Only because I saw this review being held up in various forums and comment sections as vindication for everyone who wants the game to fail. I’m not saying YOU were posting it for that reason at all and I’m sure the reviewer was sincere in his criticism. But he went from someone I’ve never heard of before to someone linked in every “LOL this piece of woke DEI garbage going to fail so hard; see this guy hated it so that proves it!” remark yesterday.
Especially since most reviews seem to consider it a middling-to-good (but not amazing) game, it felt weird to see this video held up as Word of God. Again, not by you, just a reaction on my part after seeing a day’s worth of links and snarky comments.
Ew, yeah I can see why that would create that kind of reaction for you.
FWIW I’ll almost certainly play this. Just not right away. I mean, I had a good time with the most recent Mass Effect so my expectations are apparently much more low class than the prevailing opinions.
I’ve played the previous Dragon Age games, and while I remember liking them I hardly remember anything about the plot. I do remember one of them, maybe it was Inquisition, had a trans male character. There’s a scene in the game where he says something like, “If I were a real man,” and his qunari boss replies, “You are a real man.” But I guess that was before anyone knew about DEI and didn’t know they should complain about it.
I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT WANT THE GAME TO FAIL. I would love to get another awesome Dragon Age game. I desperately want Bioware to get their groove back. The Mass Effect trilogy and the first couple of Dragon Age titles (yes, including DA2, which I will fiercely defend, warts and all) are some of my all-time favorite gaming experiences.
How and why does the prospect of looming disappointment translate into my desire for a bad game? That’s such a weird and counterproductive way to engage with the discussion.
And for the record, even despite all this, I do still have the game on preorder. It’ll arrive in the next day or two and I’ll play it next week when I’m back from holiday.
Explain again how this means people like me want the game to fail.
Heh, I just need it to be a “fun game”. If it’s a fun mostly-linear action RPG set in Dragon Age Land then that’s fine by me so long as I don’t go in expecting it to be an emotionally wrought and lore deep experience. At its worst, it sounds like maybe a Spiders studio (Greedfall) level experience but I can still vibe with that.
But it also doesn’t sound like anything so omg amazing that I need to jump on it right away AND I have Stalker 2 waiting for me on Nov 20th, and THAT I did preorder. So if I didn’t have Veilguard wrapped up before then, I’ll probably never finish it after I jump off to go get blown up by anomalies in the Exclusion Zone. Better to hold off and take advantage of more friend reactions, patches and hopefully a few percent off.
Not you. You never seemed to want the game to fail, you were just worried that it might not be a game you’ll enjoy. There are people who DO want the game to fail purely for being too “woke” and whatnot. That’s who I’m talking about. We’re not supposed to link to other forum type places but you could go to the game’s subreddit, Steam discussion forum or the comments section under most articles about the game and see what sort of people I’m talking about. I don’t recommend this though since you doubtlessly have better things to do than read people being mad about Asian elves who don’t even have “real” boobs.
It’s been so long since DA2 but the only complaint I remember having was the egregious asset recycling. I otherwise enjoyed it.
SkillUp’s main thesis is that BioWare can be forgiven for dropping the ball on Anthem because they had no business making a live service shooter, but that expectations for this game should be much higher.
As one example he contrasts video from Veilguard with video from Inquisition to show facial animations and it’s hard to disagree that they’ve taken a step backwards in some respects.
He doesn’t like the story either, but I generally don’t pay much attention to what reviewers think of story. What concerns me more is when he says that he and some other streamers he talked to turned the combat difficulty down after a while: not because it was too difficult but because it was getting dull. If this Dragon Age has decided to be an action RPG then it lives and dies by its combat.
Okay, well, those people are subliterate morons who deserve no more attention.
But for my part, the first time I got a look at what they were doing with Veilguard, I got a sick feeling in my gut that this was going to be a misfire. I mollified myself with the reminder that this is a franchise that has significantly reinvented itself with each installment, that there’s always been a major aesthetic and stylistic adjustment when going from game to game. I told myself that change isn’t always bad, be patient, let’s see how it goes. But I still felt uncomfortable and uncertain, and I discussed those feelings with like-minded players in other fora.
Now this new video review comes out, and it seems to be directly in line with my earlier fears. So to me, even though it’s (apparently) bad news, it’s worth sharing: not to celebrate, because why would I celebrate a bad game, but simply as (potential) confirmation of what I’d already been thinking, and a warning to keep expectations in check.
While PCGamer gave the game a 79 – not great, not trash – another writer wrote an article about the companions, considering them disappointing and basically tools to get past obstacles rather than vaguely interesting people to hang around with. No one you need to win over, no one who obviously doesn’t like another companion, no one with a dark secret (that lasts more than a minute), etc. Just chipper experts for you to pull out like a multi-tool depending on the situation.
Fair enough but you hadn’t even posted the review so I’m not sure why you’d think I was referring to you earlier. In any event, my comments weren’t related to anyone here.
I think that review went viral because it was one of the first ones plus negative reviews spread faster than positive ones do. I had never heard of the channel either but I watched the review and it is definitely not one of those Professional Haters that dominate YouTube now. It’s very very even handed and goes out of its way to say you might like the things he did not but for me it was convincing in that now I have decided to wait for when the game becomes cheap (had a similar path with Star Wars Outlaws recently also).
Here is a very positive review that dropped today:
The game definitely has flaws, most of which were touched on in this thread already, but I find it pretty encouraging. Especially how fun the gameplay felt.
Veilguard has been spectacular. I can’t remember the last time a game has sucked me in like this one. (Maybe Skyrim when it first came out.)
To give an idea of how much I’m liking it, I was making my way through the game and then realized I wanted to change some choices I’d made. I went through my autosaves and saw that the most recent one that took me back far enough was at 6 hours, and my current save was at 13 hours. In other words, I’d flush 7 hours of gameplay down the toilet.
I did it and didn’t mind in the least.
Only for a split second did I get upset before realizing that repeating the content means I could skip a number of cutscenes, spend less time cautiously exploring to get around puzzles, and even combat should be easier since I had more experience with it. And all of that was true, and in addition I found some things I’d missed before.
But overall, repeating it was almost as fun the second time around.
I’ve since backtracked a few more times (though not losing as much time at once any of those other times) and it just doesn’t bother me. I’m having too much fun.
This is somehow the best Dragon Age game for me. It’s a shame that it’s getting so many review bombs because this is a gem.