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Done with the game. The game has two rather big problems, only one of which is Bioware's fault. Marketing. Well, what's in a name anyway? The first is EA marketing as RPG, while in reality it is Thedas: Fallen Dragon. It is hard to stress this enough. The Veilguard is not an RPG, it is a 3D action adventure that plays mostly like the Jedi series, with a different abilities tacked on to make the combat more flashy than it was in Fallen Order (I have not played Survivor, so I cannot commet on any advancements over Fallen Order). The combat has about the same substance as the one in Fallen Order, but it certainly looks, feels and plays a lot better. The other problem with calling this an RPG is that there are barely any decisions to make, and only two of those have consequences - and there never is an alterantive way to handle quests. Bioware really dropped even the pretense of having morally questionable options for the player to follow through. Even Mass Effect's paragon and renegade system looks inspired in comparison. Which, again, is fine for an action adventure. The ability/skill tree is a bit bigger than the one in Fallen Order too, with more variety and different playstyles. The exploration of Veilguard is also similar, with companion abilities substituted for the upgradeable driod in Fallen Order. The problem is that it still isn't that much fun, or challenging. It only very seldomly goes beyond PRESS X FOR AWESOME, and the exploration element is generally fun with a capital c Caveat, which neatly leads to the second really large problem of the game: pacing. We're on a record pace to... boredom, I guess. Sigh. The pacing is downright dreadful. The game opens with roughly four hours of not very impressive content. The abilities one can use are very limited, the combat thus highly repetitive and the areas are rather constricted hallways designed to funnel you from one main quest to the next. It is only after recruiting the first companion and finishing another part of the main quest that the game itself opens up, at which point your character has a few levels under their belt and has unlocked a few more abilities and passives that transform the combat gameplay from boring to good enough. It is precisely at that time, before the game opens up or starts playing well, where you're introduced to token minority elves, one of which is a companion that joins you. It is a sad testament to the times we're living in that the minority representation in the game (which was almost always a part of Bioware games anyway) had such a terrible reception, but there's no second chances for a first impression, as the saying goes. You're already not having fun at this point in the game, and then you see that Bioware wasted development resources on brown and east-asian looking elves. In an ideal world players would realize that for a project this size, no part of gameplay, quest design or writing (outside of Taash, who we will talk about later) has suffered a lack of resources because someone was tasked to make brown textures for characters, but the polarization is what it is. The game sucks because it is woke - but that just is not the case. The game (almost inarguably) sucks at this point because it is not fun to play, and that is not the fault of Strife the Brown Elf. It then proceeds to go on for too long, especially the exploration and parcouring part of the game. Fallen Order had the same issue - and neither game is very good at telling the player that certain parts of the maps are cut off until quest progress or the abilities of a newly recruited companion opens that part of the map. I probably spent a good five hours of my playtime (roughly 75 hours, which was enough time to experience all of the content) trying my damndest to figure out riddles and/or ways to reach areas and loot that just were inaccessible at that point. The other part that is badly paced are companion interactions. This is arguably the worst part, because at the end of the day, it is still a game (ostensibly) made by Bioware. For the first twenty hours I have played the game, the companions all seemed shallow and flat. Friends that played the game also agreed. The problem here is, again, the pacing of the game, as companion interactions and dialogues are interwoven with side and main quests, and often are contingent on reloading the Lighthouse (your base of operation) map, i.e. you need to go into the game world and come back for a new set of interactions to be loaded once they're ready to be presented. So if, for some reason, you have unlocked three interactions with a companion, you can do one, then you have to go back into the world and come back the Lighthouse for the next. This is such a dumb decision that whoever came up with the idea needs to be fired, because it means you're best off with going back to the Lighthouse whenever you have finished a quest, instead of just questing naturally in the game world. Gating was always there in companion interactions in Bioware games, of course, but they were usually also frontloaded with an enormous amount dialogue to be explored with them right from the start. With a few exceptions (most notably the Antivan Crow companion, who remains boring and flat throughout the game), the companions in The Veilguard aren't (much) less developed than those in other games. They're just not front-loaded in the usual Bioware manner, and that is much to their detriment. To recap, we're now a couple of hours into the game, it does not play well, it is not fun, there's no real sense of exploration, the main quest is on rails going through several limited hallways (of which most are out in the open, to make the contrast even worse), you had an annoying "nervous and talky scientist type" Korean looking elf lady foisted on you for a companion whom you could have exactly one really short conversation with and you have just reached Treviso, a city in an "RPG" that is basically also just a colletion of hallways (which kind of makes sense, as Thedas' version of Venice) where any and all exploration options are seemingly unreachable. To make matters worse everyone talks in a weird Italian style accent that the voice actors were clearly uncomfortable with and no one sounds in any way natural. Sprinkle your own character's somewhat dumb dialogue in this part of the game on top, and you have one recipe for a disaster. Where it doesn't matter at all that all of that gets better the more you play. I mean, who's still playing at this point? By now you're angrily shouting about how bad the game is on social media. Depending on your political and social leanings one might as well blame wokeness and DEI for everything that is bad in this game, ignoring that Bioware games were pretty "woke" all along. Taash And then there's Taash (Taash was born a girl, for the record, for anyone who has no intention of playing the game). Taash is Bioware's attempt at making a non-binary character, and while they had a wonderful setup for them, they never followed up on it. Taash is Qunari, but their mother fled to Rivia when Taash was little. So as Taash grew up, they were neither really Qunari nor Rivaini. There's also conflict with her mother, neatly established during the first companion quest, which is actually pretty good. Her mother complains that Taash dresses and behaves more like a man (for those reading this who are not familiar with the Qunari, they're basically fantasy muslims with a caste system) than a woman, which frustrates Taash. Taash is an accomplished warrior and dragon hunter - job reserved for men under the Qun. Can you already see how this might make for a decent metaphor for not feeling particularily like either male of female? Taash doesn't feel like adhering to the Qun, nor do they feel like being fully Rivaini. Naturally this looks like a decent way to bring a non-binary companion into a fantasy setting without it being immersion-breaking, right? As the player character, you can probably gently guide Taash towards understanding their place in between these two cultures. Right, except then it just stops, and the game and all other characters start using the term "non-binary" as if we were in a contemporary setting, crashing you hard out of any immersion. It eventually culminates in a really weird scene with Taash and her mother where Taash has a "coming out" as "non-binary" ("Hey mom, I'm non-binary!") that is so awkward that it leaves players facepalming hard. This is all handled about as well as Adira was in Star Trek: Discovery. Like, not at all. The setup falls of a cliff so hard it becomes a disservice. It's not just a case of bad representation, it is actively hurting the cause by introducing an element that strains the already tenous enjoyment of the game. What was that saying with the road to hell and good intentions? You know what's the worst part? Taash is a genuinely fun companion with lots of funny interactions. She also has the best apology line in any Bioware game when she's having a minor fight with Emmrich, the necromancer companion. "I'm sorry I called you a skull-f... liker. Skull-liker." Conclusion So, what's the conclusion? I liked The Veilguard, in spite of all the problems. Partially that is because I have an OCD-ish tendency to finish games I have begun playing, so I kept playing, and eventually found myself immersed in the game, started to like the companions and genuinely enjoyed the flashy combat and exploration. It takes a good eight to fifteen hours of playing the game to reach that point, and I don't blame anyone who quits well before that. If, for some reason, you still want to play the game, then make sure to rush through the main quests until you have gathered all your companions. Then you can explore, and make sure to return to the Lighthouse as often as you can, to check for companion interactions. That means those marked on the map as well as where you can see two or more companions standing next to each other. That means you should go there and listen to them talking. The game will be better for it, really. Oh, and I hope you're like me and don't care for exploring city-settings in RPGs. While the game does have two cities, they're not what you'd expect from one in an RPG. I don't mind, but others might.

Of course the polls are now that way. Even Zelenskyi said in September, he wants to end the war as soon as possible. (note, neither him, nor the polls have explicitly specified what date they are talking about, when using term as soon as possible) Few days ago he even said, that he wants to end it in 2025. No surprise there at all. Still 38% of UA want to fight till the victory. And I guarantee you, that ending war as soon as possible even in the eyes of these 52% of Ukrainians does not mean to surrender to Russia, just to have peace, but “enjoy” the ethnic cleansings, like before, when Stalin was still around…

It's not just typos, some sentences were missing their second half. That's what happens when you rewrite a post to be less offensive. I tried really hard to not insult incels or use any slurs to agitate the pretty snowflakes who were bothered by my previous posts enough to actually report them to the moderator team in spite of being in support of the game and its content. *sigh*

Tbh, for me BG3 is too big already. Those 100+ hours behemoths are a tough sell on me now. I'd rather have a shorter game with way more story branching. Imo this is what Outer Worlds did well. Or Alpha Protocol back in the days.

That’s a really helpful tip, thanks! I didn’t realize the ExportGlobals command could grab all the variables from both Deadfire and the imported PoE1 save. I’ve been trying to track down all the relevant choices to carry over

For the chills...

It's a 82 Metacritic overall -- which makes it barely rank in the top100 for 2024 overall. It's also a game that over 30% of critics apparently don't recommend, as aggregators have adjusted to this score inflation by marking every review under a 7.5 as "mixed". So much for the BIG RETURN OF BIOWARE. This plus there being two games with a score of below 50 is the state of game reviews. It's not merely IGN by the way. That's a red herring. But according to the video's logics, IGN shouldn't use the lower grades for Hollywood movies as well -- which they do. And as argued, nobody reviews amateur and indie movies uploaded to the internet as well. The movies that see coverage and marked as mediocre to stinkers are noteable productions, and not comparable to garage indies publishing their first game on Steam. Germany's biggest (PC) mag is Gamestar. They officially have games scoring in the 70s range as "good" ones, 60s range as "ok" ones, 80s score as "getting the best out of their genre", and 90s as "exceptioinal games anybody should experience". Now I'm a fan of CRPGs -- but pretty much any major one got at least high 80s scores from them, both Pillars games 90s scores, Pathfinder WOTR as well -- and of course BG3. I still think that's rather generous (and I've enjoyed most of those). Meanwhile, in general, take a look at which bigger RPG-likes at all were ranked lowly in many many years. I can tell you two: Fallout 76 (50s Metascore) and Alpha Protocol (60s Metascore). Tellingly two titles that were perceived as having severe issues upon launch. Game reviews are pretty technical in general -- as argued, Michael Bay should consider doing movies. Technically, you can hardly rip him to shreds the way he is by movie critics. Unfortunately, movies as well, aren't but technology. Meanwhile, games can hardly "fail", unless they're bugged to crap.

Very very intersting. Yeah i´ll try to interpred them as good as possible and it does make sense that he still likes the people but not the god. Massive thanks for all the help and if i have further questions regarding this topic i´ll write them here again. ^.^ Edit: I wish there were options for never finishing someones quest but still recruiting them since this is what i did with Hiravias the Druid. I recruited him, played with him a bit but didn´t like the Druid class for my team and i left him in Caed Nua XD

With which, if it is true, they have broken another treaty and some people still want to negotiate with them Back to Kursk. It is said, Lieutenant General Solodkov was on site, welcoming the 12 Storm Shadow arrivals. His fate for now is unknown.

Avowed will sell millions. It's not like the Xbox beggars can be choosers.