Dragon Age: The Veilguard has any difficulty you could possibly want

By Carli Velocci Published October 8, 2024

A purple menu screen that says Combat Preset: Adventurer. A balanced experience that places equal emphasis on combat, party composition, and equipment choices. — Electronic Arts

Dragon Age: The Veilguard will have a long list of accessibility settings you can play around with when it launches on October 31, like with many AAA releases these days. This includes five difficulty presets, ranging from the easiest for players who just want to go through a new BioWare story as quickly as possible, to a nightmare mode for the most skilled or masochistic players.

And while most difficulty settings can be changed as you play, that doesn’t include nightmare, which cannot be turned off once you start. So you need to make absolutely sure you’re ready before starting a playthrough.

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EA showed off all the new accessibility settings in a new blog post on Tuesday, and there is a lot to go through. You can customize almost everything about your playthrough, from turning on aim assist to adjusting the timing for parries, and even forcing the game to auto-save more frequently. The five presets are as follows:

Storyteller: Here for the story.
Keeper: A balanced combat experience that emphasizes party composition and equipment choices over reaction times.
Adventurer: A balanced experience that places equal emphasis on combat, party composition, and equipment choices.
Underdog: Here to be pushed to the limit, requiring strategic planning and tactical decisions.
Nightmare: Overwhelming battles that give no quarter. Requires a mastery of combat, equipment, skills, and game mechanics to survive.

Of course, you can also just go “Unbound” and customize every setting yourself. We previously knew about four of these settings; the newest one is Keeper, which offers a new take on the balanced approach. Instead of a general universal experience like in Adventurer, Keeper focuses on balancing your party and equipment instead of the combat overall.

Even with presets, you can still tweak settings as you go. Some might not be immediately connected to the game’s difficulty, but say you want to be able to explore the map without dealing with objective markers or a mini map — you can turn those off. You can turn off the HUD completely if you want.

EA also used the post to reveal some of the other settings for The Veilguard, including being able to turn off camera shake, customize subtitles beyond just making them bigger or smaller, and even make it easier to spot interactable objects or waypoints in the distance.

All these accessibility and customization settings make sense considering that Dragon Age: The Veilguard also has a ton of customization options for the player character Rook and your party members, including armor transmog.

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Carli is a technology, culture, and games editor and journalist. They were the Gaming Lead and Copy Chief at Windows Central…

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Dragon Age: The Veilguard tips and tricks

A character draws a bow in Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

The threat to Thedas in Dragon Age: The Veilguard is greater than anything we've seen before. Solas, The Dread Wolf, is attempting to tear down the Veil, but that's only the tip of the iceberg of problems your Rook will need to deal with. Needless to say, the odds are stacked against you and you will need to use every edge you can get to find a way to overcome the odds. While the game does offer plenty of difficulty options, learning the deeper systems and mechanics will let you compete and keep up with the difficulty as it ramps up without having to change any settings. There's a lot to absorb when diving into this world, so we'll help you prepare with these essential tips and tricks.
Pick your class carefully, but experiment with skills

While you're making your character, the most important choice you have is which class you will be. The three options are Warrior, Mage, and Rogue and the one you pick here is the one you will be stuck with for the rest of the game. There's no changing classes or controlling other party members directly like in past games, so don't take this decision lightly. If you are having trouble deciding, we can help you decide which one is right for you.

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All Trophies and Achievements in Dragon Age: The Veilguard

A dark and dreary landscape in Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

The world of Thedas has a lot of problems by the time your Rook shows up on the scene in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. After creating your character, picking your class, and learning the basic tips and tricks of the game, you will be overwhelmed with content. There are dozens of quests to complete, chests to loot, puzzles to solve, and secrets to uncover. That's all without mentioning the main quest, which will take you dozens of hours on its own.

For completionists out there, you have your work cut out for you. A good way to help track your progress and make sure you're on the right path is to know all the Trophies and Achievements there are so you don't miss anything important. If you're curious about what tasks are required for full completion, here's the full Trophy and Achievement list for Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

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Admit it: The Hinterlands are the best part of Dragon Age: Inquisition

A dragon in Dragon Age: Inquisition.

If you, like me, have been spending a decade waiting for the next entry in your favorite franchise, you'll be able to understand my excitement for the new Dragon Age game dropping next week. Ten long years after 2014's Dragon Age: Inquisition offered arguably the best pre-Elden Ring high-fantasy gaming experience in the business, the long-awaited sequel, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, will finally take fans deeper into the heart of Thedas than ever before. The wait has been long and often frustrating -- fans can't hear the names "Joplin" or "Morrison" without shedding a tear for what could've been. However, we soldiered through, mainly by sticking to the good and, if you're anything like me, replaying Inquisition over and over again.

Hardly anyone can deny Dragon Age: Inquisition is a great game; it even won Game of the Year at the 2014 Game Awards. Yet, every time someone talks about it, the conversation goes to how the game's earliest section, focused on the Hinterlands, is tiresome. I'll be the first to admit there are some valid points to these criticisms: the Hinterlands are expansive, to the point of potentially feeling overwhelming. Yet, I cannot bring myself to fault the game for it. In fact, I believe that the Hinterlands are the highlight of Dragon Age: Inquisition, and it wouldn't be an overstatement to say the game actually peaks early with them.
Hinterland who's who
Dragon Age: Inquisition is set in a medieval-inspired world called Thedas. It's ravaged by a civil war between two factions: the mages and the templars. A conclave organized to negotiate a peace treaty goes awry when an explosion kills the attendees and leaves a hole in the sky, referred to as The Breach, allowing for nightmares and demons to come out and attack. A hero with the ability to close The Breach emerges, leading to the reformation of the Inquisition, an organization separate from other kingdoms and empires focused solely on closing The Breach.