General Gaming Dragon Age: The Veilguard (f.k.a Dreadwolf/a.k.a "Dragon Effect" | All Hallow's Eve 2024) - Information Thread, update (09/12): "Hands-On Preview" (IGN First)

[Bacon]

ONLY DOOM AND GLOOM

[skillzdadirecta]

To be honest I'm not liking a lot of things I'm finding out about the game... but I'm still holding out hope 

[Bacon]

Just now, skillzdadirecta said:

To be honest I'm not liking a lot of things I'm finding out about the game

YES DOOM DOOOOOOM

 

1 minute ago, skillzdadirecta said:

but I'm still holding out hope 

NO NO NO DOOOM

[Kal-El814]

I really liked DA:O, and while I got through DA2 and thought it had its moments I felt it was a huge step back in a lot of ways and every cut corner was so obvious you could cut yourself on it. I don't think I ever got farther on DA:I than installing it.

 

That said... when people see something like this trailer and think it looks derivative... are people forgetting how bad DA:O really REALLY wanted to be Lord of the Rings? There are MULTIPLE scenes from that game are almost straight up ripped from the PeterJackson trilogy to the extent that I'm surprised the Tolkien estate didn't sue. And for better or worse, BioWare has been pretty transparent that every game in this series has been a direct response to the previous one and contemporary trends. They realized most DA:O players never got through the first few hours of that game so they simplified a lot of things for II. They realized Skyrim was super popular so that made DA:I bigger in scale. Should be no surprise that they read the room and made this one vibe with what's been wildly popular in the RPG scene for like a decade now.

 

Hopefully they don't fumble the bag.

[Mr.Vic20]

Has Dragon Age lost its identity, or am I just being grumpy about BioWare’s new take on it? | PC Gamer

WWW.PCGAMER.COM

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Dragon Age: The Veilguard Assemble, more like

 

[Mr.Vic20]

8 hours ago, Kal-El814 said:

I really liked DA:O, and while I got through DA2 and thought it had its moments I felt it was a huge step back in a lot of ways and every cut corner was so obvious you could cut yourself on it. I don't think I ever got farther on DA:I than installing it.

 

That said... when people see something like this trailer and think it looks derivative... are people forgetting how bad DA:O really REALLY wanted to be Lord of the Rings? There are MULTIPLE scenes from that game are almost straight up ripped from the PeterJackson trilogy to the extent that I'm surprised the Tolkien estate didn't sue. And for better or worse, BioWare has been pretty transparent that every game in this series has been a direct response to the previous one and contemporary trends. They realized most DA:O players never got through the first few hours of that game so they simplified a lot of things for II. They realized Skyrim was super popular so that made DA:I bigger in scale. Should be no surprise that they read the room and made this one vibe with what's been wildly popular in the RPG scene for like a decade now.

 

Hopefully they don't fumble the bag.

Yup, again its my hope that what we saw was all marketing and the actually game retains its dark tone and world narrative focus. But the trailer did give me pause. 

[legend]

9 hours ago, Kal-El814 said:

That said... when people see something like this trailer and think it looks derivative... are people forgetting how bad DA:O really REALLY wanted to be Lord of the Rings? There are MULTIPLE scenes from that game are almost straight up ripped from the PeterJackson trilogy to the extent that I'm surprised the Tolkien estate didn't sue. And for better or worse, BioWare has been pretty transparent that every game in this series has been a direct response to the previous one and contemporary trends. They realized most DA:O players never got through the first few hours of that game so they simplified a lot of things for II. They realized Skyrim was super popular so that made DA:I bigger in scale. Should be no surprise that they read the room and made this one vibe with what's been wildly popular in the RPG scene for like a decade now.

 

Hopefully they don't fumble the bag.

 

I don't have a problem with it being derivative per se. I have a problem with the chosen direction of the reveal trailer and the fact that it doesn't even do it well.

 

The gameplay screens give me hope though.

[legend]

52 minutes ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

Has Dragon Age lost its identity, or am I just being grumpy about BioWare’s new take on it? | PC Gamer

WWW.PCGAMER.COM

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Dragon Age: The Veilguard Assemble, more like

 

 

This is spot on with my feelings.

[Dexterryu]

This went from a game I was really interested in to zero interest. Dragon Age is supposed to be a dark fantasy. Not Disney's Dragon Age.

[Kal-El814]

1 hour ago, legend said:

 

This is spot on with my feelings.

I will say I this POV is absolutely fair; I just feel as though Dragon Age has always been a hanger on with whatever is currently hot with fantasy and has always felt like it’s drafting as opposed to setting any kind of pace of its own. I appreciate that the vibe shift is a turnoff but I personally just never felt like Dragon Age was really a thing of its own even though it obviously had ideas, concepts, characters, etc. that set it apart. 
 

Also I dunno… I think in a post BG3 world, this game having a different tone and vibe might end up being smart? I don’t think there’s any way that modern BioWare could come out with a more traditionally toned game that would be compared to BG3 any way other than unfavorably at this point. 
 

What do I know, though. I just hope it’s good. Maybe I should finally try Inquisition. 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

2 hours ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

Has Dragon Age lost its identity, or am I just being grumpy about BioWare’s new take on it? | PC Gamer

WWW.PCGAMER.COM

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Dragon Age: The Veilguard Assemble, more like

 

yeah. While not as cringe inducing I was getting Saints Row Reboot vibes of tone shift from that trailer. 
 

maybe this is what the creative team at Bioware really wanted and they grew up on games like Borderlands 2, Fortnight, and Overwatch. Maybe they have the writing chops to pull it off where it doesn’t come across like “hello fellow kids. We can be hip too”. But something tells me this tone shift (if this trailer is indicative of the game’s) is more likely what we have been seeing and talking about for a bit now. Marketing guys in charge of studios and publishers mandating “your game needs to be X, because the data shows the kids like X”.
 

like so many examples over the last 10 years, it won’t grab the audience they are aiming for and will alienate the audience they have.  
 

or maybe the trailer is barely anything like the final game and the marketing team contracting with the animation house that made the trailer doesn’t care what the tone and style of the game will be. 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

I'll break my own rule for this:

 

 

[TheLeon]

What a shame, just 24 seconds of flippant pop culture references and fart noises. 

[Mr.Vic20]

11am east coast/8am West today

[Mercury33]

I was slightly caught off my the character art but other than that I thought it looked pretty awesome 🤷🏻‍♂️ granted I’ve only played a few hours of the Dragon Age that started with Battle of Helms Deep so I don’t have many expectations. 

[Mr.Vic20]

OK, hold onto your butts! 

[Bacon]

Last minute take

 

Combat will look great, but I'll still hate the characters and story telling.

[Bacon]

lol 4 more minutes

[Mr.Vic20]

Music is good confirmed. 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Whisper it, but Dragon Age: The Veilguard has me thinking the unthinkable: it looks like BioWare is back

WWW.EUROGAMER.NET

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Right, let's get all the negative stuff out the way first. One: I'm not sure about the new name. Dragon Age: Dreadwolf …

 

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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 fantastic. 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.

 

 

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Throughout the demo there was one very clear impression - that BioWare really does seem to be back here, and not just back but back with a renewed sense of confidence and faith in itself. For all of Veilguard's long and reportedly troubled development, and all the issues with Anthem and more, the first hour of it looks like those troubles never happened. It was simply an uninterrupted hour of one big, grand, thoroughly triple-A video game. One that was also campy, sincere, melodramatic and potentially very accomplished - and, one the surface at least, indisputably BioWare through and through.

 

[Bacon]

There's like 100% chance I'm getting this, but I can taste the DA:I and ME:A from here.

[Bacon]

Faces looking very stiff.

Combat does look like a Melee version of Mass Effect. I don't hate it.

[Mercury33]

I like the D&D vibes it’s giving off

[Bacon]

No it's not Souls-like. Don't even say it. I'm reminded more of FF16 or the witcher 3. From a viewing standpoint, combat "looks" boring but it's prolly pretty fun. Wish it was meatier, it's a bit weightless looking.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

With Veilguard, Dragon Age becomes what it was probably always destined to be: A Mass Effect game | PC Gamer

WWW.PCGAMER.COM

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Thedas is more beautiful than ever in the hour I spent with Veilguard, but I'm left wondering if Dragon Age has shed its RPG heritage.

 

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Here, let me relieve you. After spending about an hour watching some very tired BioWare developers navigate the opening of the next Dragon Age at this year's Summer Game Fest, I can assure you that the weird, hero-shooter tone of that companion reveal trailer doesn't carry into the game itself.

 

No sir, Dragon Age: The Veilguard (née Dreadwolf) doesn't have much time for japes at all. Things are grim. Dark. Fraught, even. A sinister hard-boiled egg named Solas is trying to dissolve the protective Veil between the physical and magical worlds, flooding the Tevinter Imperium capital of Minrathous with demons as a result.

 

The main character, Rook, is rather against that sort of thing. So are their demo companions: magical detective Neve, scout Harding (from Dragon Age: Inquisition), and Varric (basically the series protagonist at this point). Off you go on a quest to guard the Veil.

 

It's precisely the kind of tense, race-against-the-clock plot you expect from a Dragon Age game, in other words. Strange, then, that once the demo was over, I kept finding myself thinking about Mass Effect, and about the possibility that Dragon Age—the last Baldur's Gates-ian holdout at a BioWare increasingly determined to make cinematic, third-person action games—had left the last vestiges of its TTRPG-inspired past behind.

 

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Dragon Age has become more and more cinematic and action-y as the series has progressed, of course, but what I saw in my brief time at SGF really has me wondering if the last nubs of its Infinity Engine roots have finally been sanded away. At no point did the overhead tactical view—a series mainstay that let you pretend you were playing an old-school Baldur's Gate if you squinted—make an appearance. 

 

Heck, the Rogue even has Arkham-esque parries, and it looks like everyone will have to hammer dodge to evade ranged attacks. Time was we'd let a D20 handle all that for us. You kids don't know what we've lost.

 

You might think I'm some embittered THAC0 lover upset at the onward march of time. You'd be right. But wait! Note that I haven't called anything I saw in my time with Veilguard 'bad'. It was actually all quite dazzling: Slickly animated and, at times, even reasonably challenging for our presumably quite experienced demo-er. It just didn't seem very Dragon Age, the series that kept some—I stress some—of its RPG roots even while Shepard went full third-person shooter and BioWare went about its doomed work on Anthem. 

 

As someone with many hundreds of hours in Dragon Age: Origins, the most traditional RPG in the series, it's a change in mechanical emphasis that has me sceptical, a scepticism that isn't helped by BioWare's recent track record. I'm very curious to see more, but right now BioWare's fantasy RPG seems thoroughly, gorgeously fantasy, yet I'm wondering if the RPG is just hiding, or if it's gone for good.

 

[Bacon]

Bianca NOOOOO

[Bacon]

Graphics aside, this is a very 2013 looking game.

[Bacon]

Very Mass Effect

Still has some MCU vibes

Definitely gonna ask someone to get it for me

[Mr.Vic20]

Hmmm. Well, it more action game than RPG from the look of it, but what I really now need to know is how extensive is character development and equipment options/upgrades? Do I get the option to arm my companions or just the main? Are their side quests and open areas or is this fairly linear? 

[Bacon]

DA:O has never been more dead tho. It might as well be an AU game at this point.

[Mr.Vic20]

Just now, Bacon said:

DA:O has never been more dead tho. It might as well be an AU game at this point.

As I said earlier, I had no illusions that this game would be a return to DA:O, as that style of game would only have happened IF development of this title started after the huge success of BG3 was evident. What I do think we are possibly getting here is Mass Dragon Effect Age, which is fine, good even, just not what I would dream of personally.  

[Bacon]

1 minute ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

Dragon Effect

That right there is the perfect name lol

[Keyser_Soze]

Mass The Vielguard Age

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Preview: Dragon Age: The Veilguard could be Bioware back at its best | VGC

WWW.VIDEOGAMESCHRONICLE.COM

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The demo for Dragon Age: The Veilguard that we saw during Summer Game Fest Play Days was about 1,000,000 times better than the trailer at the Xbox Showcase.

 

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The demo for Dragon Age: The Veilguard that we saw during Summer Game Fest Play Days was a million times better than the trailer at the Xbox Showcase.

 

Now that Dragon Age fans have breathed that collective sigh of relief, let us tell you why.

 

Dragon Age as a franchise means different things to different people, and as such, it’s a difficult thing to bring back. Inquisition was a slow-grower, Dragon Age 2 made changes to make the game more mainstream, leaving fans of the first game wondering why they were left behind.

 

In many ways, Dragon Age: The Veilguard faces the exact same challenge that Mass Effect: Andromeda faced when it attempted to move on from Bioware’s other staple franchise. Bioware has to make a game that caters to new players, while also rewarding long-term fans, and producing a massive AAA RPG in a market that’s never been more perilous.

 

 

The first hour of Dragon Age: The Veilguard gameplay looks more fun than that trailer did

WWW.POLYGON.COM

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Varric, I missed you. Solas, I did not miss you

 

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Character customization is very extensive here; you can choose from the four races (human, elf, Qunari, or dwarf) and then choose a fighting class (rogue, mage, or warrior). You then choose from several backstories that inform what type of person you were before you showed up in the midst of the high-octane action sequence at the start of the game. The character creator has lots of sliders for body parts and overall shape, none of which are tied to the voice or pronouns (she/her, he/him, or they/them, a new addition to the series) that you choose. Thankfully, you can look at your character in different lighting upon designing them to be sure you’ll actually like their custom appearance. Epler took special care to show off the extensive curly and textured hair options in the game, including several versions of braids and locs, noting that increasing these options in particular was very important to the team. You can change your character’s physical appearance at any time during the game, but not their class or backstory.

 

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From what I saw, the combat in the game looks exciting and engaging, although it may disappoint those who were hoping to have full control of every companion. You control your own character in real-time, third-person action combat — light and heavy attacks, parries, and dodges. You can also “pause” everything by pulling up an ability wheel to select further combat abilities, including combo attacks with your companions. Epler emphasized that the different combat classes should make it possible for every player to have a way to enjoy combat according to how they prefer to engage with it. Each individual class has some variability, too; even the mage class has some up-close-and-personal attacks, since a mage player character could still conceivably have an assassin backstory and would therefore need to have some attacks to accommodate that sort of career path.

 

For the people who don’t care so much about the combat and who will only be interested in those longed-for narrative elements, Epler also told me the game does have an easy mode, and that there is even a setting which makes it impossible for your player character to die in battle.

 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

An hour of Dragon Age: The Veilguard left me with more questions than answers, but I'm starting to believe I can love a BioWare RPG again | GamesRadar+

WWW.GAMESRADAR.COM

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Preview | The Veilguard shows promise that BioWare can still build an incredible RPG for new and old fans alike

 

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The combat's not quite God of War, as the rumors suggested – if anything, it looks a bit more like modern Assassin's Creed in my eyes, but even that's not quite right. It's quite fast and fluid, and looks like a natural evolution of the sort of strategic action combat BioWare's been building for years. I don't know how good that action will feel in practice – this demo was all hands-off, after all – but it looks at least as effective as an action game as any game the studio's done before. You can cancel attacks, execute quick dodges, and build up combos.

 

On the strategic side, enemies might have elemental weaknesses, or barriers and other defenses that are more vulnerable to specific types of abilities. Combat, then, looks to be a matter of managing your abilities to best whittle down those defenses and take advantage of those weaknesses. And, of course, your companions will have abilities that play in here, too.

 

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There's still so much we don't know about The Veilguard. We don't know the overall structure of the game, the nature of side quests, or how the classes and skill systems work together. We don't know where the story goes, or whether it will be able to thread the needle of paying off a decade-long plotline without alienating new players. I'm glad to report that The Veilguard doesn't feel like it's suffering under the weight of all its baggage, even after all these years overshadowed by uneasy rumors. This first look has, at a minimum, convinced me I could love a BioWare RPG one more time.

 

 

Dragon Age: The Veilguard: The First Preview - IGN

WWW.IGN.COM

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We recently saw Dragon Age: The Veilguard for the first time, where we learned tons of new details about its battle system, exploration, and more.

 

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Dragon Age: The Veilguard is more of an action game than ever

 

So with that in mind, let’s talk a bit about Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s battle system, which reduces the party size from four to three and in so doing becomes more action forward than ever. It features what Busche calls “sophisticated animation canceling and branching,” with the design centered around dodging, countering, and using risk-reward charge attacks designed to break enemy armor layers. Much of its strategy lives in its ability wheel, which stops the action either by tapping or holding the shoulder button and allows you to issue orders as you see fit. In particular, companions can be kitted out as support units and healers, which Busche cites as a big player request after Inquisition.

 

“The combat system is an interesting challenge going into the fourth iteration of this game because as you know, every Dragon Age has reinvented combat to some degree,” Busche explains. “Of course, pause and play strategy is always the backbone of it. But what that means is that, in addition to fans of all three prior games and welcoming in an entirely new generation of fans, we've got a pretty diverse player base to accommodate to.”