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

Apparently playing a warden is the most immersive is what I keep hearing. My Lord Of Fortune is just some treasure hunter that got a death mark on his head for stealing from the wrong people like Isabela in DA2 and doesn't really have a connection to anything. Sure, Rook knows Isabela. There is of course faction specific stuff for all the Rivain bits, dialogue with Taash and so on. But outside of being recognized as a part of the faction the background might as well not exist except for a minor remark here and there. But I kind of expected this going in and still chose that faction because it's just the vibe my Rook gave me. I like him being Rivaini.

I too think origin stories would have helped this soft reboot greatly. It makes so much sense here, especially considering the game spends 90% of its storytelling in act 1 lore dumping for new players. I suspect this is the main reason why everything is kind of boring. I know all this already! I imagine for new players this is all fascinating and exciting. There is so far precious little new interesting stuff for old fans. Confirmation of things hinted at before at the most.

Couldn't BioWare wait for a reboot AFTER the literal direct sequel to DAI??? Fuck new players, have them play the older games to get up to speed. That's extra sales too. If they can't be bothered then it's on them they don't understand what's going on. I would never play a direct sequel without checking out the previous game(s) first. I'll never understand people who jump into a franchise several games down the road unless they are completely contained stories like Assassin's Creed.

This might be a controversial stance but imo devs should NOT be obligated to cater to new people in this extreme fashion. Nor should a game be accessible to everyone on the planet. I actually think that's a terrible approach and ruining AAA gaming. Games have genres. They cater to specific players who play a certain type of game. A good game is a game that is made for a specific target audience and tries to excel in that niche.

I'll never play a souls-like, don't care if Elden Ring is an RPG and amazing at what it does. I'll never play it. Don't try and make this an appealing game to me by making it less unforgiving. That would take away why fans play these games, for the challenge.
And yet BioWare did just that: let's ditch previous choices because it's too complicated all of a sudden and, really, new players don't know these NPCs anyway and that's all that matters to us now.

I really resent BioWare a little for making baby's first Dragon Age, dumbing down the lore to make it more accessible. This game should have been a love letter to the fanbase and in my eyes it's anything but. It's a handholding exercise in bringing new kids to the franchise, leaving *me* kind of bored.

I guess I really have to trust the final 5h are worth it for the fans...

From my understanding and experience, Steam reviews usually only go really negative if the game launch is terrible, with lots of bugs and crashes and issues with things like framerate. For all of DAVs flaws, it runs smoothly and most of the bugs I've encountered have been because I don't own an SSD. It is genuinely a great launch in terms of it being a working game in the modern world. 

Both this forum and the DA subreddit seem pretty divisive, though I'd say the forums are more positive, while the subreddit is more disappointed, underwhelmed and critical (but that could just be because a lot of casual fans or DAO truthers have also appeared and made the subreddit less of a bubble). Places like Resetera, that would obviously eat stuff like this up, seem also quite positive, but even people who loved the game admit that the writing has issues. 4chan is obsessed with trashtalking the game (obviously), twitter seems mostly negative (since culture wars and people who benefit monetarily from talking about that subject has hijacked the conversation around the game) and who knows what is going on at RPGCodex, presumably they hate it as well considering what the demographic of the place is. 

Personally, I'd be surprised if this game met EA's sales expectations. If they do, it has to be on the lower end. What the game is missing is the hype and good word of mouth, so it'll be super hard for them to gain any momentum anymore.

For what it's worth, the Steam reviews are going to be put up by people who actually have game time, which is probably a little bit more reasonable than some of the others. That said, you're going to get a lot of shills. I think I've kind of domineered a couple of fans who were/are very excited into saying that it's a little disappointing when I expressed that I wasn't too happy with it when they said they loved it, to which they then turned around and were like "yeah the writing isn't very good actually". I don't know if that says more about the game or me.

I have been thinking a fair bit about a couple of the companion quests, which is both good and bad. Good in that they have clearly stuck in my mind enough to have me think about them after the credits rolled, bad in that a lot of the thinking is 'this could have been better and here's how I think they could have done it'. Specifically thinking about Taash and Emmrich mostly, but also Davrin to a lesser extent. Spoilers for those quests below.

How was The Veilguard received, really? Because you can't really trust this forum or the DA subreddit because people in those place will probably like it much more than the average Joe, but then again Steam still has mostly positive reviews, which sounds pretty good to me... I really wonder