Your Expectations for Veilguard & How You Will Measure the Final Product Against Them

1) I have no expectations for the game, the amount of time for release won't impact my feelings about the game. It will all about how much I am enjoying the experience of playing Dreadwolf and doing everything I can to avoid the internet rumor mill setting my expectations for the game. I am even going to do my best to avoid as much as possible. I have taken that strategy for multiple games since Inquisition and been enjoying games or if I don't like them I can tell right away without hoping they eventually meet up with what developers promised (i.e. Cyberpunk 2077). Now for me I am more of a sci-fi gamer so I have always preferred the more modern/futuristic games like Mass Effect too so that will impact my feelings on Dreadwolf too.

2) Again I don't think that will impact my feelings about the game, I am all for different styles of gameplay. I would never expect tactical gameplay in the first place so I don't see how it could impact my experience with the game. It would be expecting it to be a point and click game. Developers in my eyes need to stick to where the industry is moving to and away from so they can manage the sales to try and generate the sales for if they were going to be more tactical then the direction and budget would be shrunk and I doubt the internet would be happy again since even in the past "this looks two generations" back was a common complaint against BioWare.

1. Yes. Any version of the game has been in development longer than any other in the series so if it is inferior it will be judged for it.
2. Yes. If it goes full action combat like the examples you gave instead of having some form of the tactical gameplay the others had, that would be points off.

Meant it in a "this was worth the wait/investment of time" (or not) way. Avengers Endgame was worth the investment of my time (to me). The final episode of Game of Thrones was not.

Or put another away, if I have to wait a long, long time for something - I'm likely to want more from it than if I only wait a very short time.

That's fair - I hope I can manage to do that as well.

1) At this stage I will treat it as an entirely new game. That way I won't be angered by any further changes they make to the lore as previously established, because I suspect they will, and won't have inflated expectations that are then disappointed. The fact it has been 10 years in production overall is irrelevant really since we know that it has not been a smooth development cycle from start to finish but constant changes of direction and reboots.

The only thing I expect to be good after all this time is the actual narrative because the core team should have been working on that throughout and so should have been able to ensure that any plot holes were dealt with in the interim. I hope that also applies to the main characters in the game and they have real depth to them and a decent backstory. I'd rather have quality rather than quantity in that respect.

2) I don't mind if it is more action orientated provided we still get a decent story to follow. I have always been more interested in the story and role playing my character than the actual fighting, which is a means to an end for me. I just hope that it is not too different to what has gone before and that they again provide an easy setting that I can opt for if I can't cope! I usually play on normal but it is reassuring to know that I can tone it down a bit if I am struggling.

Good questions.

1. I will judge it based on how much production value and enjoyment I'm getting for my money. If I pay an AAA price, I expect an AAA experience. That means a decent amount of good quality content. Whether they produced that in two years of focused work or ten years of bumbling around and rebooting, well... those costs are for EA to bear.

2. As long as it's done well I don't mind. I love a good turn based RPG but I also greatly enjoy FromSoft style action spectacles. Whatever they pick between those two extremes, as long as the gameplay is good fun I'll be happy.

But I do have to say that the "grey warden fights two darkspawn and does a drop kick in full plate" leak looked pretty darn awful and I hope it's nothing like that.

1. I don't think we'll ever have enough context to give a good answer on that. Plus I have a few contradictory thoughts on the subject.

First I did give Andromeda credit, at least when it came to its bugs, for its short and choatic dev cycle. That went into my thinking and helped me decide to be a little more lenient when it came to that specific thing. Though I must say I can't be certain how much it really moved the needle since I enjoyed Andromea's other story, writing, and role playing aspects as well to create a pretty good experience overall and bugs don't really bug me...heh...as long as they aren't too game breaking.

However, on the other hand, this issue is not really something Dreadwolf is currently facing. Hem and haw and armchair quarterbacking maybe but it still seems that games usually take 3-4 years to make even today...and it'll be four years since the game transitioned into being single player only...at least I think that was 2020. Regardless though the point still stands also since, as I mentioned a long time ago now which I am quite sure a dev liked (probably Luke but who knows at this point), that the previous iterations of Dreadwolf could carry over into the next version of the game. Or they wouldn't be starting from scratch each time but taking the stuff that can fit and move it on into the next iteration. This is all to say that EA/ BioWare seems bound and determined to, whatever else, give them time to dev this game...a lot more then Andromeda ultimatley got. And if some of the common theories are correct around here they may've even delayed the game by a whole year, last year, to ensure they had the time.

In contrast though is the principle 'its not the time that matters but the people' to borrow a phrase from Doctor Who. Gaming is replete with disaster stories both for long term and short term dev times, and also dev teams making the best of a bad situation to release a relatively comptent game. For short games we have games like Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect Andromeda, not perfect no (but then what is) but then compared to Obsidian's efforts like Fallout New Vegas, which was an over ambitious mess, and KOTOR 2 it is clear that BioWare knew their limits. On the flip side you have games like Duke Nukem forever which was in dev for many, many years, sucked, and then games like DAO which was in dev for many many years, and didn't suck.

All this to say it may be a bit of a fool's errand to judge the game by the time spent on it. It'll be good or bad.

2. On the issue of action mechanics I can give somewhat more of a defnitive answer. Considering though we actually don't have a lot of context on what a 'more actiony' Dragon Age game would look like in regards to Dreadwolf. We have vague dev comments, we have the leaks, we have our own opinions on the leaks, and that is it. In general I look forward to it though given A. each Dragon Age game has been better in terms of combat gameplay then the last thus the trend will hopefully continue and B. I do want to see the game adopt more 'action' real time/ player skill based mechanics from the start. Given that several bits of Dragon Age's gameplay loop bug the crap out of me since the beginning no matter how much I enjoy the series. Its an RPG we shouldn't be forced to play as our companion characters for starters.

However I don't really think that BioWare is just going to clone God of War or the Witcher or Horizon or any other game. Nor, based on the leaks, are they going to give me everything that I want them to do either for my own personal wish fullfillment. What they are going to do is graft on and learn from elements of more modern Action games/ ARPGs to make a better experience. Like they did with Skyrim and Inquisition, which I'm not a big Skyrim fan but they did take elements of that game's gameplay and stick it into a blender with BioWare's RP, stories, and characters. Same here since we know, from the leaked pictures, that we will have guard. No other ARP really has a guard mechanic like in Inquisition which could be a huge game changer for the genre and overall loop, giving the player to have options of beefing their character up with ablative health.

That is cool that you can do it. I know that i will not be able to do this. And that will impacted my review of the game.

1) Development time, to me, will inevitably end up a second to how the final game feels once I'm playing it, but it'll still be a pretty relevant factor. With that in mind, I will be judging based on the version that started being developed around 2018, and based on the full SP shift in late 2020-early 2021.

The total of time I had to wait is not that big a factor; I couldn't run Inquisition on my computer when it first came out, or on the laptop I've used for most of the past decade, so I've had a number of other things to look forward to in the meantime, like other games, some films and shows I've been looking forward to watching, stuff like that. Now? My current computer can very much run it, so I'm currently in the middle of enjoying my first proper Inquisition playthrough, just in time for the Dreadwolf marketing machine to start in earnest.



2) Even years ago the answer to that would be "no". I like the classic tactical mold well enough, to be sure, but it's not really a core feature of Dragon Age's identity to me. All I really want (assuming a continuation of DA past Dreadwolf) is for a proper system to be decided on as a baseline to build off of for future DA games (which, all things considered, is not so much a Dreadwolf concern as it is a future DA concern).

Depends on personal availability.