Yesterday, on June 9, 2024, a new trailer for Dragon Age: The Veilguard was released and focuses on the role-playing game’s new companions. MyMMO author has been waiting a long time for new information, but what she got was sobering.
EA and Bioware have given us a new trailer for Dragon Age: Veilguard, introducing the new companions. When the official name was recently changed from “Dreadwolf” to “Veilguard”, I became even more skeptical than I already was.
Unfortunately, the trailer couldn’t give me much hope. Although at least two characters made me very happy:
Dragon Age: The Veilguard introduces your companions in the trailer
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My love for Dragon Age and its characters began several years ago. Even though my journey with the franchise is probably a bit unconventional. I started with Dragon Age: Inquisition after a friend talked a lot about it. After that, I played the third part of the series several times and still love it to this day.
I eventually got hold of the second part and started playing it, and I think it’s just as great as Inquisition. So it’s only natural that I was very happy when I heard that Dragon Age 4 was in the works. Since then, however, Bioware has managed to bring me down from this euphoria quite a few times.
What I like about the trailer: I don’t just want to complain about the new trailer, so I’ll start with what I was happy about at least at the beginning. The return of two favorite characters. Varric Tethars and Scout Harding make their appearance right at the beginning of the trailer.
Varric has actually gotten quite old, with his grey hair, and I immediately wondered how much time had passed. I hope that Varric hasn’t lost his great personality as he’s gotten older. I haven’t seen much of that in the trailer, but it’s only a trailer, so we’ll have to wait and see.
My only thought when I saw Harding was: “Finally!” Because I was really hoping that the tough dwarf would play a bigger role. And then seeing her in the trailer really got me excited, but unfortunately it didn’t last long.
Atmosphere reminiscent of Fortnite or Overwatch
The new companions were then introduced one by one, while Varric and Harding discussed which members they needed for their mission. These included an elementalist and a necromancer, a Qunari, a mage slayer and a veil jumper.
Apart from the fact that no character really appealed to me up to now and I thought they looked interesting or particularly cool, at some point the graphic style in particular caught my eye.
And here comes the point that bothers me the most. Because there isn’t enough to say about the story, the characters or the humor of the game to form an opinion. To be honest, I don’t have much hope here either, but I’m just going to keep my hopes up a little.
Only a render trailer! – a little hope remains
But if the graphic style of this cinematic trailer is the same as what we get in the game, then for me it just doesn’t fit Dragon Age and it actually takes away a lot of my anticipation for the game. The characters look more like they’ve stumbled over from Overwatch or Fornite and put on Dragon Age clothing.
But since it is “only” a pre-rendered trailer, it does not represent the entire game. This is a hope that fans may still have.
In general, I don’t think the cartoon style from the trailer fits the world of Dragon Age at all. A look at the comments (via YouTube) showed me that I’m not alone in this. “My old friend, what have they done to you…”, one user expresses his sadness. And many are wondering why they’ve gone for this “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Suicide Squad” look.
“Solas was right, it is too painful to live in a world like this,” writes another user in his comment, and receives a lot of approval. A fan writes in response in his comment that he remembers all the trailers since Origins and that he was always happy like a little child, but now he has to cry like a little child.
There are still tons of such reactions in the comments and I can’t blame them. At the moment it no longer looks like the franchise that many fans love so much. Tomorrow, June 11, 2024, we will see the first gameplay. Let’s wait and see what that brings. A former developer from Bioware has a special opinion on the gaming industry: The head behind some of the best role-playing games says: “Maybe the gaming industry deserves to die”