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

Well after the gameplay preview . . . I hate it.

The game and characters looks visually fantastic. Art style is fine.

But combat and story/dialogue is terrible.

COMBAT: Looks like a combination of Mass Effect Andromeda and Inquisition. Meh. Loss of control of companions is disappointing and they appeared to do almost no damage. Also had silly stuff like Harding spending most of the fights in melee range of enemies while using a bow. 🙄 Enemies just pop in and stand there, not a single structured battle environment or layout with positioning or obstacles/cover etc.

Being able to swap weapon sets and abilities is kind of like the Adromeda 'profiles' thing so that should let us have more abilities to use but I don't think that makes up for the loss of companion control. And everything is way too flashy/jumpy. Just moving away from the more tactical combat I prefer.

Story/Writing: Don't like that the game opens with Solas' ritual . . . it feels like a copy of the Inquisition opening . . . but with much worse writing.

Solas says he has a plan for minimizing the damage from removing the Veil . . . and of course we bungle into things and mess it up causing the old gods to be released. We basically screw things up and turn a controlled process into a mess.

There wasn't any dialogue that was memorable, and I didn't like forced auto-dialogue that made Rook into a do-gooder 'we have to help random citizen'?!? Seriously, can we just not stop to help everyone and instead focus on the main goal?

Now I understand why the title was changed from Dreadwolf to Veilguard because Solas is portrayed as a chump.

Combat and Dialogue is Andromeda tier, art style is still distracting but it looks more like Inquisition, and the demons look bad. I really love the searchlight and "Halt!" very WW2 except this is suppose to be a Dark Fantasy.

So overall, much better than the previous trailer.

I think the worst thing is the ogre they shown in a screenshot.

Yeah, I didn't really like much the part about the 'police' in Minrathous.
Overall, I want/need to see more.

Yeah, I can agree that the trailer was kinda cheesy and lacked the seriousness you're talking about. I also didn't love that sports commercial kinda music at the end.

However... I maintain what I said before. This video doesn't feed us any information that could be enough to draw conclusions aboht the actual content. It was just a name roll for the companions that will be in our party.

All we've learned is that the current team is terrible at making trailers. Oh, and that we got GRIFFONS. The griffons are f*cking back. It is funny that people are talking more about the trailer being too silly. Lore wise, this is absolutely huge.

Apparently the Shadow Dragons are supposed to be some anti-slavery group operating in opposition to the Venatori.

It’s a pretty stupid name. It sounds like an organization of evil ninjas in a bad 80s action movie.

“Oh no! The Shadow Dragons have kidnapped the President! *Pick up phone* Get me … Commander Karate!”

First we weren’t supposed to judge the game on the trailer, now we’re not supposed to judge it based on 20 minutes of gameplay.

What’s next? “You can’t judge the game until you’ve played it to completion, because it gets good 40 hours in”?

I admit I never bought Andromeda because I didn't want to give BioWare money for THAT so I acquired it a different way... Only time I ever did that. And I was glad in the end I didn't spend any money on it. Anthem bored me in the demo already so that's the only BioWare game I never played. As a standalone MP game I did not feel compelled to experience what little story there was. With a series it's different.

I do have a more mixed response to the gameplay and want to see more of the game before making a full judgement, but I think it's quite possible and completely fair to decide to not buy the game with this gameplay.

For example, I prefer a different kind of gameplay but I'm open with the direction they're going forward (which some pretty big cons, however, in regards of the number of abilities we can use), but if some people didn't want or enjoy this kind of combat, it can very well be a dealbreaker.

It's fine to be a big fan of the franchise (or some of its games) and love what they saw. It's also fine to be a big fan of the franchise (or some of its games) and be completely turn off by it.

I’m pretty indifferent to the gameplay reveal myself. It showed nothing new 🤷‍♀️ and it looks exactly like inquisition so to me it’s just a continuation more so than a new game. Combat is about all that was shown and it was some pretty bland combat that I expected since biowares never tried to elevate themselves on better combat. I’m sure I can enjoy the game overall but the combat gameplay isn’t something that hyped me up. Especially since I’m expecting it to be another open world game like inquisition and I very much doubt biowares learned how to have an engaging open world yet. Most games fail at that unfortunately.

I need to see more into the story, the world interactions and extra features before I’m interested. Till then I imagine I’ll just get this at a discount at some point down the road but it’s not wowing me as a day one buy or even BioWare being “back” and making an actual decent game. It’s cool for those who are somehow excited by this but my standards are just higher.

Sorry but that is not unreasonable. How many games can be properly judged in a 20 minutes video of non-interactive gameplay? You can judge the video for sure, but the entire game which is likely to be at least 80 hours of gameplay at a bare minimum? That's a stretch.

This right here. After having played 800+ hours of BG3, this trailer hasn't done anything for me. The simple fact that there is auto-dialogue that have your player wanting to save a random NPC is a big enough red flag for me to realize I won't be able to play a character the way I want. Given that BW is backed by EA, this game is considered a AAA game. So I am expecting a game on par to one of the greatest RPGs that have came out recently. If you can't even give me the option to play a character the way I want, there is already a problem.