BioWare is turning up the heat on Dragon Age: The Veilguard and its marketing cycle, including a new deep dive into its combat systems, and a lengthy look at some Warrior class gameplay. Similar breakdowns for the Rogue and Mage classes are coming before launch, but what we received in this breakdown is one hell of an appetizer.
Before each battle, you will have an opportunity to prepare the player character, Rook, for battle by customizing loadouts of traits, runes, and abilities to suit your playstyle, as well as the enemies you expect to encounter. Each ability is accessed from the ability wheel, which pauses the action mid-battle, adding a little tactical RPG flavor to the game’s action RPG combat flow. Abilities are unique to each class, and so too are specializations, which grant an ultimate ability that fits the theme of that specialization and class.
Regardless of class and specialization, each has four basic actions – jump, dodge, light attack, and heavy attack, which can all be chained together in free flow combat. Light and heavy attacks can be charged to deal more stagger to enemies, which eventually lets you execute takedowns of staggered foes.
Companions also play a critical role in each battle, so choose those wisely before heading out as well. You’ll need companion abilities to help level the battlefield with buffs, debuffs, crowd control, and, of course, good old-fashioned devastation. Companion coordination is done by using what are called primers, detonators, and the ultimate abilities. Primers prepare enemies for a massive strike, detonators spring the trap, and ultimates bring the pain.
I’m oversimplifying all this a bit for the sake of brevity (yet somehow still wrote four paragraphs) but catch the full breakdown in a new blog post over on the EA website. Or better yet just see it all in action in the extended gameplay video below:
