Veilguard

Woo! I've finished Dragon Age: Veilguard. I was debating writing one more post before starting the final mission, and opted to save it for after finishing the game, but now I kind of wish I'd gone ahead: there is a lot that happens in the endgame, both gameplay-wise and story-wise, and I feel now like I'm writing about the last half of the game instead of the last third. That's a good thing, of course: the game gets even more compelling as it rockets to the finish.

 

 

Some random notes before dropping onto spoilers:

 

 

I love all the companion conversations. There's the traditional ambient banters you hear while wandering around zones, but also a lot more back at the base, both ambient chats you overhear while walking near characters and a surprising number of full cinematic cutscenes between companions. I think that makes sense because of the smaller party size - when you had 3 companions you had 3 possible banter partners while out questing, but with 2 companions there is only 1 possible banter partner. And you're unlikely to have, say, your two warriors in the party at the same time since they don't synergize, so it's much more important to have more character development and bonding back at the base. Anyways, I love this change: you used to have great companion moments as a side-effect of their personal quests, but in Veilguard it's very common to have great companion moments for their own sake.

 

 

The economy is really good throughout the entire game, and I think this is probably my favorite economic system of any Dragon Age Game, or really any BioWare game. Money is a bit tight throughout the game, and you want to be strategic about what you spend on. I never bought a single cosmetic (armor or decoration), and just spent on the gear I would personally use (bows, light armor, light vitaars) and gear my companions would actively use. You don't need to spend to be viable since you get a lot of gear through chests and quest rewards, but spending on gear you actually use does make a meaningful difference, unlocking additional abilities and increasing stats. Even at the very end of the game I was turning down nice-to-haves to support my must-haves.

 

I should note that I had a very completionist playthrough. I think I skipped a few treasure chests and maybe one or two Fen'harel Altars, but as far as I know I took and finished every optional quest in the game. So someone who didn't do all those quests would have found money even tighter. You could probably squeeze out more gold than me since some merchants will buy raw materials, so after upgrading all the shops and my gear I could have liquidated my remaining stash of heartwood, lyrium-infused ore and the like; I'm pretty confident that would have only a relatively limited increase in overall gold, though, I'm pretty sure you couldn't buy everything no matter what.

 

 

Along the same lines of being completionist, the game has a hard level cap of 50, and I hit that relatively late in the game but prior to reaching the point of no return. That did make a few quests feel a bit useless since they only rewarded XP, but most quests will also give some gear and gold or faction strength, so they're all still worth doing. I was able to get all of the skills that I wanted; there were a few random upgrades buried deep in other trees that I didn't bother going for.

 

 

The game keeps track of your "faction strength" with the various groups in northern Thedas. You increase it by completing quests for that faction (like pushing out the Antaam in Treviso for the Antivan Crows or strengthening defenses in the Anderfels for the Grey Wardens) and by selling them "valuables" (aka junk). As I noted in an earlier post, some but not all valuables have a premium in reputation gain for a specific faction. You can find some spreadsheets online that break it down, but I found it easier to wait until I had a big stock, then visit all the factions in turn, selling off the 15+ reputation items at each shop, then the 8+ rep items, and finally selling all my 3 rep items to my lowest-ranked faction. I was able to get every faction up to its maximum strength by the end of the game; oddly, the last faction to reach it was the Shadow Dragons, which was my PC's background and the group I had most dramatically aided in the game.

 

 

I played the game on "Adventurer" difficulty, which is the default; I usually like to play one step above normal, but since Veilguard is more action-y and less tactical I didn't want to push it. It took a while for me to get the swing of combat, but it ended up being pretty fun. Time pauses when you bring up the party menu (R1 on a controller), and I found myself using this like I'd use the spacebar on the old real-time-with-pause BioWare games, looking around the battlefield to locate enemies and see if I was being targeted. This did get slightly annoying late in the game: there are some combat encounters where, in addition to attacking or defending against enemies you also need to destroy Blight Boils or Venatori Crystals or other elements; but you can't lock onto these, so I would often end up accidentally targeting some dumb enemy instead of the Blight boil I actually wanted to destroy.

 

 

I was a Veil Ranger rogue, wearing light armor. Once my build came online it felt very powerful. I had significantly increased Momentum generation, especially when targeting weakpoints; I could slow down time while aiming, which cost a little Momentum, but I'd immediately get it back when a shot connected; and I dealt bonus damage based on my current (nearly always full) Momentum. So while in the early game I tended to spend Momentum as it came up with elemental attacks that I could combo with my companions, by the end of the game my companions would just combo with each other while I did an endless series of rapid headshots. It's super effective!

 

 

 

I really like how different each enemy faction feels. They aren't just different skins on the same weak/strong/elite stat blocks. When you're fighting against darkspawn, it feels like hyou're desperately trying to beat back an endless wave of zombbies. Individual darkspawn enemies have very low health and can be taken down in a single headshot, and with AOE you can clear out a whole bunch of Darkspawn at once; but if you let them swam you it gets extremely hard to break free and fight them off. Antaam are kind of the opposite, with a few huge, beefy enemies that all have barriers or armor, as well as Centurions with unbreakable shields. Antaam can stagger you and knock you around the battlefield. They generally move slowly so you have to maintain a careful distance from them, looking for openings to get in a few hits, and repeat the dance until you gradually wear them down. And shades and demons blink and teleport around the battlefield, as they've done since Dragon Age: Origins, which is really disorienting: they're kind of weak like darkspawn, but you need to chase them around or they'll mess you up. Overall darkspawn were probably my most satisfying enemy to fight and Ventari my least favorite, due to how hard it is to hit their assassins; I suspect that different builds and playstyles will fare differently against each faction.

 

There's some big variance in difficulty throughout the game. A few big boss fights, especially the optional "hidden" bosses and ones in the Crossroads, required optimized loadouts (like swapping out Electric attacks for Necrotic) and multiple retries after long battles. Many other boss fights felt surprisingly trivial, with me easily steamrolling them on the first try. It's possible this is a side-effect of my build, and again, a warrior or rogue might have found these difficulties reversed. The variance in difficulty didn't bother me at all, it was just a little surprising how widely the apparent difficulty varied.

 

 

There is a fair amount of map re-use throughout the game, but it feels much better than in Dragon Age 2. In DA2, you had literally the same map, but the game would pretend it was something different: "We're in the Deep Roads!" "We're in the catacombs!" "We're in the bandit lair!" In DAV, you'll have marquee quests that take place in existing zone maps, but fast travel beacons are disabled and some passages are barricaded off. But it narratively makes sense, like there's an army attacking this location or something. And it raises rather than lowers the stakes, because you already are familiar with this place, both narratively and in the gameplay. 

 

It took a while for me to realize it, but companions actually have two separate meters, "approval" and "bond". It seems to be much easier to get approval than disapproval, although that might be the effect of my make-everyone-like-me instincts. You get "bond" by certain story decisions, having someone in your party when you finish a side-quest, and defeating enemies that companion particularly dislikes. "Bond" is the most important from a gameplay perspective, as your companions gain Ability points when they increase their Bond to the next rank.

 

 

I spread around my Bond as much as possible, generally bringing along lower-bonded companions when taking random side-quests. Before heading in to the endgame I had a single companion at the maximum Bond of 10 and everyone else was at Bond 9; by the end of the game I had brought two more people up to Bond 10. At Bond 10 you can fully fill out three of their five skill trees, which is effectively the maximum since you can only have three skills equipped at a time. I did frequently re-set their skill points so they would synergize with whoever else was in the party at the moment.

MINI SPOILERS

Completing a companion's personal quest will make them a Hero of the Veilguard, a special status that also unlocks a new passive ability and a Legendary suit of armor. There is a slightly repetitive system to this: near the end of each person's quest you help them choose between one of two paths, and I think the specific ability you get will depend on the choice they make, as well as this ultimately affecting their fate at the end of the game. Davin chooses whether to return the griffons to the service of the Wardens or to release them to the wilds of Arlathan Forest; Bellara chooses whether to continue plumbing the depths of the past with the help of the Archives or to destroy them and release her people from the bonds of history, and so on. I didn't find any of these choices especially hard to make, either one path felt clearly better or the stakes seemed too light to really concern me.

 

 

The first person I got to Hero status was Harding, which is appropriate since she was the one I was romancing. It does feel like I may have missed a few story beats. Harding's story seemed like the climax was about her denying her anger... but I don't remember her anger being discussed before then. It makes me wonder if I skipped a conversation along the way, or maybe some content was cut, or maybe it would have made more sense if I'd been following a "friendship" dialogue path instead of my "romance" dialogue path.

 

 

Likewise, there's a whole storyline about The Butcher in Antiva. Right before dying he gives a big speech about his motivation which doesn't seem to line up with what we've learned about him up until then: all of a sudden he's talking about how much he loves Antiva and he's willing to become blighted and killed to prove that we love the city as much as he does (!?!?). I kind of feel like each of these kind of quests could have been the basis for their own game, and we ended up getting sort of the Reader's Digest Condensed version of the story.

MEGA SPOILERS

There are repeated, or at least rhyming, story beats. Family loss, for example, is a big part of both Bellara and Taash's storylines. But it's interesting to see the differences between them. Bellara mourns her brother Cyrian as part of a community with its rituals; Taash's mourning of her mother is more lonely but feels at least as powerful. There's also a strong emphasis on cities, especially Treviso and Dock Down, and we hear multiple, but slightly varied, monologues on the value of cities, how despite their faults they are sources of vibrancy and connection.

 

 

I really enjoyed the long and complex regional plots, which play out over all three acts and feed into the finale. In Minrathous, there's a street-level story, primarily associated with Neve but not exclusively linked to her, about the corruption of law enforcement and the role of the Threads crime syndicate, which ultimately rolls up into a bigger story about Venatori infiltrating the Magisterium, which leads to a huge choice about whether to make Dorian or Maevaris the new Archon. I opted for Dorian; Maevaris is very cool, I haven't read any of the comics she's in but I do know a bit about her role in Thedas outside of this game, but ultimately Dorian is my bro from Inquisition so I had to go with him. (As my previous post on this blog noted, these days I'm also more in tune with "bring a gun to a gun fight" thinking than "when they go low we go high", which also tilts me more towards Dorian's program for bold action to dismantle corrupt influences than Maevaris's more idealistic campaign of radical transparency.)

 

 

As an aside, I don't think any of the subsequent Dragon Age games have yet topped the agonizing moral choices in Origins, like whether to save or destroy Caridin's Forge and whether to support Prince Bhelan or Lord Harrowmont as ruler of Orzammar. I think part of it is that those were all very deeply flawed choices with huge downsides and moral qualms. I like both Dorian and Maevaris, either one would be a huge improvement over the status quo, and I can theorize about how is most likely to succeed or do the most good. That's different from choosing which group of people to damn or embracing murderous authoritarianism in the hopes of securing social rights.

 

 

Treviso also had a great story. You think that it's going to be about the occupation of the Antaam, but you eventually learn that The Butcher who leads the Antaam was in cahoots with Governor Ivanici. The criminal Crows are the ones who actually save the city, which both Ivanici and the Antaam would see looted. A lot of the dialogue here referenced my "sacrifice" of Treviso, sneering at my new-found concern for the city's fate after abandoning it to the dragon. I'm pretty sure the same events would have occurred if I'd chosen to save this city instead of Minrathous, just with different dialogue.

 

 

While the leadership in Minrathous and Treviso are compromised, the leader of the Grey Wardens is just obstinate and dumb. The First Warden ignroes the significance of the elven gods and refuses to consider that this Blight might be different from the ones that came before. I punched him out, which felt very much like socking the Quarian admiral in Mass Effect, a rare Renegade action in my generally Paragon Rook. Eventually the mid-ranking Wardens rise to lead and rebuild the Order, while we also inspect its past to learn more about the history of the Griffins and of previous Blights. It's kind of amusing to me how way back in Dragon Age Origins we learned the deepest secrets of the Wardens, and our player characters in every game since then have largely been unaware of those secrets.

 

 

Other factions are a bit thinner - there aren't the same level of depths to plumb with the Lords of Fortune as there are with Minrathous, for example - and they end up revolving more around companion quests than broader regional quests. That's cool though, there's definitely enough meaty story to go around, and the more bite-sized and stand-alone quests in other areas make for a good change of pace.

 

While Act 2 is mostly focused on helping your companions resolve their issues, Act 3 is equally concerned with finding allies and making them stronger. As noted above, you can do this by completing their faction quests and selling them stuff. Unlike a lot of games in this series (or RPGs generally), DAV explicitly says that you have "several weeks" to accomplish these things: the big deadline is an eclipse that is arriving in a month or so.

 

 

Once you do decide to progress pass the point of no return, though, things abruptly snap into high gear. Elgar'nan uses his immense power to drag the moon into position, firing off an early eclipse and forcing everyone to scramble. The big threat is that Elgar'nan and Ghilanain want to unleash the Blight from within the Fade and use it to infect the world, thus giving them total control. Solas has been opposing them, but his goals are only marginally better: he wants to bring down the Veil that separates our world from the Fade, which will mean unleashing demons throughout the world and killing off most of the living creatures on Thedas. Thanks to your previous regional quests, you have learned that the elven gods have forged a new ritual dagger of red lyrium and will carry out their plan on a particular remote island.

 

 

There are a whole bunch of decisions to make during the long final series of missions. The very first one turns out to be the equivalent of the Virmire decision from the original Mass Effect: you pick one person to lead the second squad. The only two choices I had were Harding or Davrin. I was immediately annoyed: Harding was my love interest, and Davrin was my favorite companion; Davrin was also the only person I had gotten to 10 Bond yet. I had been planning on taking the two of them in particular in the final missions, and right off the bat my plan had fallen through. I reluctantly selected Davrin to lead the second squad, preferring to keep Harding close by for any banters. 

 

 

It isn't immediately obvious what the consequence of this choice will be, and you similarly need to task the remaining members to handle other missions as you approach the Archon's palace: someone to disable the Venatori crystal generating a force field around the gates, someone to assassinate the Venatori commander, someone to take down the gigantic construct guarding the gates. The game gives a few nudges towards which type of person would be effective for each job: someone skilled with magical seals for taking on the crystal, which suggests Neve or Bellara; a close-combat fighter for the assassination, which screams Lucanis. These missions are also backed by particular factions, like the Crows aiding with the assassination and the Veil Jumpers with the crystal. I'm not sure exactly how everything interacts, but I presume that if you choose the wrong companion and/or the associated faction is weak, either the companion or a related NPC will perish. This all feels very Mass Effect 2 suicide-squad-y, which I adore: it's such a smart, good blending together of all the choices made up to this point, the investments you've made in people, and hitting big story beats with a strong system behind it.

 

 

This is also the most cinematically thrilling segment of the whole game, long set-pieces filled with hand-to-hand combat, explosions, incredible emotion and heart-pounding tension. The music is suitably epic, driving you forward in the action. 

 

 

As it turns out, the person you selected to lead the second squad is ultimately killed by Ghilanain; in the case of Davrin, Assan flies in after him, which is extra heartbreaking. I shouldn't be surprised: this is Dragon Age, after all, and it's BioWare, it wouldn't be a BioWare game if they didn't kill someone we loved. It definitely stings, though, both narratively and because I had lost a source of Overwhelmed and Taunt.

 

 

Narratively the two main villains of the game are Ghilanain and Elgar'nan, but I always found Ghilanain way more interesting then Elgar'nan: she looks way creepier, with tons of tentacles and a ghastly mask and stuff, while Elgar'nan mostly just looks like a slightly chubby elf. Her backstory is a lot more interesting too: she created the Blight, and has shaped many creatures over the years, endlessly tinkering with living beings like some kind of mad scientist. Elgar'nan's main deal seems to be power: he apparently has stronger raw magical abilities than Ghilanain, and a particularly strong mental force of will; later in the game he starts imposing himself into your thoughts, and more broadly commands the large factions of Venatori, Antaam and others under his thumb. He's more associated with tyranny while Ghilanain is more associated with madness, rot and decay. So it was mildly disappointing that the more interesting villain was killed first; but they do mostly make up for it with Elgar'nan's later visual transformation, growing significantly more creepy-looking as he becomes infused with the Blight.

 

 

Like I keep saying, this is a very long finale, which was great: there's time for interior twists and pauses and more and more stakes-raising. One very big twist comes relatively late, when you discover that Varric, who was injured in the opening mission in the game, actually died during that first confrontation with Solas and has been dead this whole time: all the time you've spent having conversations with him have been figments of your imagination. It sounds like this is somewhat due to Solas's influence, but also party due to Rook's own rejection of reality. Nobody else on the team was aware that you were seeing or talking to him. This is one of those things that kind of makes me want to re-play the game and watch prior cut-scenes with Varric with that in mind. It isn't a central twist in the way that Fight Club is, but could add something to those prior events.

 

 

The game telegraphs for a while that deciding what to do with Solas will be the final choice, and I was right. We've had chances all along to express our opinions of him, either being sympathetic for his trials and motivations or angry at his actions and lies. My Rook has been consistently anti-Solas; I'd be very curious to see telemetry for how players break down in their opinions, and in particular if there's a split between returning Inquisition players or new Veilguard converts. In my game Bellara was abducted by Elgar'nan and infected with the Blight; during this time she learned that Solas had bound the strength of the Veil into the two gods, so if you kill them, you will accomplish Solas's goal of bringing down the Veil. This especially stings since he had just made of a point of dramatically swearing to protect the Veil in exchange for your cooperation against the gods and vowed "The Veil will never fall by my own hand." Even then I'd doubted him; Solas has become the Benjamin Linus of Thedas, always able to convince you that he's changed and this time is different, but always with a fresh betrayal in the chamber ready to deploy. Anyways, as your team muses over what to do, you come to the conclusion that Solas is the only remaining Elven god, so the only solution is to bind him to the Veil so it can continue to stand after Elgar'nan dies.

 

 

You do eventually kill Elgar'nan, and have the final choice about what to do with Solas: fight him to force him to bind with the veil, or trick him into binding with the veil, or, in my case, using the power of Mythal to convince him to sacrifice himself to strengthen the veil. This builds on an optional previous set of quests in the Crossroads that led to finding Mythal's essence and convincing her to aid your cause. (This also culminates one of the oldest plot lines of Dragon Age: Flemeth was the embodied spirit of Mythal, and Morrigan inherited her memories when Flemeth died, but Mythal's power was kept by another spirit in the Fade. In recovering Solas's repressed memories you previously learned how he and Mythal were lovers and allies against the Evunaris, and Mythal ultimately died for his cause, which is his single biggest source of regret.) 

 

 

I'd been planning to continue my anti-Solas streak, but faced with the final choice, I mused that they all kind of fit that bill. Attacking him or tricking him seemed pretty equivalent, saying more about my methods than my goals. Convincing him was the most diplomatic path, but would presumably have the same final result. At the end of the day I'm a sucker for any secret/unlocked/ultimate ending, so I opted for that path. There is a pretty long and emotional denouement: Morrigan and the Inquisitor get involved, as does the memory of Varric and Mythal. (Earlier, Harding had chewed out Solas for his many many sins in enslaving the Titans and creating the Blight. We get some deep lore reveals in this game: elves are the descendents of spirits from the Fade who chose to become embodied in the world; the Titans were the original inhabitants of the physical plane, lyrium is their blood, and the Blight was created when Solas severed the titans' spirits from their physical forms and trapped them in the Black City.)

 

 

I played the conclusion over a couple of weekend days and it was the most compelling part of the game, very cinematic and epic and thrilling. It leveled up my entire appreciation for the game; I started Act 1 pretty unenthused, by the midpoint I was fully digging the game, and by the end I loved and admired it. I should sit with it a bit longer before ranking, and ideally replay at some point, but my gut is that Veilguard is a bit behind Inquisition and Origins and solidly in front of 2.

 

 

Oh, other random note: I was pleasantly surprised by just how much the Inquisitor ended up playing a role in this game, it seemed more substantial than Hawke's quest in Inquisition. Like I said before I kind of wish I'd spent more time on the Inquisitor's sliders, as mine vaguely resembled a written description of the Inquisitor but didn't look a whole lot like her; I wonder if anyone will ever write a tool to export sliders from a save game file so you can get a close-to-exact match in Veilguard. One small bummer is that my Inquisitor romanced Sera, and it doesn't seem like that was ever acknowledged in this game; I'm pretty sure that a Solas romance would have a big impact, and I assume that romancing a returner like Dorian would also get a shout-out. It's probably too much to expect a cameo from each of the eight possible romance options, so I do get it.

 

The actual end of the game is a series of Varric-style narrative vignettes, a la the typical slide show, which is the de-facto way to end an RPG now and fully satisfying. I'd be curious to see what variations are possible here; there are some obvious ones, like Dorian's reign as the new Archon. Rook himself doesn't seem to make much of an impact here, but it's cool to see where others' stories end up.

 

 

END SPOILERS

This was a deeply satisfying game to play. It benefits from continuing a story and lore I've been invested in for 15 years, but I think it stands well on its own. The actual combat was less enjoyable to me than Origins or Inquisition, but it did grow on me as the game continued, and I came to really like it and feel decent at it by the end. The signature BioWare storytelling is still alive and well even after some high-profile staff departures, and this game can bring tears and cheers as it hits its story beats.

 

 

It sounds like the game didn't sell very well, which is definitely disappointing. While the plot does tie up in a satisfying way at the end, and brings a conclusion to many long-running stories in this universe, it's a world that I want more than ever to explore further. I'll continue to hope against hope that the team can come back together one day and tell another story in this world.

 

Nexus

I recently read "Nexus" by Yuval Noah Harari. My friend Dan recommended it, and I can see why: it's an intriguing book, bursting with knowledge, analysis, theories and predictions. The author is a professional historian, and the book liberally cites historical examples, but the book is more interested in describing how society works as a system: the parameters, the choices and limits available to us, how technological developments have opened or closed doors in the past and how they might change in the future.

 

 

Looking back, this kind of feels like two books to me. The first third looks at the history of "information networks" from the dawn of our species through the present day. This is a very broad but very vital topic: how ideas are generated, debated, accepted, spread, and how they affect us as individuals, groups and nations. The second two thirds focus on the impact of computers in general and AI in particular, sounding an alarm for the potentially existential threats they pose to our way of life. I found the first section extremely compelling and convincing, the latter part less so.

It's hard to summarize the whole book in a blog post, but my primary take-away of his argument is that, while we tend to think of "information" as reflecting reality, it doesn't necessarily have any connection to reality. "Information" is just data or thoughts, which could be true or misleading or false or fictional. Nonetheless, despite not necessarily being true information does have a profound impact on our entire lives. Concepts like "money" are purely human inventions that don't reflect natural law, yet the shared ideas we have about "money" control so many aspects of our lives. In fact, the most powerful forces in our history have essentially been myths and stories we tell ourselves: about religion, race, nations on the macro level; love, friendship, rivalry, heroism on the micro level.

I'll note early on my biggest criticism of the book, that some of the language feels a bit shifty. Harari calls this out in particular: he writes a lot about "information" but acknowledges that this word means something different to a biologist, a historian, a journalist, a computer scientist, and so on. I think his personal definition is carefully crafted and fit to purpose, but I get the nagging feeling that there's some semantic sleight-of-hand in how he uses it throughout the book.

Somewhat similarly, he writes a lot about "dictatorship" in contrast with "democracy," but he seems to basically define "democracy" as "a good government." He explicitly says that a democracy is not about majority rule, which I think is insane. In my opinion, you can have dictatorships that protect minority rights, or democracies that do not protect minority rights, but he seems to think that any system that protects minority rights is automatically democratic. He really should use different terms for what he's talking about instead of slapping significantly different meanings on well-established words. (It's wild that he defined "populist" and traces back the etymology but never does this for "democracy.")

Later on he somewhat snippily writes that he doesn't want to create neologisms so he insists on using common words. Which, fine, that's his choice. But I don't think you get to do that and then complain about how people are misunderstanding or misinterpreting your argument, when you're using common words to mean something different from how most people understand them. I vastly prefer Piketty's approach, using a neutral word like "proprietarian" that he carefully defines and then can usefully examine in his work, sidestepping the confusing baggage that comes with words like "liberal" or "capitalist" (or "democrat").

But those complaints about words aside, I think Harari's big argument is very correct and is actually something I've been thinking about a lot lately, paralleling some significant changes in my own thinking over my life. When I was a baby libertarian in my late teens and early twenties, I whole-heartedly agreed with statements like "The solution to hate speech is more speech." As I've grown older and observed how things actually work in the real world, and how things have worked in the past, I've come to see that this isn't true at all: adding more voices does not automatically, consistently or reliably neutralize the harm generated by hate speech.

Prior to reading this book, I've tended to think that this is a symptom of the modern world, where the sheer volume of information is far too much for us to properly inspect and interrogate. We have enough time to read 100 opinions when rapidly scrolling a social media feed, and won't click on any of the articles they link to, let alone follow up on those articles' primary sources (if any). So we early believe the lies, spins, misrepresentations and exaggerations we encounter in our informational ecosystem. Why? We're biologically conditioned with a tendency to latch on to the first thing we hear as "true" and become skeptical of subsequent arguments or evidence against our previously received beliefs.

As Harari shows, though, the spread and persistence of misinformation isn't at all a modern phenomenon. One especially compelling example he gives is the history of witch hunts in Europe. In the medieval era, belief in witches was very local and varied a great deal from one community to the next: each village had their own folklore about witches, maybe viewing them as a mixture of good and bad: sometimes bringing rain, sometimes killing goats, sometimes mixing love potions. Late in the medieval era, the official Catholic church doctrine was that belief in witches was a superstition, and good Christians should trust in God rather than worry about magical neighbors. That changed when Heinrich Kramer, a man with bizarre sexual and misogynistic hang-ups, rolled into the Alps denouncing particular women for having sex with Satan and stealing men's genitalia. He was shut down by local secular and church authorities. He left town, got access to a printing press, and printed up thousands of copies of the Malleus Maleficarum, which gave lurid and shocking details about a supposed global conspiracy of secret witches who had infiltrated every village and carried out horrific crimes against children. This took off like wildfire and led to centuries of torture and execution of innocent people This is all very similar to QAnon, Pizzagate, and trans panics today. An individual can write a compelling and completely false narrative and set off a global campaign of hate and violence, completely deaf to the litany of evidence against these lies. Whether in the 1600s or the 2000s, having more information didn't bring the world closer to truth or solve problems, it led to immense misery and evil.

The conventional view of the printing press is that it broke the Catholic church's religious stranglehold on information and enabled the development of the Scientific Method, allowing people to freely publish and share their ideas. There is some truth in this, but it's overstated. Copernicus's groundbreaking book on the heliocentric system failed to sell its initial run of 1000 copies, and has been called "The worst seller of all time." Meanwhile, the Malleus Maleficarum instantly sold through multiple runs and continued to be a best-seller for centuries. The fact that Copernicus's book was more true than Kramer's did nothing to increase its popularity or reception or impact on the world.

Instead of unfettered access to information, Harari credits the Scientific Method to the creation of institutions with a capacity for self-correction. This was very different from the Catholic Church, which was (and is!) forced by its own doctrine to deny any error. Interestingly, Harari points out that most of the founders of the scientific revolution did not hail from universities, either. Instead, they were an information network of royal societies, independent researchers, journals and so on. The key difference here was that information was peer-reviewed: people wouldn't just say "Trust me," but would share their theories, experiments and data as well as their conclusions to their colleagues, who would look for errors, omissions or alternative explanations. And if an error later was discovered, journals would publicize the error, making corrections to the past record rather than cover it up or ignore it. While this seems like it would weaken the reliability of a source, it ends up building trust in the long run: the reality is that, whether we acknowledge it or not, we are fallible, and by embracing this self-correcting system we can move in the direction of greater truth, not merely the most compelling story.

Fundamentally, Nexus is arguing against what it calls the "naive" view of information, which is basically "More information will reveal the truth, and the truth will produce order and power." This idea is that more information is always good, because true and useful information will drown out the bad and lead to a better understanding of how the world works. Again, this view is easily disproven by history. One alternate view is what Harari calls the "populist" view, which essentially denies that an eternal "truth" exists at all, and equates information with power. Controlling the production and flow of information will produce power, which in the "populist" view is implicitly good in its own right.

Taken from another angle, Harari thinks that there is a "truth" which reflects "reality", but "information" doesn't have any intrinsic relationship to truth. Some information truly reflects reality, other information distorts reality. The consistent effect of information is that it connects - when we tell stories to each other, we grow more connected, and I can persuade you of my ideas and convince you to act in a certain way, or you can make me feel a kinship with you and act for your benefit. There is an even larger class of information that contributes to what he calls an "intersubjective reality". This is information that exists on its own independent of an underlying physical reality. Think of story-telling: you might make up an impressive work of fiction, someone else might write fan-fiction based on your world, a critic might write a review of your fiction summarizing what happens in it, a fan would argue that a character should have made a different choice than they actually did. You end up with this entire ecosphere of carefully-constructed and internally-consistent thoughts about an idea that doesn't have an underlying reality. You, the critic, and the fan are all choosing to participate in a shared intersubjective reality.

There is actually some evolutionary advantage to our ability to create and share stories. We talk about how our fight-or-flight instincts are biologically inherited from our ancestors who needed to quickly react to the presence of a saber-toothed tiger. Harari brings up the interesting point that our neanderthal and sapiens forefathers had a similar evolutionary advantage around their ability to cooperate in teams. You can have a small band of, say, chimpanzees or bonobos that may cooperate against another band, but you never see chimpanzee communities of hundreds or thousands. You can get bands of that many humans, though, thanks to their ability to share stories and ideas. These ideas may be built around myths, concepts of extended kinship, oral traditions of prior hardships and victories.

To this day we have a very strong reaction to all sorts of "primitive" stories: boy-meets-girl, good-man-beats-bad-man, sibling-rivalry, etc. These stories gave evolutionarily beneficial advantages in winning mates, having children, taking territory and defeating enemies. Today, we still strongly respond to those stories; however, in the same way that our daily lives have many more encounters with rude bicyclists than with saber-toothed tigers, we're far more likely to need to navigate an opaque bureaucracy than to kill a rival chieftain. But we don't have a gut-level appreciation for stories about bureaucracies in the same way we appreciate action or romance stories. And our brains don't retain information about bureaucracies very well: we can remember bible stories about rivalries and murder and who fathered who, but we are terrible at remembering lists of sewage inspection reports or NGO organization charts or certification requirements.

As an aside, this observation reminds me of William Bernstein, who writes about how man is a story-telling animal. We respond much more strongly to stories than we do to data, which was evolutionarily adaptive in the past (we won't eat the red berries because someone told us that they're poisonous) but gets us into all sorts of trouble today (we listen to our friend who says investing in bitcoin is safer than US Treasuries). Interestingly I think this observation is from his finance book The Four Pillars of Investing and not one of his history books, although the observation seems even more relevant to history. But Bernstein is a trained neurologist, has a keen understanding of how our biological makeup and mental hardware impacts our daily lives and how we organize as a society.

Harari is a big fan of the Scientific Method, as is Bernstein (in The Birth of Plenty), but neither writer is too rose-tinted. One thing I've heard in the past that Nexus backs up is that individual scientists almost never change their mind, even when faced with persuasive empirical evidence challenging their prior beliefs. Scientists are humans, with egos and prejudices and concerned about maintaining their prestige and positions. When science advances, it isn't like everyone reads a journal and changes their mind; it's that the old guard continues believing the old thing but eventually dies off, and is replaced by a new generation that grew up being persuaded by the better, new belief. Change is measured in decades, not months or years.

Which is fine, if that's how it works, but feels discouraging when considering the problems we face today. We may not have decades to react to crises like climate change or the subversion of democracy. And "decades" is specifically for the class of professional scientists who pay attention to evidence for a career; it's even less likely that the populace as a whole will change their mind to a truer, more correct belief. I mean, Newtonian physics was disproven something like 120 years ago, yet we still learn it in school and most of us follow it in daily life; those of us who have finished high school are vaguely aware of relativity, and have probably heard of string theory but don't really understand it.

All to say that, I don't think science can save us from urgent wide-spread problems. It's slow, and while it can influence the elites it can't change the mind of the masses. Harari seems to suggest that the real key is trust. If we're a society that trusts scientists, because we know they peer-review their work and admit mistakes and are continually improving, we may accept their pronouncements even if we personally don't have the time or inclination to check all their work. But if we don't trust scientists, we lose the benefits of science: longevity, productivity and affluence.

Science is ultimately about truth, but as Harari keeps noting, truth isn't the end-all and be-all: a society with access to truth does have some advantages (it can keep its citizens healthier and produce more reliable military equipment), but it is not guaranteed to triumph over a society with less devotion to the truth. Harari sees Order and Truth as two separate pillars upon which societies are built. You need both of these. Without truth you can't survive: you'll have feces in the water supply, desolate cropland with the wrong grains planted in the wrong season, walking on foot because you don't have motors. Think of something like the Great Leap Forward in China, which upended scientific truths and led to internal misery and the stunting of external power. (In a surprising coincidence, Nexus devotes a few paragraphs to Trofim Lysenko, who I just wrote about in my last post: he was a charlatan who convinced Stalin that genetics was bogus and led the USSR down a path that led to the evisceration of its sciences and widespread man-made famines.)

But you also need order in a society. If you don't have order, then you have anarchy, the collapse of the bureaucracy and the inability to function. Again, you can have bad sewage, because nobody is preventing others from poisoning the water supply; crops are desolate, because farmers know bandits will take any crops they grow, walking on foot because nobody is organizing the factory which makes motors. Between truth and order, you can make a convincing argument that order is the more important factor. Stalin was a moral nightmare, his internal terror was horrific to truth, which caused huge real problems like massive losses in the Red Army; and yet, the system was incredibly stable. Nobody dared challenge Stalin despite his many failures, the USSR endured for multiple generations and had a real shot at total world domination. Or consider the Catholic Church: it has consistently prioritized order over truth, defending bad ideas like the geocentric nature of the universe, disastrous crusades and self-destructive inquisitions; and yet it has lasted for two thousand years, far longer than the School of Athens, the League of Nations or the Royal Academy of Sciences.

In an ideal world, of course, you would balance these two. Those of us in the West will generally push for the primacy of Truth, but still recognize Order as an essential ingredient. There may be times when this requires tough choices, as in the 1960s with widespread dissent and protest against the Vietnam War and racial injustice. One thing I really like about Harari is that, like Piketty and unlike Marx, he foregrounds the importance of choice. Order doesn't inevitably triumph over Truth, nor Truth over Order; multiple stable configurations exist, we can help shape the kind of society we live in, and we should also recognize that other societies may follow other paths, with results that are different from ours and may be stronger or weaker than us.

Going back to the various views of information, Harari has rejected the naive view that information leads to truth, and truth leads to wisdom and power. He also rejects the simplistic populist view that there is no truth or wisdom, that information directly leads to power. His view is that information produces both truth and order. Truth and order, in tandem, generate power. Separately, truth also leads to wisdom. Wisdom relies on truth, but power does not require wisdom. It's an interesting view; I think I'll need to sit with it a while longer to digest and decide if I actually agree with it, but it does feel useful to me.

Phew! All of the above thoughts and reactions are for the first third of the book, which is mostly teeing up the second two-thirds. (There's a lot more I didn't get into in this post, like how advances in information technology enabled large-scale democracies for the first time, the historical development of the bureaucracy, or the 20th-century conflicts between democracy and totalitarianism.) I'm less enthused by the last 2/3 of the book which is mostly about the threat posed by AI.

Examining my own reaction, I think I have a knee-jerk skepticism. Overall I find his arguments persuasive but annoying. I am not at all an apologist for or proponent of AI, but I've been in the camp that views AI as the latest graduated step in advancing technology, whereas Harari sees it as fundamentally different from prior technologies. His point is that algorithms in general and AI in particular are agenic: they can actually take action. Up until now technology has merely augmented human decision-making. A human needs to consult a book, then execute the action described by the book; a human is in the loop, so there's an opportunity to stop and question the book's instructions before carrying them out. But a computer program can, say, deny credit card applications or impose a prison sentence or alter the outflow rate at a sewage treatment facility without requiring any human intervention. Two programs can directly communicate with one another in a way that two books or two TV shows could not.

In another interesting little coincidence, I just recently (re?-)watched The Net, the 1995 thriller starring Sandra Bullock. Many parts of that movie felt like they were in strong conversation with Nexus. For example, in one scene her character Angela Bennett is trying to get back into her hotel room, but the clerk tells her, "The computer says that Angela Bennett checked out two days ago." She insists, "No, I'm Angela Bennett, and I didn't check out, I'm standing right here!" but the clerk refuses to engage with her and moves on to the next person. Even thirty years ago we had offloaded our decision-making to the computer, so what's different now? The fact that there won't even be a clerk in the future: just touchless entry at the door, with nobody to hear your complaint or the ability to override the system. And the ubiquity of the system: in The Net, human hackers had singled out Angela Bennett in particular (much like Will Smith's character in Enemy of the State); but in the future, AI might target entire classes of people: the sick, or anyone with a criminal record, or humanity as a whole.

The triumph of AI isn't inevitable: it requires us choosing to give it control. But if we do make that choice, we may find it impossible to reverse. We can't appeal to AI's mercy or wait for it to fall asleep. Harari repeatedly refers to AI as not just "Artificial Intelligence" but "Alien Intelligence": it isn't that it thinks like a human but more rapidly, it "thinks" in a completely different way from us. For well over a decade now AI has been a black box: we can't understand how it makes its decisions, only watch the final choice it makes. All this adds up to a very urgent and potentially deadly situation.

Harari does offer some suggestions for how to address the threat posed by AI, which I do appreciate. It's very annoying when books or articles lay out doom-and-gloom scenarios without any suggested solutions. The proposals in Nexus tend to be pretty narrow and technical. They include things like keeping humans in the loop, requiring us to sign off on decisions made by AI; along with this, AI needs to explain its reasoning. Harari also muses about banning or at least prominently labeling all bots and generated content online: we waste far too much mental energy arguing against bots, and the more we engage with them the better they get to know us and the more likely they are to persuade us.

As modest as these proposals seem, he acknowledges that they still seem unlikely to be implemented. In the US they would require legislative action, which is incredibly difficult these days, and even more so when the majority party is (perhaps temporarily) benefiting from AI support.

One of my annoyances with this book is how Harari stumbles into what I think of as terminal pundit brain, the impulse to treat political factions as equivalent. He writes things like "Both parties are losing the ability to communicate or even agree on basic facts like who won the 2020 elections." It's insane to act like the Democratic party is equally to blame for January 6 and election denialism! Elsewhere, though, he does acknowledge the reality of the situation, making a cogent abservation about the abrupt transformation of right-leaning parties. Historically the conservative party has, following Edmund Burke, argued for cautious, slow and gradual change, while the progressive party has argued for faster and more ambitious change. But in the last decade or so, Trump's Republican party along with parties abroad like Bolsonaro in Brazil or Duterte in the Philipines have transformed into radical parties that seek to overthrow the status quo: getting rid of bureaucracies, axing the separation of powers, imposing new economic systems, and broadly and rapidly changing social relations.

This is a surprising change on its own, but Harari notes that this has also thrust the traditional left-leaning progressive party like the US's Democratic party into the unlikely role of the defender of the status quo. They aren't necessarily adopting more conservative positions, but they do want to retain the overall democratic system. While Harari doesn't dig into this aspect much further, it does really resonate to me. I often feel like the Democratic party insists on bringing a knife to a gunfight. It's very frustrating to hear, say, Chuck Schumer repeat the tired paeans to bipartisan cooperation and consensus, when the house is burning down behind him. I do feel a bit more sympathy for him when I think of how he wants to keep a robust pluralistic democracy running, but I have yet to see any convincing evidence that his actions will help bring that about. My overall pessimistic feeling has been that that era is just over now, and while a populist left may be less stable than a broad-based democratic left or broad-based democratic right, it's the best option available to us now.

I think that Piketty is much more useful in this area than Harari. If we're going to marshal the resources to actually address climate change and similar existential issues, we need to retake democratic control of our wealth, which in practical terms means taxing the rich and limiting the influence of money in our politics. It's no coincidence that the ascendant conservative faction tearing down institutional systems is the faction aligned with the wealthy.

Harari points to the breakdown in political and social cohesion in the US. During the 60s the country was wracked by big divisions over civil rights, women's rights, war in Vietnam, and other points of friction. The entire Western world seemed to be coming apart at the seams. And yet the system still functioned pretty well. The Civil Rights Act was supported by majorities in both parties, the Nixon administration broke every norm of the justice system yet ultimately abided by court order. The fragile and messy democratic West eventually came through this period and triumphed over the more order-orientated USSR. Today, there's no bipartisanship, not a shared set of beliefs in facts let alone ideology, a lack of trust not just in specific bureaucracies like the CDC or the FBI but overall institutions like science and government as a whole, as well as a rejection of core structural decisions like the separation of powers.

Harari admits that he doesn't know what the reason is for this breakdown in consensus that has occurred over the last decade or so, but he implies that there's at least a chance it's the impact of alien intelligence: shrill political bots driving outrage on social media, algorithms steering individuals into more siloed media environments, and so on. Personally, though, I think you can draw a straight line from Newt Gingrich giving speeches to an empty House of Representatives in 1984 through to Donald Trump pardoning the January 6th rioters in 2025. There's a pundit-brain temptation for symmetry and a refusal to acknowledge that one faction just wants power and doesn't have qualms about how to get it or keep it.

Again, there's a lot of stuff in this book that I found valuable which I haven't unpacked in this post. I should mention that Harari does a terrific job at examining Facebook's culpability in the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar and YouTube's role in bringing right-wing nationalist parties to power in 2016. That's all stuff I'd heard before (and lived through!), but it's really helpful to view as a unified trend and not isolated phenomena. But once more, I think Harari's instinct towards bipartisanship blunts the potential insights he could have. He views the algorithmic pull towards outrage in purely capitalist terms, as angrier people will interact more with content, not only generating direct ad revenue but also providing Facebook and Google with additional data they can store to make their products more powerful. But he skips over the fateful Peter Thiel-led decision to axe the human team running the Facebook News team in favor of the algorithm in the first place. Likewise, he doesn't mention how the GOP House accused YouTube of left-leaning bias and pushed for a more "neutral" algorithm, which in practice meant less truthful content and more outrageous content. Harari argues that we have collectively given too much power to the machine; in my view, a specific faction has led that charge, and is benefiting the most from the consequences.

I should also mention that Nexus is an extremely readable book. It looks a bit long, but I flew through the whole thing in just a few days. The language is very readable, each section is just a few pages long and makes a clear and cogent point. For all my complaints, I think Harari does an excellent job at noting what parts of the book are well-established facts, which are well-supported inferences, which are controversial statements, and what are merely speculative scenarios.

Overall I think I'd recommend this book to others. I think the first section is fantastic, the latter two are arguably even more important but less fun. I am curious to check out Harari's earlier books, it sounds like he's been working in adjacent areas for a while. I like his mix of concrete history and abstract systemic theorizing, and am curious what other tools he has come up with.

Monday Starts On Saturday

I've been enjoying working my way through the Strugatsky Brothers' novels. I just finished "Monday Starts On Saturday," which is the fourth one of theirs I've read. I haven't been following any particular order, just what happens to be at the library. All of their books I've read up until now have been science fiction, although they're all pretty different from each other. Roadside Picnic is set on a future Earth, not exactly post-apocalyptic but aspects of it can seem dystopic. Hard to Be a God was set on another planet, but its setting feels equivalent to our historic past. Monday Starts on Saturday is set on Earth, in modern times, but the setting feels very strange. 

 

MINI SPOILERS

It takes until about a third of the way through the book to clock what's going on. The narrator, Privalov, is a young computer programmer in the contemporary 1960s. He's driving while on vacation and picks up two hitchhikers, who set him up in an unusual house. This leads into an increasingly odd series of encounters: a quirky landlady, a very disturbed night sleeping on the couch, repeated dreams, disembodied voices, a talking cat, a regenerating coin, and so on.

For a while I thought that Privalov was in an extended dream, thinking that he was waking up but actually dreaming. We eventually learn that these fantastic things are really happening. This isn't really a sci-fi book, more of a book about magic, being done in the "real world" of the Soviet Union.

Once this becomes clear, Privalov becomes a part of this world, joining NITWiT: the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy. The rest of the book is kind of a series of vignettes about life in the Institute: the magical research being conducted, the zany scientist/magicians, the administration and bureaucracy, feuds and rivalries and collaborations. There are demons and djinns and homonculi and all sorts of creation and manipulation of matter.

The setting reminded me of quite a few other books without being very much like any of them. I was immediately reminded of the Laundry Files by Charles Stross, which I'm reading in parallel. Like that book, MSoS has an explicit linkage between mathematics and magic: the Aldan computer is a key component to the simulations that power many magical experiments. And both books/series pay nearly equal attention to the mundane bureaucracy that supports the supernatural excitement. But the tones of the books are very different; both are funny, but the Laundry Files tends to be very sarcastic, while MSoS is satirical but also optimistic, maybe having a bit more of a Swiftian or even occasionally Wodehousian voice. And the Laundry Files are set against a very dark and malevolent Lovecraft-esque backdrop, while MSoS's magic feels much more whimsical and ridiculous.

The "magic in the real world" angle to the book feels a bit like Harry Potter in general and Hogwarts in particular, with a sense of place where magic is being focused on in a world that mostly ignores it; but there isn't a focus on learning magic at all in MSoS, NITWiT is very much a research institute and not at all a teaching college. As you get further in the book, it also seems like there's a different relation between magic and mundanity. In Harry Potter, magic is real in our world, but all non-magical people are ignorant of it. But late in MSoS, there are a bunch of sections where journalists are covering the "experiments" of various researcher-magicians, and it's clear that stuff is being written about and reported on. So it seems like this is probably an alternate world to ours and not a hidden side to our world. (Though, now that I'm writing that, I suppose it's also possible that these journalists are writing for a select audience, maybe not the general population, in which case the overall dynamic may be similar.)

The overall feel of the setting is maybe closest to Unseen University from Terry Pratchett's Discworld, especially the bumbling of the supposedly very intelligent wizards. But again, MSoS is definitely set in the Soviet Union and not a fictional world.

One of my favorite parts of the book is when Privalov volunteers to be a guinea pig in a time machine. "Time machine" is one of the only elements of this book that sounds science-fiction-y, but this is very different from an H. G. Wells - style machine. This machine takes the rider into the "described past" or the "described future": not our own timeline, but the timeline as recorded by historians or as predicted by science-fiction writers. Privalov opts to go into the future, which feels like it's probably a tongue-in-cheek criticism of Soviet science fiction. He sees hundreds of rockets blasting off into space, each one with a heroic young man being seen off by a doting young woman. Later on each one comes back with a tale to tell of what they encountered out in space. Privalov is very bored at how there is so much talking and so little action, which feels like a tongue-in-cheek criticism of contemporary Soviet sci-fi, or perhaps some lampshading self-criticism.

A particularly interesting segment occurs when Privalov encounters the "iron wall" that blocks off the view from one side of the "Refrigerator" complex: I'm like 99% sure this is a reference to the "iron curtain". A young woman says he's allowed to look at the other side but will have to answer for it, which fits with the supposedly open but de-facto autocratic surveillance state of the era. Privalov peeks through a door and is immediately overwhelmed by what he sees on the other side, a horrifically violent post-apocalyptic scene of destruction and despair. He revisits the door a couple of times, briefly chatting with an English-speaking man on the other side. Over there, they have dealt with malevolent invaders from other planets: a planet of aggressive bees, a planet of aggressive spiders, a planet of aggressive vampires, even a planet of aggressive Communists! I laughed out loud at that. Again, this has to be meta commentary on the state of science fiction in the 1960s, and it's fascinating to see a sort of comparative literature lens over genre fiction from within a work of genre fiction itself.

The end of the book does get a bit more science-y and a bit less fantasy-y, but the science always feels pretty magical and unknowable. There's an interesting bit on counter-motion near the end, where someone starts traveling backwards in time: not second-by-second, but living one day midnight to midnight, then jumping back to midnight on the previous day, and so on. This feels less plausible to me than a continuous Looper-style backwards flow through time, and the characters in the book are similarly initially skeptical. Ultimately it serves the story, which seems to be what this is all about: not science fiction for science's sake but for fiction's sake.

END SPOILERS

I looked up a few things in the book after finishing it, which led me down a wiki wormhole that led to Trofim Lysenko, who was the inspiration for a particularly pompous and buffoonish character. Reading about that person makes me feel freshly depressed about the times ahead for the United States with RFK Jr. in charge of our national health.

I haven't dug deep into this, but I have been fascinated by Boris's afterwords to these novels, which usually touch on the censorship the brothers occurred under the Soviet regime. There was a bit of a dance, where sometimes they were able to slip through some criticisms and original ideas, other times innocent and innocuous things would bring down the censorship hammer. Sometime I would love to read a biography of them, I'm so curious what their personal ideology was, how that was expressed through their writing, and what their experiences were like living through the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Overall, Monday Starts On Saturday leaves me even more impressed at the Strugatsky brothers. I'm coming to appreciate how there is a huge variance not just in their stories and settings, but even the style and tone of their books. Most of their books may end up getting filed under "Science Fiction", but each one I've read has felt like a wholly original creation. I'm glad that I have more of their books to look forward to!

Double Dragon

I hit another major story beat in Dragon Age Veilguard, so this seems like a good point for another checkin!

 

 

Overall I'm really enjoying it so far. This most recent section was pretty explicitly framed as Help Your Team Members Deal With Their Personal Issues, which I honestly enjoy, particularly in a BioWare game. Companions are always a high point in these games, and while I shouldn't draw any final conclusions before finishing the game, at this point I feel like this is one of the best overall ensembles from any of the Dragon Age games. In particular, I think this may be the first DA game where I have felt a strong attachment to every single member of the party. Typically there are a few characters I love, a few I find interesting and one or two I'm annoyed by. This time, from top to bottom I like them all. They're all very unique, in personality and background and combat style and stuff, but they all click individually and work as part of a big, varied but unified team.

 

 

I'd mentioned before that my motivation behind team composition has changed over time, and it continued to evolve in this act. DA:V (which, side note, now that I write it that way it seems confusing, since V is the fourth game and not a roman numeral fifth) is the first game in the series with a rigid separation between your PC and the companion NPCs. You personally gain XP and level up as you complete quests and kill monsters and stuff. Your companions don't have levels or the same skill tree or XP. Instead, you gain Ability Points as you increase your Bond with them. It seems like you make a lot of progress in the Bond when you finish their personal quests, but you also gain some Bond by having them in your (two-person) party when you complete a quest, and I think you also gain a little Bond by defeating enemies/bosses in their primary enemy faction (like Darkspawn for Davrin, Venatori for Neve, Antaam for Taash, etc.).

 

 

In some ways this reminds me of the 90s / early 2000s era of CRPGs where companions would only gain XP while being in your party, so you were incentivized to recruit your core party early, and then keep them around forever and never swap in less-favored members. That shifted later to have companions always gain XP at the same rate whether in the party or not, so you wouldn't be gimping yourself (or not significantly so) if you wanted to temporarily bring another member in because they seem more relevant for a particular quest or environment or something. In DA:V I feel like I'm actively encouraged to swap between party members, not just to hear different banters and things, but also to keep their ability points moving forward. So we've moved back to companions advancing based on having them in your party, but in a way that feels like it's rewarding you for adding them versus penalizing you for removing them.

 

The pacing of the game has felt good, it's a long game but not overwhelming. I think the zone design really helps here, usually there are multiple things you can do in an area, including major story quests, companion quests and side quests, along with a few puzzles to solve and high-value treasure chests to track down. There's a good sense of progression, and more opportunities open up as you move along, but since there's a finite amount of stuff to do at a given time in a given zone you never reach that breaking point of an Oblivion or a Skyrim where the sheer volume of quests makes each one feel meaningless.

 

 

Gear advancement has felt pretty good. I said this before, but I'll repeat that I love the lack of inventory management. No item limits or carry limit, and you can't sell any gear, only trash/"valuable" items. That does mean that you end up getting a ton of equipment that you'll never use, but that's okay, it doesn't harm you to have it in your inventory, and it is extra-exciting when you do get a drop that works for you. I've been sticking to pretty consistent loadouts for my PC and my companions, I think so far I've only customized for one specific fight, after losing against a very tough optional boss who's vulnerable to Necrotic and resistant to Electric attacks. The one very minor annoying thing is that each Enchantment can only be applied to a specific piece of gear at a time - you can swap to another item of gear at any time while in the field, but if you want to put an Enchantment on that, you need to trek all the way back to your home base first. It would be nice (at least gameplay-wise) if each enchantment was applied to the slot instead of to the item, or if you could swap enchantments in the field.

 

 

Build-wise, I took the Veil Ranger specialization, which is the Archer subclass of a Rogue. My Abilities are mostly lightning-based, and for combos I can inflict Weakened or detonate Overwhelmed. I can make this work with a lot of companions, but it's a particularly natural combo with Taash who can detonate Weakened and inflict Overwhelmed (both on command and periodically passively). I mostly do ranged attacks from a distance, usually trying for headshots but often settling for center-of-mass targeting. During this Act I've mostly been rocking the Trueflight Bow, which does bonus damage to Armor; a big part of that is that it's generally been my highest rarity useful bow, I think it's currently at Epic tier. The special effects of this are generally useful, I think there are some other ones that might be a better match for my playstyle, so once I finish upgrading other bows I might swap it out.

 

 

One interesting thing about Veilguard is that there are two broad classes of gear. Most items have a dual upgrade track: as you find duplicates of the same item, you upgrade the Rarity tier, which in turn will unlock other special effects of the item; you can also use the Caretaker's Workshop to upgrade the Level of the item, which will directly improve the numeric stats of the item (like Damage or Stagger). Then there are a few hard-to-find Unique items. These don't have a rarity or a level and come fully unlocked. These tend to be gimmicky. Examples include a Bow that reduces your Arrow Count to 1 but massively increases the Damage; another Bow that adds seven arrows and fires triple shots that each do 50% damage; one piece of Armor that massively increases your Defense but reduces your Ability power; and so on. I think that for a future playthrough of the game, it could be very powerful to design a build around some of these specific Unique items and beeline to them as soon as you can. In a way these items remind me of the Meteorite Staff from Elden Ring, in that it's a very powerful item if you get it early, but will eventually be outclassed after you're able to upgrade other items.

 

 

As I've built out more of my Archery abilities I do less hand-to-hand combat, but it is very satisfying. My strategy is heavily built around Dodge: I'll close range with someone (or shoot at them until they close range with me), get in a few hits with my dual-wielded blades, then dash through them, get a few more strikes, dash again, and repeat. Depending on the enemy speed and how crowded the battlefield is I may be able to get a whole attack chain in before the dash, or might need to dash after each individual tap. I'm currently using two Unique weapons for my melee swords. One does very low damage but inflicts Bleed on each hit, along with increasing the max stacks of Bleed; obviously this gives decent DOT, so if I'm in trouble I can lay down a few stacks of Bleed, run away, and hopefully something bad happens to the bad guy. The other weapon does 0 base damage, but inflicts a good amount of every type of Elemental damage, for high overall damage; I added an Enchantment to this that adds back in some Physical damage. I think this ensures I can do Critical melee hits no matter what element an enemy is resistant to.

 

 

Overall, I try to pick items and abilities that increase my archery abilities. I'm not too concerned about arrows: thanks to my ability tree I have a good amount to carry and good regeneration, so even in boss fights I never run out. But I'll use items that boost ranged damage, help with weakpoint attack, or otherwise increase my most common attacks. (Unlike Elden Ring, I haven't dug into theorycrafting and still don't understand [haven't bothered to look up] some basic concepts; for example, I have taken several passive abilities that upgrade my Area Abilities and Duration Abilities. But, I don't know what Area Abilities and Duration Abilities are, and whether I use any of them, and thus whether those upgrades are useful or useless.)

MEGA SPOILERS

In the romance department, I'd been flirting with multiple ladies, narrowed it down to Bellara and Harding, and ultimately locked in to romancing Harding. I already had a soft spot for her from our time together in Inquisition, and she's just great in general. Some sweetness (I love her subtly flower-embroidered collar), a lot of strength, self-awareness, devotion to her cause and her team, a certain level of maturity while still remaining open to new experiences. We're currently dealing with a physical incompatibility in the form of her raw lyrium expression triggering intense drowsiness in Rook. I'm curious to see where her Stone Sense storyline continues.

 

 

Harding is a bit of an outlier in general. She seems to be the one companion without any associated faction. I suppose that Kal-Sharok is her most affiliated location, but unlike, say, Arlathan Forest for Bellara you can't ever return there. She's most linked to the Inquisition, and I did love meeting the Inquisitor and getting notes from them, but that's a very distant southern faction you never directly interact with. On a practical level, while all other companions have unique gear you can buy from their faction merchant, Harding seems to have a few pieces scattered between a few different stores.

 

 

My favorite overall companion is probably still Davrin; as I noted in my previous post, I've been surprised by just how strongly he's grown on me. I initially assumed he would be a boring one-note fighter type, but he has such a great personality, an interestingly specific struggle he's dealing with, and... I dunno, I just really like him a lot.

 

 

Emmrich is probably the most out-there companion; I can't think of anyone similar from any other RPGs I've played. His vocal delivery reminds me of Dorian from Inquisition, which is great, but his personality and background are very different, despite both being mages. Like Bellara he has a nerdy obsessive quality to him, but he's her opposite in age, experience and maturity, reminding me of a beloved professor emeritus. Full of interesting ideas, confident while never seeming arrogant. He's often my go-to when I have a tough boss battle ahead but Harding isn't in my party, as I've built out his Heal ability and he synergizes well with a different set of companion abilities.

 

 

For the main story: I don't think there were any especially huge choices in this act like the Minrathous-vs-Treviso choice of Act 1. I've been generally supportive and encouraging of all companions as is my wont, although the form this takes can vary; some seem to respond better to toughness while others warm up more to a sympathetic ear. I don't think your tone ever locks you out of content, but you get stronger reactions one way or the other.

 

 

The last big story beat I hit was helping the remnants of the Grey Wardens defend against one of Ghilan'nain's blighted high dragons. This was a pretty epic fight: once you get the dragon down a good chunk, the second blighted  high dragon swoops in. But there's also a fun mechanic for the latter part of this fight where you can periodically summon off-screen allies (in my case Minrathous shadow dragons) to fire a powerful magic ballista at a designated target. By this point in the game I'd fought enough dragons to get the mechanics down. Periodically, one or more of their limbs will start glowing and appear in the modal overlay as a "Weak Point". After doing enough damage to the shifting "Weak Point"s, the dragon will collapse to the ground, exposing its heart as a new Weak Point. It takes massive damage when you hit that - I think each hit might be a crit or bypass defense or do multiplicative damage or something. Anyways, you want to whale on that exposed heart while you can, but that's also a great time to fire off your Ultimate Ability or invoke a lyrium-infused ballista bolt or otherwise do huge damage. So, even with two dragons on the field at the same time, I was able to get through this battle without dying and reloading, yay!

 

 

Immediately after this sequence and the next set of story beats, I picked up Taash's personal quests, which led me to yet another two cool dragon battles, one fire dragon and one ice dragon. So that was a good four dragons taken down in one long session - pretty fun!

 

 

I'm just dipping my toes into Act 3, which so far seems to be continuing the Act 2 theme of "The most important thing you can do now is to teach the Power Of Friendship to your team." I feel like the game is heading towards an ultimate boss battle against Elgar'nan, possibly with Ghilan'nain but maybe separately. But who knows. I haven't seen Solas for a while and I definitely still don't trust him. I am curious about Mythal; I did talk with Morrigan and Flemeth's alternate spirit, so I imagine Mythal will be an ally if anything. The stuff about the Titans has been interesting too, especially as that's been teased since the Descent DLC for Inquisition. I imagine that the Titans will be more prominent in a future DA game, but again, I've been surprised in the past!

 

 

Oh, I should also note here that I defeated the Formless One late in Act 2. I've loved how this tradition of semi-hidden, optional, super-duper-powerful bosses has continued throughout all four games, and of course that continues the great tradition of Kangaxx and similar "secret bosses" in Baldur's Gate and earlier games.

END SPOILERS

I'm already making good progress in Act 3 and enjoying the game. I think it took longer for this game to click with me than the earlier ones, in large part due to the more Action RPG style of it, but now that I'm invested in the companions, world and story I feel motivated to keep going, and I have enough experience with the controls that I'm no longer annoyed with them. (I do still wish this was more of a traditional tactical RPG than an action RPG, but that isn't my choice to make.) I probably have one more post to make after I wrap up the game, will see you in a bit with that!