You can tell thatDragon Age: The Veilguardstarted off as a live service game. ThenAnthemhappened andEAswiftly realised it needed to pivot the game back to the single-player fantasy RPG players were expecting. This shift was pretty successful, but as I made my way through the campaign, many of its online foundations became clear.
The Veilguard’s narrative is largely linear, and instead of letting you explore a world split into a variety of regions likeInquisition, it throws you into relatively straightforward missions and small hubs that are all designed to either progress the narrative or facilitate certain quests. There isn’t a lot of freedom even if you can hop between different locations at will to buy new bits of gear and equipment from merchants, or casually vibe in places that don’t have much to say. Instead, you fill in the gaps with lore entries and dialogue, which keeps on reminding me of vanillaDestiny.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard And Destiny Are The Strangest Of Bedfellows
When Bungie’s live service loot shooter first launched, it was a mess. The gunplay was good, and it sold millions of copies thanks to anticipation alone, but the campaign was just a couple of hours long, while there was nothing worthwhile in the endgame except to grind for new loot or wait for a raid that, while spectacular in its own right, didn’t justify the steep asking price.
The original story for Destiny was seemingly ripped out of it before release, and so Bungie tried to do everything it could to try and tell a tale people cared about.
As a report fromKotakuwould unveil months later, prior to launch, Destiny was pulled apart and rebuilt into a shadow of what Bungie hoped it would be. The narrative was neutered so much that the finished product made no sense, and the majority of gameplay amounted to activating a computer with your Peter Dinklage robot and defending it from the same boring enemies over and over again. But as you explored the likes of the Cosmodrome and explore new challenges, lore will be dumped on you in the form of Grimoire Cards.
You couldn’t read these tidbits in-game though. For some godforsaken reason, they were all offloaded into a mobile app to try and push Destiny’s second screen experience like a lot of triple-A games did at the time. Little of the storytelling made sense, and to parse it you had to go out of your way to install an app and read about everything there. And then itstilldidn’t make much sense, and years later the series remains loaded with too many proper nouns.
Yet this strategy was an early sign of how live service shooters and similar titles would try to blend narrative into the experience, long beforeFortnitewould debut live events to bridge its seasons together. Bungie was trying to innovate, but in turn only managed to frustrate when the game all of this information was intended for was mediocre. Over the years, it has grown into something worthwhile, but it’s hard to ignore its otherwise troubled beginnings.
In Another Life, Dragon Age: The Veilguard Would Have Been A Live Service
As I take my Rook through the many biomes of Thedas, I keep being brought back to my time with Destiny. Every other room you enter has a note waiting in the corner that adds fresh information for your codex, or features just a handful of lines designed to offer more context for where you currently are or the people who once existed here. It would be great world building if this wasn’t a BioWare game where I expected the world around me to feel more alive. Many of them feel like refashioned hubs for online play that doesn’t exist.
Combat arenas resemble multiplayer maps that loop around each other, while some of the cities I’ve explored so far have a handful of NPCs and quest givers to interact with, but so many of them serve a purpose that feels more suited to a multiplayer hub occupied by an entire server of players rather than a single adventurer. I have no desire to sit around the locations I visit in The Veilguard listening out for stories or trying to make myself belong, as each one is built with a specific mechanical purpose in mind that is ultimately fleeting.
The puzzles too, which so far amount to little more than building bridges and redirecting reflections to open the way forward, feel like they should be more substantial, but Dragon Age positions them as filler between each combat encounter. The ways BioWare has taken its original vision for The Veilguard, one we will likely never see for ourselves, and tried to turn it into a single-player experience is admirable, even if the cracks show in more places than anticipated.
Even when exploring The Lighthouse, a companion’s home amidst The Fade, it feels like it once served a greater purpose with its winding designs and optional puzzles. Perhaps it was an instanced hub where you would advance your own stories away from other players, a place where you could customise your character and optimise gear in a similar fashion to The Tower from Destiny.
The Veilguard is quite a strange and fascinating game to play through because of the evolution it went through during development, and midway through production shifted towards the games we wanted to see from BioWare, rather than shareholders chasing an ill-advised trend.
But Unlike Destiny, The Veilguard Won’t Have A Chance To Grow
BioWare has confirmed that The Veilguard will not be receiving any future expansions or downloadable content, with the studio now focusing all of its attention on Mass Effect. It’s unfortunate, even if the game is likely to still receive small quality of life updates in the future.
I know it isn’t a live-service game, but so many of its components feel inspired by the online world and gameplay design that part of me feels like updates and refinements are all in production, and this isn’t the lukewarm RPG we’ll be stuck with. But much like Destiny in its infancy, I can’t help having a soft spot for it.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
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Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the long-awaited fourth game in the fantasy RPG series from BioWare formerly known as Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. A direct sequel to Inquisition, it focuses on red lyrium and Solas, the aforementioned Dread Wolf.
