Dragon Age: The Veilguard offers intricate, magic combos so you and the companions in your party can feel like the strongest elves of the millenia, but the action RPG's early playtesters found the game's initial user interface more confusing than empowering.
During a panel at GDC 2025 today, BioWare's former lead UX designer Bruno Porrio discussed the Veilguard team's multiple attempts to make the game's complex combat more intuitive to their disoriented playtesters, who sound like they were suffering.
"I wanted to zoom in a little bit and talk about what, in Veilguard, we call primers and detonators," Porrio said, referring to the game's combo system that allows you to create "opportunities for one ability to then 'detonate' another one." In Veilguard's current iteration, that looks like releasing a status effect with one class, like using a Rogue to apply Sundered, for another character class to deploy it in a potent AoE attack – in this case, a Mage.
Strategically planning combos in this way requires comfort with both your character's and companions' abilities, "so it could be overwhelming," Porrio explained.
The Veilguard's UX team designed the game's interface with this in mind, and Porrio said they believed that, "'okay, if we're not obtrusive, players are not going to be overwhelmed.'" So they stuffed information about things like creature weaknesses, equipped items, and available companions to the tops and sides of players' screens… until it turned out that players "won't notice the things on the top right, the top left."
"So much confusion around detonation," Porrio remembered. "There was a lot of confusion, and players weren't really utilizing the detonations."
As the Veilguard team continued to tweak their UX design, they thought that adding visual effects to indicate helpful abilities could help clarify things in battle, but there was still "a lot trying to get the player's attention," Porrio said.
"It was still confusing," he continues, "It's OK. Sometimes, we have to let it go."
