Dragon Age: The Veilguard is my third-favorite game of the year, and I don't care who knows

GamesRPGDragon AgeDragon Age: The VeilguardDragon Age: The Veilguard is my third-favorite game of the year, and I don’t care who knowsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Bioware/Electronic Arts)

Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Personal Pick(Image credit: Future)In addition to our mainGame of the Year Awards 2024, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We’ll post new personal picks, alongside our main awards, throughout the rest of the month.

Personal Pick

(Image credit: Future)In addition to our mainGame of the Year Awards 2024, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We’ll post new personal picks, alongside our main awards, throughout the rest of the month.

(Image credit: Future)

GOTY 2024 Personal Picks

In addition to our mainGame of the Year Awards 2024, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We’ll post new personal picks, alongside our main awards, throughout the rest of the month.

I can’t remember a single game that has polarized the PC Gamer team as much as Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Even pre-launch, opinions were mixed, and now that it’s been out for some time, we’ve congealed into three camps: Anti-Veilguardites Robin and Fraser, Radical Veilguard Centrists Harvey and Lauren (who wrote our review), and The People’s Revolutionary Council of Revisionist Veilguard-Likers, which consists of Jody and yours truly.

Even as BioWare struggled with everything else during its wilderness years of the late 2010s, it’s only been getting better at making action-RPGs, and Veilguard is no exception. I love tactical RPGs, but that hasn’t been BioWare’s bag for a long time, and while I could take or leave some of the ways Veilguard smooths away the last remnants of CRPG-adjacent rough edges from Inquisition, a lot of the team’s decisions here were pretty inspired.

Veilguard definitely has a reverse difficulty curve, and its fights are starting to feel samey as I approach the 60-hour mark, but that’s an issue I’ve found with all of BioWare’s games to date, and the core of Veilguard’s combat and character building is fun enough to carry the day for me. I’m always a rogue first in Dragon Age, and here I opted for the classico dual swords edgelord “Duelist” specialization. The “Thousand Cuts” subclass-specific ability feels so good, I don’t mind that every fight consists of me building up enough Rogue Pointz™ to just start spamming it⁠—my qunari rogue adopts an “en garde, my liege” stance before launching into a flurry of AOE anime slashes, trailing poison with every strike.

(Image credit: Bioware/Electronic Arts)

Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Veilguard’s level design, meanwhile, is unambiguously BioWare’s most interesting and complex in over 20 years, at least since Neverwinter Nights in 2002. I’d seen Veilguard’s levels derisively compared to Overwatch maps, with simple layouts and pretty skyboxes, but that sells Veilguard short, and I think it’s in a whole other league compared to the Mass Effect games. Don’t get me wrong⁠, I love Mass Effect⁠, but its levels were exclusively linear shooting galleries with maybe a short side path or two to a weapon upgrade if you’re lucky, while its non-combat hubs were the tiniest Disneyland suggestions of real places.

The Veilguard’s levels are videogamey⁠—they don’t immerse me or feel like real places in the same way Elden Ring or Indiana Jones managed⁠—but they are also fun, twisty, and visually striking, with Metroidesque shortcuts and switchbacks, as well as enough hidden loot and secret areas that I felt genuinely rewarded for exploring both in missions and during free roam of the hubs. A word of advice though: I definitely recommend taking Fraser’s cue andtoning down Veilguard’s aggressively handholding objective markers. I went one step further, completely disabling both them and the minimap, and I haven’t regretted it once.

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But that’s just an annoyance, while the story being told is genuinely good fun. Thedas is definitely tamer, friendlier, and less politically fraught than it’s ever been⁠—I was more amused than annoyed that the infamous Antivan Crows assassin guild from games past is more or less a confederation of plucky, crime-flavored freedom fighters now⁠—but it stillfeelslike Thedas, and I didn’t realize how much I missed this setting until I dove back in.

Plucky archeologist Bellara, Grey Warden hardass Davrin, and friendly neighborhood necromancer Emmerich carry the cast for me. I was worried that Bellara would just be a worse version of Talli from Mass Effect or Merrill from Dragon Age 2, but after a poor first impression, I found her to be a winning, layered character with a great arc. Davrin brings a nice edge to the sword-and-board knight sort of guy, and I really dug how things played out between him and pet griffon Assan⁠—there’s a bit of a Lone Wolf and Cub, “step dad who stepped up” thing going on, and I found that much more fun and palatable as one aspect of one member of an ensemble as opposed to The Plot of Every Console Triple-A Game For A While. Emmerich, meanwhile, is just a nice guy, a sweetheart⁠—he reminds me most of Gale from Baldur’s Gate 3⁠—but the contrast of his chirpy attitude with his grimdark necromancer profession and aesthetics really charmed me.

(Image credit: BioWare, EA)

A mage casting a fire spell in Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

That’s development hell, and somehow, The Veilguard escaped it. With a backstory like that, you might expect the finished result to be a mess, a cross-section of competing visions and stratified eras of development that’s simply unfit for prime time.

But that’s not what we got at all. The Veilguard is a fun, well put-together, and engrossing action-RPG that’s had me hooked for 60 hours and counting. I know it’s a good RPG because I indulged in my favorite vice andrerolled my guy after 20 hoursto make aslightly different guy, and I didn’t mind experiencing the first act of the game again⁠—I even cranked the difficulty up to the “tough customers only” Nightmare setting to spice things up. BioWare actually managed todo the thingwith Veilguard despite all the factors working against it, and I’m proud to call Dragon Age: The Veilguard my third-favorite game of 2024.

TOPICSBiowareElectronic Arts

TOPICS

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After years of holding out hope, 2024 was the year I finally gave up on BioWareBioWare considered bringing the hero of Dragon Age: Origins back for Veilguard, but with a horrifying catch: ‘Do not let her see me like this’

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