On October 31, 2024, a new game in the Dragon Age series was released. The Veilguard is the sequel to Inquisition, which was released in 2014. Fans have been waiting for this event for ten years.
The new BioWare game has a complicated fate. The first news about the development of The Veilguard flashed online as early as 2015. During this time, the project changed several names and concepts, and by 2024, there was no trace of the original idea. A short time after the release, the Blix team is ready to publish player reviews and share statistics.
Contents
Highlights
- What players praise and berate the highly anticipated Dragon Age: The Veilguard for
- Game Online Statistics
We track stats for other games as well, such as Deadlock Online Stats. You can also read our article Space Marines 2 Users Review.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard Online Statistics
Many media outlets have written that Dragon Age: The Veilguard had a record-breaking peak online presence on Steam among all BioWare games, managing to attract more than 70,000 concurrent players. While the record itself is good news, fans are worried that such results may not be enough for Electronic Arts management.
The game’s peak online can be celebrated on Saturday, November 3. At the same time, there were 89 thousand players in the game, which is quite a lot.
Steam DB charts
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a high-budget RPG, but it has failed to reach the level of many mid-budget ones on Steam. For example, Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Divinity: Original Sin 2, released 7 years ago, attracted over 90,000 concurrent players at launch – and that’s when Steam wasn’t as big a platform as it is today.
The selection of trending games remains number one for now, as evidenced by the Steam DB rankings.
However, as we can see now, online games are slowly dropping. We will keep an eye on events. This is most likely due to the overwhelmingly bad ratings on Metacritic and the dissatisfaction of many players, which we will discuss further.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard User Review
Feedback from player JRDN on Steam
On a positive note for BioWare, The Veilguard mainly garners positive customer reviews. To the surprise of some players, the game is receiving mostly positive reviews on Steam.
Many players note the excellent, unboring plot and funny, awkward characters that stay positive while not looking like “tough guys.” This is a touching review left by one of the players, and perhaps he is right—”We’ve all already experienced our best game ever.” From the point of view of Steam users, the game is excellent; about 80% of players agree with it.
Feedback from player Sillygoose13 on Steam
Mostly on Steam, gameplay, story, and graphics are rated very even well; usually, if rated on a 10-point scale, it’s close to the highest rating but falls a little short. We’ll leave you with a link to an interesting review from a user who has broken down aspects of the game in detail.
Other players rightly point out that the game isn’t fully polished:
“OK so first off id like to say iv played and enjoyed all the other dragon age games and i do and don’t like this one it feels like for the amount of time they spent getting it to us its rather unpolished and there are some rather majorly upsetting bugs of encounter like having an cant lode my file when im trying to lode between different chars or removing my chars hole appearance and returning it to defult state forcing me to go and redo in game over and over again i think if they do some tweaking and updates they could really turn it around”.
There are also negative reviews on Steam, where players are perplexed by the game’s cartoonish drawing style, as well as its humdrum nature:
“I wanted this to be good to spite the anti-woke crowd, but this game is just a slog. Horrible Fortnite-esque art-style, awful dialogue, boring story and companions. The combat is fun, but that’ about it. I’ve loved this franchise since Origins, it’s depressing to see what it’s become.”
However, after 54 reviews from journalists on Metacritic, Dragon Age The Veilguard received an average score of 84 out of 100 (PS5). There, the game received only 3.9 out of 10 for PS5 and 2.3 for PC based on 4,705 ratings at the time of this writing.
Critics’ reviews also caused great resonance: the reviews published a few days before the release on Metacritic had no less than 8 ratings and praised the game in very similar wording. They especially suspiciously often used the phrase “triumphant return to form,” which was used by almost every second journalist.
At the same time, only a couple of reviewers—Skill Up and Mr. MattyPlays—openly called the game terrible. And because the keys were given in advance only to those publications and bloggers who never once denounced the game during the promo campaign, gamers immediately accused EA of bribing the media.
On Metacritic, the good things were not good dialogues, optimization, and graphics, but they were not enough. You may be surprised, but the game is criticized for the same things they praise it for. Characters are too kind; the world is too light, and discrimination and fighting do not exist.
“1. The battle of Good VS Evil. Dragon Age was my absolute favourite dark fantasy setting. It was a grey world filled with grey characters. Every villain had motivations beyond wanting to destroy the world, every good guy had its flaws and wounds. All of this is gone. Villains are pure evil motivated by power and destruction, and good characters are angelic in every little aspect. How do you make a companion grow when they are already flawless? Simply… you don’t. 2. The absolute unforgivable destruction of the lore. Thedas was a realistic world where ocurred discrimination against some races, sexual orientations, and magical abilities. For example, previous games established Tevinter as a power-hungry country, controlled by mages who can turn to blood magic, and where elves are considered lesser beings and therefore enslaved. I was trilled to play an elf as I pictured myself as having to desguise in Minrathous, free elven slaves, be faced with horrors like abuse and so-on – nothing. Discrimination against elves doesn’t exist anymore. 3. The companions are bland as a consequence of pt 1, as they are all heroes at heart. This is what BioWare characters used to look like: a panel of realistic people, that had gone through abuse, that suffer, and evolve in contact with your character. You get nothing here, just plain goody-two-shoes that are at the peak of their goodness.”
The combat is also being berated, along with the graphics, which have also been written about on Steam, but very few.
“They talk about the disappearance of the griffins in the game saying a lot of nonsense twisting the original **** combat system **** and a random button pusher and all classes are the same the mage attacks in melee and ranged like the thief does and like the warrior does. You have “well” 3 skills plus an ultimate that give 0 depth to combat. Companions are immortal and useless only serve to fill the screen. <…>The graphics are 10 years behind not to mention it now looks more like a disney world than dark **** to mention it’s not a medieval fantasy game but welcome in cyberpunk with neon and fluorescent lights.”
As a result, on Metacritic, the game received many ratings of 0, which scolds the game without reasoning, as well as many 2-3 for evil plot and dialog, broken combat, and terrible graphics.
Sometimes, you can still see ratings 8 and 10, where the game is praised… precisely for what they scold.
What’s Going On In The Game Right Now?
The BioWare team announced that Dragon Age: The Veilguard will soon receive its first update. The patch will primarily fix bugs discovered by players during the walkthrough. It will also include minor balance changes and general improvements to the game’s stability.
The developers will publish full notes for the patch on the day of its release, which should take place in the next few days. For now, they can confirm that the update resolves an issue that could cause DLSS settings to become inactive on Nvidia 40-series GPUs. In addition, a companion skill reset bug has been fixed, and PC optimization has been improved.
