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

Sorry for the size of the photo...I have no idea how to shrink it. And before someone asks, this was on my old PS4.

No, of course not. Did you think they would allow broodmothers to still be a thing, in this day and age?

Anyway, Fextralife posted an impressions video. Their take is that Veilguard is an OK action RPG, but a disappointing Dragon Age game.

I think the most damning thing about this game is that it didn't inspire hatred or disgust or any strong passionate emotion - but apathy. It's like staring at a corpse or a husk. It might vaguely resemble a dragon age game if you're half blind, but it's otherwise hollow and broken.

I'm a few hours in and the game is... fine? Just kinda mid so far. I will say, and I haven't seen anyone else point it out how exactly

Tempest Rogue has a time spell in a bottle.

Getting away from dialogue or lore complaints, I got a flavour of what some reviewers mean by boring fight mechanics last night. There was a section of story on You Tube (which is what I was watching it for) and part of this involved a dragon fight. This was a good comparison with previous games because we had dragon fights there, particularly DAI. Now it was the sort of dragon fight where it flies around a bit, lands, you get its points down to a certain level and then it retires to a ledge to fire stuff at you whilst you run around dodging it. Then rinse and repeat. I'll admit I found those sorts of fights tedious in previous games, although often they were broken up by baby dragons attacking you too. However, I don't recall one lasting longer than 10 minutes at the most. Perhaps I'm remembering that wrong but honestly, I don't remember it being longer than that.

Now out of a 30 minute video I swear the dragon fight took 20 minutes. I had put it on to fill the time whilst my dinner was cooking. Well, during the fight (which I left running) I was able to get up put on the vegetables, come back, watch a bit more, get up and go to the toilet, come back, watch a bit more, get up check on progress of dinner, come back and watch a bit more, get up, serve up my dinner and come back with my meal on a tray to witness the last moments of the fight. Honestly, if I had actually been playing the game I would have got so bored.

The build of Rook was a Reaper and they had Lucanis and Bellara with them. Perhaps it would have been faster with a different build or set of companions but it just seemed repeating the same battle tactics over and over again, with Bellara healing from time to time. I also noticed that when companion hits were showing on screen they were often in just double figures (barely in one case - just 11!) when Rook's hits were in the high hundreds and still the health bar of the dragon only went down really slowly. I know dragons are meant to be challenging but did it have to take that long? It wasn't as though Rook ever seemed in any real danger of dying, although the hit points got down to about a quarter a one point. It just seemed you had to be willing to stay the course and not lose concentration. I don't know the level of difficulty they were playing at, so may be it would have been better on a lower setting because I can see why some reviewers advised you do this in order to shorten the amount of time you spend in long repetitive battles.

Looking back Inquisition was the teaser to a lot of the BS in Veilguard

Inquisition still had good aspects, mostly saved by good companion writing, some quality story missions and the Tresapsser dlc

But its when Bioware slowly started to go PG with the series and also dumb down the RP options

They removed any dark elements, I can barely think of any heavy scenes compared to Origins and DA2. Freaking demons were coming out of the sky and it was all portrayed in such a safe way. The Inquisitor was just handed everything easily (huge army, top advisors, everyone kissing his ass) and also was bland as fuck.

The Mage Templar which was build up was wasted completely, much like Veilguard wasted Solas

You had more evil choices than in Veilguard but barely any compared to the others.

Cory was also a huge joke. Really without Tresapsser the story would be much worse

It really is the visuals and platformer level design that destroys any sense of dread and forboding atmosphere.

The pointless time skip is pissing me off more and more now that the full games out.

The timeskip between 2 and DAI was fleshed out by two novels, tie in comics, and a bunch of expository information.

Meanwhile post DAI we have a bunch of supplementary stuff that covers 1-2 years post Trespasser at best, and then an egregious 7 year time skip. There’s no good reason that the game should have taken place in the mid to late 9:40s other than that BioWare wanted an excuse to age out or retire other characters.

imgur.com/a/eYSy3mA

The dialogue lines in this game are mostly ridiculous, it's impossible to read. Here it is not even possible to speak of a drop in quality, but of a complete lack of it. Who wrote it and for whom ? I have seen better and more meaningful dialogue lines in recent Pokemon games.