why is nobody talking about Veilguard

[Pyrephox]

I’m playing it! I’m enjoying it quite a bit - love the characters, enjoy the combat, and the plot is a Dragon Age plot: perfectly serviceable but don’t look too closely at the gaps.

I think there’s still plenty darkness in the setting, but definitely overall the writing and focus is on a lighter, more hopeful tone. There are times I have to remember that IC time and location has progressed quite a bit from Origins, or even Inquisition (“wait, everyone knows the differences between spirits and demons and is cool with the former?” - sure, years after stories about the Inquisition has made the rounds, and in places like Nevarra and Tevinter where these things were always seen a bit differently. It does remind me that Ferelden is, let’s face it, the depressed Bible Belt of Thedas.)

I’m gonna smooch the necromancer. IT WILL HAPPEN.

[Tori]

I WAS THINKING THE SAME THING and wondered if maybe no one was really into DA anymore or something.

I actually started Greedfall II a couple of weeks ago just to dink around until Veilguard came out. I’m putting that on the back shelf because I’m not a fan of early access, turns out.

I didn’t finish Inquisition because it just started feeling soooo sloggy to me. I loved Dragon Age 2, but yeah. Inquisition was too big for me. ANYHOW

I’m digging it. I’m not that far in but man - it’s so pretty and I like the story thus far.

[Pavel]

Played it, finished it, and smooched Harding.

I agree that they sanded it down a bit too much, with very little resolution or development on several thorny pieces of lore from previous editions: the ghettos, casual anti-elven racism, Tevinter slavery, etc. But it has been a decade, and I’d wager most folk these days are after more joyous fantasy escapism than the grittier fantasy-like-reality.

Additionally, from my limited checking, most of the voice actors seem to be culturally/ethnically appropriate – save for the main character, for obvious player-choice-related reasons. ETA: So the accents aren’t necessarily ‘silly fake’ they’re just accents. They might be put on, but they’re not like the formerly faux-French we’ve had to deal with.

Without spoiling the ending(s), it definitely feels like it’s bringing this era of Dragon Age to a close. Perhaps something akin to what ME3 and Andromeda attempted to do with Mass Effect, starting off a new series in the same setting. If that’s the case, I’m not entirely confident that Veilguard is going to be any better than Andromeda was at introducing a potential new series even though I had oodles of fun while playing it.

[dvoraen]

@Pavel said in why is nobody talking about Veilguard:

Played it, finished it, and smooched Harding.

I agree that they sanded it down a bit too much, with very little resolution or development on several thorny pieces of lore from previous editions: the ghettos, casual anti-elven racism, Tevinter slavery, etc. But it has been a decade, and I’d wager most folk these days are after more joyous fantasy escapism than the grittier fantasy-like-reality.

I would say that a few of the key writers (such as Mary Kirby) no longer being at the studio is another reason for this. I mean, they literally announced it as Dreadwolf, then a whole lot happened in terms of staffing there before reannouncing(?) the fourth flagship game as The Veilguard.

[Rinel]

@Pavel said in why is nobody talking about Veilguard:

Additionally, from my limited checking, most of the voice actors seem to be culturally/ethnically appropriate – save for the main character, for obvious player-choice-related reasons. ETA: So the accents aren’t necessarily ‘silly fake’ they’re just accents. They might be put on, but they’re not like the formerly faux-French we’ve had to deal with.

I think the Antivans are mixing Spanish and Italian, or am I missing something?

Also, is the female British VA for Rook Scottish? I keep hearing a twinge to her vowels.

I do agree with you with the escapism, but I’m not going to lie, I’d really, really, really like to kick some Tevinter ass for all the shit they’ve pulled

[Roz]

oh also, important update, since one of the rook faction backgrounds are the ANTI-SLAVER LIBERATORS i made my rook aleksei

[Pavel]

@Rinel said in why is nobody talking about Veilguard:

I think the Antivans are mixing Spanish and Italian, or am I missing something?

They are, but the voice actors are also Spanish/Hispanic and Italian (eta: thus the accents are more authentically from the region they’ve adopted/adapted), rather than Generic American doing a voice.

@Rinel said in why is nobody talking about Veilguard:

Also, is the female British VA for Rook Scottish? I keep hearing a twinge to her vowels.

Not originally, she’s from Northumberland, but that’s very close to Scotland so there’s likely some overlap… Her name is Bryony Corrigan, for reference.

[dvoraen]

@Roz said in why is nobody talking about Veilguard:

oh also, important update, since one of the rook faction backgrounds are the ANTI-SLAVER LIBERATORS i made my rook aleksei

Excuse me, did you just talk about Arx in a NON-ARX THREAD???

Anyway, more seriously I just want to know if you mean in terms of character choices and/or appearance, because in the latter case you have to supply a screenshot of Rook-Aleksei. I don’t make the rules.

[Tez]

DAI burnt the shit out of me. I really did not like it. I’m waiting for wider reporting and feedback on Veilguard from people I trust. SO HURRY UP GUYS.

[Pyrephox]

I will say I have returned to A Place after doing A Thing, and I take back the ‘not as dark’ comment. It can definitely bring the dark.

NEVERMIND. Spoiler does not actually spoiler. Bah.

[Jenn]

I’m not playing it, for a mix of reasons, but mostly because poor hand/eye coordination, pain, and focus/fatigue/energy issues.

But it looks cool af, and I would LOVE to see others playing it. So. If any of y’all are game streamers who like folks asking silly questions about shit while you’re off adventuring, I’d be down to tag along from time to time!

[Dreampipe]

I kinda just have trouble with the Dragon Age series in general. Played all of them except Veilguard on launch. Origins skyrocketed to my favorite game when it first came out, then Dragon Age 2 was a big shift away from all that. Inquisition was a huge game that made you do a lot of MMO-esque grinding to get to the good stuff.

Just feels like the games have been struggling to get a concrete identity on how they’re played for so long. I want it to be good, it’s a really cool world. I’m just hesitant.

[sao]

I am going to play it eventually, but I am not in the mood right now for a big rpg.

[Rinel]

@Tez said in why is nobody talking about Veilguard:

DAI burnt the shit out of me. I really did not like it. I’m waiting for wider reporting and feedback on Veilguard from people I trust. SO HURRY UP GUYS.

Much better combat than inquistion, much less mmo feel, equally or perhaps even more scattered focus in terms of setting and story, worst writing in the series by far. Really suffers from essentially no connection to prior games or locations.

Fundamental miss on so much of what made Origins and II so compelling (religion, politics, culture, how people are products of their environment). Pretty much all of your companions feel like folks from 2024 isekai’d into Thedas.

On that last note: some people are BIG MAD about the focus on trans issues, but they can shove it. The options for Rook being trans are actively good, and a subplot regarding a character discovering their own gender identity is fumbled pretty badly but is at least attempted.

Liz verdict as she nears the end: buy now if you’re the hugest DA fan ever or are desperate for even an ok game (I got it for the election), wait for a sale if you like DA and aren’t desperate for a game right now, possibly avoid if what matters most to you is a lore rich world full of interesting issues and solid characterization.

6.5 out of 10. Hurt most by the fact that comparisons to early games come so easily.

[Testament]

The problem with Veilguard is that it’s…serviceable. That isn’t to say it’s a bad game, but I’m not sure I’d be willing to call it a great game either. Everything is…fine. About the biggest standout in the game is the visuals and art direction, that’s probably my favorite thing about it.

The story is boilerplate, though oddly better than Inquisition’s story. Inquisition’s story annoyed me because it’s main villain was basically a cipher for the story, had no actual character themselves other than being ‘bad’. Also found it weird that their mainline game antagonist came from a DLC of the previous game. So whatever.

I have issues with the voice acting. At some points it’s fine, even good(at least with interactions with Solas and Varric because their VAs know what the fuck their doing), but I have a particular disconnect with some of your companions VA(Neve especially)where they delivers lines either unsure or stilted or something that I can’t quite put my finger on. It kind of gets better as your progress through the game where they feel like they’re getting comfortable with the character, but I’m also going to chalk this up to very lousy voice direction and script writing.

Which yeah, the script is just…bad. While the plot is fine, whoever wrote the script needs to get better at it. Now, I’m going to put two points of contention onto this. One, being the game was changes a couple times through it’s almost ten year development cycle, so I have no idea how many rewrites happened in that time. And after checking the writing credits on Veilguard’s IMDB, it becomes a lot more clear as to why the writing isn’t up to par. A number of people on the writing team had barely, if any, legitimate writing credits. When you factor in that I suspect some of this was happening during the writer’s strike, and knowing EA’S penchant for not wanting to pay, they probably just pulled people who had some kind of, if minimal, writing experience off another team. AFAIK, this also affected the voice direction. Is it the whole reason? Probably not, and I imagine there’s a lot more extraneous factors at play, but it’s the most glaring that I’ve found thus far.

However, not gonna lie, I actually enjoy the combat of the game, even if it’s some weird blend of God of War Ragnarok mixed with some diet Dark Souls. Which, considering how this game was in development during the time where these games were big, it’s kind of not hard to miss that they probably took inspiration from them. Which is whatever.

That said, Dragon Age has never, and I mean never figured out what it wants to be. Every time, every installment of the series, everything is changed up. Systems, combat, mechanics, etc. It’s different. It goes from one playstyle, to another, to another, to another. It strikes me as if the series is just chasing trends at this point and can’t figure out it’s own thing. It’s the core opposite to what Mass Effect did, which was just build upon and improve what they already had. Origins was fine, but some people thought it was too hard being a Baldur’s Gate love letter, so they dumbed it down to hack n’slash of an almost Devil May Cry lite. People thout that was too dumb and too easy, so it was changed to an MMO-lite…thing from Inquisition. Which was just too grindy, because goddamn was that game too grindy.

I think the devs just played it safe. There’s no conflict between your party members, everyone gets along, and it plays like it’s some kind of low-bar Netflix series you can binge in a weekend. Which if that’s what you’re looking for? Cool. Veilguard does what it needs to. And while I criticize the game, I’m still playing it. I’m still enjoying it. That’s generally my biggest though and takeaway. It’s played safe. They don’t take any kind of risk or chances with it. There was something that could’ve been really, really good. But if I’m being perfectly honest, the last Dragon Age game that had a compelling charactes and stories was probably the first two.

As for the transgender topical matter in it, I could not care. Twitter sure as fuck cares, but that’s Twitter for you. Is it written kind of…cringe? And I say cringe because it just wasn’t written well. So yeah, there are some points that does not handle that topic well, or even nuanced. To a certain point I think it does more of a disservice. But if someone is bothered by that, just go be asshole elsewhere.

I dunno, it’s a big mixed bag of shit. If you like the lore, it’s mostly consistent with the lore and adds stuff onto it. This isn’t exactly how I had hoped for the northern part of Thedas to be explored after it had been talked about for the past three games. It seems like such a drastic departure from how Trespasser ended, but again, it’s not bad. It’s just not what I had hoped for. It’s serviceable. It’s fine.

[Rinel]

@Testament said in why is nobody talking about Veilguard:

If you like the lore, it’s mostly consistent with the lore and adds stuff onto it.

Honestly my biggest complaint about the game is the massive elimination of basically any mystery from the past several thousand years.

[Testament]

@Rinel Oh, I have questions about some of the plot points I’ve encountered. Ones that I will not reveal. There’s a plot device you get very very very early in the game and later Varric talks about what it is, which really made me side eye the narrative.

[Roz]

@Testament said in why is nobody talking about Veilguard:

I have issues with the voice acting. At some points it’s fine, even good(at least with interactions with Solas and Varric because their VAs know what the fuck their doing), but I have a particular disconnect with some of your companions VA(Neve especially)where they delivers lines either unsure or stilted or something that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Agree that Neve’s voice work in particular feels oddly stilted.

A number of people on the writing team had barely, if any, legitimate writing credits. When you factor in that I suspect some of this was happening during the writer’s strike, and knowing EA’S penchant for not wanting to pay, they probably just pulled people who had some kind of, if minimal, writing experience off another team.

I’m not sure why the writer’s strike would have an impact here. Video games weren’t one of the industries that the WGA was striking against, and the WGA doesn’t include video game writers AFAIK.

[Wuff]

I felt like I got a huge Saturday Morning Cartoon vibe from the whole thing. The claim that they couldn’t import anything from the Dragon Age Keep and decided to just keep everything past vague if not ignored feels kind of lazy when they still have that data. They easily could have just mined it and used the choices that were made most commonly for most things. Plot by consensus.

[Testament]

@Wuff The companion conversations have no fail state, no situation where one of them gets so pissed at you leave is kind of, no very, annoying.

As negative as I can be about Inquisition, there were those fail states. Treat the mages badly enough, and I distinctly remember Dorian chewing your ass out. Which also gave you the option to put him on his ass with a punch, which makes him leave.

There’s no options like that. I think I could look past everything about Veilguard if it had just been willing to commit to some kind of interpersonal conflict instead of everyone literally gets along.

As a sidethought, it’s honestly making me go back and rethink my opinion on DA2 and how much scorn I had held for it for such a long time. Say whatever you want about continously reused and recycled maps/environments, the Ashatok was a great mid-game villain and made the Qunari actually terrifying as a potentially antagonistic faction. While I really like the art style of the game, I absolutely hate how the Qunari look now. I think that’s the one part of the game’s lore that was changed too much.

Then again, the Qunari suddenly have horns from DA2 and forward and Sten from Origins being a weird exception was also a massive departure.