behind the franchise to leash themselves so closely to Inquisition after so much time, turnover, and tribulation.

But I came out of my time with Veilguard nursing the miraculous-seeming hunch, “Mythal’enaste, I think those crazy fuckers might just have done it.” Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m right. Maybe I’ll turn out to be right, but only after the first-act rug pull. But either way, to my personal relief, I’m really looking forward to finding out.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard will be released Oct. 31 on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.

Disclosure: This article is based on a preview event held by publisher EA in Redwood City, California, on Sept. 5. EA provided Polygon’s travel and accommodations for the event. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.