Having played the other Dragon Age games, this was a real disappointment.
Good:
- The gameplay is pretty good if you're looking for an action game.
- The skill trees mean that you actually feel the progression and get to lean different combos and styles over time.
- Being able to respec abilities without having to go to a trainer or buy a talent reset is great, but it would have been better if you could have it memorize certain presets.
Bad:
- It's nothing like the party-based games that all the previous games in the series were shaped around.
- Your companions are mostly present so that they can either A) heal you or B) set you up with "primers" and "detonations" every 30 - 45 seconds.
- The story writing is awful. You don't have any really significant choices. Solas justification for tearing down the veil seems well founded based on the plot and evidence from Inquisition, but Veilguard pretty much ignores all of that. [spoiler] It would have made much more sense for you to have an option at the end to A) tear down the veil, B) have spent effort to find an alternative, or C) bind Solas to the veil (as is currently your only option. [/spoiler]
- The dialog is atrocious. You've got a choice between the "getting along", "joking", and "brash" dialog choices. All of the joking options make you sound like bad marvel dialog.
- The game is tagged LGBTQ+, but if that was actual goal then they utterly failed. They picked your companion Taash as a token non-binary character but made them rude, socially awkward, and generally unlikable. That doesn't really change even after you finish the whole line of Taash's companion quests. If this was genuinely an attempt at representation then it completely failed.
- The companion characters all feel hollow and like they don't actually bring much benefit as a companion. There isn't anything you can do to significantly degrade your relationship with them, cause them to leave, or even avoid recruiting them in the first place. The romance is likewise pretty empty.
- A lot of the cutscenes make little to no physical sense. Characters will end up in places or wholly new locations without any sense of how they got there or explaining how they got out of a situation.
- The art style is very cartooney. All of the darkspawn look like caricatures of themselves.
- Harder modes aren't more challenging by nature of enemies being smarter or using new abilities. They're mostly just tougher and you've got smaller reaction windows. It's harder, but not in a satisfying way.
- A more minor nitpick, but ranged parries are extremely unreliable. When you try to parry your character does a sort of duck kind of animation and sometimes that causes the attack to just miss your character even if you previously were warned it would hit you. This especially happens if you're not at the same vertical height as your attacker or their attack makes any kind of significant arc or travel.
