The official DA4 Skepticism Thread.

I was going to reply with something like "it's pretty hard to avoid politics when people equate your existence to a political view"..... but nah. I'm tired of having that same argument over and over and over.

So I will leave you to your cynicsm and continue having high hopes for the next Dragon Age game.

Can you imagine saying that representation of other people identities that is not straight, white or male are politics TM in 2019




It's been a while since I posted here but I see this forum is still a bridge for this kind of shit and hate lol

While I'm sympathetic the basic/general idea here (That of being opposed to politically preachy writing that distracts or detracts from the narrative of the game), I honestly don't think it's as much of an issue in Dragon Age as it is in other IP's. The only thing I can think of is the scene in DAI where Krem's Trans-ness is just thrown in your face with no option for the player to essentially say "Aiight, you do you bruh.". Yeah that one scene in a series of games does come off pretty preachy. But honestly, the amount of options available to you the player in terms of how to RP and present your character, from a Chantry/Dalish Zealot to an Atheistic Iconoclast and everything in-between, and somehow make it all work? Praiseworthy.

Forget politics. The only thing that will destroy Dragon Age is what ALWAYS destroys good video game franchises: greed.

One need only look at Dragon Age 2 for an example of greed nearly destroying the franchise. Was it not EA that forced the ridiculously short production cycle out of a desire to capitalize on the success of DAO? Regardless of what you think about the final product's quality, I don't think anyone can dispute that another six months to a year would have resulted in a much more polished game.

And now we have EA tossing out the work already done on Dragon Age 4 to meet their mandate of LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE SEEEEEEEEEERVICES. Now, it may be that mandate proves to be a boon for Dragon Age and its fans, but when I see some of the other live service clunkers like Sea of Thieves, I'm not exactly filled with boundless confidence.

Hmmm, it’s almost as if the human brain is an irrational lump of meat that’s lived in modern societies for a tiny blip of its evolutionary timeline, and thus its purchasing choices are rarely in alignment with what it would find most enjoyable.

Otherwise, greed would naturally lead to great games, because great games would make the most money.

Count me as a skeptic. The problem I see is that EA doesn't learn from its mistakes. It was dedicated to lootboxes and shoehorned multiplayer to the purpose of absurdity. There were a lot of failures, from EA and otherwise, but failures don't mean anything if they don't learn from them.

Take Mass Effect: Andromeda. We all had a good laugh mocking that game, so much our faces were tired. And make no mistake, poor animations, weird glitches, falling through walls, running like you're about to a kickflip, faces that don't match the models, the game was a buggy, half-finished mess. But here's the thing: Even if that game was perfectly polished with gorgeous animations and spot-on characters, the writing was still very weak. The villain was dull, the protagonist was a wimp, and the companions were a collection of trolls, cliches, and Vetra, who was great but had that Liara feel from the first game: That you had to bring her along merely because you found her, and otherwise felt like an optional character.

I never saw these things being talked about. I heard talk of changing directions, about originally making procedural generated maps with loads of planets. Going into this, I have no idea if those issues were addressed going forward. This would be even moreso if Anthem doesn't do well (and I suspect it won't).

The overly preachy director does bother me as well. "Celebrating our diversity and differences" is such a vacuous term as to be meaningless. His preachy, holier-than-thou attitude reminds me of all the worst virtue signalers on TV. Considering the director changed his profile in response to say "leftist" instead of "pro-intersectional feminist", I'm even more concerned. I don't precisely know what a narrative director does, but I'm not sure the project will benefit with him in it.

BioWARE has a chance to surprise me. I was intrigued by The Descent and it blew my expectations wide open. But if they can't give me a quality story without injecting real-world politics into it with the grace of a dying walrus, I won't buy it.

Fair enough, but I'd like to just point out that the entire (stated) basis for OP's skepticism IS the premise that BioWare is inserting personal politics into their products.

I feel like that frames the thread in a particular way. If I say "I'm skeptical about BioWare's ability to write a gay male romance", is that a) appropriate off-topic because it's not within the framework of OP's initial criticism, or c) political, because homosexuality is politicized and there's nothing I can do about that?

Guess I should do examples. Its going to be mostly books though. Hmmmm, if you have read them, compare the old Newsflesh Trilogy vs her "Drowning in the Deep" Books. The writer's personal politics, while present in the Trilogy, were on the back burner. It didn't interrupt the story or knock you out of the setting. IN her newest books though, even people who lean super left noticed how blunt she was being and how it derailed a story.

Case in point, DA4, you can include Lynn Flewelling level of gay/ect into your series, but make them epic characters to be around and not just about one aspect. PS: Read this series if you do love fantasy like DA. Its good stuff and lore rich.



I play to be entertained and I want DA:O level of funtimes again. Or Hawke type character funtimes. Is it so bad that I want old Bioware of Yore level of fun again? Will EA ever let them be that again? Or did the magic really escape after the DA: Acquisition? Pun intended.

QFT. In the dark RPG days of ... 2004-2014 ish, Bioware was almost a single light in the darkness. These days I'm finding so many other developers that scratch that same itch. I pointed my sister toward Assassin's Creed Odyssey and her gleeful reactions to the game are similar to the way she used to react when playing old Bioware games. I never thought I'd see the day she'd get her Bioware kick from Assassin's Creed 0.0

I have greater concerns about the writing than ham-fisted politics. The only time it was immersion-breaking for me was Iron Bull getting mad on Krem's behalf. Beyond that, I can't really think of when the games were preachy.