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

It isn't only bizarre marketing. It's looks like a) they are new in marketing or B ) they want the hate train, so that more people see the game.
I don't like it. It is really bad timed and put out in wrong places.
We need to see more.

Or even a playable demo, so players can actually make an informed decision regarding the combat.

Still not in love with the art direction/stylization of the game and characters faces look so.....smooth? Combat is another big "meh" for me. I'll give it a shot and if I hate it too much I guess I'll just use the no die option and steam roll through combat parts, lol. Also not a fan of having "so many abilities!" or skills in a tree or what have you and then can only use like 4 or 5 at a time. I miss the DAO ability days *wistful sigh*. Okay, I'm showing my oldness and grumpiness. But, honestly, in spite of it all, I am hopeful about the game.

P.S. I will never be over not having tactics like DAO/DA2 had.

I think the graphics look pretty good, but the art style is just not Dragon Age to me. Cartoony hits an especially sour note when set against the grave and sorrowful tone Trespasser ended on. The series obviously had light moments in the past e.g. Shale and pigeons, but to see the shift into How to Train Your Griffon, derpy Darkspawn and a bespectacled sidekick skelly just feels like moving to a completely different fictional universe. Why not make a new franchise with that aesthetic, or a spin off? Dragon Age with all its pre established world building is too solidified now. Certainly not malleable enough to be turned into something that looks like a slightly more serious Dreamworks Animation. I just find it so bizarre seeing the likes of Solas inserted into this aesthetic. Scout Harding I barely even recognised as the same character. The new companion designs also don't inspire anything in me, or speak to my experience of countless hours spent in the Dragon Age universe.

Combat we still haven't seen a lot of, but there's some big red flags there. More fast paced action is no excuse to limit spells/ abilities. In Elden Ring you can slot up to 12 spells, have tons of consumables or weapons to swap, and that game doesn't even have a pause button. Limited abilities and builds was one of the biggest weaknesses of Inquisition and to see them seemingly triple down on that is frankly maddening.

The whole thing is honestly baffling to me. I was hesistent to comment with the initial reveals because things change a lot in game dev, but now it's only a couple months from release... it's actually a little heartbreaking if I'm totally honest. The past few months have been pretty rough personally, but delving back into the enigmatic and sorrowful world of Dragon Age has provided some respite, a cool balm of dark fantasy and getting lost in tactics and min-maxing. When I look at Veilguard I just can't thread the connection in my mind that this is that same series. I have to consciously remind myself that this is Dragon Age as opposed to intuiting it. Weird.

However looking at launch details I have to give props to Bioware for ditching the EA app/ Origin requirement and having the game be relatively reasonably priced. I doubt very much I'll buy it though, unless reviews are universally extremely positive. Even then I'd probably wait for a sale because the aesthetic and tonal 180 is seriously befuddling, and the gameplay/ roleplaying appears extremely limited.

It looks like solas is not the villain, and we’ll be working with him. And it looks like he was 100% right about the evunaris. Not too happy that people called this months ago. It’s way more interesting if lied, exaggerated, or was simply wrong about them. Hopefully it’ll be more complex than what’s presented.

I am more concerned about writing. So far, I have not seen a single instance of a single cohesive dialog or narrator talk. Graphics are still as cartoonish as they were and of not so good quality even in the clips.

I'm also confused by hardware requirements for PC. Recommended specs are i9-9900K and RTX 2070, which are on the low side especially with regard to GPU, and the CPU is also 6-years-old. Seems like the game is not properly optimized for release. On the other hand, backward compatibility with older systems might be OK. However, it won't look as good as Cyberpunk after latest patches or BG3 for sure or any other optimized modern game whatever that would be. Of course one can always object that something like Warframe also has even lower requirements but still looks great. Overall, it might look like FarCry 5 with regard to graphics quality, which is not ideal but not too bad.

At least it does not have an always online connection requirement and seems like there is no need to use EA launcher.

Eeesh.

I feel like this is being made for people who never played:
- Any Dragon Age
- New God of War
- From Software games
- Pretty much any game in the last 15 years

Like, it's trying to be the Greatest Hits of combat from like 8 different games, but doing them really poorly. I know they're probably specifically demoing the various options and stuff you can do, but this is the most stilted combat gameplay I've seen in as long as I can remember. My first thought was "Kingdoms of Amalur, but not even as good as that".

I don't know why. If anything, the game appears to be a copycat of MEA. MEA did remove options/choices from the game that was in the trilogy. Veil has removed the number of companions to two. Companions are not playable. Not sure if all companions are mandatory? I like to have the option not to recruit one or two of them. Hopefully there's an option to tell chuckles to **** off. I know Ryder in MEA didn't have an option to tell the voice in the head to shut up.

It totally looks like Dragon Age: Andromeda.

I think I'll stick with Wrath of the Righteous. None of the characters are required, allows good or evil options, You can control companions in combat, and there's more of them.

The comparison with MEA fits in regards of the streamlining approach that happened from ME3 to MEA, which can be compared to what seems to have happened from DAI to Veilguard, but I think a better comparison in terms of gameplay is ME2/ME3, given how the pause wheel works.

The gameplay is not my preferred choice in RPGs, especially in regards of how companions are treated, but if the game is good otherwise, I can get past the gameplay. TW2/TW3 have a mediocre gameplay, and I still loved both games. Veilguard *seems* personally more fun to me that both of those games, even though I’d have preferred a closer gameplay to the other games in the franchise of Origins.

On stars, I think there might still be more in the Stats tab on the character screen, but I’ve said before that if they worked like in Inquisition, it’d have been better to simply scrap them, since you had basically no control over them, and all that to can influence through passives were the class’ two primary stats.

I think it’s quite likely that companions will be forced upon recruitment, and the way they talked about disagreement makes me doubtful ah outright dismissal will be available. Which could make sense in the light of the increased importance in the plot of them, but it leads to the drawback of not being able to decide if you want them around. I do hope you’ll not be forced to become friends with them (considering the way companions are going to important in this game, a system close to F/R of DA2 would’ve at least allow the player to develop different types of relationship and disagreeing with them). Maybe they’ll tackle more on this, this week.

On Solas, I think it’s a different kind of relationship from MEA, and given what they said I think we should be able to remain antagonistic and counter him, even if forced to work with him to stop the Evanuris. I personally think it’ll be a more closer, possibly expended relationship of the one Shepard had with TIM in ME2 then MEA.

The biggest interest in regards of this game remains, even if I know not everyone agrees, on the exploration of the deep lore of the franchise and the reveal of the truth on the elven gods, the Titans, the Old Gods and the ancient history.

I don't think Veilguard will sideline the main story, or at least, not nearly as much as ME2 did. We have an example with the high level gameplay, which is quite likely related to Davrin's quest, but it also serves as a main quest, given who is attacking Weisshaupt.

If that's true, it's quite possible that the companions' quest will be at least partially tied to the main plot, and will be less about the companions' personal issues, like ME2's were. 

I hope they'd have look at ME2 and improved on that formula, without repeating the same mistakes in regards of the main plot, but we'll see.