Here’s a long look at Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s complex combat and character loadouts

Dragon Age: The Veilguard, like its predecessors, is an action role-playing-game, meaning all the slashing, spell-casting, and shield-bashing unfolds in a real-time scrum, rather than a turn-based set of choices made deliberately and with lots of careful thought.

The player builds, the weapons, they carry, and the perks they all have are so deep and complicated that Veilguard does need a kind of mechanism that allows players to analyze the combat space and put together a plan that’s more than just dodge-rolling and button mashing.