sirsagrell

[sirsagrell]

So I literally created this account just to read people yelling about Veilguard on this website, and I'm predictably getting sucked into participating.

Disclaimer: I've always been the "it's good enough to hook me hard, but now I have to mentally rewrite the story in my head to really enjoy it" BioWare fan. I'm self-aware enough to realize, that when I think something should have been done a certain way to do justice to the story told so far, that story told so far may not have been there in the games that BioWare actually made.

I will, as such, try to stick to the Dragon Age that exists and not the one in my head, when writing about Veilguard. Will I succeed? No idea.

With that out of the way:

There is a lot of valid criticism going around about the sanitized/whitewashed/shallowly inoffensive writing. I agree with a large portion of it, and don't have much to add. A lot of the writing fell flat in a lot of the ways it never did in BioWare games before. Not all of it, though. There were moments of brilliance here and there.

But I think my actual main problem with this game boils down to something that isn't talked about much in the critiques that I read.

Specifically, that Veilguard should have been the ending of this series.

But instead, they tried to make Dragon Age yet another one of those fictional universes that they wouldn't fucking let go of.

I think it is very important to let stories end. It is very important to let go of entire settings, especially the most beloved ones. Because if you don't, they fossilize under the requirements of nostalgia and the need to stay recognizable and quickly turn into this hopeless cycle of increasingly warped self-repetition where everything always comes back to the status quo and engaging with the setting in any way leaves a taste of existential dread in your mouth.

(I'm looking at you, Star Wars. I will insist that KOTOR II was the best thing ever written in that setting because it broke the fourth wall, pointed a finger at this exact phenomenon, and said "look what you're doing to us")

(Or maybe that's just how I remember it, because that's how I overwrote it in my head)

(I think there's a profound point about possessive love to be made here somewhere, but it's late and I'm too tired to look for the right words)

Anyways.

If Veilguard was the ending of the series, it would have at least set itself and all of us free from that.

It could also have attempted to say something more meaningful than world is good and always worthy of being saved. Like, people complain that Veilguard couldn't handle variable world states going in, and I get that, but I think the even bigger missed opportunity is that, having to account for more games in the setting, BioWare couldn't afford having varied world states coming out of it.

We save the world from mad tyrants, and a blind broken man, and that's it.

But there was setup for so much more here. I'm sure I didn't hallucinate it.

We're never asked what it actually means to save this world, and if it means the same thing for everyone.

We never have to wonder if it could possibly be us who are the blind and broken ones here, unable to turn from a dead-end path, because it is the only one familiar to us.

We never discuss what specifically it means for the Veil to go. It just defaults to DEMONS, BAD, and all the interesting foreshadowing for the Veil maybe coming down that we previously had goes completely out of the window.

And so we're never given the choice of what to do with this world. And we can't stop to really contemplate how fucked up it actually is for flawed individuals such as us, or Solas, or the Evanuris or whomever, to have the power to make decisions for a whole world to begin with, no matter how good we think our intentions are.

Just now realized how apt Veilguard is as a name for this game. Makes me wonder what it was, before it got that name.

It will be ironic if, despite all the work they did to make sure there is room for more sequels, and all they had to throw out to get a clean simple world state, this will actually become the last one in the series.