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

I can’t speak for sales, but it’s not even cracked the top 50 most played list on the Xbox so I know it’s not doing to hot on there.

I expect about 2 million copies in sales, just my own personal guess and that’s not gonna be good enough for EA. Question then becomes what happens. I’ve said I won’t be excited for a mass effect 5 until I see how veilguard goes as I believe the success of this game is gonna determine the future good or bad. Do they scale BioWare down yet again? I think they’re too big to completely shut down but I can see them making leadership changes given they’re very clearly the ones who’ve influenced the final product being what it is. There’s a lot of very cringe cutscenes and I haven’t even played it yet myself.

I suggested the similarity in butchering the lore some weeks back now. However, I did say then that at least Bioware created the world (or the earlier writers they have now dumped did), so they do have a degree of licence to do as they please with it because it was their invention. What Amazon did to Tolkien's creation was unforgivable. There was no excuse. He did map out the entire plot of the 2nd Age in the appendices to Lord of the Rings, because he had already drafted out what later appeared in the Silmarillion. There were also constant references to it throughout the fellowship, particularly at the Council of Elrond but also in the songs and stories of the characters, such as Sam remembering the Lay of Gil-galad; Gimli singing of the glory of Durin's Day when they are actually sitting in the darkness of Moria and Galadriel also remembering what the dwarven kingdom was like before its fall. All the races in Rings of Power a shadows of what they were shown to be in the 2nd Age by Tolkien but particularly the dwarves and Numenor.

What seems clear to me is that the writers of Rings of Power thought they could use the fact that he hadn't written an actual novel as an excuse for writing something totally different. Then they kept referring back to the movies rather than the books, even though they maintained they were doing the latter. Then I swear the designers had played Dragon Age and based Khazad-Dum on what they saw there in that dwarven location in the Hinterlands (Valdamar?) rather than as it ought to have looked (the film version was closer). I did find it amusing though when in the first season someone used the insult "knife ear" when referring to an elf, which was never an insult in Middle Earth but was in Dragon Age.

Incidentally, just as Bioware is never getting any money from me again, neither did Amazon. If they had made a half decent stab at recreating the 2nd Age, I'd have signed up to Prime just to watch it but they didn't, so I saved my money. In fact, I decide to boycott Amazon altogether. I now prefer to use local storekeepers, even if it costs me more, because they can do with the help after the hammering they got during Covid. I was rather proud of the fact that last Christmas I managed to source all my presents from local stores.

gervaise21

I'm laughing at the idea that Dragon Age ripped off Tolkien only for the writers of a Tolkien series to rip off dragon age.

Ill add Amazon's Wheel of Time to Jordan's/Sanderson's fans. Complete destruction of lore is the new trend in entertainment these days. Talentless hacks being pushed to decision making positions and doing all the self inserts they possible can. Peak narcisism.

I don't want this game to fail, I'm sure many people in Bioware worked their asses off for many years for this game and while they are not directly at fault for its condition if it fails they'll be the first to go.

On the other hand this game being successful will send a very wrong message. This game doesn't deserve to succeed. But it's very hard for me to predict whether it will or not.

It literally just now occured to me what a gigantic waste of time that choice was...also a pretty big indicator to me, that Veilguard wasn't Laidlaw's vision for this franchises future.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest you're overqualified.

It does seem like a pretty scorched earth approach. I suppose they could go back to previous ages for material or go far enough forward to start afresh. So much of the franchise has had the underlying lore supporting it that I agree it looks difficult.

Come to think of it - I would do some sort of epic adventure/war rpg around the 1st Blight.

I share your ambivalence and I sympathize with everyone who worked on this project. I do not wish everyone to lose their jobs. I wish the right people to lose their jobs. The people who decided to disrespect and degrade this franchise with this slop do not deserve to be working on Dragon Age. That is the shotcallers who decided that this game needed to abandon its loyal audience and cater to god knows who with generic, middle of the road, amateurish garbage. As you say, it doesn't deserve to succeed. 

What did I just watch??? I bet the writer for that scene was watching Netflix's Wednesday and thought: "Everybody loves the show, so they gonna love this in Dragon Age... OMG Im a genius!!!"

I feel like you know and care about the lore much more than most people in Bioware at this point