My quest to finish all theDragon Agegames ahead ofDragon Age: The Veilguardhas been derailed byStar Wars Outlawsand other games I have to play for work, but I’ve still been trying to keep up in the ways I can. One of those ways is that, as a certified podcast fiend, I’ve been listening to the companion podcast, Dragon Age: Vows & Vengeance.
Vows & Vengeance, a collaboration between Dragon Age publisherElectronic Artsand marketing agency Pod People, bills itself as an “immersive fantasy podcast series” that introduces us to two original heroes “brought together by fate” who “embark on a journey of revenge, redemption, and love”. Its deuteragonists, Nadia and Drayden, are on a mission to save Nadia’s partner (fiance, kinda) from the Fade, and in the process, meet every single one of the upcoming fourquel’s seven companions. There are eight episodes, seven of which will feature a different companion.
The actors from the game reprise their roles here. It’s clear they’re trying very hard to make this script sound convincing, but unfortunately, they’re failing.
Do you all remember when the game’s first trailer was revealed in June and fans started freaking out on social media becauseit seemed to be getting the tone all wrong? People called it“cheesy” and “goofy”, highlighting its constant quipping. The companions sounded less like the “complex” charactersBioWare insists they areand more like comic relief characters in a schlockyMarvelmovie, constantly stating the obvious and dropping one-liners obviously meant for comedic effect but failing to transcend the 2010’s millennial humour of the ‘He’s right behind me, isn’t he?’ variety.
Now, I don’t want to alarm you. You can’t judge the quality of a game or its writing off its companion podcast. But this podcast soundsexactlylike that trailer everybody hated.
The podcast, inherently, is an Avengers Assemble type deal, at least from what I can tell from the first two episodes. Characters come across each other by coincidence. In one case, they immediately act like besties – Nadia and Harding exposition dump on each other from their first meeting, compacting their getting to know each other into as small an amount of time as possible. In another, they form a childish rivalry that doesn’t seem conscious of its laziness at all – Nadia meets Drayden in the second episode and takes to rudely calling them Books, because they read a lot and bring it up in conversation. Books?Books? As a mean nickname?
Nadia also brings up her mother and her fiance in hamfisted, awkward ways, completely in contrast to her hardened, roguish nature, which doesn’t inspire a lot of faith in me when it comes to The Veilguard’s writing.
And then we get an enemies -to-friends scenario because Books proves their worth in battle, and they end up going off into the sunset together. Yes, it feels as inorganic as you may imagine. And yes, the quipping is still incessant, and incredibly unfunny. Not once has one of these characters’ sassy retorts managed to make me crack a smile, and I’m quite easily amused.
It’s just not very good writing, and quite frankly, quite a lot of each episode is also made up of grunting, shouting, and other similar sounds from battle scenes, which isn’t exactly suited to a podcast medium. Perhaps it would be more tolerable as an animated series, or a graphic novel, something that doesn’t reduce the combat to incoherent shouting and weak, unconvincing threats hollered at various enemies. But that would still keep in all the hackneyed, cliched writing that prompted my partner to say, sadly, “This is bad” when he walked in on me listening to it one night.
I’d managed to convince myself that maybe that first trailer just wasn’t very representative of what the game is like, but maybe it’ll turn out to be the most accurate of all of them. Varric’s episode has just released, and if he sounds as cookie cutter and tropey as what I’ve already heard so far, it’ll be a very bad sign.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
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Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the long-awaited fourth game in the fantasy RPG series from BioWare formerly known as Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. A direct sequel to Inquisition, it focuses on red lyrium and Solas, the aforementioned Dread Wolf.
