Why don't you let me change my class, Veilguard?
Dragon Age The Veilguard is one of the big names of 2024 but it seems to avoid letting me decide how to experience the world it wants to much to tell us about
My first memory involving a Dragon Age game was an embarrassing situation where I needed to ask a friend for help to go through the tutorial of Dragon Age Origins. I rented the PS3 version from my local rental store and only one week before I had to return the game. To tell you the truth, I don't actually remember the reason why I got stuck during the tutorial. I probably ignored the explanations popping up on the screen on how to issue commands, by pressing fairly intensively the X button in my controller and thinking I would figure it out when I could finally control the characters. This has been my method when starting new games for most of my life (I plan on writing more on this subject in another moment).
Long story short, a friend came over to my house and helped me. Unfortunately, they did it with only two days left before I had to turn the game back. From this moment. Dragon Age was a name I would never forget, although I wouldn't become a huge fan of the series. With time, my contact with Dragon Age games became more and more distant. I beat Dragon Age 2 but I never even started playing Dragon Age Inquisition. My history with these games makes me someone who knows about the potential of a Dragon Age game but is not expecting much from the series.
It was unlikely that Dragon Age The Veilguard would be ignored or a complete failure. Now, a little more than one week after its release, we know that in general, the game went well. It would be perfect, of course. It has some issues and one in particular has struck me as a weird but annoying contradictory design decision. The main story wasn't a major problem. It didn't mean much to me since I had no idea who Solas was – if he was in Dragon Age 2, I couldn't remember – and had no personal investment in the world. The limited exploration most maps allowed wasn't also the source of my annoyance with the game. Above all else, I hated that Veilguard didn't let me change my character's class.
For context, Veilguard has three classes for us to pick when creating characters, Rogue, Mage, and Warrior. They all have large skill trees, each split into sections that converge into specializations, the game's subclass system. During the initial levels, these classes follow the traditional fantasy tropes we would expect. Rogue is the fast and furious class, a dual-wilder with skills that inflict poison into enemies. Mage is the overpowered long-range class, the equivalent of having a bazooka. And Warrior is similar – but less impressive – to playing Elden Ring with a STR build.
When I created my first character – yes, first –, I started playing the game with Warrior. I needed to unlock the Reaper specialization for a guide I was going to write so nothing much to do about it. I’d played a good chunk of the game when I realized that playing Warrior felt like grabbing a bite from a visually stunning plate whose cook behind it forgot to put salt. For me, playing Warrior is boring.
I could only see how uninteresting hitting enemies with a sword-turned-into-magical-scythe is when I played as a Spellblade, one of the Mage's specializations, with my second character. Once I got it unlocked, I stopped being a caster who stayed safe and only shot Fire projectiles to kill enemies. I was a killing machine. I became a magical assassin, capable of bursting enemies by combining two skills. Zapping through groups of demons, I felt unstoppable. A wave of flavors in the form of a class. One can argue that the issue with Warrior isn't a matter of design but of personal preference. And I agree. I know some people might be having the best day of their lives playing Warrior. It just wasn't for me. Therefore, this conundrum could be easily solved by changing classes, a simple but for some reason nonexistent answer.
Considering how well-designed so many aspects of Veilguard are, to imply that Bioware couldn't implement a system to change our character's classes is impossible. It is to disrespect everything they have accomplished with this game – which runs amazingly well on the Steam Deck! There aren't genre conventions that would make such an application unlikely or problematic as well. We live in a world post-Final Fantasy XIV, an MMORPG that lets you level up all jobs available in the game with a single character!
Such a decision by the developers of Dragon Age The Veilguard would make a lot of sense if, in key moments of the game, the selected class would play a major role. By playing Rogue we might get access to a unique strategy when facing an important enemy. Our class has no direct impact whatsoever on the story though. Factions play a more important role when it comes to interacting with characters and having access to different dialogue options. If you’re a Shadow Dragons when visiting Dock Town with Neve, the characters you meet know about you. But they never mention whether you have always cast magic or used a shield in the stories told about you. So, we can only conclude that Bioware decided not to include a changing-class system.
Bioware takes this approach because they want to make Veilguard a story as much about Rook as it is about the world of Dragon Age. They want to tell a special story, where this group of individuals fight gods from the past. At the same time, Veilguard wants to make Rook feel like a real person in this world. Their existence is shoehorned into this game, trying to force us to believe that Rook has a history behind them, that they are the product of the multiple stories that make the world of Dragon Age interesting. But they are not. We learn so little about their past. Most of the time, Rook is merely a window – a window whose skin tone, race, and many other features were chosen by me, but still a window – that allows me to examine the other characters.
Rook's shallowness is not a problem as long as the game and player accept that they, as a character, are not important. They are a tool, an instrument for the designers and writers to tell a story about a world and certain characters, and an apparatus for us to experience such tales. This agreement isn't fulfilled because the people behind the game seemed too eager to make Rook more important than they really are. To make them as important as other major pieces on the chessboard. This is the only reason for them to lock our character's class to what we chose in the beginning and never allow us to change it.
By preventing Rook from going from a sword-and-shield Warrior to an assassin-like version of a Mage, Veilguard tells us that a class is not only an archetype out of which details about this individual are condensed but a product of history. That Rook doesn't carry a sword and a sabre because of aesthetic conventions, but because of life or out of necessity, they learned how to wield these weapons. However, if I want to have some fun pressing the buttons on my controller, I must swap from one Rook to another and pretend whatever they have lived so far mattered.