Right, let’s get all the negative stuff out the way first. One: I’m not sure about the new name. Dragon Age: Dreadwolf was much cooler than Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
Okay! Now we’ve got all those negatives out of the way, on to the positive. After an extended hands-off demonstration of Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s first hour I can say, with some confidence, this video game looks . The combat looks like a blast. The writing is cheesy, but deliciously cheesy – there is a place for this very specific, “I’m voicing my own D&D character out loud” flavour of high fantasy cheese. The character creator is vast. There are dialogue wheels and skill trees and waves of “we hear you” responses to fan requests. And it is utterly gorgeous, the first hour a luxurious nighttime romp through a crumbling city under a mix of twinkling starlight and lavish midnight blue. I’ve one or two questions that remain unanswered, but as far as hands-off demonstrations go, this is about as confident as they get.
Deep breath now though, and into the specifics. What we saw in the demo was a full walkthrough of the game’s entire first hour, beginning with what seemed like an excellent character creator. Here you’re given five categories to work your way through – Lineage, Appearance, Class, Faction, Playstyle – each with a range of subcategories within them, such as the eight subcategories within the “head” subcategory of your appearance alone.
Lineage dictates things like your race – the usual Dragon Age quartet of elf, qunari, human, and dwarf – as well as your backstory, a long standing fan request. Backstories include things like factions – some returning, some new – which offer three distinct buffs each, like being able to hold an extra potion or do extra damage against certain enemies, and the odd reference in dialogue. There are separate options for binary and non-binary pronouns and gender, “dozens and dozens of hairstyles,” as Corinne Busche, Veilguard’s game director, put it during the demo, with individual strands of hair rendered separately and reacting quite remarkably to in-game physics.