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

Solas is pretty stupid.

I don't often find myself agreeing with your opinions, Sartoz...but this is an absolute must for me. Anthem proves they can do flying (and do it well, from all accounts - even people that otherwise disliked the game).

Being able to fly on a Griffin would be an amazing hook that would help mitigate some of the lost interest from the huge gap between games.

*shrug*

So? I've yet to see mounted combat be better/more effective in a game. Maybe there are games out there with a similar to real life advantage to being on horseback while in a fight against enemies on foot, but I haven't played one. Wasn't so much interested in combat as in traversal.

We'd just need our companions to have them as well. Which would actually be the bigger problem, unless they just perfectly link the pathing with the PCs Griffin.

Mount&Blade Bannerlord and its predecessor M&B Warband. Speed is your advantage. The high ground too but spears can negate that. What you do is pin with your heavy infantry and smack the back with a cavalry charge. Timing is crucial and a skirmish phase where you successfully counter the enemy cavalry to pull it off. Secondary objective is to smash the enemy ranged troops. Against light troops you just charge.

Griffins as a Fast Travel mechanic sounds pretty cool to me.

I think the logic (if any) is that player choice is being respected (their choice of words, not mine) by keeping any reference to the consequences of those choices either vague or making specific references so easy to implement that all possible choices can be covered with a reasonable cost of resources. I.e. if you were to play the Inquisitor again in DA4, there would have to be voice lines for all possible outcomes in DAI if you wanted to respect player choices, and that would likely come at a massive cost. Or DA4 would assume that everyone made the same choices, i.e. it would establish an actual canon, thus not respecting previous player choices. But if you were to play a new protagonist who had only heard vague rumours of some Inquisition thing happening down south, all those details could be omitted, also "respecting" player choices (by not contradicting them with a newly established canon). Any specifics could just be codex entries, i.e. written text instead of voiced conversations.

This is all about choices made, not the previous protagonist (the Inquisitor) taking the L because they got replaced by a new guy or girl.

So throwing people’s characters away like trash after upending their story for an ad is being respectful? Well, now I know not to trust them at all with their promises of respecting player choice. “We know that your character vowed to stop the world from ending in the choice we gave you, but we decided to respect that by making them a worthless bum instead. Thank you for your money. Fuck you. Love, BioWare.”

In some ways, the writing was on the wall at the end of Trespasser. You are meant to be making a decision about whether to disband the Inquisition or hand it over to the control of the Divine to be her private army, yet the information informing that decision is directly related to whether the organisation will now be more or less likely to keep free of Solas' agents. Surely, if disbanded, there will not be an organisation for him to infiltrate. In the epilogue Leliana is grooming Harding and Charter as her successors, which is odd if she is no longer Spymaster of anything, which should be the case if you disbanded. Of course, what is true is that right at the end the Inquisitor declares they need new people Solas doesn't know, which was the big hint that the Inquisitor and other major characters from Inquisition would not be returning.

Then both the comic series and Tevinter Nights confirm that apparently the Inquisition is still operational regardless of any decision made in Trespasser. In the latter the Inquisitor is even referenced and Varric is also identified as a point of contact, even though he is someone Solas is bound to know and thus keeping an eye on.

The problem is the real baddie of DAI was not dealt with in that game or its DLC, in a similar way really to what happened with DA2. With that Hawke's story was meant to be completed in the Exalted March DLC and when that was cancelled, they ended up with a somewhat illogical and disappointing cameo in DAI, with their story still not conclusively tied off if you don't leave them in the Fade. Likewise, they involved the Warden by proxy and gave them an unresolved plot-line as well.

So just using a new PC to remove the problems associated with bringing back the old one is not satisfactory if they still try to include them in some way indirectly or with a disappointing cameo. I personally feel that it would have been better not to have that confrontation between Solas and the Inquisitor in Trespasser but instead just leave it with the explanation of why the Inquisition is no longer a major force and the Inquisitor retired from active duty, having had their hand cut off by someone else, but thinking that their mission to save the world was done. Then the new PC could have been the one to discover this was not the case. That would have made sense.

If the direction they have taken with a new PC, after what did happen in Trespasser, is meant to respect player choice, then I really don't get it either.   "I'm off to save the world, again", was my dialogue choice on disbanding and that really didn't sound like someone who was going to do this from behind a desk.

Speaking of cameos, oh yeah they were really respectful of players who chose things like romancing Merrill or became blood mages with all the “every blood mage is a monster”, or who liked the Wardens which their sibling can be a part of with “Grr Wardens” and so on.

I wonder how they’ll bastardize people’s Inquisitors.

I don't think DA:I gets to be called recent anymore

Unless they are going to meticulously plan 3-4 games at the same time then you are always going to run into problems with continuity. Its not like Bioware have really been invested in keeping one particular protagonist going from DA2 onwards and the only surprise to me is that they insist on these tenuous cameos - which only serve to remind people [who care] that their relationship with a previous character is unresolved. For me they would be better off leaving out former protagonists entirely than what they did with Hawke in DAI. They seem to be better at using the supporting cast in recurring roles - Leliana and Varric seemed well executed enough to me. I suppose its a glass half full/empty scenario where either they feel 'we must include so and so,' or 'that guy could come back and really add something to the story.' Audience matters too, if you bring back X, someone will be disappointed Y isn't there.

I doubt the long term approach is on the cards - writing a few games when parts 2 and 3 might be a decade away or worse may never happen.