Dragon Age: The Veilguard hits in just a few days, and given how the roots of the series fandom sprang up from the CRPG scene, many of you might be wondering how the PC port stacks up. According to pre-launch tech analysis, The Veilguard thankfully ditches the problems that have been plaguing recent AAA PC releases.
"This is by some measure the best triple-A PC multi-platform release we've seen in a long, long time," as Digital Foundry says in a tweet promoting its analysis of the port. "Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a radical departure from the current AAA norm of releasing games on PC with half-baked or flat-out broken technical problems," that analysis begins. "It is polished with a smart user experience, it is smooth running where it counts - and as a PC version should, it offers noticeably higher fidelity than console equivalents, tapping into the strengths of the platform."
This shining verdict is particularly impressive given that The Veilguard runs on the same Frostbite engine EA used to power the Dead Space remake, which suffered from extensive stuttering issues when it launched last year. The Veilguard will have you sit through an extensive shader compilation process when you first launch it - expect to wait five to ten minutes depending on your CPU - but the process is clearly worthwhile, because DF found the whole game to be stutter-free. You won't find yourself "constantly being ripped out of the experience of playing the game due to frame time hitches, and that definitely cannot be said of many [PC] games releasing this year."
Other positives? An extensive menu of options where you can edit graphical settings and see the changes reflected in real-time. There's an extensive set of dynamic resolution settings you can tweak for better performance. There are also much better ray tracing settings than are available on consoles. And, most importantly of all, it seems to run very well, and all those settings will help to scale it to whatever your PC can handle.
Check out our Dragon Age: The Veilguard review for more on the content of the game itself, and stick with us for more on all the big new games coming your way.
