Dragon Age: The Veilguard
My favourite game that BioWare has ever produced... That I've played, at least. An entertaining classic RPG experience.
Notes as I’m playing:
- Performance: Very good, though default texture quality is too high (High on an 8GB card will breach the VRAM limit easily); a 7800X3D + 3070 can run the game at 1440p with everything else high/ultra + full raytracing at a reasonable consistent 60+ fps. Drops tend to be in civilised areas, which is fine.
- Visuals: Spectacular. Everything looks incredible - hair & cloth physics are always something I’ll appreciate!
- Incredibly inclusive so far! All characters are pan, and your character can use he/him, she/her, or they/them pronouns and separately can identify as either a binary or non-binary gender. You can further have your character identify as transgender, with the character creator going so far as to allow you to have top surgery scars if wanted.
- Expect to spend a long time in character creation if you played Inquisition…
- Annoyingly I think they’re missing some hairstyles from Inquisition(?), so my Inquisitor doesn’t look quite the same. It’s a good enough approximation though.
- I could also just have misremembered some stuff though, lmao.
- Gameplay is fun! Big fan of switching to just straight action rather than shoehorning in a hybrid strategy system. Abilities are well designed with some neat combo ideas, and I’m liking the skill tree structure.
- Writing thus far is pretty weak imo. Some lines feel especially ‘off’, though I struggle to identify the issue there.
- I should really replay Inquisition at some point and see how its writing was with fresh eyes.
(Currently expecting this to land somewhere 3.5~4.5. Largely depends on if the writing improves over time, I think.)