The tradition of all dead preorder bonuses weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
I seriously dug Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s latest trailer, but right at the end I found myself face-to-face with a ghost: “Pre-order now! Receive the Blood Dragon cosmetic armor.” Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.
For my money, the Blood Dragon Armor is a primeval DLC/”Digital Deluxe Edition” original sin on the order of Oblivion’s infamous Horse Armor. The hideous armor set reared its head in four different games at the height of BioWare’s popularity, somehow managing to always feel unwelcome and out of place whether you were exploring a medieval dirt village or the distant spires of an Asari utopia. For a design to have such a place in two iconic franchises, wouldn’t you expect it to be beloved or essential?
I thought you were dead. (Image credit: BioWare)
Has anyone seen my little boy? (Image credit: BioWare, Dragon Age Wiki)
Looking pretty ugly Shep. (Image credit: BioWare, Mass Effect Wiki)
Its first appearance was the worst of the lot: The original Blood Dragon Armor reused a dwarven heavy armor model already in the game, one of the chunky “Massive” plate mail sets that made warriors in Dragon Age: Origins look like rejected Gears of War potato men. So it’s a generic model, and the distinctive texture setting it apart was just plain awful: pearlescent white with a neon red dragon streaking across one corner, and, dear god, glowing red eye slits and highlights like the most “A for execution, D- for vision” bespoke gamer rig the late aughts had to offer, a shameful step cousin to Bush-era Alienware.
The Mass Effect iteration benefitted from a sleeker model, but there’s just no getting around that color palette—it felt like you were adventuring around the galaxy wearing an advertisement. Commander Shepard would have looked more dignified in space commando armor with a big ole’ DraftKings logo across the rump like a pair of MMA trunks.
Thankfully, the “cosmetic armor” phrasing in the Veilguard trailer makes it sound like the neo-Blood Dragon set will avoid one of the original’s great sins: It was mid to late game gear you just got for free right at the beginning of Origins, with the RPG’s balance overturned by the strength of the armor alone, or how much cash you could get for selling it. There was no Blood Dragon Armor in Inquisition and we were better off for it.
And yet, for all that whinging, I feel so warm and nostalgic now. The years have tempered my bile for the frankly absurd heights of EA’s monetization schemes for BioWare games, not the least because they lost. I always feel a certain pity for Juul, the punching bag of America’s first wave of moral panic and legislation around youth vaping, now that every middle schooler in the country is honking on some kind of neon candy disposable vape rig that costs 75 cents. In a similar way, EA’s proprietary ecosystem of codes for exclusive gear and $10 companion DLC is just so adorably quaint in comparison to the permanent live service economy we live in now.
In 2024, the Blood Dragon Armor is like some kind of Golden Age comic book villain reduced to slurping applesauce in an old folks home. It can’t hurt us anymore, and I feel all my frustrations at the EA single player microtransaction schemes of yesteryear melt away, leaving only memories of the good times. The armor still looks pretty ugly in The Veilguard, though—even if I preordered the game, you couldn’t catch me in that getup.
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