I haven’t written many reviews, and only then, once I’ve completed games. But I feel kind of like I have to spread the word on this game, considering how many people seem to be trying to make it seem like this is a “fail.” It’s not, in my opinion. In fact, I have been loving it so much.

First of all, initially, I had a heck of a time trying to adjust things so the game wouldn’t crash. I wouldn’t be able to even make it through the character creator without a crash. I was frustrated and, embarrassingly, starting to get pretty angry. THEN I remembered the notice in the requirements listing on the main page, “AMD AM4 CPUs on Windows 11 require AGESA V2 1.2.0.7 or newer.” This is no joke, I guess. I thought I had a relatively up-to-date system, but my BIOS did need to be updated. (It's an ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming 4, for the record.)

I used CPU-Z to see what BIOS version I had, then went to the ASRock site, downloaded the new BIOS, put it on a flash drive, unzipped it, restarted, booted into the UEFI, and updated the BIOS from there off the flash drive. Took a bit of time to do, but I think it's completely worth it. I’m posting what I did here, in case it helps anybody else out of crashing issues.

It boots up so fast now, and I don’t have to wait for any “shaders loading” thing. The game runs like butter on high settings, with ambient occlusion turned off. I’m playing in 3440 x 1440 (so, a widescreen) on a rig with a Ryzen 9 5900x, an RTX 3080, and 64 GB of ram.

Secondly, I know I’m an outlier, but DA2 is my favorite Dragon Age game to replay. I love Inquisition, too, and I very much like Origins, but DA2 has a lot for me to love. The companions, the combat, the tight storytelling, etc. I also love Hogwarts Legacy. Veilguard feels to me kind of like a combo of DA2 and Hogwarts Legacy, with the beauty of Inquisition.

Speaking of beauty, I also turned off the Bloom in the configs, and suddenly, that washed out/cartoony/smeary kind of look that I was seeing in Veilguard disappeared, and it looked wonderfully like Inquisition – or very close to it.

There are myriad things that I’ve been seeing people complain about, but none of those things have really bothered or affected me. I tend to enjoy most games – not really hard to please. I just want to be engaged with the worlds and look and story, etc. As I said, I’ll likely update this review once I’ve completed the game, but for now: I love it. The BIOS update and the bloom config thing has made the game wonderful in my opinion.