Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Freeze time on the ability wheel, prime an enemy with one companion's spell, then detonate it with the other before the cooldowns come back.
Better than its 40 player score, weaker than its 80 from critics — the combat nails it, but no companion ever disagrees with you.
For you if
- Action combat is the appeal — you would rather parry and detonate than pause and issue orders.
- You are new to the series; there is no save to import and only three prior choices to set.
- A polished 40-hour fantasy campaign at a deep discount is enough, without it having to be Origins.
Not for you if
- Tactical control is non-negotiable — the top-down camera is gone and companions cannot be directly controlled.
- BioWare's draw for you was companions who push back; Veilguard ships no disapproval system at all.
- You want your Inquisition save to matter — the Keep is unsupported and only three decisions carry across.
Players who stuck with it credit the prime-and-detonate combat and the romances, and several say they enjoyed it far more than they expected to.
Series veterans say the writing lost its moral weight and that Thedas here feels generic next to Origins.
Latest patch
Patched 1 years agoMedia
What critics say
- 4.5/5GamesRadar+
In many ways, Dragon Age: The Veilguard feels like a true return to RPG form for BioWare.
- 79/100PC Gamer
The Veilguard nails action combat and exploration and visual grandeur but in a series about defining a hero with morally ambiguous choices, the choices here are too easy to make.
- Rock Paper Shotgun
Overall, combat is engaging in flashy sprints - sometimes balletic in tandem with pause-to-listen soundtrack bangers - it just isn’t robust enough to last the marathon.
Before You Play
Refreshed monthlyWhy did players score Veilguard so much lower than critics?
Partly brigading, partly not — and the venue tells you which. Metacritic's user score fell to 3.8 in a documented campaign where reviews attacked the game for being "woke", and Metacritic does not require you to own the game to post one. Steam does, and its verified score is a far less dramatic 68% positive across 44,000 reviews. So the most extreme player numbers are the least trustworthy. But the gap does not vanish once you filter to buyers: 68% still sits below a Top Critic Average of 80, and Steam has drifted down from 74% at launch. Critics rewarded the combat and production; a lot of paying players judged it against Dragon Age's own history and found it flattened.
Source: PCGamesN
Do you need to play the earlier Dragon Age games first?
No — it works as a standalone. What you actually lose as a newcomer is narrow and specific: unglossed proper nouns like the Venatori and Andraste, and returning faces landing as ordinary NPCs rather than payoffs. As TheGamer puts it, "The only thing you would be missing by not playing the last game is nostalgia and compassion for certain characters." The antagonist Solas is the real cost — a decade of history is what separates him from a standard villain. Character creation also asks you to define the previous game's Inquisitor before you have met them, which a newcomer can simply leave on defaults.
Source: TheGamer
Do your choices from previous Dragon Age games carry over?
Barely. There is no save import, and Veilguard is not compatible with the Dragon Age Keep at all — the site that used to store your franchise decisions. Instead you rebuild the Inquisitor in character creation and answer exactly three questions: who they romanced, whether the Inquisition was disbanded or absorbed into the Chantry, and whether they vowed to stop Solas or redeem him. Everything else across Origins, Dragon Age II and Inquisition is dropped. BioWare's creative director framed the move north as "a bit more of a clean slate", with three decisions chosen so each could be represented meaningfully.
Source: PC Gamer
How does Veilguard's combat compare to earlier Dragon Age games?
It is a full action game now. You control only Rook; companions are AI-driven and cannot be taken over, a first for the series, and the active party drops to three including you. The top-down tactical camera is gone entirely. What replaces it is a time-stopping ability wheel where you fire your own skills and order companion abilities, chaining status effects into detonations. Moment to moment it is light and heavy attacks, two weapon sets, dodge, block and parry, with cooldown-gated skills. Better feel than Inquisition, less depth — Rock Paper Shotgun called it "frequently satisfying" but "a pastiche of other, more confident systems".
Source: ScreenRant
Did Dragon Age: The Veilguard ever get story DLC?
No, and it never will. Support ended about twelve weeks after launch: BioWare's Patch 5 notes on 23 January 2025 said that "with the game being in a stable place, we are moving to monitor for any game-breaking bugs", and no patch has followed. Steam lists only two add-ons, both cosmetic — a free weapon appearance pack and the Deluxe Edition upgrade. Days earlier EA had told investors Dragon Age engaged roughly 1.5 million players, nearly 50% below expectations; BioWare then restructured around the next Mass Effect. Buy it as a finished, closed game, because that is what it is.
Source: EA
Dig deeper on this game
If you liked this
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
The story-first RPG that landed what Veilguard was faulted for
Avowed
Smaller first-person RPG with the same too-safe criticism
The Outer Worlds 2
Obsidian writing and choices, the thing Veilguard thinned out
Starfield
The other big-budget RPG that missed its studio's own bar
This week's picks
Find similar games
Browse our catalog by what made Dragon Age: The Veilguard click — every link is a short list, ranked by what's actually worth playing tonight.
See how Dragon Age: The Veilguard stacks up
One of several games on our radar — line it up against the field, or find something else worth your time.
- Compare head-to-head Side-by-side matchups across the catalog.
- Most played Ranked by current Steam concurrent players.
- Best of 2024 All 2024 releases we’ve covered.
- Best deals Current price cuts and historical lows.
- Find by vibe Filter by vibe, mechanics, and platform.
- Also covered Every game we’ve written about, archived.