Don't be afraid of Dragon Age: The Veilguard's hard 'Underdog' difficulty—if you're hoovering up all the sidequests and collectibles, it's pretty much perfect

A Qunari, dressed in a snazzy suit, smiles confidently at an NPC off-screen.

(Image credit: Bioware / EA)

Dragon Age: The Veilguard'll be out on Thursday—and if you're anything like me, you'll thoroughly hesitate when starting a new game, made to suffer as you're asked to make a judgement call on just how hard you want your high-magic romp to be. Well, having sunk about 37 hours into the thing at the time of writing, I can tell you that Underdog difficulty—which wants you to "overcome punishing odds" is far from being too hard—if anything, it's just about right.

Some background info for this recommendation. I am, generally speaking, not terrible at videogames (I know I know, hold your applause). I like my action RPGs quite a bit, and I enjoy a good soulslike—but Underdog is far from giving me that nail-biting fix. Rather, I'm thanking my lucky stars that I did pick it, because it feels like the goldilocks standard for players who are familiar with the genres at play.

I've rarely encountered anything I couldn't manage a second go around—if anything, I'm still chewing through enemies with relative ease. However, the game has made me reconsider my tactics sometimes for difficult fights, especially if I've been stubborn enough to tackle them when I'm under-levelled. So far, I've had the perfect balance of butt-clenchers, while also being able to carve through Darkspawn and Venatori mooks like butter.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a game that rewards exploration and side quest completion thoroughly—and while it absolutely is more action than RPG, the synergies you build up between both your characters (and the thoroughly impactful skill tree) are vastly more important when it comes to player power. As such, the difficulty selection is a bit of a misnomer. It's not really asking you whether you're up for a challenge of technical skill (I mean, your parry window's smaller, but it was still pretty easy for me to pull those off).

Rather, it's asking you how much exploration you'll be doing. If you're halfway engaged with putting together a solid build, go around grabbing your chests, and tick off side quests as they come up, I'm pretty confident in saying that Underdog's the difficulty that will provide the appropriate bite for the rewards you're getting—and, conversely, that the default difficulty of Adventurer may indeed bore you.

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Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.