WithDragon Age: The Veilguard,BioWare’s fantasy series is continuing a trend that sets it apart from nearly every other series in gaming. Every time a newDragon Agegame comes out, it’s extremely different from the one that came before.
Veilguard is no exception. Thelast game was an open-world RPGwith a bunch of mindless side activities. This one is mission-based and significantly more streamlined than any other game in the series. The previous games emphasized group tactics. This one is more focused on individualized action. The previous games had muted colors and realistic graphics. This one leans into saturation, expressive lighting, and more stylized visuals.
I think this point is, generally, overblown. Veilguard’s graphics areslightlystylized.
And if you went back and looked at Inquisition, you could find as many points that differentiated it from2, and could repeat the exercise with 2 andOrigins. In that way, Dragon Age is a whole lot likeSerious Sam.
No, Really, I’m Serious
But first — since I didn’t know much about Serious Sam before 2020 and I suspect most people couldn’t pick the wise-cracking FPS hero out of a lineup — a brief introduction. Serious Sam is one of those long-running series that keeps chugging away behind the scenes without attracting much mainstream notice. The thing you need to know about Sam is that he fights way more monsters than any other shooter hero. If Doom is combat chess, Serious Sam is combat Pandemic, in that if you take your eyes off the game for a second, you’ll find yourself overrun.
Every Serious Sam game is about the same thing: shooting more enemies than you thought was possible to jam on one screen. The games aren’t always great and the levels aren’t always especially varied, but they manage to capture a feeling that’s pretty unique in the shooter space. The only other games attempting to do a similar thing are musou titles likeDynasty Warriors.
I went back and played through the mainline games in the series in anticipation for Serious Sam 4, and was shocked by the extent to which each new game has a new tone and aesthetic than the ones that came before. Though the games all stay true to this core horde-slaying loop, each mainline entry has an entirely different art style from the one that came before it.
First Encounter and Second Encounter came out in 2001 and 2002, and they look a lot like the shooters that dominated the end of the ’90s, with the rigid lines and flat textures you expect from games like the originalHalf-Lifeand Unreal Tournament.
Those games are two halves of a whole, and were combined the next year with Serious Sam: Gold Edition.
Serious Sam 2 feels like a hard reboot, with cartoony graphics, exaggerated character designs, and over-the-top humor. It reminds me of the ugly (I use that word affectionately) CGI animated shows from the early ’00s, stuff like Butt-Ugly Martians, Cubix, Code Lyoko, and The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius.
Serious Sam 3 was an equally hard swerve in the opposite direction. It launched in 2011, at the heart of the military shooter era, and it looks like it, tasking Sam with navigating realistic-looking, desaturated, bombed-out Middle Eastern locales. Serious Sam 4 attempts to synthesize all of these vibes, and lands on something that looks and plays like a fusion of The First Encounter and 3.
A New Look For A New (Dragon) Age
After playing the first eight hours of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, I’m realizing that BioWare has done the same thing. Though every DA is a character-driven RPG with a recurring cast, they change in basically every other way. Dragon Age: Origins was a traditional RPG, not unlike the games BioWare was making a few years earlier, like Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire. It wasn’t open-world, and instead had you traveling between towns on an overworld map. The combat (on PC, at least) was real-time with pause, like the classic CRPGs.
Dragon Age 2 traded out real-time with pauses in favor of straight action combat. Instead of following characters over the course of a short period of time in a variety of locations, DA2 zeroed in on one location, Kirkwall, and followed protagonist Hawke’s adventures there over the course of several years. And, as we know, Inquisition went open-world, while The Veilguard has returned to a mission-based format.
No game in this series really prepares you for any other game in the series. I’ve tried to think of analogues, and I’m coming up empty. Minecraft, kind of? But Story Mode, Dungeons, Earth, and Legends are all spin-offs, not sequels. BioShock, maybe? But, the gameplay doesn’t changethat muchfrom entry to entry and the vibe is always similar, even if the setting is different. Serious Sam is the only other one I can think of. Congratulations, Dragon Age. You’re in, uh, weird company.
