Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a garbage-collection sim that wishes it was an RPG

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

I have an unofficial metric I use when thinking about video games; I call it the Bored To Death rule. Its formulation runs something like this: How long can I play a video game without having some outside distraction—a podcast, TV show, some other sort of brain sponge—running, before my thoughts start drifting toward the inevitable certainty of death? That is, how well can a game hijack my brain—typically a premium engine for the production of morbid solipsism—so completely it can’t run down its usual tracks?

I’ve been thinking about death a lot while playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the new garbage-collection simulator from BioWare Studios.

Veilguard‘s creators would probably balk at that sanitation-minded descriptor, but if they were being honest, they might admit its accuracy: If I’m breaking down my time with Veilguard—which has run to about 12 hours since the game’s release—I’ve probably spent about a quarter of that time engaging with its fairly fun (but light) take on action-RPG combat, and another quarter trapped in conversations that seem to have very little ability to steer the game’s low-stakes apocalyptic plot. The rest has been spent running around the very pretty landscape, working through “puzzles” often so complex that a clever kindergartner might break a sweat while solving them, and hoovering up the massive amounts of trash that the people of Thedas are apparently obsessed with leaving in little boxes scattered across their world. (I remain hopeful that the game will eventually take me to whatever leviathan industrial facility actually generates the thousands of containers the game fills every nook and cranny with—although the fact that these shiny lootboxes sometimes literally pop out of corpses suggests they might, in fact, be birthed.)

I focus on these waste-management elements not just because they’re tedious, and omnipresent, but because they speak to Veilguard‘s overall design sensibility, which frequently feels like it was crafted by hooking a bunch of testers up to eyeball monitors and EKG meters, then adjusting the game every time their attention flagged—or their emotional reactions dipped—for even a fraction of a second. Veilguard is so worried players will get bored or have a bad time that every inch of the world must be filled with some tiny *ding* to make the dopamine receptors fire; the result is a world where reward itself becomes blunted down to nothingness. (Hooray, I think, another 5 pieces of hardwood! 20 more, and I can craft an upgrade that lets me improve my sword’s attack damage by 5! And then 5 more! And 5 more, soaring into infinity!)

Meanwhile, over in its writing, the game similarly indulges in a pathological fear of bad feelings, going out of its way to blunt the consequences of even the rare decision points it deigns to put in players’ hands. I can’t count the number of conversations I’ve had with the game’s blandly appealing supporting cast where I’ve deliberately tried to make my main character, Rook, as unpleasant as possible, only to be told that everyone “approves” of his blunt, whiny indifference to their petty little issues. For a franchise, and a developer, that used to delight in making you feel the hits from making hard choices—that used to let you piss party members off so much they’d draw steel on you in the middle of a quest because you’d violated some firmly held value—it’s a profoundly disappointing de-evolution of personal stakes. Worse, it’s a sabotaging of whatever character these virtual people might have had: BioWare has always struggled to create party members that weren’t just adulation machines, doling out praise, banter, and sex in exchange for pulling their very simple levers; Veilguard feels like someone looked at the studio’s typical NPC design and said, “Whoa, too many levers.”

Ultimately, Veilguard—which can be fun enough in its own way, provided you’ve got some outside distraction running to keep its time-wasting elements/The Thoughts at bay—feels small, and cowardly, even by the standards of BioWare’s ongoing slide toward more safe design since the days when the studio got flamed to a crisp for the boldly weird Dragon Age 2. (Many of the things we’re complaining about here got a pretty good trial run in the endlessly compromising Dragon Age: Inquisition, and have presumably only been amplified by the total failure of the studio’s last stab at an original IP, Anthem.) Given that this series started as an effort to make a more modern, console-friendly version of computer RPG classic Baldur’s Gate, it feels almost system-shocking to play Veilguard the year after the release of Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3; to go from a game so committed to player choice that it frequently lets you blow its whole world up with a single careless decision, to one that will gently footnote every time you slightly hurt someone’s feelings (but not too bad), is the gaming equivalent of catching a case of the bends. Veilguard desperately, obsessively wants to make you feel like you matter, like your character is the world’s most special person, even as Rook spends half the game functioning as a fantastical garbage truck for shinies. It wants you to matter so much it makes everything in its world—once one of gaming’s most interesting fantasy landscapes—feel like it doesn’t. No wonder I spend half my time with it contemplating the great beyond; at least it’s more interesting than this.