Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s change that’s surprisingly good.
For those out of the loop, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the next addition to the Dragon Age fantasy strategy-based RPG series, released following the success of Dragon Age: Inquisition. Although community reception based on the promotional footage of this game has not been great so far due to the sudden shift in art style, the difficulty system is one small aspect that actually seems like it is not a bad decision for once.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard has an interesting take on the difficulty of its combat. There are the usual three difficulties; Storyteller for those who don’t want to focus on the combat, Adventurer for those who want a balanced experience, and Nightmare for the ones who want to learn the ins and outs of the combat system and want to challenge themselves considerably. In all the difficulties except Nightmare, you can adjust the difficulty if one is not your style, but the mentioned Nightmare mode is permanent which means it is a true test of your skills.
The most interesting aspect of the difficulty is the fourth Unbound option, where you will reportedly have free reign over almost every combat mechanic that you come across. Yes, you read that right, this means you can tweak individual aspects of difficulty like parry timings, enemy health or damage, or even their aggressiveness.
You can even turn off death if you are so inclined to do so. This applies to both ends of the system; you can tweak the settings to make the game super easy, or you can create an ultra-challenging experience for yourself that even surpasses what the Nightmare difficulty offers.
Usually, this level of customization is only found through installing mods made by the community, so this addition will be much appreciated by fans, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard will certainly have a strong and long-lasting community given the bread-and-butter of the combat system is engaging enough.
While this unbound approach is creative, the stock difficulty levels and the combat itself still need to be good enough that players don’t feel the need to be forced to use the special mode. If this is not the case, the developers’ inadequacies may come through.
On a more optimistic note, there will most definitely be collections of custom difficulty levels and special challenges made by the community of Dragon Age: The Veilguard so you can pick one that caters to you the closest. This can be a sigh of relief to many fans as the difficulty of a game is oftentimes what puts people off from continuing a game – and this applies to people on both ends of the difficulty spectrum.
This is promising news for this upcoming fantasy RPG game. Oftentimes, it is this sort of customization that keeps a game thriving long after release. Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing how this will be implemented and whether this sort of approach will be available to other aspects of Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
