The Dragon Age games have never been exactly short experiences, especially when you factor in all the different choices and routes you can take through the story. Inquisition blew this up to an even bigger degree by going open world, filling your quest log with well over 100 hours of adventuring. Dragon Age: The Veilguard isn’t quite on that scale, as it is more linear than Inquisition. However, it’s still a hefty RPG that’s going to take up a lot of your time, especially if you’re looking to see and do everything.
How Long Does It Take to Beat Dragon Age: The Veilguard?
Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s story is split up into three major acts, made up of 14 different “Parts,” or chapters essentially. If you want to mainline through the story without doing any side content you can absolutely do that, and you’d likely complete Veilguard in roughly 30-40 hours, depending on your difficulty.
There are a few vital choices that split the main story in a couple of ways, so you can replay the game to see alternate outcomes. Of course, the three different classes can drastically change your experience as well, so Veilguard has quite a bit of replayability.
How Much Side Content Is In Dragon Age: The Veilguard?
While the main story of Veilguard feels decently long, the majority of the game’s playtime arguably lies in side content. But the way the game doles it all out is a bit different. The main story will take you through an array of locations, and typically after the main story takes you to a new place, like the town of Treviso, you’ll be able to return there from the world map to explore and take on side quests.
There are dozens upon dozens of side quests spread across the game’s various regions. Apart from that you can simply explore these sizable hand-crafted areas to find treasure with new equipment, crafting materials, and statues that boost your health or grant skill points.
Apart from that, each of the seven companions has their own dedicated line of side quests that tie into the main story. These aren’t just one-off events, but rather full questlines that will run throughout the entire game.
If you want to engage with just the companion side content you’re looking at adding 10-15 hours to your playthrough, but if you really want to see and do everything you should expect to spend 80-90 hours with Veilguard.
How Much Side Content Should You Do?
Now the big question with Veilguard is how much of the side content is worth doing, and is anything vital to the story? In short, yes, there is side content that is vitally important to how things play out.
Without spoiling anything, Veilguard’s ending takes into account what you’ve done, and if you’ve helped both party members and the various factions. To this end, if you really want the best ending possible, you should do every single companion’s questline and make sure they’ve achieved “Hero the Veilguard” status.
It’s also a good idea to boost Faction Strength to three stars for as many of the factions as you can. You can build Faction Strength by completing side quests that apply to each faction or selling valuable items to their vendor. The Factions in the game are The Shadow Dragons, Grey Wardens, Mourn Watch, Veil Jumpers, Antivan Crows, and Lords of Fortune. Building all of these to the max will make you do almost all of the game’s side content, but again, get at least two or three of them to the max level.
Of course, if you really want to, you can not do any companion quests or Factions and see what happens — it’ll definitely be interesting. Then you can do a second playthrough and do the exact opposite. There’s a lot of variation in how the final hours of Veilguard can play out.
