whiteraven191

Hello! It’s been a very long time since I’ve sporked something so I apologize if I’m a bit rusty. I have. So many thoughts about Veilguard. I’m mostly doing this so I can finally put the game behind me and move on with my life instead of stewing in my hatred. As this is a video game sporking, there will be a lot of images. Also, while Veilguard is a lot less dark in a lot of ways than its predecessors, it does still manage to pull out some genuine horror imagery now and again, so be aware of that. I will mostly be sticking to talking about the writing, but I will also talk about the mechanics now and again when it seems relevant.

The game opens with a bit of narration from Varric Tethras, who was a companion in the previous two games, laying out the basic premise for anyone new, or anyone whose memory is a bit fuzzy after the decade-long gap between games.

The salient details are this: Solas used to be a friend but was revealed to be the elven god Fen’harel. Traditionally, Fen’harel is considered a trickster deity akin to someone like Loki from the real world. However, according to Solas, he was a freedom fighter against the tyranny of the Elven gods, who had enslaved the elves. In order to defeat them, Solas created the Veil, sealing them away but also cutting the elves off from most of their magic and their immortality. Solas is now trying to bring down the Veil to make up for that past failing, since Elves in the modern world of Thedas are wandering nomads mistrusted by outsiders at best, and enslaved en masse at worst. The prologue ends with Varric saying that you, the protagonist, are the one who will stop Solas.

This intro also lets us hear Solas’s new leitmotif for the first time. Despite having Hans Zimmer do the score, this track is the only one that really sticks in my head. And it only sticks in my head because it’s a remix of the main theme from Inquisition, and thus I’m already kind of familiar with it. This choice for Solas’s leitmotif is also a bit of a headscratcher, because in-universe, the main theme of Inquisition is a hymn from the Andrastean faith, the main human religion, one that has played a big part in subjugating the elves.

Once the intro is done, we are put into character creation. We get four choices for race: human, elf, dwarf and Qunari.

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Qunari are a unique race to the Dragon Age games, but I’ll get more into what their deal is once we actually run into some. I am not going to be playing one for this playthrough. Instead, I shall be playing an elf.

So, let’s talk about the character creator a bit. One thing I absolutely love is the hair options. We have almost 90 to choose from and most of them look amazing. The curly hair options have a real bounce to them and even the straight hair options move like real hair instead of being one solid mass. It’s so so much better than the Inquistion options, which had only a scant handful, and half of that handful were different flavors of bald. The only Veilguard hairstyle I truly think is ugly is this one:

Because what the fuck is that. The only real complaint I have with the head/face options is that you can make your character look older like I’ve done with my elf guy, but the game will treat you as a young 20-something no matter what. Why give us the option to make old characters if we can’t have that reflected in the narrative?

Once you’re done with hair and face, you can move on to the body. And this is one of the places conservatives absolutely lost their shit.

You see, you can give your character top surgery scars. And oh, boy, having the option (not the requirement, the option!) to play a trans character is the death of society if you listen to these people. Never mind that there was a trans character in the last game. Never mind that even back in Origins in 2009 Sten talks about how the Qunari have very different ideas about gender than the rest of Thedas. The conservative pissbabies who want a bit of plausible deniability try to frame their objection as “oh, it’s not historically accurate to have this modern medical procedure in a Medieval-esque setting!” This is stupid for a number of reasons. One, mastectomies are actually a lot older than a lot of people realize. We have records of them from Ancient Egypt. Two, Thedas has extremely powerful healing magic so if you open your mind to possibilities, it makes perfect sense that the setting would have more advanced surgical techniques than we had in the real world in our equivalent time period. Three, most importantly, this is a fictional world with dragons and shit. What the fuck do you mean “not historically accurate?”

I have elected to make my character for this playthrough a trans man because marking your character as trans opens some extra dialog options and I’m curious to have a look at them. Once you get your character designed, you start moving on to the more combat-related parts of character customization.

Like all Dragon Age games, you can choose between Rogue, Warrior, and Mage. The only exception to this is if you’re playing a dwarf; they can’t be mages since they don’t have a connection to the Fade, the mystical dimension sealed behind the Veil and the origin of magic. Put a pin in that because it’ll be very important down the road. Mage is my favorite to play in this game for reasons I’ll get into when we get a look at actual combat, but Rogue is a close second. I think I’m going to go Rogue this playthrough. Once you’ve picked your class, you can choose your Faction.

This feature is reminiscent of the Origin feature from, well, Origins. In that game you had a handful of different backstories for your character depending on your race, and you would play through that backstory as a little prologue to the game, getting to know your character’s family and/or friends, learning what life was like as a Dalish elf, or Human Noble or what have you, before something inevitably went horribly wrong and you had to be recruited to join an organization called the Grey Wardens or you’d die. It’s one of the highlights of the game and really immerses you in your character’s world.

The Faction system could have been a way to bring back a beloved feature that hasn’t been seen since the first game. Sadly, they didn’t go that route, probably due to a lack of time or resources. Your faction isn’t just flavor, though. It gives you some unique dialog options depending on which you choose, though those options are not spread out evenly. Lords of Fortune really get shafted in that department (and most departments as we’ll see down the line). Each faction has its own mechanical benefits too. Each one lets you gain reputation faster with your chosen faction, and gives you a damage bonus against one specific type of enemy, and then they all have a unique ability. Regardless of which faction you choose, your character goes by the nickname of Rook so that the characters have something to call you in dialog. I am going to play as a Shadow Dragon, so I get a bonus against Venatori (mage supremacists from the Tevinter Imperium) and the resource I spend to use my abilities regenerates faster. Instead of getting to play through a prologue showing how we got involved with the events of the game, we instead get a text box telling us what our backstory is.

All the Faction backstories follow this basic format: you were doing a thing related to your faction, something went wrong and you took initiative to save the day in a way that pissed off your higher-ups so you ended up traveling with Varric while you wait for things to calm down. But here we can see a failing of the Faction system versus the Origin system. Back in Origins, there were 6 Origins. Most were dependent on your character’s race, and even two origins with the same race could be wildly different. Dwarf Noble and Castless Dwarf are both from the city of Orzammar, but as you can probably guess just from the names, they are from opposite ends of society. They are two different people. There is one Origin that can be picked by multiple races, the Mage, but even then, the elf Mage and the human Mage are two different people. Amell, the human mage, is from an upper class and at one point Anora, queen of Fereldan, comments that (if you’re playing as a man), you could’ve been a good candidate to marry her if you weren’t a mage. Surana, the elf mage, can choose whether they’re from the small village of Lothering or the alienage (basically a ghetto) in the capital city of Denerim. It’s only a line or two of dialogue for each of these, but it’s enough to establish that Surana and Amell are different people with very different backgrounds.

In Veilgard meanwhile, no matter what race you picked, you have the same backstory. Every Shadow Dragon player character is a foundling taken in by a military family from the Tevinter Imperium who eventually joins the anti-slavery Shadow Dragons. And that raises so many questions. If you’re playing a human, the backstory makes sense. Playing as a dwarf is a bit of a stretch, but mages need a substance called lyrium to make their magic stronger, and dwarves are the only ones who can safely handle it, so there’s reasons a dwarf could be up in the Imperium. But then you get to the elves and Qunari. The Tevinter Imperium is a magocracy that runs on blood magic and slavery, and most of those slaves are elves. It’s weird that a (presumably) human family would take in an elven foundling as a member of the family instead of simply enslaving them. The Qunari meanwhile have been at war with the Tevinter Imperium for ages. It would be weird for a Qunari foundling to even exist in the Imperium, even if their parents were not actively part of the Qun (the main Qunari society that’s making war on the Imperium), let alone to be taken in by a Tevine family as one of their own. And yet, how these outcomes came about is never explained. We never meet a Shadow Dragon Rook’s family, or even hear about them in background chatter or anything. Inquistion had similarly simplistic, un-fleshed out backstories for its different character options, but you at least heard about them in the game. There’d be a wartable mission related to them, and you’d have a chance to flesh out your relationship with your family/clan/gang/mercenary company in conversation. There’s nothing like that here in Veilguard.

And the Shadow Dragon backstory isn’t the only one that makes little sense. The Veil Jumpers and Mourn Watch backstories also fall apart depending on which option you choose. The Veil Jumpers are a group of elves who study the ancient remains of elven society from before Solas created the Veil and catalogue and contain the artifacts in old elven ruins. You would think this would be an elf-only faction, but no. You can be from any race and be a Veil Jumper. The Mourn Watch are a group of necromancers from Navarra who tend to the Grand Necropolis, a sprawling cemetery, and to the spirits that inhabit it. A Mourn Watch Rook is also a foundling, but you’d think the Mourn Watch would’ve given the child away if there was no chance of them being a mage, like, say, if they were a dwarf. But no, not being able to actually command spirits or do any of the other magical stuff Mourn Watch members need to do doesn’t stop you from being a member. Somehow.

But the player character isn’t the only one that needs to be built. We also need to create our Inquisitor, the protagonist of the previous game.

Behold my current Inquisitor. I find it very weird that, despite having almost 90 hair options, some of the hairstyles from Inquisition aren’t present. It makes it hard to make a proper one-to-one remake of the previous character. They’ve also way trimmed down the amount of eye colors. In Inquisition you had the full RGB wheel. Here, well, you can see all the options available. RIP if you gave your Inquisitor funky fantasy eye colors. In addition to their physical appearance, you also pick out a few major choices to import from your Inquisition worldstate.

The first question is who your Inquisitor romanced. This is an illusion of choice. The only one that actually matters is Solas. If you romanced Dorian, you get one line of ambient dialog during the literal last mission. If you picked anyone else, you get a letter from them and that’s it. I romanced Sera that playthrough, so this choice will be completely meaningless for the playthrough.

The next question is if you disbanded the Inquisition or let it be folded into the Chantry. As far as I can tell, this affects one conversation and that’s it. Maybe some of the codex entries about what Carter, one of the Inquisition’s spies, has been up to, but I don’t really count those since they’re purely flavor. This question sounds like it would matter and affect how much resources we have to throw at the conflict in the game, but no. That would require Inquisition to actually matter.

The last question is whether your Inquisitor wants to stop Solas violently or try to talk him down. That’s it. Those are the only decisions from Inquisition that actually carry over. The mage/templar conflict? Who was chosen as Divine? Was Hawke or the Grey Warden companion left in the Fade? Irrelevant! This was the moment that I knew this game was going to be bad. All of those things should have a big effect on the world and the events of Veilguard and yet. Nothing.

Once we’re finished with character creation we get a bit more narration from Varric, telling us we’re going to try and stop Solas from performing his ritual to bring down the Veil and then setting the scene.

Our contact is missing! Whatever will we do? …That is a question for next time because holy moly I’ve managed to talk way too much just about the character creator. Next time, we will get into the actual story of the game!