Dragons spewing fire, lightning, and ice have been unleashed over Thedas, as armies of mages and horned warriors march on major cities. Two evil gods have unleashed a plague that threatens to cover the world in corrupted flesh. Raw magic runs rampant, tearing holes in the fabric of reality and sundering the land. But for all its high fantasy drama and world-shaking action, some of my favorite moments in Dragon Age: The Veilguard were spent sitting on the couch with my party, chatting about the latest demon attack like we were having the world’s grimmest sleepover.

The stakes couldn’t be higher for The Veilguard, both in its narrative and in expectations for the game itself. BioWare’s beloved RPG series changed a lot over its three previous games, but the latest feels the riskiest, fully committing to real-time combat for the first time and exploring lands never seen before in the series while still clinging to the story established in the previous game. Fortunately for fans who’ve been waiting over a decade for it, The Veilguard mostly succeeds in both heading in a new direction and showing the climax of what’s come before, even if the growing pains of its new combat system and an uneven story keep it from being truly great.

A decade has passed since Dragon Age: Inquisition, but that 2014 RPG still haunts The Veilguard. The political struggle between mages and templars, the dominating religion of the Chantry, and even the locations where previous games were set have been left behind, but The Veilguard directly continues the story of Solas, one of Inquisition’s most important characters. In the game’s opening moments, Solas attempts to tear down the Veil that separates the physical world from the spiritual realm of the Fade, only to unleash two tyrannical elven gods in the process when your party stops him. From there, your mission switches from stopping Solas to assembling a crew to defeat the gods.

When you adapt a book into a TV series, there will naturally be some shifts. Pacing a series and pacing a book are two different tasks, and as budget and logistics come into play, the purely imaginary world of the book needs to adapt to real-world limits. That’s why it’s a good idea to have the creator of the source material on hand to approve those changes and keep things true to the original vision. For example, The Last of Us is often heralded as one of the best TV adaptations in recent years, and that’s in part because the original game writer, Neil Druckmann, is a co-showrunner.

Silo, Apple TV+’s breakout sci-fi hit, took the same approach. Hugh Howey, who wrote the original trilogy of novels, is on board as an executive producer and, according to showrunner Graham Yost, is always on hand to chime in about what’s changing in the move from page to screen.