In my Veilguard Era

Some Veilguard ramblings, or my kind of a love letter? to DAV

So I wrote a thing. As my friend called it - constructive decriticism. For me it's just a 'couple' of thought on what people didn't like about Veilguard and how I look at those arguments. Sorry for any mistakes and ramblings, my ADHD goes hard sometimes and I tend to miss words.

Also, no BioWare didn’t pay me. I don’t know devs personally (I met Matt Rhodes once), these are just my feelings after finishing the game. Would I love to ask the writers a hundred questions about how they wrote the game? Yes, obviously, I just wrote a 7 pages long document about the writing in this game. And I’m an artist, it’s not even something I do for games professionally ;; 

As any piece of media, every person can relate to it in their own way. You may love it, hate it and everything in between. I just personally think that the game is better than people give it credit for. To me it was a strong 9/10. So I decided to tackle some of the criticism and how I see them in maybe a bit of a larger context. And maybe I am delusional and none of what I’ve written below is true. Maybe the writers didn’t have those conversations, and I’m just very protective of a franchise that I care about deeply.

It’s no secret to my friends that I love BioWare games. A lot. There are many better written games, with better gameplay, but those damn BioWare games just hit different. I am the first person to say - the main plot is often mid to good, but the characters are amazing. They fumble, more often than not, the third act. Gameplay can be tedious or just, very not for me (sorry BG1 and 2, we’ll never be friends and you couldn’t pay me to replay Origins). But there is something special, magical about these games. They have a very special place in my heart. Every time I go back to Thedas, and to a lesser extent, when I start a Mass Effect game, I feel like coming home, with my friends waiting for me to give me a biggest, warmest hug. 

This whole piece is a bit of a love letter and a bit of a critique of DAV. The game has issues, as every game does, but my main two are:

And below is my look on the critique this game has recieved:

The game isn’t dark enough

Many people as their main issue with DAV cite the lack of dark themes as their main criticism. The game is sanitized, they say. And I might agree, to a point. I think it’s very weird to just say, oh it’s probably EA that wants to make the game more PG (it’s still rated mature) or the writers are just ‘bad’ or whatever. I’d like to look at this argument from a bit of a different perspective. What role those ‘dark’ themes serve in a game/narrative.

Mage/Templar conflict -  Mage/Templar conflict is something that the franchise tried to tackle from the beginning, and I would say, largely, it failed. And I’m very happy that we are in the North where this conflict doesn’t exist. Let me explain why.

The conflict in itself is really interesting on paper and would probably work amazingly in a book, but in games that for most part deal with world ending problems, it always felt a bit out of place. 

Yes, we do see arguments for both sides and yes, we see how good and bad (I will try to not use ‘evil’ as I believe that BW themselves aren’t really big believers in ‘pure evil’) both mages and templars can be, but the conflict isn’t really presented in a meaningful way, besides Mages are oppressed.

Let me elaborate - in DAO there is probably the most context, due to Mage Origin being an option, Broken Circle quest and having Wynn in the party. It is a great start for the conflict, both opposing sides have great arguments and we see how Circles work and how they can fail (and what might happen if they do). The big problem arrives in DA2 and is compiled in DAI.

In DA2, the most ‘personal’ out of all DA games, the conflict plays a much larger role with Anders planning to start the Mage rebellion in the background. And even me, as a big supporter of Mage rights and freedom, kinda hates him for blowing up The Chantry. Even though I kinda agree with him, and you know, sometimes violence is the only voice of the oppressed. BUT, and this is a bit but, we see how bad the situation in the Kirkwall Circle is from the outside. If you play Mage Hawke and take with you Anders and Merrill you have basically three apostates just running around under Templars noses shooting magic left and right. It doesn’t exactly paint the picture of oppressed Mages. Those two things clash a lot, with what the story tries to tell you and what the limitations of it being a game hinders, the frankly, powerful story. So Anders blows up The Chantry and I, personally, feel a lot more angry than I should be, because my life as a Mage in Kirkwall wasn’t so bad. No one was chasing me, I was never threatened by being made Tranquil. I hope you catch my drift. For the story like that to work it would require to be ABOUT Mages and their plight instead of it being relegated to the background.

By DAI time, we have a full on rebellion and for the most part, both Mages and Templars are relegated to mobs to kill. The only southern Circle Mage we have in our party, Vivienne, has found a way for Circle to work for her, she’s not oppressed, she’s a talented politician at the top of the ladder. The other Circle Mage is from Tevinter, so as far as his Mage status goes, he is basically nobility. And then we have Solas, our only ‘apostate’, who never was in a Circle and doesn’t need to fear the Circle, because he’s a god. So our choice is basically cosmetic only and the faction we don’t choose is corrupted, so they automatically get assigned the status of enemy.

I’m not saying that DAI doesn’t have interesting things to say about magic, mainly through Solas, but I wouldn’t say that the Mage/Templar conflict is handled particulary well. But also, and this is something I think BioWare realised - the game is not about it, and even on a thematic level, the conflict doesn’t work well within the story. But I will touch on that later.

The big one - Slavery in Teviner - I could just write, that not every story set in the Roman Empire has to involve a plot about slavery in a meaningful, but that might be too simple. 

So, we know that Tevinter uses enslaved people and for the most part, it works a bit like in the Roman Empire. There are many types of slaves, some can and will be freed, some won’t. And apparently a lot of people agree that DAV just ignores this.

So, does it? I’d say that it ignores it as much as DAI did. Is it weird because we are in Tevinter? Maybe? But, on the other hand, the only place we have a free reign to run around is Dock Town. No one there owns a slave. They have a much higher chance of either being enslaved themselves. Again, going back to DA2, due to the game being more personal and one of the companions (Fenris my beloved) being a former slave, DA2 has much more room to elaborate on the theme, but again. It is a game. With choices. And one of the choices is to give Fenris back to his owner. So my question is - does the game deal with the issue of slavery, or just presents it as part of the world our characters inhabit. It allows us basically to become a part of the slave trade, without ever going into how horrific even the concept of owning another human (or elven in this case) being is. Would a game about just Shadow Dragons fighting against Tevinter slave owners be amazing? Maybe? If it was done well it might be. But is DAV a right game to tell that story? Personally, I don’t think so. Slavery in DAV is present in environmental storytelling (which is amazing, if you start to pay attention. Whoever worked on that, great job!) and in codices. And I think that is enough. I’d actually bet quite a lot on someone at BioWare basically saying - if we can’t do the story of Tevinter slaves justice, let’s not tackle it at all. Was it the right choice? I don’t know. I’m a white person from Poland, so I’m not gonna be an arbiter on that.

I don’t know what people wanted to see, maybe hundreds of chained slaves, but I think that adding them without our characters getting more personally involved in, for example, freeing them would be just weird. The choice, getting back to the fact that the game is about something completely different, was - show slavery on every corner but not comment or do anything about it, or leave it as background information as a fact of Tevinter life, and BW opted for the second one. 

Antivan Crows - John Epler already touched on this one, but even before he did, I assumed (and this is the biggest DAV problem, the game doesn’t sometimes tell you enough. You can logically arrive at what the writers wanted you to see, but it’s not the best) that who we dealt with is basically Crow ‘nobility’ for lack of a better word, who see themselves as vigilantes and protectors of Antiva, instead of rank and file like Zevran who had to go through years of abuse. You can see the hints of darkness in Crows, how Illario and Lucanis, despite being family, were pitted against each other. How Lucanis sees himself during Inner Demons quest. 

The banter about House Arainai hints at Zevran killing so many Crows that a lot of corrupt and abusive people are dead now. Would it be better if some of this was said out loud? Yes! Does it mean that if you look deeper those things aren’t there? No, but you also need to pay a lot of attention to get all of it.

Lords of Fortune and Isabela - this one will be short and sweet. Yes, I think after what happened in Kirkwall with the book, no matter how the conflict was resolved, Isabela would think twice about stealing and selling off some precious cultural item, especially if she can make profit in a much safer way.

The game has ‘bad’ writing. 

Honestly I was trying to identify what the bad writing meant exactly and I found a couple of things, and with some of them I agree, although I don’t think it’s writing per se that is bad, more how the game and games in general work. Also, I’m no expert, as I said before I draw, I don’t write. Maybe my standards are abysmal, but nothing really jumped at me and took me out of a scene, but that is my personal opinion.

Let’s start with the critique I agree with (also bare with me, I played only elves in DAV, soooo)

Schroedinger’s Dalish - the main thing I agree with, is that the game is very inconsistent about Rook’s elfiness. I headcanon all my elves as Dalish, so the game somewhat worked for me, if I ignored all the - ‘I’m not Dalish’ remarks. 

There are moments in the game where elf Rook speaks elvhen despite not being Dalish. This was true both for my Veil Jumper - kind of makes sense, a lot of the Jumpers are Dalish and a Crow - if I wasn’t headcanoning him as Dalish, how would this city boy know any elvhen? 

Another issue, and this one I don’t have a problem with, but your mileage may vary - elf Rook calling elven gods ‘our’. For me, I always understood it as our, as in elven, not his, Rooks, specifically. But, reasonably, you can feel it’s a weird thing to say for city elf believing in The Maker.

Here we arrive at the problem - when writing meets game design, or better, game mechanics. For the writing to work for everything perfectly, there would need to be either only the city or only the Dalish elves. Both if there were enough resources, but with how much talk about elven gods there is, it would be like adding a fifth lineage. I can see why they opted out of this route. What we are left with is the writer trying to allow people to lean more Dalish or more city elves, with neither working perfectly. But here is where you can go on, and build your own headcanons, no one is stopping you. My Crow elf is full on Dalish elf and no one will stop me. BioWare won’t send cops and tell me to not do it, I promise. 

Not the best start - the writing seems more clunky in the beginning, and I don’t think it’s bad, in terms of quality, but the amount of onboarding they had to do is, quite frankly, too much. DAV is both a direct continuation to Trespasser and a game new players need to be able to play. I can only imagine what a nightmare to handle this was. I also think that the 10 year time jump is both the best and the worst thing they could have done. I think they shot themselves in the foot a bit, with how much Solas’s situation has changed (I will get back to this later) and how much Thedas has changed since Origins.

But also I can’t imagine how much worse it would be if the game took place just a couple of months later. That would probably be actually impossible without doing Inquisition 2 basically. Or add every companion and every choice into the game, probably what a lot of people wanted, but that would be like making two games at once, just with unique companion models etc.

But back to onboarding - it is clunky, there are a lot of repetitions, but there is no way to elevate this, unless the game would be completely disconnected from DAI and it is as disconnected as humanly possible while still being connected to Solas and his plan. Was there a better way to do it? Maybe? I wasn’t there, so I don’t know, but what I know, that it isn’t the worst thing in the universe.

Choices and Consequences - everyone always says that Dragon Age games are about choices (and consequences). I often think that people forget that a game is a game and it’s gonna game. What do I mean by it? Those choices, for the most part, are cosmetic ones. In DAI a Warden could appear in one of the quests, it could have been Alistair, Loghain or Stroud, but there always will be a Warden, just with a different ‘skin’. I think, when we meet the characters that we love from previous games we build those cameos in our heads to be bigger than they are. We get the illusion of choice and that is what is magical about RPGs, but we often forget the illusion part.

One critique I’ve heard repeated a lot about BW games is that, no matter what, the world doesn’t change in any big way. And that is, for the most part, true. You can’t choose to destroy The Veil, not unless it was the last Dragon Age game to be made. And yet, people want these big changes. And so we arrive at the destruction of Souther Thedas and the, let’s call it, defeat of The Blight - people want big changes, but only if it’s their choice. And only if they like that change. BUT, it’s a game. True big change that can happen in a game is if developers make it happen for everyone. So the Southern Thedas is destroyed and a lot of people are mad. Personally, I don’t feel that BioWare somehow destroyed the world I played in. All the bad faith reading, that every character you ever loved is dead is just that…bad faith. The previous companions might appear in the future, or they may not, and you can decide if they lived or died. I think there are a lot of interesting stories to be told about rebuilding the Southern Thedas. Will the Circles return? What will happen to Mages and Templars? What of the city elves, will they still be an underclass in a world that needs every hand available to help rebuild it? Will the caste system at Ostagar survive, or will everyone be equal when facing The Blight to end all Blights?

On the topic of Blight - in the AMA John answered that the Blight is, more or less, dead. Being blighted is a chronic illness, not a death sentence. Does it cheapen HoF looking for the cure? Maybe a little bit. But now that it isn’t a death sentence, the question of curing the Blight still remains. Maybe HoF did find a way to actually cure Blight, not just make it less deadly. All those questions still remain.

On the Consequences - the fact that Lucanis won’t romance Rook if they save Minrathous - people want consequences, but only the ones they like. Frankly, I think this shows how well written Lucanis is and there are some things that he simply can’t get over, even maybe when he should. He is a very passionate man and maybe that passion sometimes works against him and his better judgment. He is allowed to have flaws. I think all of us have that one person we know that we should forgive, but we just…can’t. At least not without a significant amount of time and distance.

Writing - I am in no way an expert on writing, but generally, I think it was on par with other BW games. Also, it’s a game and not a book, so comparing it to Tevinter Nights for example is kind of a moot point, both require quite a different set of skills and serve different purposes.

The biggest criticism I saw is that the language is too modern. Some time ago David Gaider wrote a post about not using words that were created after the 1900s, so in my 2nd playthrough I decided to track it (in a very unscientific way).

The worst 'offenders' are Bellara and Taash (My Rook ‘Okay’d at least once, when talking to Bel and there is at least one letter where Harding uses ‘okay’, but the word is from 19th century, although it was used very, very rarely) - and to that I have to say, Alistair was also using modern language sometimes, and Dorian said that his ‘footsies are freezing’. But back to my point - I think that the language they use fits both characters, Bel with her adhd energy (I felt very seen) and Taash, being the youngest of the team and maybe a bit gen Z while at it. It is entirely possible that Taash was born AFTER Ostagar. So to sum it up, language evolves, in the 20 years between DAO and DAV there might have been a couple of changes. Maybe I’m just trying to find an excuse for a pretty rough development cycle, but with the love I know these people have for the franchise I believe that they probably had a conversation about how language might have changed during that time.

I think each character speaks in a distinct manner and, maybe some people will not like this, often speak to each other like I do with my friends. And yes, sometimes it is silly and random.

Non-binary of it all - some people will say that they should have come up with an in-world term for being non-binary. And I kind of don’t agree. I think inclusion in situations like these matters and it’s better to plainly say - yes, you belong in this world, than try to walk around it. Of course there are as many opinions as there are non-binary people, so I get it if you’d prefer they use some in-world word.

And something small to add. Before the release there was this clip on Twitter making fun of part of Taash’s questline. Without context it was a bit weird and sounded, for lack of better word, wooden. When I played their quest though, suddenly the wooden performance of the ex-navigator/weather man Qunari touched me very deeply - this was a man whose only purpose was knowing weather and Antaam basically ripped him from the only thing he knew in the world and left him to fend for himself. Without Qun, without purpose he was lost and traumatised by the things he saw. And in this context, the silly conversations about eating fruit before cookies, turns into a conversation about offering a helping hand and treating people with kindness. 

And this leads me to my last, probably most important point. Kindness. Companions are too nice to each other and Rook. Rook is nice to everyone. There is no conflict between companions, where are my Anders and Fenris that want to kill each other?

Well.

Theme and a power of hope

I don’t think any previous Dragon Age game had a consistent theme that ran through the whole narrative. As I mentioned before, the games were, for the most part, about saving the world. We had The Hero of Ferelden - he recruited some allies, maybe had a god baby and killed an Archdemon. Hawke tried to save his family, and later, Kirkwall. The second one mostly by accident. It was a very personal, intimate story with a brewing Mage rebellion and Quinari invasion in the background. Then we had Inquisitor trying to close the Fade Rift. All great games. And all of them without a theme, other than a story of a hero, or sometimes even Chosen One (although rather by accident than circumstance of birth).

Rook isn’t a chosen one. They have no special ability besides the fact that Varrik saw something in them. Because this game, the main and companion quests alike, are about cooperation, community and kindness. How regular people, when working together, can build a better, kinder future. The game does even spell it out for you sometimes.

On one side, we have elven gods. If we strip them from their Blighted glory, what they want to do is re-build their empire. All they want is to go back to some mythological ‘before’, no matter how bad, corrupt and full of slavery it was. And, to be quite frank, Solas wants that too. He also longs to undo what he did and bring back the past where elves were immortal. He literally wants to make Thedas great again (sorry, I had to). But the empire was never great. It was built on corpses of Titans, the Blight and enslavement of elven people. What Solas wants, actually never existed. And yes, he does care more for the past, then for the present or the future. He seeks redemption not by helping people to build a better tomorrow, but by going back to the past that no living creature even remembers. Does he care what will happen to elves when they’ll suddenly be re-connected to the Fade and immortal? Will that even happen? And if yes, what will happen to their families and loved ones, if they will remain mortal. Will the elven psyche be able to handle immortality after all these years? And what with all the spirits and demons that will flood Thedas? These are the answers Solas doesn't bother with, because Pride took over Wisdom and only he knows what will be best for everyone. 

Taking a bit of a detour from the theme and focusing on Solas. It is fascinating that a portion of the fandom thinks that Solas’s character was handled like Deanerys from GoT. Yes, both of them were revolutionaries that freed slaves, and yes, both of them had a villain turn. But people forget that there is a secret, third option, which both those characters inhabit (although Dany needed at least two more seasons to get there properly) - Paul Atreides. All three of them - a cautionary tale on charismatic leaders. Not by mistake Rook ‘wins’ against the gods because they have the support of his companions and allies. They help their allies, care about their problems and communities. 

Solas had a chance to do all of that, with Felassan at his side. But Solas never saw modern elves or any other humanoid as fully realised people, with the Inquisition team being the exception. The person that truly cared about them was Felassan, who Solas killed and I think that this was what ultimately broke down whatever structure Solas’s followers had. Without Felassan Solas neither wanted nor cared for his followers enough and continued with his plan alone.

Solas is a villain in this story, but he’s not evil. Thinking beings rarely are. Even Evanuris weren’t evil. They chose to be tyrants, and to use blight. They weren’t controlled, they just, like many people, chose their own interest over everything else. 

And for the final piece of the puzzle. The biggest hint though, and a piece of writing and lore that made me love this entry is this - for three games The Blight was pure evil. This force that corrupts and even Wardens that fight it, succumb to it at the end. It can be reasoned with, it’s just an unthinking force of corruption. But in this kind and hopeful game even it gets a bit of redemption. It isn’t some unnamed, unknowable evil anymore. It’s nightmares of the Titans imprisoned in the Fade, feeding on itself, tortured for millenia. It suddenly might be possible to heal it, to help it instead of destroying it. To truly make amends for what elves did during the war.

But getting back on the topic, companions and Rook are nice to each other not because some mythical EA HR person was dictating what BioWare can and can’t write, it's because normal, regular people don’t want to murder their friends, they only joke about it.

Allow me a little personal anecdote - in 2018 I had the privilege of meeting Matt Rhodes at a Polish art festival. He was very generous with his time and honestly one of the kindest people I ever met. I talked his ear off for what must have been at least a couple of hours and asked, I’m sure, way too many questions. One thing that is certain though, he really cares deeply about both Dragon Age and Mass Effect and about fans whose lives these games touched.

I don’t think it’s an accident that a game made by some very kind people that was largely developed after 2020 is about building a community through mutual understanding and kindness. And maybe it’s not a game everyone will like, or maybe they feel that this isn’t a Dragon Age game without some, let’s be honest, edgy elements. But BioWare games were always about hope in a hopeless situation. This time though, it’s not just the main plot that supports this idea, but the whole game, that consistently and at every step boldly chooses to follow it’s theme. Maybe I’m just tired by how fucked everything is and what I needed this year was a game that chooses better tomorrow over ‘great’ past, that chooses to build up and give people a chance at redemption. Maybe I needed to kill two irredeemable assholes and to save one redeemable one. In Thedas and in real life I want to choose kindness and even if we can’t count on our governments to do the right thing, there is community and mutual aid. And maybe, just maybe, with a lot of work, tomorrow can be better than today. And maybe, we can’t save the world, but we can save each other.