4/5 ★ – DanteHR's review of Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Not being a fan of the legendary RPG studio that everyone was talking about in the past and that was rumored to have fallen into the dark void of complete disappointment. I decided to try their latest game from series that made them famous, namely "Dragon Age". The latest game in the series, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a game made for today's audience (namely children) so as not to create too much controversies, like Stellar Blade or Black Myth: Wukong.. However, the controversies started from nothing, the game being Gen Z and having a ton of dubious choices in the story, which appear in the most inappropriate moments.. that's probably the problem everyone was talking about, ah, yes, and the dialogue, which is mediocre, in the most honest way possible. Ever since the first reveal X years ago, when the game was still called Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, I've been meaning to play it at launch, here's this day, and I can't say that I'm the most satisfied with the experience I had in my playtrough. From the simple fact that the story is very mediocre from the very beginning. The game starts with a rather interesting creative character, where have I been very impressed with the hair physics, but other than that, I didn't have a lot of customization options.. Besides that, I had a ton of story-related classes and guilds to choose from, I was looking in wonder and reading without understanding anything, at one point I was overwhelmed by so much text and I decided to choose the guild that has the coolest costume. After the intro I talked about above, I started to delve deeper and deeper into the mechanics of the game. It's not something very complicated, it gave me a feeling of God of War 2018, but, of course, a bit cheaper.. Leaving the applause of other games, I want to talk about the combat in Dragon Age: The Veilguard (DA:TV). Very simplistic, at the beginning you only have a light and a heavy attack, compensated by a dodge, parry and a range attack (depends on the class). The game having 3 special classes: Mage, Rogue and Warrior, personally I chose Warrior, so I can't comment much much about the other classes. The variety of enemies is quite good and more unique than what I have seen in the other games in the series, the bosses gave me a similar vibe of what it would be like could have Hogwarts Legacy (a game I loved when it was first released). Being an RPG, skills could not be missing.. The skill tree consists of 3 categories, each skill tree is different between classes.. in my skill tree, I had the 3 main tabs of: Survival, Weapons and Abilities.. but the others were made up of: Champion, Reaper and Slayer. The observation I made is that, in DA:TV, it is very difficult to level up skills, it can take you whole hours just for 2-3 skill points, which makes the grind for a full skill tree, very hard. We have reached the graphics part, where it is clear that the game has its place in this generation.. First, I would like to talk a little about the performance of the game on PC. Bioware made the game in Frostbite engine, the newest graphic engine they have. For my PC tests, I used a system with an RTX 4070 TI, a processor from Intel i7 13700KF and 32GB of RAM of a frequency of 3200 mhz. I also ran the game on Windows 10 64-bit with the latest nVidia drivers installed. Right from the start, I noticed that Bioware decided to go all in with the options on PC, having a TON of options for graphic calibration of textures. The game also supports Ray Tracing + main upscaling.. nVidia DLSS 3.5, AMD FSR 3.0, Intel XeSS, + special upscaling Special PSSR for PS5 Pro. I have a lot of respect for the developers because they decided to offer us such good and easy-to-use settings, they explain in detail what each one does setting and shows you in real time what that setting changes, downright amazing, if you ask me. The performance I had on that system is very good, with preset to Ultra in 2K and with DLSS 3.5 on quality, I had somewhere around 85-88 frames per second all the time, RAR dropped to 80 in certain crowded areas. As for the graphics itself, there is one of the most beautiful games I've seen lately, and I can praise the hair physics all day long, I haven't seen such good physics in the games made by Capcom either.. congratulations Bioware for all the good work they managed to do. The artstyle is also very good, it reminded me again of Hogwarts Legacy, where everything looked so magical and beautiful, like in a fantastic series from the 2000s. When it comes to the sound, I was mostly satisfied, I didn't encounter any problems with the soundtrack, even from the very beginning it seemed to me that it was of a very high quality. Sometimes, I encountered a delay in the sound.. but this happened only in cutscenes (where the sound has the biggest role), however, with a small restart, the game returned to normal and I could enjoy my playtrough in peace. As for the music, I'm not the biggest Hans Zimmer fan, it's of a very high quality, I can't comment on anything, but personally, I don't feel anything especially when I hear the composer's music, especially in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. It's not the same as in Granblue Fantasy: Relink or Final Fantasy XVI, where the music stays in your mind, even if it's just an instrumental. The story of Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the only reason why I didn't want to finish this game, even though I already did. It felt so cheap and forgettable that I started to skip it most cutscenes just to gain more gameplay time. In DA:TV, the story takes place 10 years after Dragon Age: Inquisition, this time, in the role of Rook. Being the 4th game of series, Bioware himself said that it is a perfect game even for newcomers (like me). However, it is necessary to know certain characters from the previous games of the series. Namely Morrigan, Varric and Solas, one of the most important characters in the game, from whom absolutely everything started. Our goal is to stop Solas (who is actually Fen-Harel, the Elven God of Betrayal or with the other name, Dreadwolf). Succeeding in stopping his ritual, the story gets complicated, we find out that Solas had not meant to do harm and that he was just keeping the other 2 gods in check, but after we destroyed his ritual, those 2 gods managed to make a place in the world of DA:TV. I leave it to you to discover the story in its entirety, although it becomes very boring along the way, not only because of the dialogue, but also because of the plot very predictable. I've reached the climax, namely the last babblings you hear from me in this deplorable review. I can only say that.. the game failed to reach my expectations at all, I was mostly disappointed, but not entirely.. the optimization and the combat managed to keep me engaged for several tens of hours, but I don't see it as a game that I would like to finish completely.. especially with games like Indiana Jones and The Great Circle or S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2, where I see all the time I spend in them. Mostly, I only recommend the game to people who don't even want to hear about it the story, the combat and the huge skill tree can keep you hooked for hours, but I definitely don't see it as a Full Price game. 8/10 Made by DanteHR