Okay, I apologize for calling it vaporware: Here’s the Dragon Age: The Veilguard gameplay preview (and it’s pretty good!)

It was a dark and stormy night in Minrathous… no, scratch that. The neon-stained city thrummed with ancient magic… no, no, that’s not right either. I’ll just have to let this trailer speak for itself.

BioWare came through with the big Dragon Age: The Veilguard gameplay preview we were promised. It’s 20 minutes of gameplay from the early game (with portions cut for time and to avoid spoilers), which seems to follow immediately from the bit of story we got from the unpopular character introduction trailer at Summer Game Fest, which showed Varric and Harding in a bar fight alongside an unknown stranger — who, unsurprisingly, was you.

You appear to be a character named Rook — but beyond that, it’s up to you to choose your look, class, and faction. In this preview, Rook is a seems to be a Rogue, and is shown fluidly swapping from melee to ranged combat — something we haven’t been able to do in previous games, which required you to specialize and equip weapons for one role or the other.

The gameplay looks more action-oriented than previous games, but I suspect that’s the result of watching someone else play a Rogue rather than (necessarily) a big gameplay shift. We see Rook on several occasions pause the action to pick out an ability to use, but at this early stage in the game not many are available so there’s a lot of shooting and slashing.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is due out this year, and I think I’m finally ready to believe it. While the initial character reveal trailer received an extremely poor reception online due to graphics that looked more cartoonish than previous games, the gameplay trailer doesn’t look cartoonish at all. In fact, it’s a gritty look that reminds me more of Blade Runner than Dragon Age, though part of that certainly is due to it being a genuinely dark and stormy night in Minrathous. Still, the gameplay and dialog we see felt very much like a Dragon Age game.

We don’t have a release date for Veilguard, but we’re already half-way through 2024 which means the game has to be out relatively soon.