The writing in Dragon age the veilguard.

Not a huge fan of people outsourcing their discussions. I'll drop by again when someone says something.

Just a couple of three things.

How can Rook sustain being blasted into a wall to such an extent that he bleeds from a head wound yet is perfectly fine in the next scene? No headwrap or bandage. Nothing. Like it never happened at all. It's only used as an excuse as to how he's able to speak with Solas in the fade. Yet later on he can simply 'meditate' to achieve the same goal. No bleeding head wound needed. Funny that. Meanwhile Neve or Harding got some booboos(that take way too long to heal) and it's played up as if they were gravely injured. Ridiculous.

Tevinter - Where are the slaves? Where's the blood magic rituals that we've heard so much about? It's understandable that the latter would be hidden and you might get a codex entry or hear about it in gossip, but what's up with the former? Last I checked, Tevinter embraced slavery and yet we see it nowhere. It's almost as if it doesn't exist. It's so scant. Why the sanitization? Why isn't anyone calling my elf 'knife ear'? He's not the Inquisitor, or the Champion of Kirkwall, he's not the Hero of Fereldan. He's a nobody important to no one when the world is ending because Knife Ear gods got loose. If there was any time for the racism to come into play, now would be that time. It doesn't make sense.

We meet Lucanis who is possessed by a demon, but it's not a big deal. Not like the things have wiped out villages and started wars. No. Not this time. Lucanis is special. Yes, he's technically not an abomination, but look at what the envy demon in Inquisition was able to achieve. He's the demon of Vyrantium and only Davrin has the foresight to call this shit out and take it seriously. But no need to hide him away. Why don't we stop by the cafe to speak to Illario and get coffee? The characterization is tonally dissonant with what you're being told. You're telling me this person is a demon possessed master assassin while we go grocery shopping. Huh? What Marvel movie is this from? And Spite is presented like a misbehaving mutt not a threatening force to take seriously. Even Lucanis doesn't seem too concerned about it. All of it stinks of white washed, milquetoast, 'nobody gets hurt' Disney nonsense.

Blight? What blight? Oh you mean this cold I picked up after the dragon left? No big deal. Don't need to become a Grey Warden or anything. Oh, it took out a Templar in the presence of a being infused with Mythal's spirit and even she couldn't stop it? It's nothing. It literally makes the land uninhabitable and kills everything it touches? Don't be so dramatic. You know we have blight days where the kids get together and make a blightman and sing songs? It's wonderful.

And the dialogue speaks for itself. There are so many improvements required that it would be easier to simply have another team rewrite it entirely. Hand them the Joplin notes and see what they come up with.

Meanwhile, I found her painfully relatable. The thing where she can't look anyone in the eye when she's upset, especially, made me wince repeatedly because it's so familiar.

(Which doesn't mean she has to work for you as a character, obviously! But looking at John Epler's BlueSky feed I can see I'm not alone in going 'oh no' every time she did something visibly AuDHD.)

Much has been made of the quality of Veilguard’s dialogue, which is too modern and trying too be hard to be clever while failing miserably. But I believe the writing quality also dipped in the codexes.

Too many notes written in the first-person, too many goddamn recipes, too many mind-numbing rants from Taash about how something is “messed up.” Virtually nothing about the history and culture of Tevinter, Antiva, Nevarra or the Anderfels from multiple perspectives.

And what the hell happened to creature codexes? Where did they go?

“Well, who reads those?” I FUCKING DID.

Harding or Neve look as if they've been on the bad end of a bar fight. Not as if they barely survived stopping a world ending ritual. What they do is walk a little slowly, grimace, and occasionally moan. Yet they're always right there ready to go on missions. It's not convincing in the least. The game is telling you one thing and showing you another. And yes, when Rook is slammed head and back first into a stone wall at a high velocity, enough to draw a decent amount of blood, you would expect there to be something to show for it. And it wouldn't just be a cut. Not with that force, not with the implied dizziness, not with Rook going in and out of consciousness afterwards. The narrative fails to justify Rook's Wolverine healing factor, and instead sloppily uses the injury as an excuse to speak with Solas but then does nothing else with it.

If you want to go the meta route, why didn't Neve or Harding at any point gulp down some potions to heal their "injuries"? No green pots lying around? And Neve's got magic, so she has no excuse.



Exactly. There are some blood magic rituals. Mostly in the background where you would expect them. That's fine. And what about the slavery? Where are the auctions? Where are the alienages? Where's the elven servants running back and forth? Where's the blackmarket that would be rife with this sort of thing? If any of these things are there, they are conveyed so poorly as to not even exist. This is Tevinter. The mecca of this sort of behavior. What they've "shown" is awfully lacking at its absolute best. Regarding the depiction of racism, it's completely inconsistent with past titles. That's what's wrong here. I don't expect it to live up to City Elf Origins. They couldn't even if they wanted to, but what about Dragon Age II? What about the magistrate's son and the guard's dismissal of the knife ear's father? We couldn't even get that. The best we get is implied racism? If you're brand new to the franchise, you wouldn't pick this up. You would not pick up that this is a world where elves are either nomadic, live in ghettos that are purged, slaves, and are looked down upon no matter where they are. You would likely think this a world where it doesn't really exist. Especially systemically.


Not a big deal as compared to a certain mage from the second game in the franchise who the writers were clearly emulating with the possession angle of someone from a specialized organization who's conflicted about their situation and wrestles with it internally. Yes, I understand they are different characters, but the comparisons are obvious and they are valid because of the set precedent. What set precedent? The one where we have a demon/spirit possessed companion in 2 out of 4 games, and the one where if they aren't possessed, they're "spirits" who appear to possess living beings. Which makes this 3 out of 4 games with Lucanis. I gotta tell ya, they don't make 'em like they used to. You have one who starts a potentially world ending war, betrays and lies to their lover and friends, spirals into insanity no matter what you do. And then you have someone who feels they need to drink Coffee so the bad man won't take them on walks...


Yeah we completely disagree about the blight. And that's fine. It's hard to buy for a single second that this blight is more terrifying than the one from Origins or even Dragon Age II. It killed the land, killed the people, and destroyed lives. You don't get to eke out a life in a blighted Lothering. In Veilguard, it appears to be mostly an inconvenience. We're told about it's effects and shown some of them, but you don't feel it and they don't seem as bad. Compared to lets say Bethany/Carver in the Deep Roads without Anders, or hell, Wesley and Aveline. You felt something when you saw Daveth seize up and drop dead during the joining, you cared when the village where you met Leliana, helped the townspeople, and recruited Sten got swallowed up by the blight. And D'meta's Crossing was supposed to be horrifying. It doesn't land because you don't know or care about people you've never met or even heard of dying. It's an unfortunate situation but there's nothing to gain here in terms of making people care. And of course the bad dialogue completely undercuts whatever dread they were trying to sew with this scene.

And yes, I would want to hand Joplin to Larian, Saber, or CD Projekt Red. 

Special or not, Lucanis and Anders are nothing alike. Their histories, personalities and motivations are completely different, because they're different people. Justice and Anders corrupted each other because Anders had a deep sense of injustice regarding the mage situation, twisted by a growing anger about the inability to change it.

Lucanis otoh has managed to minimise the corruption of Spite (though Spite still hurts Lucanis, if you recall) by locking himself away emotionally. Additionally, during the events of the game, both Lucanis and Spite are able to focus on very specific goals: revenge on Zara Renata,

as well as helping Rook kill the two Evanuris. If you remember that Spite is the Spirit of Determination, then the existence of any focused goal actually helps it stay true to its nature, and thereby limiting corruption.

If you don't think Lucanis is interesting, then I'm sorry you don't, but I do. In DAV, Bioware hasn't been overt about the deeper implications of our companions' characters and quests, but that doesn't mean those implications don't exist. I just think they are written so people can enjoy them both on a surface as well as a deeper level if they so choose.

Important Goose's points seem like needless nitpicking to me. The Harding-Lucanis coffee scene is a perfectly charming little background moment for an overheard corridor exchange that Rook passes in the lighthouse or somesuch. The problem is much more of a macro one, this scene has nothing to do with Dragon Age's world, lore or plot yet it gets full high quality animation and dialogue input game mechanics. Production resources are limited and they chose to spend them on this, a scene almost completely divorced from the world of Dragon Age, such that huge revelations and world ending mechanics are getting sidelined as a result. Kill your darlings is the idiom that springs to mind. 

On a more subjective level I will say that this representation of Harding is deeply unpleasant. I do not want to see representations of my own petit psychological failings in a game that is supposed to be about deep arcane mysteries and God slaying. Harding was once an inspiration, stoic, independent lead scout of the Inquisition. Putting her people pleasing assertiveness failings so front and centre is not only boring, it's depressing. Again, good writing on the micro level, would've made for a cute and funny overheard moment, but when it becomes front and centre at the expense of more mythical content is when I start button mashing to skip through cutscenes in a way I never have before in a Dragon Age game. 

I think pretending to enjoy something a friend made for you is fairly typical ? Unless somethin is vomit inducing I'll eat and drink stuff I don't like much with a small smile and go "oh yeah I'm enjoying it". I'm not torturing myself with "oh lord I'm such a people pleaser!" 
And harding in banter threaten Lucanis at first because he's an abomination. So clearly she isn't such a people pleasing lady.
She disagrees with Varric then Neve at the start of the game as well.

What I was trying to say is from what I remember from Veilguard (I don't remember much ^^), Harding doesn't feel like a doormat who can't say no. There's just that one scene, about coffee... And if you only do people pleasing in small doses with some people (like I got a friend going through a rough time, low self esteem, she enjoys cooking and baking a lot, so even if I'm not into her food I will still pretend I like it, and if she do something I do enjoy I make a big deal out of it.) I don't see the problem? 
If it starting to gnaw at your self esteem sure, it's bad. 
But harding get into a fight with Emmrich about stupid books, can lecture Emmric about age difference if in a relationship with Rook,  get in a fight with Lucanis because he's an abomination and argue with Neve and Varric at the start because she thinks they are wrong...so for me the people pleasing thing came out of left field? Like pretending to enjoy a beverage you don't is not a whole personality trait or some kind of neurosis?

I think perhaps they tried to do some kind of trauma stuff with harding? In a banter she tells she people please because she learn that as a small child to protect herself. It's called Fawn. 
In case of danger with someone you can fight freeze flee or fawn. For some folks it can turn into an automatic learned behavior that can cause issues as adult.
But it's not really in game. It doesn't seem to me like Harding suffer from some trauma, just someone who just did a quizz in a magazine and declared "damn I'm such a people pleaser." 
Trauma fawn behavior can cause you to go against your own values, put yourself in danger etc just to please and appease people. It can of course destroy your self esteem.
Like Harding joining and buttering the Evanuris up  out of sheer fear, and trauma learned behavior when inside she would despise them and would rather fight.