My biggest disappointment with Dragon Age: The Veilguard is that everyone likes me. Seriously. I genuinely wish one of my companions would yell at me for my choices. But none of them seem to care about anything enough to ever disagree with me, and that lack of tension is what's flattened my party into the cast I've cared least about in the entire series.
The Veilguard sets out a pretty rigid framework: six of my seven party members come from factions around Thedas that I spend the majority of the game working with to stop the elven gods from destroying the world. I hoped that those factions, and my party by proxy, would bring with them disagreements about strategy, priorities, and questions of morality. But companions and factions both have been watered down into a thin gruel of niceness that I find it hard to care about.
I explained briefly in my Dragon Age: The Veilguard review how disappointed I was that the game seems to have stripped all its companions of values related to the wider world. They think that we should stop the gods who want to destroy Thedas, and they all agree that anyone who accepts power from the gods and uses it to hurt others is evil. That's pretty much where their opinions end.
Take the Antivan Crows and Lucanis, for example. I thought surely that our first real dive into Antiva's assassin guild would bring up all sorts of questions about how they operate, and natural opportunities for Rook to either support or butt heads with Lucanis. I hoped to see some acknowledgement that maybe an unregulated murderocracy isn't actually great for Antiva. I hoped to see how Dellamorte family heir Lucanis had been shaped, for better and worse, by the awful things we know from past games about how the Crows operate: trafficking, child conscription, and worse. Lucanis should be, at a minimum, complicit in a pretty terrible status quo, if not actively defensive of it.
But The Veilguard ignores all of that in favor of painting the Crows as purple spandex-wearing action heroes with hearts of gold. The only character who ever questions the Crows is, conveniently, an evil power-hungry traitor to the country. So Rook never gets put in a position to challenge or question Lucanis' loyalty to the family's goals.
I don't even get to disagree with him over the fact that he's possessed by a demon called Spite who has a habit of taking his body for joyrides when he falls asleep. Spite never causes any real harm. Lucanis isn't even personally to blame for the possession. Despite his "perfectly gathered clouds of doom" about the situation, Rook is forced to be supportive and never gets to question whether Lucanis is compromised—by Spite or the Crows.
I could write a similar tirade about Neve, who apparently has no problem at all with Rook making a deal with a local crime syndicate in Minrathous to fight against the oppressive Venatori cult. I had hoped to see the underdog detective actually wrestle with whether the ends justify the means when allying with the Threads. But it never comes up. The ending of Emmrich's personal quest, which I won't spoil, is the only one that gives me something close to an interesting question.
Part of the problem is that there's no functional mechanism for disapproval in The Veilguard. For the past three Dragon Age games, companions could take issue with your protagonist's decisions. But the Veilguard pretty much does away with that concept. There's a scant handful of choices in the game that my party members can allegedly disapprove of but never with any noticeable effect—in the menu or in dialogue—on Rook's bond with them.
Even the most likely source of companion disapproval, Minrathous or Treviso, really falls flat. That decision has consequences, sure. I do appreciate that it has actual effects on romancing Lucanis. He and Neve can both be hurt by the possible outcomes, but the choice itself lacks complexity when the threats are functionally identical. The trolley problem may be a mostly stupid moral gotcha question, but it would be even stupider if you were choosing between two individual people at equal risk of becoming roadkill.
I understand that The Veilguard is fundamentally telling a story about an unlikely hero so there's no room for Rook to be evil. But couldn't Rook get into debate about ideals with someone other than Solas?
I really miss some of the touchstone debates of past Dragon Age games. Fenris and Anders in Dragon Age 2 are both messy loose canons who resent one another and disapprove of Hawke's leaning too far for or against the rights of mages in Kirkwall. Origins gives its hero the awful choice of what to do with a child who's been possessed by a demon, and Alistair is livid if you choose to handle it in a certain way, culminating in a steep disapproval hit. I even enjoy Vivienne in Inquisition, hotly debated as she is, for effectively being a scab who believes her fellow mages should be relegated to the Circle towers. Those are just a small sample of the ways that Dragon Age heroes have wrestled against the morals of their party in the past.
The Veilguard doesn't want to come anywhere near disagreements like that and falls flat even when it does attempt to introduce conflict. More than one pair of companions winds up with some personal differences to sort out: Lucanis and Davrin being two who don't initially respect one another's work. Not to worry though, Rook gets to step in on that fight and choose between two functionally identical ways for them to resolve those differences. And then they do, in whichever manner Rook instructs. Copy paste that across a couple other companion disagreements.
By the end, Rook's companions are all pretty much goodie two-shoes characters with uncomplicated beliefs. There's a ton of groundwork to each character that could have made them morally complex and interesting but, frustratingly, that all goes unrealized. I get that, in the plot The Veilguard has laid out, everyone has to be willing to put aside differences to fight the greater evil. But without any willingness to challenge their leader, The Veilguard's companions are the most dispassionate cast in a series that used to be so full of feeling.
