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

Perhaps it was a conscious choice. I may be wrong, but Veilguard smells faintly of a quasi-reboot helmed by creators wanting to put their own stamp on a property they don’t particularly care for, similar to what happened with the Netflix adaptation of The Witcher.

If so, what happened in past games doesn’t really matter. We’re taking Dragon Age to strange new places.

An adjective that aptly describes my feelings on DAV.

Combat from the PC perspective looks fun (albeit overthetop at times) yet the enemy AI is terrible.  Instead of programming special and particular tactics the achieve difficulty they just buff or nerf...which leads to dull and repetitive gameplay.  That's frustrating.

The CC is by far Bioware's best attempt...hair is in fact phenomenal yet you cannot a create realistic female body or ridiculously ripped male like Arnold Schwarzenegger back in his Conan days.  And don't even get me started on the Qunari.  That's frustrating.

The visuals at times look really good...and I don't even mind the art style choice, but the design of enemies I've seen look comical rather than menacing or terrifying.  This might be dark fantasy for 10-12 year olds but for few others beyond that.  Even the companions look pretty meh to me.  That's frustrating.

The marketing, ugh. Every time they show some aspect that get's me a little bit excited they follow it with something utterly incompetent.  IGN has done more harm to the marketing campaign than good.  But the fact that Bioware decision makers approve it as good demonstrates they are completely clueless.  There is always going to be haters out there looking to tear pretty much any project down...handing them the ammunition shows me just how clueless they are.  That's frustrating.

I'm going to predict this ends up with 5-6 score on average among players...maybe it hits 7 if the story is phenomenal, but given what I've been shown so far let's just say I'm pretty skeptical of that.

Do we know for sure we can’t make a character with a ripped physique?

I haven’t followed every CC video, but given their previous words on elves being not as muscular as other races in the CC, the on I saw was more muscular then I expected from the race.

I’d also say that, even if I agree that the CC should have more freedom in for more curvaceous figures, I disagree that you can’t make realistic women. There are lots of women who have slender figures, and the we did see a female Rook with a thin waist and a more round figure, even if not as thick as some want.

I think you're right. They don't even know who Zevran is...

I think the lady is the new voice director. For years and years DA had the same voice directors, also a lady. I felt mostly her work was solid minus the Iron Bull. But the guy had worked on ME3 and was doing fine.
Here the voice acting sound mostly ok, minus Neve (sounds real bored and dry. And sure she's a cynical detective but she sounds the same during flirt lines...) and Emmrich sounds really flat. I heard his banters during a big fight and it was bothering me. Taash sounded way better to me in that same battle.

I don't know this voice actor at all. 
But there might be issues with direction/editing the voice lines. Nothing awful but the female british voice actress sometimes has a northern uk accent and sometimes not.
I'm happy she sounds way less posh than the Inky but she goes from sounding neutral to i guess she's just one of the lads.

No idea. I don't follow voice actor honestly.
I don't wanna sound too harsh because from what I've gathered they started recording during Covid, and it made the process complicated. 

Maybe, although I'd say this is an issue Bioware always had with developers switching teams.

John has always worked on DA, and the writing team was composed, before the layoffs, of writers that all wrote in some forms on Dragon Age, except John Dombrow.

Granted, there are lots of more developers that worked on Veilguard and perhaps you're right, although I don't necessarily think, regardless of how good or bad the game will turn out, that they don't care for Dragon Age, but I could very well be wrong.

Isn't that how 'access media' operate though? 

It reminds me of the slew of glowing reviews that came out after the 'Rangs of Prime' S1 premiere.  And as soon as the season was done, many of the same reviewers came out and said (paraphrasing) "now that's it's done, let's be honest it wasn't very good".

This is kind of why I keep saying BioWare marketing needs to just stop talking until a month after the game is released. Stop talking about things, let people speculate, let it come out, and then not until late November/early December do you start to talk about it again.

They need to create hype. It is pre-order season after all. 

Do you mean obfuscate until the game launches, to rake in as many pre-orders as possible?  However clumsy the current marketing campaign, it had at least the unintentional effect of showing their true colors ahead of time, thus preventing a far larger storm after launch.