Before I played Dragon Age: The Veilguard, I created a list in my head of all the choices I was going to make. It’s a ritual I employ for any decision-based RPG. I research the kinds of choices I can make through previews, demos, and conversations with friends, then make my determinations ahead of time. Through this system, I’ve found that my enjoyment of these kinds of games is formed in the gap between what I originally decide and what I actually wind up doing – the wider the gap, the better the game. And the gap for Dragon Age: The Veilguard was huge.

Spoilers for Dragon Age: The Veilguard below.

My first thwarted choice came with the game’s character creator, specifically class. There are three choices: warrior, rogue, and mage. I’ve never liked Dragon Age’s mages. Up until this game mages, along with elves, were the game’s stand-in for an oppressed minority class, something I have no interest in experiencing. But Veilguard presented a new opportunity. For the first time, Dragon Age has ventured beyond the lands where mages were oppressed and into a place where they’re celebrated or at least not treated with fantasy racism. With the change in location, I could try at being a mage free of the baggage the writers saddled them with in previous games. And I’m glad I did.

I loved being a mage. I had two weapon types at my disposal – a knife / orb and a staff – that I could switch between on the fly. Using my knife / orb to stab and stun up close enemies, then quickly switching to my staff to attack enemies at range lent this kinetic, almost chaotic energy to combat. Unlike typical casters in RPGs, Veilguard’s mages aren’t the type to stand in the back, slinging spells from relative safety while the melee classes get their hands dirty. They’re more like Gandalf, right in the thick of battle, smacking enemies around like everybody else. It ruled.

I also loved the new elemental system that assigned my weapons and abilities an elemental affinity and each enemy an elemental vulnerability or strength. It made each encounter a rock-paper-scissors match that I had to puzzle out. Knowing that I’m about to face a gaggle of evil mages who are weak to ice and their demon summons who are weak to fire, I can equip one weapon and ability of each type and cackle as their health bars all but dissolve. But my absolute favorite were the lightning powers. I loved calling down bolts of lighting that knocked enemies prone with a satisfying rumble from my DualSense controller. 

Another new feature is the combo system. One party member applies a status effect like sundered, weakened, or overwhelmed, and the other detonates it resulting in huge, health-melting explosions. The problem, though, is that combat encounters can run long with wave after wave of tanky enemies with multiple health bars. That incentivizes parties that can blow shit up. But if you only craft your parties around ability synergy you’ll miss out on some fun banter – one of the main reasons people play these games – because not all party compositions are compatible. Emmrich the necromancer and Taash the dragon hunter don’t start out with a compatible combo (through companion progression you can change that later on), but they have some of the funniest exchanges and the best relationship evolution that I only got to hear because I ignored that fact. I suggest you do too.

That my romance didn’t pan out the way I planned was probably the second biggest surprise of the game (and I’ll get to the biggest shortly). I wanted to go for Lucanis. I liked his vibe as the moody, debonair assassin. But as I progressed through the game all of the companions had this spark that made me seriously consider them as a romantic partner. The Grey Warden Davrin had this upright, knightly charm that most closely resembled the characters I’ve romanced in Dragon Age games past. Then there’s Harding’s earnest sweetness combined with her devastating good looks (those freckles!!). Neve’s severity as a hard-boiled mage detective reawakened the Nick Valentine lover in me while Taash was simply the “please squish me with your big muscles” choice.

I flirted with all of them, delighted by their dialogue and their voice actors’ performances. And I was grateful my amorous attentions didn’t lock me into a romance until the game explicitly warned me they would  – a nice improvement over previous games. When it was finally time to settle down, I wound up choosing the elderly necromancer Emmrich.

I’m so glad BioWare wrote his romance seriously. It was sincere, sweet, and didn’t gloss over the fact there’s baggage that comes with romancing an older partner just like in real life. It would have been easy to make endless jokes about “breaking a hip” because video games tend to treat older characters as fragile and sexless – someone suited only to dispense wisdom and die. But that old man turned me out, not the other way around. I was tickled to death in the aftermath of the love scene where he was up and walking around while my character was still comatose in the coffin we just shared.

But no subverted choice was so significant as the one that came at the very end. After two games of chasing after Solas, Inquisition’s companion turned Veilguard’s secondary villain, I finally confronted him. I have been aching for this meeting because I had determined long ago to kill him. That choice was reinforced every time I spoke to him in Veilguard, because I had to listen to his sanctimonious ass try to justify his genocidal actions. Then, when I thought we had reached common ground, he betrayed me, again, just like he did in Inquisition’s Trespasser DLC.

When it was finally time to fight this asshole for all the grief he put me and my two characters through – I didn’t. BioWare crafted his story arc in a way that didn’t soften his actions as villain backstories typically do, but in a way that I felt compelled to make a different choice. One that would let me end the thousand-year cycle of violence that kicked off the game in the first place. After 10 years of making jokes about “cracking” Solas’ bald egghead to scramble his brains for my breakfast, I let him go and it hurt. 

For Veilguard, my system failed me. I made none of my pre-determined choices. And the disparity between what I decided and what I actually chose speaks to the skill with which BioWare has crafted the narrative and characters for this game. Making each choice felt like the developers dangling a carrot in front of me. “You’ve already chosen Lucanis to romance because you like characters with a brokenness you want to fix,” they’d sayd, before whacking me with the stick, “But can you afford to miss out on experiencing old man Emmrich’s surprising charm?” BioWare made me love the stick, and the pain was so worth it.