Here’s a long look at Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s complex combat and character loadouts

Dragon Age: The Veilguard, like its predecessors, is an action role-playing-game, meaning all the slashing, spell-casting, and shield-bashing unfolds in a real-time scrum, rather than a turn-based set of choices made deliberately and with lots of careful thought.

The player builds, the weapons, they carry, and the perks they all have are so deep and complicated that Veilguard does need a kind of mechanism that allows players to analyze the combat space and put together a plan that’s more than just dodge-rolling and button mashing.

That’s where the game’s new Ability Wheel comes in, expanding on some helpful mechanisms that 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition introduced. As seen in the following 10-minute collation of four videos BioWare released over the weekend, players will see what in their arsenal works best against the foes on the screen, helping them lean into an effective dispatching of large hordes and big sub-bosses while still getting lots of heavy action on the sticks.

Players will have something akin to a loadout screen where they can swap abilities and weapon runes in and out to address the threats described for them in the mission ahead.

In the video shown, the player-character “Rook” has adopted a defensive, sword-and-shield fighting style from a skills tree, and is supplementing that in a fight against the undead with lots of crowd-management skills and good-ole fire attacks. Rook brings in two companions, Davrin and Lucanis, from a cast of seven that include Bellara, Emmrich, Harding, Neve, and Taash.

In combat, bringing up the Ability Wheel stops everything, and the wheel calls out the attacks, buffs, debuffs, “detonators” and ultimate takedowns that are particularly effective in this instance. When the baddies still get too close, that’s where the shield bashes and dodge rolls come into play, so it’s a good idea to have command of basic strikes and parries, and use the Ability Wheel to manage the nitty gritty that’s hard to remember in the heat of the moment.

The final three minutes of the video show it all coming together as Rook’s party of three dismantles way superior (and stronger) numbers, particularly through the use of “primers,” the detonators, and ultimates, to dictate the pace of play, put the sub-bosses where they want them, and blasticate them and their cronies with powerful area-of-effect bombardments.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard will launch Oct. 31 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game has been in development in some form since 2015, and it was only retitled to “The Veilguard” back in June. (It had been known as “Dragon Age: Dread Wolf.”

It’s the fourth game in BioWare’s fantasy RPG series, which dates to 2009’s Dragon Age: Origins. Players will be able to fully customize Rook as both an avatar and a character build, choosing from three classes — warrior, mage, and rogue. But Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a single-player only game, as most high fantasy RPGs usually are.

Featured image via Electronic Arts

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