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

Yeah even the music is completely generic. It has no charm, same as everything else in this game.

Come to think of it, a game for children is even too generous a notion and insulting to any child older than five. I've played games for children with much better writing. The writing is honestly brain dead. No normal adult talks like that unless talking to a toddler. I'm glad that Rook feels like the most normal mature person of the group.

Besides the horrible writing, another thing that's giving me pause is Rook catching all the aggro. That sounds extremely annoying, and not like something you can change in the options menu.

I'll tell you why is that. It's because the "companions" in this game are not much more than special weapons on a technical sense. They can do damage but they have no health bar

I think I'm very bad at this game. My friend's PC is not that good and the game didn't run so well so maybe I can blame it on that instead of my own incompetence but I kinda felt like I spend tons of time healing myself during combat.

Imo combat being the only check mark is pretty damning in an rpg.
Like an Oreo without filling, I guess somewhat edible but not why you bought the packet.

Go and look at Cohn’s face as he says “the game is fine”, after only playing it for 8 hours. The same amount of time most previewers had to come away with positive impressions of the game. Tells you everything you need to know about this title. The man looks as if he just got done working in a particularly difficult public school where the kids are the worst behaved in the nation.

For whatever it's worth, Veilguard currently has a 2.7 user Score on metacritic:

www.metacritic.com/game/dragon-age-the-veilguard/

It infuriates me that many people, and not just from this thread, started sounding the alarm in regards to the writing months ago. And we were told 'it's just a letter', ' it's just the background', 'you're nitpicking', 'she's not quirky'. And now look, the most agreed upon aspect in regards to this game is the damned writing. Maybe it wouldn't have changed anything, but I do think we would have been better prepared to endure this mess if more people had looked at this title as it really was and not what they wanted it to be.

Combat is so boring. I ended up turning the difficulty all the way down just so I could mow through it quicker. It's always just some round arena or open area w/o many features to it and enemies running directly at you or dropping some AOE you gotta dodge out of.

The voice acting is so uninspired. Neve started out doing some weird voice that sounded like she was trying to imitate a noir movie detective but seems to have just gone for a huskier affect halfway through act 1. Varric, Harding, Lucanus are decent but don't have very much that's interesting to say. Bellara is... fine, but most of her writing seems to be about her fan girling out over Neve.

Every map is just a series of hallways stacked on top of each other that you can't fully access until you have the right companion ability or complete some side quest. Unfortunately the game doesn't tell you that so you might waste some time checking every corner of the hall for some broken wall or roof you can climb on before you realize it's some locked door that will only open after you finish a quest. There are some chests that have a unique loot item, but the rest are mostly just generic trash that will feed into their weird armor gacha system. Also speaking of generic looking systems, hope you enjoy waiting for a level up for some lame +5/+10 % skill increment. Granted RPG systems have never been BioWare's strength, but this wish.com assassin's creed tree they cooked up is rough to look through. Not sure what the point of giving the mage so many spells was if you're just looking at weaken or overwhelm as your verbs.

Really embarrassing shit. I'm really surprised at some of the 9/10 reviews I've seen. I guess a high level of polish goes a long way, but this game is basically the same tier as something like Rise of the Argonauts or one of those Spiders RPGs in terms of writing and gameplay.

yeah definitely no review bombing going on there

A lot of people have shared the same sentiment and again it was ignored. It's the first thing that popped out when they showed us the gameplay footage after their fortnite trailer. I was really immersed in the story with Varric and Rook. Then they get to Neve and it falls off a cliff. I'm not sure it's the VA, because Neve isn't the only one who sounds strange. Why does Bellara perpetually sound as if she's talking to a young child? It seems to be more the direction. 

That's actually much lower than I was anticipating.  It's gone up some since you posted: 2.2 PC, 3.3 and 4.2 respectively on PS and XB.  The lower scores on PC make sense since PC gamers tend to be older than console players.  On Steam it's mostly positive on reviews and number 2 seller globally.  The disconnect between Steam and Metacritic is probably due to review bombers being ahead of the up-voting crowd at the moment...I expect that to change in the coming week.

I give it a 6 thru the first 4 hours.  I may end up knocking off a whole point for the messaging at the end if it's really bad.