A Tepid Defense of Dragon Age Veilguard's Materialism
Dragon Age Veilguard feels too new. Everything feels too polished. Too clean. Every piece of armour is beautifully detailed. Every weapon lovingly crafted. But at a certain point as you meet your colourful cast of companions you begin to ask a question: hey, why isn't anything damaged? What fantasy world is this where every outfit is fresh off the press, pristine and perfect. To some extent Inquisition suffered this over polish too, but the art direction allowed for more natural scuffage. The sort of proto-cartoon aesthetic of Veilguard makes this tendency far more challenging to not see.
On episode 72 of Remap Radio Rob Zacny elaborated on this coming to a head in Dock Town: a setting supposed to call upon the grime, work-a-day poverty and violence of London’s Docks at the turn of the eighteenth century. Neve, the hard-boiled mage-detective, tells you to steel yourself: shit’s about to get real, man. And it just… kind of doesn’t. Dock Town is fairly pleasant. Balconies and swooping buttresses canopy overhead producing shadowed alleys lit by flames and lanterns, but the people are friendly. Many stop and affably provide updates to Neve on the local goings on. In a real sense Dock Town feels like a tight-knit community working together to get by. For all this, Dock Town does feel lived in, a little bit, but the mediation of the dialogue and the play space are at odds. There is no effort made to sell the player on Dock Town being dangerous. In fact, the interlopers, the Venatori, are the dangerous element. Otherwise Dock Town seems chill and fun, right? This, to me, is the absence that impacts the sensation of a place where people have lived, where infrastructure has aged, where history has occurred. What Winner called “Political Phenomena” [1] do exist, but their frequent absence in the physical objects (technology) speaks to the larger aesthetic priorities of the game. This extends to clothing, too, perhaps the worst offender, clothing that by definition ought to be grubbed up. When I buy my assassin an Antivan Crow dueling cloak the outfit is pristine and fit for a day at the horse races, not for wetwork and skulduggery.
After twenty hours I came upon the first moment where the world felt used and lived in, where history is made manifest by the material conditions of the location: the flooded district of Antiva. I round a battered corridor, and discover a clutch of houses sunken into the water. Wooden beams split and fracture away from supports. Rooves separate from fixtures after years of dampness and bloating. And here I am struck by the dissonance that plays out in the opening act of Veilguard. While your base of operations, The Lighthouse, is by definition an object of Technological Determinism, at times the rest of the world feels like a static painting, even as the broader world structures advance. The nature of The Blight evolves, even as this evolution takes place in locations that feel as if they have been holding their breath, waiting for you to arrive. This sensation vacillates naturally as you encounter the same areas over and over and influence them by your actions, or when you arrive at an open Wetlands that feels like a real township at the foot of a mountain (seriously the Hassberg Wetlands rule). There’s a haunted well that tore a family apart. A fort of Greywardens that’s clearly been understaffed for too long, the intimidation and veracity of protection clearly diminished, if barely there at all. A vestigial fortress overlooking a dying township. And the level design itself--the sculpting of the earth where the snow has melted and formed a tributary running into the wetlands, the clear block the fort enacts on the ecology of the crops--feels organic. Used. The homes are in tension with nature, pushing and being pushed upon. Pressure and release.
Yet the broader absence of identity coalesces into a pitched siege at a familiar fortress for Dragon Age old-heads like myself, and it finally feels as if the game starts. Not just borrowing an existing location but evolving it entirely, that same “woah” feeling of stepping into The Fade for the first time in Inquisition. Bizarrely only after this mission does the game world click into place for me as a player. We begin returning to old locations to see the consequences of prior choices building upon one another. More locations open up for exploration and here we must contend with a problem: occasionally in discourse we run headlong into a wall called “definition” where the prototypical categories of description become ineffective and lethargic, this is often where we reach for various frameworks to put arguments into pressure against each other. Dragon Age Veilguard’s reception suffers from what I can only call the disillusionment of the player as a concept. That the player is defined by loud reactionaries that represent a vanishing percentage of a given audience. Not a new problem, but a particularly difficult one for this game as a lot of the bad faith arguments graze the surface of real challenges in the game’s design and writing. Allow me to demonstrate.
Veilguard’s foremost challenge in the outset is that you cannot really be good or bad, and you cannot really be a character. This is, in some ways, normal for RPG’s. Geralt of Rivia can only ever act within the degrees of Geralt. The difference with Veilguard, and perhaps the root of the woke allegations, is that this Dragon Age really wants your party to be happy. To work through their problems with your ear and counsel, and become greater than the sum of their parts. So, like, here’s the rub: why does no one like this video game? Or instead, why does everyone say they do not like this video game.
These questions collapse into the remaining chemical makeup of these stories. Varrick is still here, sure. So is the Blight. So is Harding. But in the same way transitioning from Origins to II shed a certain… gravity, so too Veilguard must contend with telling the story of a great hero rising from nothing, calling on Origins more than Inquisition. No special mark for Rook this time, we’re just one of the guys out here. Yet we’re not just one of the guys, are we? We’re a bridge between that first story of the Wardens and the socio-political pressures of war, and this hero-driven story that focalises a liminal hideout between worlds. Perhaps this is why none of the critics can agree: this story is both not the great reoccupation of CRPG progressive scale the old-heads have awaited, nor is the return the seismic sensation of Inquisition and its many opportunities to sway the world. Though it does approach this feeling in the late hours of the story it never quite achieves that sensation of crafting the world to come. Instead Veilguard begins drawn in opposing directions, and opts for a third choice: what if this liminal headquarters were made real by the characters and their relationships to their respective homes, and what if this space were made by Solas, and what might that say.
And so Veilguard attempts the same exercise as Inquisition but slightly shinier. I can’t visually see a great army at my beck and call (not for thirty hours of in-game time at least). Instead, and perhaps here we come face to face with the “wokeness” of it all, the game becomes about my character helping these people save the world. I don’t so much make choices like a CRPG, as much as I am here to decide the flavour of the predetermined choice. This is where the mediation of the dialogue wheel and the genre comport with the character of Rook. I make dialogue choices every few minutes, yet it’s only every few hours that these choices mean more than whether a character stays behind or comes with me. The consequence is usually hurt feelings for the former, and some kind of sideways glance or less approval by a character. Yet the best of Veilguard is when the lens zeroes in on a location and how this colourful cast of odd-balls interacts with the place. Taking Neve and Bellara into the Hossbeg Wetlands is a strange, bizarre experience as Neve treats the Grey Wardens with a flippancy rivaling my own, while Harding can and will get along with basically anyone.
Ultimately Veilguard succeeds when the talking heads allide with a physical location that feels verisimilitudinous. The problem is that the dialogue wheel and choices you the player make frequently do not mediate these talking heads. For example, I chose to not save Neve’s home town at a particular moment in the game. I’d rolled a Rook with a background as an Antivan Crow and I tried to imagine what would motivate this character, and so loyalty one out.
Neve leaves the party for a while to tend to her people, but after her initial return and some apologies, this does not change the dialogue when me and Neve are bebopping around Dock Town. It changes the quests available, and there’s physical damage throughout the city, but the devastation never feels quite realised. It certainly impacts Neve: she brings it up all the time, but this sense of place waxes and wanes, and this, dear reader, is why people complain about the writing. Not because there’s queer characters or because it’s too “Disney” (whatever that means), no, the problem is that it does not always feel like a compelling version of real. Tangible. Character flaws are really just quirks in arrangements with story components. Davrim feels guilty over failing the Grey Wardens he failed, and continues to fail. Lucanis has a demon in his body that gives him awesome powers - you free him from a prison which is how he got the demon inside him. Bellara is a little ditsy and writes fan fiction - she literally shows up at the end of the opening mission. Compare and contrast with the characters of Baldur’s Gate 3. Shadowheart literally worships a god of death and torture and is doing said god’s bidding when you bump into her and holds the maguffin of the story in her pocket. Gale has a magical demon inside him that literally eats magical equipment that you need in the game and he won’t tell you why - he emerges from a portal in the wall and is suspiciously eager to help you out. And so while all characters in Baldur’s Gate 3 have reason to help you, they also want to get the mind flaying parasite out of their brains. These characters are influenced by the conditions and frameworks that exist in Baldur’s Gate and are impacted by the political phenomena that emerge from player decisions.
Comparatively, while the characters in Veilguard frequently struggle to balance the simulacra required to render a character who feels of a piece with the world they inhabit. Too often it can feel that characters are written with a reaction determined prior to an event occurring. This over-signalling can produce a feeling of constant arrangement of stakes that need no reestablishment at the expense of flavourful dialogue that might urge a character forward or make you slap your knee and mutter “bars” at your TV. Where all characters do succeed in this regard is being absolutely out of their depth dealing with the task put in front of them. No one has any idea how to stop these Eleven Gods and the writing carries the weight of this existential problem throughout some effective, best in class conversations where the player as Rook must try and comfort, rebuild and sustain a team who feel like they might crack under the pressure once a week. Or best in class “quiet” moments like lighting candles at a graveyard with Emmrich.
And in truth the game’s story does attempt to use the events of the narrative to place and evolve pressures on these characters in ways that reflect their contention with the world and draws our focus to how these individuals feel about, as Edmun Husserl’s intervention puts it, “to the things themselves.”
Perhaps this story about building a team of unlikely allies into a group of heroes, and friends, rings a little hollow in the moment this arrives, but as it stands there is some undeniable charm buried in Veilguard that’s holding my attention: it’s nice to play a protagonist who is just trying to help out the squad, you know? And so we must conclude, inevitably, that Rook is just fantasy Ted Lasso, isn’t she?
Sources
[1] Do Artifacts Have Politics? (1980). Langdon Winner. https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf
