Dragon Age The Joyguard (formerly Hype Train) [Spoilers]

yes and no. There are good things and bad things going on within the industry.

On the business side I think game development has gotten very...troubled of late. The mass layoffs are the obvious big contenders in the room but you've also had a big push for heavy live service games/ multiplayer. Plus, like the rest of society, game dev is having to reckon with the ethics of AI usage. On the bright side though there is some evidence that the industry is learning, which will come with its own problems especially since outside forces are exasperating the issues.

On the game dev front I think that, generally speaking, we've seen a lot of good games, good trends, and good potential paradigm defining games since then. Of course this isn't universal and as I argue the entire gestalt of a game is what matters. Inquisition is still my favorite game of all time and I'm having such a blast replaying it. But there has been a lot of positive mechanics and story trends which have popped up over that time.

And one of my big questions was how would Bioware learn from their competition and the growth we have seen in the RPG space? Given Veilguards extended dev how much COULD they learn? And hold onto the things that make them Bioware? Well,I will go into it more in the thread but so far the answer seems to ve yes. There is a lot in there I have seen from other games, QoL improvements both large and small, but it still feels very much like Inquisition from what they are showing. Are there concerns? Yep. But so far the questions they have answered for me in a yes are starting to far outweigh them. Though the ultimate test will be the game itself.