Dragon Age Veilguard: A rook can only move horizontally or vertically

[MrBrown]

70 hours, finished the game.

Seems like there's some differences in ending, I think I got the best one, but not sure.

Overall, I liked the game. For me it was probably the worst in the DA series, but it wasn't a bad game overall. Can't really compare it to modern AAA games since I don't play that many.

Worst part was the writing. The overall plot was fine, and the ending too, but the more minute details weren't that good (the baddies were uninteresting, dialogue was often bad, quests were really repetitive etc). Or as good as previous DA games, anyway. A lot of Bioware fans seems to like the games for their writing, so maybe the game won't score that big with them. No real knowledge, haven't googled to find out.

Exploration was good, but they started running out of gimmicks later on, and it got a bit repetitive. Thankfully the game ended soon after that.

Combat grew on me. It's very actiony and flashy, so that might be turn off for older players. Maybe modern AAA games does it better and ignorance was bliss for me.

Builds and stats seemed great, there were a lot of options and I could come up with lots of different ways to build my character. Buuut, since I really only played one, I have no idea if it's really that balanced. DA:O and DA:I were quite bad at that part (DA2 much better) so can't really claim it's Bioware's forte.

The game tied up most of the plotlines from previous DA games, so it felt like they intentionally made it the last one... buuut, then

Spoiler

in the end they put in a big teaser for a new baddie.

So it seems they're keeping their options open.

Edited November 10 by MrBrown

[Sarex]

1 hour ago, MrBrown said:

The game tied up most of the plotlines from previous DA games, so it felt like they intentionally made it the last one... buuut, then

  Reveal hidden contents

in the end they put in a big teaser for a new baddie.

So it seems they're keeping their options open.

Spoiler

They literally just copy/pasted the BG2 ending. I found it kind of funny.

 

[MrBrown]

I went to check on the Bioware fan forums what everyone there was thinking, and my main takeaway is that they like to call the game "DAVe".

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

15 hours ago, Sarex said:

  Reveal hidden contents

They literally just copy/pasted the BG2 ending. I found it kind of funny.

 

It's pretty much nothing. Oooh an ancient gang of ring-wraith knockoffs have been behind it ALL ALONG.

[Sarex]

6 minutes ago, PK htiw klaw eriF said:

It's pretty much nothing. Oooh an ancient gang of ring-wraith knockoffs have been behind it ALL ALONG.

My friend is telling me that it's not a shadow council but the forgotten gods, but he is also certain that the whole story was written before DA:O development even started.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

10 minutes ago, Sarex said:

My friend is telling me that it's not a shadow council but the forgotten gods, but he is also certain that the whole story was written before DA:O development even started.

I hate to **** on your friends, but that's giving Bioware too much credit. To say nothing of how the writers room has had complete turnover a fea times now.

[Hurlshort]

David Gaider probably had a long term plan, but I doubt that exists anymore.

[MrBrown]

3 hours ago, Sarex said:

but he is also certain that the whole story was written before DA:O development even started.

I got that impression from DAVe. Mainly because the big plot seemed much more interesting than all the details.

[Sarex]

6 hours ago, PK htiw klaw eriF said:

I hate to **** on your friends, but that's giving Bioware too much credit. To say nothing of how the writers room has had complete turnover a fea times now.

I was biting my tongue too when I heard him say it. He heard somewhere that they spent 4 years building the lore, before they even started the development. Seems far fetched to me too. Especially considering the ME ending fiasco.

3 hours ago, MrBrown said:

I got that impression from DAVe. Mainly because the big plot seemed much more interesting than all the details.

Who knows... It very well could be the case, but I personally have little faith left in Bioware so I doubt it. My theory is that the main quest is what didn't change much and everything else is what they had to rush when they shifted back from the MMO plan.

Edited November 11 by Sarex

[Zoraptor]

2 hours ago, Sarex said:

I was biting my tongue too when I heard him say it. He heard somewhere that they spent 4 years building the lore, before they even started the development. Seems far fetched to me too. Especially considering the ME ending fiasco.

Fairly sure I'd heard similar. I think it was DGaider? on his blog or in an interview saying that they'd developed the setting prior to DAO via pnp rpg or similar? Can't find a reference with a quick search so can't be certain I'm not mixing it up with something else though.

[bugarup]

Yeah, with the world's name Thedas (aka The Dragon Age Setting), one of the towns named Lothering etc. it does look more like something that evolved from D&D session that took 4 years. Thing is, the world made  sense and had enough verisimilitude so that if I had questions of how and why something happened, it was easy to find explanations without breaking game's inner logic and it was fun to play (still is). Second game had this too if you squinted at the story through tacked-on decisions like "We need boss fight either way!" or "No time for too different branches", but it was buried under the pile of stupid. By the third game pile of stupid turned into mountain of stupid, and from what I read about the last one they pretty much threw everything away and now's it just generic high fantasy. 

[majestic]

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.

Edited Saturday at 05:35 PM by majestic

[MrBrown]

Interesting to hear they got all that from Fallen Order. I never played that, but it all falls in with the conspiracy theory...

 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

It seems like my read of the game as a Whendonist-Gunnist action romp is largely panning out. Not necessarily a bad thing (well, the Whedonite dialogue is) but the gameplay itself just doesn't seem like a very good action game to me. On top of that I am biased towards rpgs and after BG3 it's a bit off-putting to see Dragon Age veer away from that and towards action gameplay (which many more games do and often do better). From my end I just don't see a reason to pick this up, my time is limited as it is and dunking 70 hours or so into a mediocre experience does not sound like a good thing.

The "woke stuff" is really just baffling in that both Bioware has been doing it my whole adult life so it shouldn't be a surprise and how consistently TV/Game writers just aren't very good at it because they're (hopefully) well meaning guys whose interactions with "woke DEI CRT BLM/ANTIFA" are secondary at best. Generally I don't think it should be more than a footnote but between a terminally online cadre of anger addicted losers and an industry of youtube videos with random capitalization pretty much anything with "representation" is going to generate 1000000 hours of "gowokegobroke" content. Very tiresome tbh.

[majestic]

I should really start proofreading these posts. Yikes.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

3 minutes ago, majestic said:

I should really start proofreading these posts. Yikes.

Never. Typos are what make us human and will also poison the AIs.

[MrBrown]

3 hours ago, PK htiw klaw eriF said:

 On top of that I am biased towards rpgs and after BG3 it's a bit off-putting to see Dragon Age veer away from that and towards action gameplay (which many more games do and often do better). 

Well, if DAVe became like this because of Fallen Order's popularity, then presumably the next DA game will be modeled after BG3.

[majestic]

1 minute ago, PK htiw klaw eriF said:

Never. Typos are what make us human and will also poison the AIs.

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*

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

18 minutes ago, majestic said:

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*

Ok that's a different thing all together. Never pass up an opportunity to insult the incels, I'd tell them to go to hell but that's probably a nicer time than being in the comments of Matt Walsh videos. And the snowflakes are a good indicator of media literacy being terribly low, many such cases. The only things I've reported to the mods is treating wizardry as a laughing matter and images from a Polish neo-nazi site.

[Gfted1]

Yes, cookie for you.

[Zoraptor]

11 hours ago, PK htiw klaw eriF said:

Not necessarily a bad thing (well, the Whedonite dialogue is)

Eh, the problem isn't the Whedonite dialogue really, it's the lack of talent from the writers trying to do it. It's worked ok for Bioware in previous games, though the most recent was probably ME2 when they still had a decent cadre of writers. And it's not like, say, Buffy/ Angel etc retroactively have bad writing just because they've been so often (badly) imitated.

Quote

The "woke stuff" is really just baffling in that both Bioware has been doing it my whole adult life so it shouldn't be a surprise and how consistently TV/Game writers just aren't very good at it

I don't think the problem is the 'woke stuff' in particular, as above it's the way characters in general are written nowadays by bad writers. The best example I've found as comparison is Omar from The Wire vs I Can't Even Remember His Name After 4 (OK 5, but I skipped S4) Seasons But He Was Played by Anthony Rapp, from Star Trek Discovery. You can describe the entire character of the STD character in about two words: gay engineer, and for probably 95% of his screen time that's all you need to know because that is, basically, his 'character', over the 5 seasons. The other 5% is him getting upset about Gay Doctor (again, all you really need to know 95% of the time) dying. If you tried describing Omar as an equivalent like gay hit man... it just doesn't work well at all, outside of the most simplistic situations and interpretations. That's because one is a well written engaging character with depth who happens to be gay, the other has gay as his defining characteristic. Of course the problem with STD is clearly the bad writing, since most of the, uh, non woke characters are basic caricatures as well.

The unfortunate thing is that often bad writers with good intentions think that 'gay' or 'non binary' is enough to make an inherently well written character when it isn't any more than 'heterosexual' would make a good non woke character. The net effect is the feeling that you're being preached to, and worse, preached to very very badly.

Ultimate problem is of course that writing good characters whatever their skin colour/ sexual orientation/ occupation/ etc is is hard, and few people can do it. There also don't seem to be any consequences for those who are bad writers, so it's self perpetuating.

Edited Sunday at 01:34 AM by Zoraptor

[melkathi]

I find that is a general problem with writers.

You even see it in shows like Walking Dead. The protagonist, Whatshishame sheriff in all the Karl memes, had as sole personality trait "protagonist". Writers seem to think audiences will care for the protagonist just because they are supposed to, then wonder why the supporting cast gets all the fans. Then as series progress, often you see secondary characters come to the forefront, because for those some interesting idea was used somewhere on an episode to justify the episode.

Think BSG, where nobody cares all that much about the admiral's son, but everyone wanted to know what happened to the guy who gave up his spot to evacuate the scientist - to the extent he got written back into the show.

[bugarup]

I always liked how Obs handled diversity in Deadfire, i.e. they just put it there along with world building for it to make sense, no fanfares or shining a spotlight on it.

[Zoraptor]

4 hours ago, melkathi said:

I find that is a general problem with writers.

You even see it in shows like Walking Dead. The protagonist, Whatshishame sheriff in all the Karl memes, had as sole personality trait "protagonist". Writers seem to think audiences will care for the protagonist just because they are supposed to, then wonder why the supporting cast gets all the fans. Then as series progress, often you see secondary characters come to the forefront, because for those some interesting idea was used somewhere on an episode to justify the episode.

Dunno about that: Rick had a lot of fans himself, and generally having a good ensemble cast/ characters is a plus that indicates overall good writing (cf Discovery vs The Next Generation).

That's partly because Andrew Lincoln is a good actor who was clearly doing his best with often limited material and partly because the writing of TWD may not always have been good, but for most of the early seasons was functional and overall/ specifically memorable/ memeorable, which in many ways is the most important factor (cf prequel trilogy Star Wars vs sequel trilogy). There's also a bit of an expectation difference between a post zombie apocalypse comic book adaptation TV series and Star Trek, character wise.

(As a TWD watcher I'd say that the problem with Rick and with most of the long term characters was that the show simply went on too long rather than bad writing. They ran out of character development and they ended up either flanderised or stuck in a repeating loop. They also got stuck only introducing new characters whose purpose was to die after a certain point, because they had a big backlash to two established ones being killed off. A lot of the backlash was actually due to the writing rather than the deaths themselves. The overall writing took a massive dive too since they took too long to get anywhere and started having the other bane of modern writing: working the plot to include 'cool' scenes they wanted to do whether they made sense or not. Like driving up to a fortress, having the enemy leadership all come out for some chit chat, pull out your guns and... shoot all the windows in the fortress, since you couldn't end the plot early by just, y'know, shooting the bad guys)

Edited Sunday at 08:03 PM by Zoraptor