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

If I remember correctly the publisher pushed the game out against the unified protest of the devs saying it wasn't ready. Or am I confusing it with a different game? Been a while...
The lying did happen though... I don't care anymore though because they fixed the gameplay side and the story was great since day 1. And Phantom Liberty was amazing. So I'm back to worshipping them, lol. For now. Sweet Baby involvement makes me wary but I'm still super hyped right now.

I MUCH prefer how Ciri looked in W3 but CGI isn't in-game so let's not all get overdramatic here. I like in-game Yen a lot better than how she looked in the trailer as well. And don't get me started on how hideous Morrigan looked in the DAI trailer. *shudders*
Also nobody shit talk Aloy!

As for the narrative, women have always been brutalized in the Witcher universe, much like the actual middle ages I would guess. The theme of the Witcher to me is that 90% of the people are just awful, including those sorceresses. Philippa has always hated men. Geralt finds the few decent people in that world and befriends them.
So let's all hope W4 doesn't turn into men bad, all women victims and paragons of virtue. With a female protagonist nowadays there's always the danger that they'll lament hos terrible it is to be a woman in a man's world. I don't recall anybody ever having any nice words for witchers before who are all men. Their lives sure ain't fun. Plenty of men in that world have wretched lives too.

In any case, that trailer overall was fire to me. 100% proper Witcher vibes. Casual superstitious evil is that world's bread and butter.

Imported Japanese media has been a thing for 30 years. 

This honestly reminds me of all the debates people had with Jack Thompson how violent vidya games was making society immoral. At the end of the day video games is likely a scapegoat, an easy demon to point at and potentially easy solution to what is an extremely complex culture upheaval in America.

What happened with the health CEO shooting? A portion of mainstream news dug up the suspects video game history:

Luigi Mangione, who was arrested and charged with murder in the shooting death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, once belonged to a group of Ivy League gamers who played assassins, a member of the group told NBC News.

In the game, called "Among Us," some players are secretly assigned to be killers in space who perform other tasks while trying to avoid suspicion from other players.

www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ironic-suspect-unitedhealthcare-slaying-played-video-game-killer-rcna183550

Is his habit of playing Among Us relevant? Of course not. Why even report it? Likely because it's a very easy demon to point to. The only difference is now we've progressed from "CoD and Halo" to ... Among us and sexualized Japanese games *rolls eyes*

You do know that porn is free on the internet, right? So even if there were no Japanese video games depicting women in certain ways, everybody who wants to can easily find their way to however many gigs of free, violent porn. People realize this, right?

In fact if we go to Steam we find this game pretty easily available, that's not Japanese, that you can buy on Steam. Which reportedly made 4 million dollars in sale on release

store.steampowered.com/app/1034140/Subverse/

I think Stellar Blade, or ... what other one is there? Whatever should be the least of your worries :S Also the idea that Steam enforces a R18+ whatever doesn't help, you can easily get that game for free if you want.

EDIT: There are some very western, popular sex games you can very easily get your hands on if you want. Wiping out Asian media will do little

The worst part about that Witcher 4 trailer is knowing CDProjekt only recently went into full production, so it's probably 3 years away

I'm a straight woman but boy Ciri is gorgeous. I wish I looked that good.

I have a friend who is also playing Veilguard and I guess was anti having her female characters have jaws to the point she brought every single slider down to 0 and now her character just looks like something is deeply wrong with their face. It is hard to find a midpoint between lantern jaw of justice and 'oh my god they lost their entire lower jaw' in Veilguard's character creator but it is possible, lol.

"My safe word is 'ouch'" 

Man, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, do you?

Sweet Baby Inc is absolutely a deal-killer for me.

This is so out of character. Not a single strawman catchphrase in sight. Someone must have put it on the high shelf where you couldn't reach it until they felt you could use it responsibly.

Don't even need reviews. If people are on the fence, there's a bunch of streamers that play the game on launch. I use them to check out whether the game looks technically decent and not too buggy and whether the game itself looks interesting

I enjoyed Persona 5, but it did a lot to sexualize Ann, who is 16.