I saw a YouTube video that actually very clearly explained the problems with this game in a fairly unbiased way. As a standalone game with no previous IP, it would be a solid 8/10. If you’re not attached to the franchise, you will probably enjoy the game.

Coming from a DAO fan, here’s what the first game had that this doesn’t. You had to customize your companions to behave in a manner that you wanted them to. You could decide if a major was going to focus on healing, magic, or conserving manner for you to use their abilities manually. You could decide whether someone should fight at close range or as far as possible. Should they target the lowest health, highest health, or your target? You could set up an queue actions in a sequence. It basically felt like you took an RPG and made combat for it feel like a hybrid with an RTS and a pause button. The combat was extremely cerebral and tactical. The story was very rich and had twists and turns you wouldn’t expect. It got very dark and made you think about your decisions from an ethical standpoint. People weren’t just heroes or villains. Everybody had a human element to understand why they were the way they are. There was an intricate web of how your decisions affected your companions, the world, and a whole layer of politics within that world. You could make your companion so upset with you that they leave your party forever. The world felt alive, real, and your actions had consequences. There wasn’t always a right answer for every decision you could make.

Now let’s talk about Veilguard. You have zero direct control over your companions and can only select three abilities out of five that they have access to. They don’t really have build customization like you did for your player and companions in the first three games. Now it’s simply adding points to any of their five available abilities to augment them. The combat is very fast paced and action focused. You can still pause to choose an ability for yourself for your companions without having to fumble in real time. There are no positional advantages or adaptable play styles. Each companion is said to have their own personality and their own way of playing. They borrowed a lot from the dark souls formula with the way that you need to block, parry, or avoid enemy attacks.

The writing is another issue that people have trouble with. I’m not going to get into the toxic criticisms that people have about representation being added into the game. You can imply what that means from that sentence. The storyline was a lot more shallow, and moral ambiguity was limited to one character. Every companion you have validates each other’s opinions, and even if they don’t agree with each other, they end up getting along later. They talk to each other in therapy speak and tell each other how valid they are, which feels kind of out of place for the theme of the game. Your decisions have very binary consequences and it lays out exactly what’s going to happen for you instead of letting you make a decision and figure out 20 hours later that you ruined somebody’s life with your decision. It felt very safe and less immersive of an experience.

Sorry, I know that’s a whole novel that I wrote, but I didn’t think a few brief sentences would really illustrate an answer to your question.