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

Yes everyone loves Solas and Anders, the two most questionable love interests in dragon age - besides for maybe Morrigan and Zevran lmao.

One of my favorite quotes ever is from Lord Of The Flies:
"However Simon thought of the beast, there he rose before his inward sight the picture of a human at once heroic and sick."

We are all BOTH. And good writers know and show this. Solas is the closest thing to that in DAV. Which is why he's the best written part of the game. A remnant of a time when BioWare writers were still good at their job.
I really wish he'd been the only villain of the game. It should have all been about him with the qunari war as a backdrop of the petty wars of current Thedas. Solas was the best villain DA ever had BY FAR. Exactly because he's such a tragic character, a hero turned villain not because he wants nothing but total destruction but because he thought he was doing the right thing in his twisted guilt riddled mind. Solas was heroic and became sick. The best villains think they're saving the world imo. It's of course a bit of a cliche by now but imo that's the truest to real life. I believe most villains are the heroes of their own story. They really don't think they're evil. This even applies to the much hated ME3 catalyst. It was the only solution to a problem. The catalyst thought it was doing everyone a favor, saving organics. I liked that.

What was the motivation of Ghil and El? Fuck if I know! They are cardboard. They are evil for evil's sake and that's bullshit and boring. There is no villain origin story to them. Nothing. Just power corrupts, I guess.

I'm reading a lot of pushback against the villain story in S2 or Arcane right now and I'm surprised. I'm getting Solas PTSD from the fans of a hero turned villain. Got an actual subreddit just about that character being idealized. It makes perfect sense to me. They didn't ruin that character. It's an evolution that's very plausible to me. In fact, this could be my villain origin story. It's the most sensitive people who can flip like that in a misguided attempt to end suffering. I LOVE what they've done with the character and what the moral of the story was.

Every character on that show is complex and flawed. Human beings are messy. I think closing our eyes and pretending that's not the case is actually dangerous, which brings us back to Lord Of The Flies. Only by confronting and accepting our capacity for evil can we fight it, but I digress...

I do agree that in times of great fear of war and rising poverty people turn to comfort entertainment to cope. And it makes sense that that's why DAV is 80% a cozy friendship simulator. But this will not help anybody navigate an imperfect ugly world. The world is unfair and cruel and we need to understand this and raise our children to cope with this rather than try to shield them from it. Because that's impossible.

I miss the days when fictional stories taught us lessons about life in an abstract way that is easier to deal with than reality. You can tell a lot of difficult stories through fiction because ultimately nobody gets hurt but you still can apply there lessons to real life. You know this happens in real life to somebody right now but you don't know these people so it's bearable.

If we as a society cannot even deal with fictional cruelty, then I don't know how we're supposed to function well in real life. So I guess this is why we're seeing all those snowflake meltdowns on social media. Nobody prepared them for the real world not giving a shit. Nobody owes you anything. The world doesn't care about your problems. People will cheat you for their own gain at every turn. You better learn to deal with that. Because there isn't a Rook at your side turning everyone into your friend through the magic of HR speak.

I don't have anything against cozy games. When my cat died that's what I needed. But Dragon Age was never meant as that kind of escapism. They sold us something completely different here. A shallow good guys against evil tale instead of the complexity of life that we got before.

I just think about how Final Fantasy XVI came out a year before and was very upfront in its grim world of slavery and political warfare and yet was still a hopeful story with a strong power of love and friendship center. It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than what Veilguard did.

I don't mind a villain that's just evil for the sake of evil without much complexity but DA needs something to work with.

Changing the series is what annoys people most I think. I saw quite a few people saying this was an okay standalone game, but a pretty bad dragon age one

Ah yes, Veilguard seems to be a game made for the “I like Dragon Age, but I sure wish it was a lot less problematic” crowd.

I believe the original tweet no longer exists - in fact, it was a pair of tweets - but here is a Reddit thread with an image of said tweet.

www.reddit.com/r/DiscoElysium/comments/11smfyz/what_skills_would_the_infamous_hypothetical_disco/

Kids' writer Kornei Chukovsky described such an attitude very well about sixty or seventy years ago.

"Why do small kids - who are not actually too kind - take the fate of their favourite characters so close to their hearts, be that Caracol the Hunchback, or Pinocchio, or Aladdin, or Cinderella, or Vasilisa the Beautiful? Why do they grieve and cry when these characters suffer and feel such joy when they are victorious and happy?
The main reason, I think, lies in the fact that children have an ability to identify with each of these characters.
When my grandson closed his eyes to avoid seeing Caracol's suffering, this probably happened because he saw himself in Caracol and pitied himself. And, since protagonists of fairytales are always fearless, selfless, noble, active and always fight against evil and dark forces of life for the sake of good, the child feels that they also fight on the side of good. That's why they are so unhappy to see evil and dark forces prevail even for a second. In such moments, they close their eyes, using this simple action to ensure their peace of mind.
'In our family,' a reader wrote me, 'there's a keepsake - a book called Fairytales of Grandma Tatiana. For half a century, as we read the books or asked the adults to read for us, all three generations of children (my uncle, I and my children), knowing the plot of these tales, always skipped the pages that depicted the deaths of the Cockerel or the Gray Goatling.'
In the famous fairytale "Goldilocks and the Three Bears", a girl gets lost in the forest, winds up in the bears' house, breaks a small chair there and eats their food - they get angry and berate her.
Vova hated the tale and threw everything uncomfortable away. According to him, this story happened to him, not to Goldilocks. It was he, Vova, who got lost in the forest and found the bears' house. He didn't break anything there; he did eat their food, but then immediately went to the kitchen and prepared new, even better food for them. The bears were very kind: they treated him to honey and apples, gave him an entire Christmas tree with toys and taught him how to shoot a gun.
So, basically, if Leo Tolstoy (who translated "Goldilocks" into Russian) depicts both happy and sad episodes in his fairytale, a four year-old kid will correct Tolstoy, eradicate all sad things from his story, eliminate the scenes that depict the heroes' setbacks, only leaving lucky and joyful things."

[cut]
The sanitisation of old tales and legends is actually the source of a lot of literature among those who study that sort of things.

I think there’s a dual purpose with the destruction of southern Thedas.

First, it’s to give weight to the conflict going on in the north; you can’t say as Rook “Well, even if we lose to the Evanuris in Tevinter, at least the south can still fight back.” Nope, the south has fallen, all hope rests with Rook and the Therapyguard. Epler sort of alluded to that during the AMA.

Second, it’s to wipe the slate clean so they don’t have to worry about all those pesky choices from previous games.

Plus, they have little interest in returning there; again, Epler indicated he’d like to tell more stories in Minrathous, which is now the “diplomatic hub of Thedas.” Somehow.

But, but, but... wasn't there supposed to be a world-healing wave when the Minrathous Ladybug beat the villain? How dare they make the aftermath so uncozy?

Funny because in recent article the Developer mentioned that they'll explore the previous choices in the next game (if there is one).

The destruction of the Southern Thedas is just simple case of writer want to put more weight and urgency to your quest, like you said - but I don't think the writer expected us to think that the destruction is so severe that turn Southern Thedas to just basically a Wasteland




Exactly.

Silly LoonySpectre, the world IS healed! We got rid of the gross parts of the setting that the current devs disliked!