Dragon Age: The Veilguard difficulty options detailed ahead of launch

The next Dragon Age game has extensive difficulty options and customizable settings

BioWare

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is one of the most anticipated games of the year, with the game just a few weeks away at this point and fan fervor reaching a fever pitch. Now that the game’s gone gold ahead of its launch at the end of the month, EA and Bioware have detailed The Veilguard’s extensive difficulty and accessibility options. 

In a lengthy blog post on the Dragon Age website, Bioware revealed that Dragon Age: The Veilguard would not only have five curated difficulty settings, but also an “Unbound” difficulty setting that allows players to finely tune all aspects of the game to their liking. 

Here are the difficulty settings listed by Bioware: 

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. 
• Selecting Nightmare cannot be undone without starting a new playthrough. 

Unbound 

• Customize all settings. 
• Settings impact numerous aspects of gameplay. If this is your first time, consider a curated preset instead. 

Bioware says that you can tweak the gameplay and combat options outside of the preset difficulty settings too, including the option to adjust elements like parry timing, aim assist strength, and how aggressive enemies are, as well as the option to reduce enemy damage and health and prevent death altogether. 

In addition to difficulty settings, there are a host of accessibility and approachability options across all fields of the game. There are settings for just about everything you could imagine, including objective markers, customizable HUD elements, camera shake, motion blur, subtitles, text size, and much more. Unfortunately, the colorblind settings seem to be limited to full-screen filters, one of the less useful approaches to colorblind accessibility, but The Veilguard is far from the only game to take this route. 

We went hands-on with Dragon Age: The Veilguard last month and found it to be an absolutely delightful experience:

“It makes me optimistic that, in a year where several heavily hyped titles failed to impress, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is going to be one that delivers on its promises. I still have some questions about how the characters develop (and how good the romances are), along with the overall pacing of the game, but with excellent combat and a lot of narrative intrigue, I’m more excited than ever to get my hands on the full game.”

Dragon Age: The Veilguard will be released on October 31, 2024 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.