Lifestyle
Tonally inconsistent ‘Dragon Age: The Veilguard’ is still BioWare’s best action game
Two buddies and a baby griffin enjoy a quiet moment of companionship.
Andy Bickerton/BioWare
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Andy Bickerton/BioWare
In 2010, Canadian developer BioWare was in peak form. It released Mass Effect 2 to near-unanimous acclaim, winning over 100 awards, just one year after the successful launch of an old-school roleplaying series in Dragon Age: Origins. The company was the name in cinematic RPG experiences, with a near-pristine record of classics like Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Knights of the Old Republic (we don’t talk about Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood).
But in the following years, BioWare’s reputation began to falter. Dragon Age 2 was rushed and underbaked. Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age: Inquisition sold well, but felt a little off — from Dragon Age brightening up its dark fantasy setting to Mass Effect failing to deliver the meaningful choices players expected. Then came the critical disappointment of Mass Effect: Andromeda, the commercial disaster of Anthem, leadership departures, and layoffs. BioWare’s heyday had all but ended.
Now, after a nearly decade-long development cycle, BioWare is shooting for redemption with Dragon Age: The Veilguard. After completing it in 60 hours, I’m happy to report that the game is packed with excellent combat, level design, progression systems, equipment optimization, and charismatic companions. It is, simply put, a well-executed action RPG. However, Veilguard’s wildly inconsistent tone prevents it from standing tall in BioWare’s illustrious catalog.
If you’re hoping for a return to the series’ origins, you’ll be disappointed. But if you’re looking for an expertly streamlined blockbuster, Veilguard is a delight.
Controlled detonation
Let’s start with Veilguard’s strongest feature — its action gameplay. Mastering combat and party composition is a thoroughly rewarding experience from start to finish. I began the game in normal mode, dying more than I care to admit with my rogue assassin build. After completing Shadow of the Erdtree, I thought, “I’m better than this!” — so I respecialized until I found the right archery-focused build, stacked gear buffs on gear buffs, assigned all the best combinations of companion skills, and demolished the game on hard mode.
My character’s archery powers in their full glory.
Andy Bickerton/BioWare
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Andy Bickerton/BioWare
I say this not to flex my true gaming prowess (although I’ll gladly take credit), but to show how well BioWare created mechanics that encouraged, nay demanded, mastery. Veilguard’s undoubtedly their strongest outing when it comes to action-focused combat — and plentiful accessibility and difficulty settings allow for a more casual experience, if you want to take it easy.
Similarly, the level design, clearly inspired by 2018’s God of War, beautifully improves on Inquisition’s bland open zones. Rather than focus on formulaic checklists, Veilguard offers side quests that consistently reward exploration with useful loot and impactful plot points. I was often surprised by the depth of Veliguard’s missions, particularly when they involved factions or the history of Solas and Mythal (hint hint: do that one).
Avengers assemble
Compared to its predecessors, Veilguard often feels ripped from a different franchise. Some scenes are distinctively Dragon Age, while others feel more like a Disney movie. It’s an M for Mature game with an excess of tonally conflicting E for Everyone moments. On the one hand, you have blood mages ritualistically sacrificing enslaved people, a horrifying blight decimating villages, and ancient Elven gods turning innocent people into monsters. On the other hand, you have a silly skeleton butler soundtracked by music that feels like Christmas morning at Hogwarts.
All seven companions, gathered in the game’s home base.
BioWare
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BioWare
It’s not wrong to pepper moments of levity into a grim storyline — lord knows The Last of Us Part 2 could have used some — but Veilguard’s jarring tonal shifts betray the compelling dark lore Dragon Age was founded on. Ultimately, it doesn’t add up to a cohesive, well-realized world.
It’s not like the writing is awful. Companions are generally likable, and much of the dialogue feels organic and engaging. Your home base in the Fade, The Lighthouse, is crammed with rewarding character development, fun interactions, and, of course, romance (not just between you and your chosen partner, but also between companions themselves!).
Relationships are the horse driving the cart rather than, say, the political and religious complexities of Inquisition. It feels more like Mass Effect than Dragon Age in that sense — and that’s not always a bad thing. BioWare has always been ahead of the curve in diverse representation, and Veilguard incorporates a storyline involving a character coming out as non-binary. You can even have your character, “Rook,” identify as trans.
A new age
Another critical element of any BioWare game is player choice. On that front, there were several times I had to take a long, hard look in the proverbial mirror. The lasting consequences of many decisions tie together seamlessly in Veilguard’s stellar finale, and the scale of potential outcomes feels grander than any past BioWare game (it’s not as grand as the ending Larian pulled off in Baldur’s Gate 3, but it’s still quite impressive). One choice hit me with a gut punch so hard that I’m still grappling with it days after finishing the game.
One of the game’s big bads, the blighted Elven god Ghilan’nain.
BioWare
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BioWare
But like Mass Effect 3, if you’re hoping for decisions from prior entries to matter, you’re in for a letdown. There are only three choices that you can set for Veilguard’s world state, and they’re all from Inquisition — flying in the face of the “Dragon Age Keep” system that recorded your decisions across the whole series. I can understand how complex it would have been to honor every choice made in prior titles, but it’s a tragic lost opportunity not to reward fans who have been playing since Origins.
It’s easy to see how this squandered potential, along with the tonal inconsistencies, could have arisen out of Veilguard’s near-decade of troubled production. David Gaider, Dragon Age’s lead writer and creator, left BioWare in 2016. Originally designed with substantial live-service components, Veilguard shifted to a full-on single-player RPG in 2021, six years after development began.
But I’m ultimately hopeful. Even though BioWare didn’t quite hit the mark in Veilguard, if it could take its best innovations and stick the landing with consistent storytelling, the anticipated Mass Effect 5 could restore the company to its prior glory.
Golden Age BioWare is dead. Long live BioWare.
James Perkins Mastromarino contributed to this review.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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