After ten years, EA and BioWare revived the “Dragon Age” franchise with the release of “Dragon Age: The Veilguard” on Thursday.
So far, the title has been drawing good numbers of players and good critical reviews – an 84 on Metacritic. That’s as the title has come under fire across fan forums and among user-posted reviews – on MC it is scoring a 4.0 from 3,840 user reviews.
On Steam, the title has drawn ‘Mostly Positive’ reviews so far and hit 89,418 concurrent players earlier today. However, as it’s a single-player game, concurrent playing figures on Steam don’t mean that much compared to a live service title where those figures are a more crucial metric of success.
The figure that matters more for single-player games is unit sales which aren’t available as yet aside from Steam where sales outpaced Activision’s recently released “Call of Duty: Black Ops 6” initially. However, that new COD title is available freely on GamePass which is expected to negatively impact its sales numbers.
Complaints-wise, whilst there are some shouting the usual culture war trolling slogans, a lot has been genuine critical appraisal with targeted complaints about the quality of the game’s writing, clunky dialogue, and the amount of ‘hand holding’ it does.
There’s also been plenty of criticism of the game’s tone which moves away from the dark fantasy of the original “Dragon Age: Origins” title or last year’s “Baldur’s Gate 3” into something more “Fortnite”-style kid-friendly and ‘jokey’ with every character trying to do Marvel-esque quips.
That said, there’s a good bit of love for the game’s combat which has taken a more action-oriented approach with RPG elements and has drawn “God of War” comparisons. That change, from the heavier RPG, tactics and more turn-based style of earlier “Dragon Age” games, isn’t going well some hardcore fans of the franchise.
“Dragon Age: The Veilguard” is now available for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.
