Dragon Age The Veilguard Criticism Thread (formerly Skepticism Thread) [Spoilers]

Review views doesn't equal interest. The game is selling like hotcakes anyway, it seems. Most preordered game on Steam now, I think.
I'm honestly surprised given the extremely bad PR at the beginning with the teaser. All the anti woke rage bait doesn't seem to have done any damage. Nor the Pixar art style. Probably because the people who buy BioWare games are super LGBTQ friendly and like BioWare for it. So that rage machine is falling on deaf ears.

The very positive review scores are probably helping a lot with people on the fence. People don't actually have to watch lengthy YT videos, they just have to look at the review scores and read a bunch of summaries to be convinced this game isn't a complete failure. And that's good enough for s purchase.

Going to be interesting if DAV is another game where the professional reviews don't match user scores at all or if us here are the outliers.

Will people have the patience to stick with the boring beginning that seems to range from 30-75% of the game, no less! I still can't wrap my head around that... Getting such high praise despite that. Really feels fishy as hell, not gonna lie.
Either this is the biggest bought review campaign ever or the last act REALLY blows it out of the water somehow. Or maybe people are extremely forgiving of a beloved franchise and don't want BioWare to get shut down so everybody has collectively decided to praise the hell out of it to ensure this game sells well enough to make EA happy.

It's 3rd top selling on Steam above Factorio, War Thunder, Sons of the Forest, a bunch of other old games, a rerelease of the original RDR, Rust. No indication how it's selling atm but it could sell well. Being 3rd on the Steam Charts as a preorder isn't by itself a fantastic result

store.steampowered.com/search/?filter=topsellers

It's beating out Monster Hunter Wilds ... that doesn't release til February next year 

Given that some negative review still praised the third Act/final hours of the game, it is possible that it’ll be a very positive part of the game. Some of the positive reviews mentioned the game takes a while to get more interesting/good.

Regardless of the actual overall quality of the game, it could be true that the initial part is the worst part and the final part the best.

So I guess we're the crazy haters and everyone else is totally unbothered by the kindergarten tone. WTF.

When people

- have been playing a game franchise for 15 years

- are treated to something that doesn't fit the tone of past entries

- AND disrespects player agency (a prominent feature of those past entries)

- AND disrespects (via ignoring or altering) existing lore

- AND disrespects (via ignoring or altering) existing characters

then there will be a LOT of disappointment. Some people are "riding the hate train," but Skillup and MrMattyPlays are not. MrMattyPlays in particular sometimes goes out of his way to make excuses for games that are mid at best (one of my criticisms of him, and why I'm not subscribed to him though I still watch his stuff sometimes). A lot of people feel the same way about both of them: not fans, but Skillup and Matty usually have opinions worth hearing. That both their reviews were negative is extremely telling, because both of them have enough gaming knowledge to say more than "I just didn't like it." Matty's is more of a talking-head video imo, but Skillup's review is incredibly well-rounded.

So there are a lot of misgivings right now from a lot of people (many of them long-time franchise fans), and in their disappointment some emotions are running high. 

Skillup's review speaks to old Bioware fans. He didn't have a hate boner, he's reviewing it with old Bioware expectations in mind and people resonate. There are legitimate concerns yup, and people are also jumping on for sure, but not all or most youtubers have a hate boner

Skillup's review speaks to old Bioware fans. He didn't have a hate boner, he's reviewing it with old Bioware expectations in mind and people resonate. There are legitimate concerns yup, and people are also jumping on for sure, but not all or most youtubers have a hate boner

Judging by the video of
maybe, might even be a carbon copy of it. If everyone is praising the end people might even die, Idk.