Videogame Review: Dragon Age: The Veilguard

The long-awaited fourth installment of the Dragon Age series from Bioware—does it match up to the legacy?

You gotta have dragons, right? It's there, in the title.

What makes a Dragon Age game a Dragon Age game? Is it the mechanics? The plot? The worldbuilding? The characters? Something else entirely?

For me, it's the characters and their relationships, as well as the joy that comes from the branching web of plot decisions and ramifications, that show you a world in which your choices have meaningful consequences for the world, the people around you, and your relationships with those who inhabit it. It's what draws me in, makes me love all three (and a half?) previous iterations of the franchise, and had me so frothingly excited about this one I booked annual leave for launch day and the start of the week after so I could play more hours per day than is healthy for a person (it was great). It's what drives me to have logged around a thousand hours of play time across the series to date, and with no expectation that this number won't grow in the future.

Which isn't to say there aren't issues with each of the previous games, of course. And one of the interesting things about Veilguard is how evidently Bioware has put in the effort to resolve them this time. So I'll start my review there.

Charitably, I might describe the mechanics of Dragon Age: Origins as… clunky. Underdeveloped. More honestly—janky af. It's imperfectly attempting to recreate some of the D&D experience in a video game, and at a time when the tech was not exactly making the job an easy one. We—or at least I—forgive it because it makes up for it with excellent characters, some banger bits of dialogue, an introduction to an enjoyable fantasy world, plenty of lore to dig into, and some very interesting plot moments where the player has the opportunity to impact the direction the world and plot takes… if they do things right. But good lord is the actual gameplay a mess. Do not get me started on the inventory system.

Dragon Age 2 attempted so simplify and pare down a lot of that clunk (to reasonable success) and developed its skill trees into something actually functional. It was not exactly focussed on getting the player that involved in the nitty gritty of fighting, but it had some really cool, stylistic animations of your various characters giving the baddies what for, with occasional big dramatic moments that made your Hawke feel like a badass.

Dragon Age: Inquisition made the big jump into having you actually… doing the combat, rather than clicking to select the enemy and the skill you wanted to use on them. I actually had to get close enough and wave my sword right to hit the guy? Madness! Another marked improvement on the previous games, and with yet again a more developed, more interesting skill tree alongside it, where the choices you make in building what your companions can do feel like they actually have an impact on gameplay.

All the info you need is right at your fingertips on the tab screen in combat; it's easy to be fully involved in what's going on.

Veilguard then feels like the natural development of this thread—moving away from point-and-click D&D simulation into a fully bedded-in action game. I am choosing, moment by moment, what my character is doing and to whom and how. I block, I duck and roll, I parry, I shield. My involvement in the combat is down to me and my timing, my choices, and so feels… well, like I'm actually involved. And when you add in combos with your teammates—also very easy to achieve and clearly signalled in the combat screen—it just gets even better. There's a bit of a learning curve at the start as you get used to it, especially the timings for blocking, ducking and shielding, but the game does tutorial you in pretty well, and it is absolutely delightful the first time you manage to employ the perfect timing with a shield-block and are rewarded by absolutely twatting the opponent in the face. I am utterly, completely convinced that as a pure gameplay experience, Veilguard is hands down the best game in the series and just genuinely, actually fun to simply… play.

It also does a great job in differentiating the character classes by feel. My initial run was as a warrior, which felt suitably tanky, while still being able to dish out damage. Returning as a rogue, whose special attacks rely on the building of momentum (which is lost if you allow yourself to get hit) rather than a warrior's rage, changes how you react to combat. Suddenly, the dodge button is my best friend, rather than the parry. Then again into mage, where I can throw up a barrier and then go long range with staff attacks that really knock the enemy's socks off, but I'm constrained by my mana pool and refill rate. What we don't see is the full differentiation within the subclasses—Inquisition had you choose if you would be sword and shield vs two-hander warrior, for instance. What we get instead is the ability to switch between the two subclasses at any point, even in combat. For warriors, that's hitting X to pull out your two-hander. For mages, dotting between the two-handed staff and the ability to barrier, vs. orb and dagger which allows close combat, stabbing and parrying, at the cost of no shield. For rogues, there's no explicit switch-between at all—at any point, you can right-click and start shooting with your bow, while your default dual-wielding weapons remain in play for close combat. You can optimise your build for the subclass you find yourself most wanting to play, but the flexibility remains at the touch of a button. There's a learning curve to each class that comes with how truly distinct they feel, but once you get into the groove, each one does feel genuinely worthwhile—and enormously fun—to play.

However. As I said above, this is not why I play Dragon Age games. It's great, don't get me wrong, and I hope future installments keep and develop this, because it is extremely well done and satisfying. Moment by moment, there was none of the frustration because I just didn't have the control to win a fight I was involved in, or that combat was just feeling repetitive and dull. I applaud it. But… it's nothing more than a nice bonus to me. The meat of my interest was always going to be elsewhere, in the plot and the characters. Which is where I found things getting a little unstuck.

Which is weird, because a lot of the promo going into Veilguard talked about how they knew fans wanted character focus, so that was going to be where they put their efforts, and they visibly have done that. It just hasn't quite achieved what I, at least, want out of it. To boil it down to fundamentals, Veilguard just feels safe in a way that none of the others have. While the setting and story may be extremely dark, the characters and their interactions, both with each other and with Rook, the protagonist, just lack bite. I don't necessarily even mean conflict, though that could work too. There's just quite a sameness and a safeness to how they all interact, that ignores the vast range of positions and opinions on the core topics of the game that we've seen throughout the previous iterations.

Which also manages to deny the difficulty inherent in some of the factions at play within the story. One of the companions you recruit is a member of the Antivan Crows. This was, I know, something a lot of fans were hoping for, and harks back to Zevran in Origins. But the thing is, Zevran's story is one full of conflict—his position within the Crows is a fraught one, and one that has left lasting and unpleasant marks on him that he details in conversations with the Warden. The Crows are absolutely not an uncontroversial good, in that story, or his story. Which… of course they're not! They're a band of assassins for hire. They literally kill people for a job. Of course they're going to be morally complex at best.

So why then, in Veilguard, are they uncontroversial good guy patriots protecting Treviso, and we're just… not going to examine anything else about them, or about Lucanis (the companion from that faction)'s position within them?

Just some good ol' fashioned patriots, no murders here no sir.

What's extra strange is that we do get this introspection a little bit, but directed only at the Grey Wardens, who took a big hit on the "doing dark shenanigans" front in Inquisition, so that doesn't feel like treading new ground. But it means they were thinking about it, at least to an extent; they just never felt the need to turn that lens onto the Crows. Huh.

And it's that kind of lack of thoughtfulness that makes the game really suffer. Everyone gets along, more or less (I'm not saying there's zero conflict, because that patently isn't true, but it never rises to the levels we've seen in any of the previous games), and no one really critiques the position other people come from, or their background, or engages with any of the longstanding, baked-in societal difficulties that we've seen portrayed in the world so far. For a game that very much centres the elves, their stories and their histories, Veilguard is very light on talking about the impacts the events of the game will have on elves throughout Thedas. There are a couple of specific bits of dialogue (one of which you only get in the literal final mission) that touch on it, but it's not core to the story, when it really really should be to give us that feeling of a real, complex world that has been a key part of the series up to now. This is not a game that could encompass, for instance, a Vivienne or a Sera, two characters whose positions within their factions and peoples in Inquistion are fonts of discussion, argument and interest. There's no Merrill, with a complex view of blood magic that runs contrary to the dominant game view. There's no Alistair or Cullen to give us an insight into a Templar viewpoint. There's barely any Templar involvement at all. Without characters occupying fraught or complex positions, or a voice speaking from the other side of the divide, we end up with fairly unknown and unconsidered bad guys (why are the Venatori up to what they're up to? We never really get to know), and a coherence of vibe from the companions that feels a bit weird at times. Yes, we're all saving the world, but so were we in Origins, and that never stopped Morrigan from bullying Alistair, did it?

To add to this, on the one hand, we get way more party banter than in previous games, and they've added a device where, in the central home hub, you sometimes go into rooms and just find two companions chatting, which is great. And yet… for how long of a game this is, it feels like you don't get proportionally as much romance content as the previous games have given, which is one of the core USPs that Bioware have always had. We jest that it's a dating sim with a fantasy RPG in the background, but… well. Personally, I have always enjoyed the romance content because it adds yet another layer to those deep characterisations. It's part of making these people seem whole and real. And when that gets skimped on? It adds to the same feeling that their lack of bite feeds into.

In other gripes, the early game dialogue is rough, as frankly is the early game plot. You can see the shape of a slightly different game, one with some sort of prologue that has been skipped over now, and so they have to funnel new players quickly into the fun, main bit with enough info to get them invested, while also keeping hold of old players who know all the lore. They have not managed it well. But that evens out once you get into the main substance of things.

There are also times when the whole thing feels a little too linear, a bit too trammelled into the singular shape of the story they want to tell, without the semblance of broad-reaching options that the other games have managed to convey.

But… for all that… there are some moments, some choices, that really do hit and hit good. One of them came out of absolutely nowhere for me and left me fully shooketh, and remains one of the emotional highpoints of my playing experience. The game tells you early that the choices you will make matter, and on the whole, when those choices come up, they very much do. I would, of course, always love more of them, but I'm aware this is a sticking point for many games just in terms of hours of time and dollars of money that go into every branch they make. Where Veilguard does it, I think they do it right.

They also give us some really solid lore drops that are of a great deal of interest to anyone who's played the previous games and is into that sort of thing, things that make you go "OOHHHHHHH" about things previously hinted, or overturn things you thought you knew, sometimes in really fun ways. Unfortunately, there are issues with it as well, generally, more about what's missing than what we see. This is a story that really does centre a bunch of elven stuff, and I would have liked to see more of… well, literally anything else in the world. The chantry and chantry opinion and politics barely figure, even though we touch on a number of really quite important religious issues. For the die-hard elf fans, there is bounty. For the rest of us… a bit of famine. It also, in this elven-centricity, stumbles a little bit into… and here it is hard to critique without treading too close to spoilers… I suppose into the issue of wanting to make things too simple. Too many questions boil down to the same answer, where a multiplicity was one of the things that has long made this a world worth playing in.

Also, for all the people with deeply held opinions about the character creator, long hair and clipping? They got you covered. Like, so much. Also body sliders, which I am quite pleased to see.

I do also have to come back to the point that… it's just gorgeous. They've gone back to DA2-style "strong, coherent visual design" and it works, but expanded out further and with better graphics and more time spent on the game to back it up. I mean, look at this shot from Arlathan and tell me it's not pretty:

Or not enjoy how atmospheric and utterly committed to the bit the Necropolis is:

Or appreciate the atmosphere of a blighted wasteland, full of relics of the past:

So all in all… it's rather a mixed bag.

On the whole, I enjoyed playing it. I had a great time, moment to moment, dedicated some days to an intense amount of gaming, gasped, laughed and felt sad at various appropriate moments, and just generally got into the spirit of things. But there was, when I looked back across it all, and especially when I compared it with the games that had come before, some little spark missing that made it truly magical. What I keep coming back to, more than anything, is that there is no single moment in Veilguard that comes even mildly close to doing what In Your Heart Shall Burn did in Inquisition—i.e. permanently rewrite my brain chemistry and steamroller me on an emotional level. I will never recover from that quest, and I thank Bioware for it. Veilguard… just could never. For all the fixes, for all the improvements, for all the better mechanics, better systems, better graphics, better character creator, they have failed to fully preserve the spirit of the previous games, the thing that made me love them beyond sense and measure. And it's hard not to be sad about that, even when what I've got is still, objectively, a good game.

Nonetheless… I am currently working on both my second and third playthroughs, which is not nothing.

If you're a die-hard Dragon Age fan or a complete newbie, I still think Veilguard is a game worth playing, for all the things it has done well. I hope it succeeds, and I hope the studio can continue to make games set in Thedas, taking on all the improvements they've made here, but one day maybe recapturing that little special something that just hasn't quite made it through here.

The Math

Highlights: absolutely gorgeous graphics, genuinely enjoyable mechanics, lore drops that really dig into some of the background questions fans have been pondering for years.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

First Contact Project: Mass Effect Andromeda

The unfairly maligned fourth installation in a much beloved series.

My love of the Bioware game is... not a small one. We shall not dwell on the number of hours I have played in the Dragon Age franchise, mainly because it's threatening to include the word "thousand" and that would be... well it would be something. But that and Mass Effect are my comfort games. They got me through furlough and lockdown with a modicum of sanity retained, and they just hold a very deep, dear place in my heart.

But somehow, I have never played Mass Effect: Andromeda. Well, I say somehow. Until approximately mid-March, the reason for that was clear - I had never had a machine capable of running it. And so, naturally, the first thing I did once I acquired one was to download it with a swiftness hitherto unwitnessed in the realms of man. But I was cautious. You see, I've heard things about Andromeda (hereafter ME:A because typing is effort). Not... good things. It is the awkward ginger stepchild of the franchise, at the bottom of every ranking, beloved of none, though I had never seen a clear reason why. It was just not as beloved, and so I went in concerned that it simply could not live up to the legacy of the previous games.

In my opinion, not only did it do so, but it bested them. It is, without a doubt, for me, the best Mass Effect game in existence, and there exists clear water in between it and the rest.

But I'm going to come back to that. I want instead to examine first why I think it is not beloved, why I think it is unfairly maligned, and what that says about the franchise and the fandom more broadly, and perhaps why coming to it at a number of years removed might have helped my appreciation of it.

Simply put, I think the problem is that it's not a game about Commander Shepard. Maybe that's too simplistic, but it makes sense. For the whole of the original trilogy, you play as this legendary, badass hero, as she* becomes even more legendary and badass, you see her through a galaxy-wide crisis, through death and beyond, as she holds in the balance the future of every analogue and digital life form in the Milky Way. She is the soul and centre of the trilogy, no matter how compelling are her companions, and so the game is her. Can Mass Effect be Mass Effect without Shepard? Maybe for a lot of the fandom the answer to that was a resounding "no". It doesn't matter that the ending(s) of the original trilogy leave us in a place where creating a genuine sequel story would be nigh on impossible, with some incredibly complicated and wide-reaching world-state variations to try to account for. The heart wants what the heart wants, and if that was more Shepard badassing about the galaxy saving worlds and cutting through red tape, then anything else won't do, no matter what logic tells you.

And I think this is a deeply unfair expectation for ME:A to come in to. It can be understandable and unfair at the same time. It is what it is.

They went in knowing they couldn't fit something in to follow on from that trilogy, so they didn't try. They decided to wipe the slate entirely fresh - literally move to a new galaxy - and leave their connection point to the existing story where things still weren't resolved. We still have connections, snippets of links to known places, people and things, but those connections are trailing into the past, and we enter a fresh gamestate, in a fresh setting, unfettered by the player's previous decisions. It's the best they could have realistically done with the corner they had painted themselves into, and I think it's a shame that player reception didn't accept that.

But it didn't, so here we are. It meant I went in with extremely low expectations, which were met, exceeded and then fully blown out of the water. Why? Because this was a game that, for me, totally got what Mass Effect could be good at, and leaned into it, while making the best use of the updated game mechanics and system design that wasn't around when the first game came into being. It adapted the heart of the feeling of the first game - the exploration, the relationships, the badassery, the building up of a legend of a person, and made it fresh. How could I not love that?

 That being said, the game it most reminds me of is Dragon Age: Inquistion. And I mean, it's Bioware, right? They're all paddling in the same pool. But it's a Mass Effect story in a map/quest/structure environment that feels so similar to what Inquisition does with its multi-area stuff, its camp exploration, and its supplementary off-screen missions that get you tangible rewards. And I love that. I think it's a game shape that really works, so why wouldn't they do it? They both have the same problem - there's a point when you're about half way through the game where you have a lot of open quests and no real drive to pick any single one over another - but on the whole, they both work really well as a vehicle for telling good stories. Not just a single story, though of course there's one that takes priority, but a bunch of interlocking stories, about different people, different cultures and different places, and put you in a position to steer those stories in the direction you want, and to fit an overarching theme on top of it, as well as giving a lot of space for additional personal storytelling.

There's so much space in the Andromeda galaxy in the game to imagine stories. There's so much potential. That's what the world after Mass Effect 3 no longer had, and that's what it needed. All of this untapped narrative potentiality for players to map their thoughts onto, and characters to fill it with and move around. Characters that felt deep and real.

I personally did not like Mass Effect 2 (because I did not want to be on team Bad Guy), but it is an incredibly character-focussed game. Your companions have depth, and have their own stories that you are a part of, but not the whole of. You help them, you may steer their decisions, but you are not their world, mostly. It's the standout part of ME2, for me. And Andromeda gets this, and gives it in spades. They still have the loyalty mission mechanic (good, yes, correct), and if anything have expanded it, so each companion quest is a big, multi-step affair. You spend real time with these people, learning who they are and what they care about, and it is wonderful.

And, of course, you can romance some of them. Unlike the recently-released Baldur's Gate 3 (and previous Bioware release Dragon Age 2), Mass Effect: Andromeda does not let you romance indiscriminately - all of your romanceable companions have their own sexuality and preferences, and not all of them will line up with who you are. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I do think it makes characters more diverse and well-rounded if they represent a variety of different sexualities - it forms a part of who they are, and if it is integrated into their story, all the better. But on the other hand... there's always such a small cast. You functionally limit people quite severely by doing this. If someone is playing say... a gay man, and you have only two male characters who are receptive to male advances (in this case, one pan, one gay)... well, that player has to hope he likes one of them. I got some veeeryyyy awkward dialogue when my female protagonist hit on the male engineer, let me tell you. It's a tricky balance to find, and for me, I think the Andromeda cast is just that little bit too small to pull it off well. You want to give players options. Full pansexual chaos gives you those options. Luckily, at least for me, there were characters I liked well enough and who were willing to date a woman, so it worked out. But that won't be true for everyone. 

The romance is also... a little on the weak side. There's just not a huge amount of content to it, outside of romance specific missions and a few snippets of dialogue here and there, which feels like something of a shame, given how characterful the rest of the story and missions are.

But it's a small price to pay. The story, for the most part, really does work, and there are some genuinely dramatic and moving moments throughout. The key antagonists of the story are worked in pretty early and pretty well, and the way they fit into the wider story of the world makes really good sense. There's also a strong thread of alliance-building throughout, which I really appreciated - there's a lot of options to be respectful and collegiate with the existing inhabitants of Andromeda, and to defer to them on matters of leadership and who gets to go where. Does it entirely erase the colonial vibes of the premise? Well... no. But neither does it go full bore space empire, which I quite appreciate. Baby steps, I guess.

It is something of a shift away from the previous Mass Effect games that your character has a lot more options to start both as a rule follower and as being diplomatic in the face of conflict. Even the upper left bluest of Shepards is something of a maverick (derogatory) in that regard, and I appreciate being given the option to at least try solving problems without shooting someone in the face. It's a shooter game, so it's going to come to that eventually, but it's nice to be able to say you did your best first, y'know?

I don't want to bog this review down too much with nitty gritty, but I do also think that this is the mechanically smoothest of the Mass Effect games, which again, I appreciate. I felt much more at home in skill selection and utilisation than I have in any of the others, even if the tutorial stuff at the start didn't entirely bring me up to speed on everything. It's slightly annoying that you can only use three abilities in any given fight, rather than the slightly bigger number I'd have expected, but once you get used to it - and with how well some of them combo - it works really well, and they do their best to make it easy to switch out between the abilities between fights, and create specific builds for specific purposes that you can port in. Unlike previous games, you have complete free licence to select abilities from any of the different skill trees, though you do benefit from concentration in allowing you to get to higher level options sooner, and with levelling up of certain skillsets. They're managed a good balance between simplicity, functionality and badassery, and once you get going, it feels really good.

Also you have a jet pack. The jetpack is great.

Is it a perfect game? Of course not. I'd have liked more character dialogue between each other, I think the pacing could have been better (though some of that was down to my own playstyle), and I think the difficulty scaling towards the end of the game isn't... great. The last couple of fights were epic in story scale, but surprisingly easy for my very high level party, in a way that made them less satisfying than they could have been. I ideally want to just scrape through the final boss fight, or maybe die once and then triumph on the second go. If I'm breezing straight through it... well, it's not my superlative skill at videogaming, let me tell you.

But honestly? I don't care. I had an absolutely great time with it, packed in 83 hours of play time for a relatively completionist run, fell in love with several characters, hated at least one location with the burning fire of my heart, jetpacked and biotic-zoomed my way across the maps with gleeful abandon and fully just felt like I was playing a Mass Effect game again. Also Jaal is an absolute sweetheart and Indira Varma voices two - two! - characters. What more could I want?

So did coming in later to this game help in my enjoyment of it? I expect it did. Tempers had long since cooled, and the grumbling was sufficiently distant that I had forgotten the substance of most of it, only the vibe, which was much easier dispelled by a fun playing experience. But truly, I cannot imagine not loving this game, even had I played it the year it came out. It does too many things I love, has too many characters in it who work well together, has such a smoother set of mechanics... I simply cannot see that the lack of a Shepard, the lack of further closure on that story, would manage to hold me back from falling for it. It's a good game that deserved better. 

*I played as FemShep throughout, and assigning her any pronouns but these sounds weird to me.

--

The Math

Highlights: genuinely excellent characters with great interpersonal dynamics, 

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Microreview [video game]: Anthem by Bioware (developer)

Out of Tune

Anthem is a mess. There's no nicer way of putting it. I can't recommend it in any form today. The good(?) news is that it's essentially unfinished but it's a part of EA's games-as-a-service strategy. Like so many other games-as-a-service shlooters (that's loot-shooters, games like Destiny and The Division), it's being patched frequently with new features, quality of life improvements, and bug fixes. The outstanding questions are can they fix this game post-release and do they have the will to keep working on this game?

You play as a freelancer, someone who has a Iron Man-esque suit of armor and a partner to guide you through your contract missions. Beyond the usual wildlife threatening Fort Tarsis, an enemy nation is seeking to take control of the "anthem of creation", the source of all life. You have to stop them and confront the deadly events that lead to the downfall of the freelancers.

This is a wild oversimplification of an overly-complex plot. In Bioware fashion, they've crafted a world and breathed life into it but this may be one of the clumsiest introductions they've ever done. This is, above all, an action game and you are thrust into the action first. All of the shapers, relics, anthem of creation, javelins, and other such periphery is either spouted by non-player characters that stand around in the hub world between missions or, more frequently, dumped into an in-game encyclopedia for you to read at your leisure. It's all fluff but it makes the missions you go on really nonsensical. They throw all the lore and technobabble at you while you're elbow deep in enemies and none of it informs your actions. It can all be ignored so you can safely enjoy the action game without thought. It's really odd that Bioware, a company that built a reputation on its writing and characters, has made an action game that doesn't need any of that.

The game itself is serviceable at the very best. The open word is big and you get to fly around it like Iron Man and that's pretty cool. But the shooting doesn't feel particularly great and the world itself would be extremely difficult to navigate if it weren't for the objective markers. It all really looks the same. The missions themselves aren't that different from other shlooters, but they lack flavor. I know when I land at an objective, I'm going to defend a spot, look for slightly hidden items, or just kill a few waves of enemies. There's a distinct lack of compelling antagonists, so everything feels less like heroism and more like routine pest control. All of this is preceded and proceeded by terribly long load times. The load times so long that you can put down your controller and play with your phone for a minute.

Alright so there's no flavor in the gameplay and the game world is both incomprehensible and utterly optional, but the game is also plagued with bugs. When I started this game (on Xbox One, on retail release day) I spent the whole series of opening cutscenes staring not at what was happening but at a tiny aiming reticle and a HUD compass that were obviously misplaced. The day after, I couldn't login for a couple hours because they pushed out a patch that made it appear to many people as if they were banned from the game. That was fun to sort out on my own. Throughout the game, in the opening mission that was strictly single player and in routine coop multiplayer, I've experienced a lot of movement stuttering and rollback because the networking code can't keep up with the action. I've started missions to find I've been added to someone else's mission in progress, so I don't even get a chance to listen to the briefing dialog, and the game is very aggressive about not letting anyone stray too far from the group. Fall behind for any reason (like picking up collectables or harvesting crafting materials) and it'll give you 10 seconds to catch up before warping you to where everyone else is. I've even been dumped out to the start screen from the single player hub world for no obvious reason.

I've finished Anthem's main mission branch and I don't feel like I need to see much more for the purpose of this review. Anthem, at best, is a functioning video game and too frequently it isn't. Other shlooters have improved over time, and sometimes made radical changes to address problems. I don't know if Bioware can turn this game around. They've communicated a roadmap that extends to May and beyond but it's all new missions, items, and features to be added. Recall that Mass Effect: Andromeda also released in a disaster state with a slate of paid addons planned, and those plans were canceled. They made the game work and dropped everything else to do it. Anthem may never significantly improve on what they published on day one.

What they've released is a mess. I'm a glutton for punishment and I will be keeping tabs on Anthem's progress. I expect to come back in a year and revisit this review. Today, no one should waste their time with this game. I don't hate Anthem or EA but I'm terribly disappointed that this was pushed out in the state it arrived. It feels like it needs another year in the oven to get to an acceptable state.

If you still think you want to brave Anthem's current state, here's a selection of images and videos I've captured to highlight some of the bugs I've seen.

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The Math

Baseline Assessment: 5/10

Bonuses: +1 Nails the flying around in a suit of mech armor aspect

Penalties: -1 vestigial plot, -1 riddled with bugs, -1 barely fun

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10 (just bad)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Bioware (developer). Anthem (Electronic Arts, 2019)

Microreview [video game]: Mass Effect: Andromeda by Bioware

A Distant Star

Regardless of how well or poorly you personally received the ending of the original Mass Effect trilogy, following those games with a non-reboot, non-sequel game in the same universe is going to be a tall order for anyone. Mass Effect: Andromeda (as reported by Kotaku) had a difficult development, and it shows. But the biggest factor for whether or not you'll get some enjoyment out of this game can be boiled down to a single question: what did you think of Dragon Age: Inquisition?

In the non-reboot, non-sequel Mass Effect: Andromeda, you're a pilgrim, a passenger onboard the human ark sent to colonize the distant Andromeda galaxy. The trip takes 600 years of cryo-sleep, and everything goes wrong when you finally wake up. A coral-like space growth called The Scourge inhibits space travel and wrecks ships. The Nexus, a space station sent ahead of the arks, is barely functional and none of the other species' arks have arrived. Worst of all, none of the "golden worlds" surveyed in advance of the voyage are suitable for colonization. Something horrible happened over the 600 year trip. 

The Mass Effect and Dragon Age series are linked by more than just having a common developer. They were largely developed in parallel, and borrowed gameplay mechanics from each other on numerous occasions. When Dragon Age 2 came out and it felt like Dragon Age shoehorned into Mass Effect, with a greater focus on a smaller scoped story and action over tactical combat, it was a disappointment to me but the problems I had with that game were mechanical. Enemies warped in from thin air (with no particular in-game reason), and it overly reused game environments. 

Mass Effect: Andromeda feels like Mass Effect shoehorned into Dragon Age: Inquisition. This time around, I'm not that mad about it. I loved Dragon Age: Inquisition despite the game having too many collect-a-thon quests, and too many fetch quests that added nothing to the game. This one suffers from the same problems, but the gameplay loop itself is enjoyable. The combat in the Mass Effect series has continued to build upon itself and become more fluid over the stop-and-pop Gears of War-esque combat of the original Mass Effect. Planetary exploration is done with the Nomad, a six-wheeled vehicle that's far more fun to drive than the Mako. Here's a piece of advice that carries over from Dragon Age: Inquisition: if something isn't a core quest, or a companion quest, and it doesn't interest you from the start, don't bother doing it. There are tons of quests that are meaningless. Do what seems like fun, unless you're a completionist and a masochist.

What hurts Andromeda is that it doesn't take the conceit of being a different galaxy 600 years into the future far enough. It adds a couple of new Andromedan species of sentient aliens, but their designs aren't exactly inspired, and it brings with it the core species from the original series, and none of the cool edge species. Of course, there are going to be Salarians, Turians, and Asari, but we've gone to a different galaxy. There should be more than two sentient species here when the Milky Way had handfuls of aliens. It even leans too hard on an ancient, technologically advanced species that influences the present. 

Playing this game months after release has turned out to be the best way to experience it. Early reviews noted a plague of technical issues within the game. I saw none of that. The chief complaint was that faces were poorly or weirdly animated. I never noticed anything particularly out of place. 

Over the course of 53 hours, I enjoyed my time with Mass Effect: Andromeda. While I'm not inclined to buy DLC, I would look forward to a second game in this series. Mass Effect: Andromeda has more in common with the first game of the original trilogy than the other two, and that was my personal favorite of the three. It's a more optimistic game, even if it suffers from borrowing too heavily from the original trilogy and Dragon Age: Inquisition. It's hard for me to say whether or not a newcomer to this series of games would enjoy Andromeda more without playing the original trilogy, but it's at least a competent game.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 Eschews grimdark and dread for optimism and a brighter future

Penalties: -1 Feels too much like a Mass Effect side story

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10 (still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore)

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POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Bioware. Mass Effect: Andromeda [EA, 2017] 

Microreview [video game]: Dragon Age: Inquisition

 Sweet Redemption
 

Quite a while ago, I wrote about what I thought of the Dragon Age series as it was prior to the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition. I won't say that I was wrong, because I still stand by those opinions, but Dragon Age: Inquisition has absolutely redeemed the series for me.

DA:I takes place several years after the events of Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 and it starts with a bang. The conclave, a gathering of templars, rebel mages, and Chantry religious figures, explodes, and a huge green rift is ripped open in its place. The player escapes the rift with no memory of how they got there in the first place, and a glowing green mark on their hand. Implicated in the deaths of everyone at the conclave, Seeker Cassandra Pentaghast invokes a backup plan put in place by the now-dead Divine Justinia, and enlists the player and others to close the rifts and stop whatever caused the explosion at the conclave.

Inquisition takes a lot of the best parts of Dragon Age: Origins and combines it with the best parts of Dragon Age 2. It is absolutely enormous. The game takes place in many locations spread across Orlais (a French-inspired state) and Ferelden (typical medieval state). The environments are as varied as they are large, with almost every common biome represented. It's a huge improvement over the complete lack of variety in Dragon Age 2. It's even an improvement on the large world of Origins.

Many improvements were made to the core gameplay of Inquisition over the previous games. The flashier, more action-focused attacks in Dragon Age 2 are refined in Inquisition. It's almost an action RPG, except that it also includes a "tactics" mode, where the game is paused and the player can micromanage their party members to their heart's content. Complaints against the lack of tactical options in Dragon Age 2 have been largely addressed. What you see is what you're fighting. No more bad guys teleporting in during a fight, except when it's to close a rift and then you're still seeing where they come from. My only complaint about the action is physiological. The attack button on a controller is the right trigger. I spent so much time playing DA:I that I strained a muscle in my right hand from holding down the trigger constantly. This is why I'm poorly suited for racing games. I suffer for you.

Some BioWare tropes are also minimized or adapted to better use in Inquisition. While you still gather a party of character sympathetic to your mission, and your actions still influence how they feel about you, it's not as overt and game-y as it was in previous games. There's no light side/ dark side meter. No good/bad. No saint/satan dichotomy. Conversations options are marked by tone, and not even by name. There's an icon that indicates a stern tone, and an icon for a sad tone, and an icon for a quizzical tone, among a few others. More often than not, conversation options don't have a tone at all. This makes playing the game feel a lot more natural. It's hard to say that you're going to go on a light side playthrough when your "good" options aren't marked outright. In my playthrough, I tried maintain a consistent point of view and that's my playthrough. If I were to play it again, I can't say I wouldn't make the same exact choices, with a few major, obvious exceptions.

There are no meters on your relationships with the people you attract. The choices you make will either be approved or disapproved to some degree, or cause no reaction from any particular member. For example, Seeker Pentaghast is religious and orderly. These aren't spelled out in a character profile. It's just traits I determined by her reactions. When I did things that supported the Chantry, Cassandra approved. When I made exceptions for bad people, Cassandra often disapproved. Again, these contributed to the feeling that the game world is living and that it's not super game-y about it. These characters have motivations and desires. I couldn't just buy their happiness.

The quest design is rather good, if heavy on collection and fetching. As is typical, the main quest line and the quests connected with party members are the best in the game. They're varied and expose more of the interesting characters. The party members have excellent in-game banter that seemingly never repeated itself. It lent to me mixing up my party more often than I do in most BioWare games. If there's one complaint to be made about the main story, it's that there comes a point where it feels like you've walked into a movie that's already started, and I'm not speaking as a Dragon Age newcomer. It's not overtly explained, but this feeling comes from having not played the Dragon Age 2: Legacy DLC. I can hardly be blamed for skipping it because I wasn't a fan of Dragon Age 2, but I now kind of wish I didn't. Without having played it, it feels like I might have missed out on something that probably should've been in Dragon Age 2 to begin with.

As with previous games, DA:I is heavy on lore and there is a lot to dig through, if you want to. If there's one thing DA:I could stand to steal from Destiny, it's that there's so much lore that it should really have come with a companion app/website to read it all outside of the game. It's interesting stuff, except that when I'm in the game, I want to play the game. Destiny was starved for background and motivating information. Inquisition is the opposite. I get enough out of the story that they give me. I want to be able to read the side/extra stuff when I'm not playing the game.

I went into Dragon Age: Inquisition skeptical, but left it a believer. It's an excellent Dragon Age game, and very good BioWare RPG. By improving upon video game parts that worked in the series, and making it feel less like video game in the roleplaying parts, BioWare has made something great. If you liked Origins, and you suffered through Dragon Age 2 like I did, you owe it to yourself to play Dragon Age: Inquisition to see the series shine again. If you haven't played either of them, Inquisition is still a good place to start, even with the middle-of-movie experience at some point.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 signature, excellent BioWare party members

Penalties: -1 awkward introduction of a major character that will make some players feel like they must've missed something among the many different ways to consume Dragon Age media

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 (an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws)


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POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: BioWare. Dragon Age: Inquisition [Electronic Arts, 2014]

Revisiting Dragon Age

A Look Back Before Dragon Age: Inquisition

It’s been three and a half years since Bioware released the last major entry in the Dragon Age series. In video game sequel time, that’s about a million years ago. An entire new generation of consoles has been released since Dragon Age 2. Three Assassin’s Creeds and four Calls of Duty were released since Dragon Age 2. Dragon Age: Inquisition is coming next week. I think it’s time for a refresher on Dragon Age, and whether or not we should be excited for Inquisition.

Dragon Age: Origins was the first major game in the series. After Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect, Origins felt like a return to form for Bioware fans like me, who remember Baldur’s Gate and their older Infinity engine games fondly. Where Infinity engine games were Dungeons & Dragons based, Dragon Age was an entirely original fantasy setting and system. What Bioware brought back with Origins was diverse backgrounds and character selections: different races, classes, entirely different prologue chapters based on those combinations. On PC, it also brought back a more tactical combat system. You could take the camera into an overhead perspective and position your characters to block melee enemies or flank them. It wasn’t strictly turn-based, but almost every ability had a cooldown time. The story was a typical fantasy epic of good versus evil but it also included some civil intrigue. A lot of attention to world-building was given in Origins, and there was a massive amount of text codex entries to flesh out the land of Thedas.

On a whole, I was a huge fan of Dragon Age: Origins. In fact, it was the first proper Bioware RPG I ever finished besides Mass Effect. Beating Dragon Age: Origins felt like a spiritual victory to me. I had played bits and pieces of all of the previous Bioware games, but Dragon Age: Origins pulled me in with a new fantasy world and traditional RPG combat. In the old Infinity engine titles, I would get sidetracked or I’d hit a difficulty wall at about the 10 hour mark, and I’d play something else. Dragon Age: Origins held my attention for the whole 40+ hours. “I can finish a proper Bioware RPG,” I thought to myself. I can do what millions of others have already figured out, but that’s beside the point. I’ve really enjoyed playing those RPGs in the past, and this was the first one I saw through to completion. It felt like a milestone for me and Bioware.

By this time, Bioware was deep into development on Dragon Age 2. Dragon Age 2? Yes, a proper numbered sequel to a game with a relatively dumb title. I mean, Dragon Age isn’t exactly descriptive, and “Origins” is usually tacked on to the prequel, not the first entry. But regardless, we were going to get Dragon Age 2, and it’s going to be a smaller, more focused game than the last! Wait, what? Instead of going for bigger and more, as most sequels, numbered sequels, do, Dragon Age 2 was promising a tighter focus and more compact experience focused on a single character and a single city over the span of several years.

I’m going to be honest here: I think Dragon Age 2 is an awful game. Rather than a diverse selection of backgrounds, you could play a human male or female, warrior, rogue, or mage. Dragon Age 2’s Hawke was a fantasy equivalent of Mass Effect’s Shepard. Like Shepard, Hawke is fully voiced, which is an improvement over Origins’ near silent protagonists. The combat in Dragon Age 2 was also punched up a bit to be more action-y and look less like characters waiting for their turn to swing at you. Those are the almost good things about the game.

The bad parts about it can be measured by what it doesn’t have compared to Dragon Age: Origins. The top-down tactical perspective is gone. That’s okay, because tactical battles are also gone. Enemies frequently warp into combat from thin air, making any kind of positioning irrelevant. Battles became slogs that made me only wish they would end sooner. These battles don’t take place in diverse locations anymore either. Nevermind the limited scope of the game, where you spend most of your time in a single city that doesn’t significantly change over the years, but areas of the game are frequently reused and passed off as entirely different locations. You’ll get very familiar with a particular cave structure. Anytime you go to a cave, it’s the same map, but with different doors blocked off. You can see the rest of the map in the minimap, but you can’t get there. You can see where the doors should be, but there’s just a giant stone block. The companion characters ranged from uninteresting to outright unlikeable. The story is on a clear rail, with no meaningful choices to be made. Dragon Age 2 is the definition of a sequel that was rushed out of the door to capitalize on the successes of Dragon Age: Origins and the popularity of Mass Effect.

Where does this leave Dragon Age: Inquisition? I won’t speculate on the content or how Inquistion looks. However, we can look at the previous games. Origins was a fantastic roleplaying game. Dragon Age 2 was a mess that didn't come close to living up to expectations. Since Dragon Age 2, Bioware has released the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Mass Effect 3. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that both of those have been divisive games, and neither of them have been unqualified masterpieces. There’s still a massive amount of Dragon Age materials that aren’t Origins or Dragon Age 2, including the Awakenings expansion for Origins, mountains of DLC for both games, mobile games, comic books, a web video series (featuring Felicia Day), and five novels, among other Dragon Age media. If you want to immerse yourself in the Dragon Age world, there are plenty of ways to do it. It's a deep, rich world with a lot of interesting characters and stories, but the mainstream games are one for two in terms of being worth playing. In the meantime, I would hold off on making any pre-release purchases on Inquisition until you can play it for yourself.

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POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014