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nobodyexpectsthe · 7 days ago

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okay i'm going to do a veilguard critical post and i want to start it with this post by david gaider that has lived rent free in my brain since i read it.

and i want to be clear as i begin this rant that i am critical of studio leadership. not the development team themselves, because god fucking knows they tried.

i cannot emphasize enough that the game we got is not the fault of individual writers, or game designers, or any creative team leads. the issue came from people way, way, way above their heads.

and that is extremely important to remember that veilguard's active retooling had only been in play for, what, a year? from 2022 to 2023? when the games industry decided it was time for record layoffs?

where like their entire QA team got shitcanned?

and devs had to fight to get more than two weeks fucking severance?

if veilguard had remained an always online multiplayer experience i think it's story would have been praised, because the story was not meant to be the main draw. the gameplay and character customization was. any story in an online game that isn't an mmorpg is generally praised - even if its a stupid mystery box story where you're just drip fed tiny details that will take actual years to pay off.

in a singleplayer experience in a franchise that people went to because of it's storytelling the whole thing just falls so short.

but for me the issues went so much deeper.

i like most of the character concepts. i like most of the ideas the game was built on, but the execution made me angry.

needing to constantly leave and come back to the lighthouse to pop new quests was frustrating. if they dropped me in the middle of the hub it wouldn't have been so frustrating, but to talk to lucanis i have to go from one end of the map to the other.

there was nothing to do at the lighthouse besides that and i guess upgrading my armor. i can't talk to my companions. i can't even like - prog conversations between them? why can't i use my caretaker points to build out areas for my companions to hang out in, drop some fucking items in there associated with them, and maybe get the conversations i want to hear instead of lucanis talking about fucking coffee for the sixteenth time?

there's a dining room. why can't i use that to get ambient banter conversations?

why am i at the fucking mercy of what the npcs want to do?

so much of the gameplay felt like a holdover from the multiplayer version. things that wouldn't have bothered me as part of a game that was meant to be played in realtime, with idk the conversations being daily login incentives,

but nothing stood out to me as bad as the quest recaps did. the quest recaps actively fucked with my ability to get immersed and stay immersed. they were either clearly a holdover from when there were meant to be huge real time gaps between content drops or an extremely poorly thought out addition that really only made the stop-starts of every quest that much worse.

and the little pop-ups that reminded me why a character did a thing or felt a certain way were infuriating. that just happened. literally at the start of this quest.

the companion quests don't change. they come to conclusions on their own, and even if you try to sway them in another path it doesn't ultimately change anything? i think emmrichs is the only one you can drastically affect the outcome of.

like yes, game, you are not terribly complicated. i have a handful of choices so if a character is doing something or saying something directly related to a choice i pushed them to make, i would assume that's why.

except i had no actual choices. i have replayed dragon age 2 & inquisition multiple times just to see how different scenarios play out depending on my choices. i have played BG3 to fucking death to see how little dialogue options get called back.

i am not talking the grand sweeping choices at the end of the game. i am not talking about the four different endings - which i actually did not enjoy at all.

an ending where everyone dies because you didn't amass enough political power and/or recruit all the party members would have fucked hard actually.

and see, one of my favorite rpgs of all time is tales of symphonia. that's a jrpg. that has a set plot, a set way things play out, you cannot change it except for one small detail - your interpersonal relationships.

i do not need to drastically change the ending of the game, i need to feel like the little stones i throw make little ripples. i need to see that my actions, the person my character is, has an influence on the people around them, their willingness to stand with them and follow their orders, and veilguard didn't give me that.

what i got instead was the illusion of a choice.

what if instead of rook assigning people to missions (THAT IT HOLDS YOUR HAND THROUGH TO PICK THE RIGHT CHOICES) it came down to a matter of trust? what if you gave an order and rather than following it, your teammate / the faction decided you knew jack shit actually and deviated from the plan?

or what if their unhealed personal trauma actually came up in the thing that gets them killed? what if instead of it being cinematics, it was something you had to play through ala DA2? where you have the option to try to salvage the relationship one last time before they either die or get themselves killed?

why was i a fucking spectator in this game that was supposedly built around the strong bonds the veilguard had? because like the whole ~hero of the veilguard~ thing falls flat to me if their fatal flaw isn't ultimately what destroys them.

an ending where i got fed up with the same boring repetitive sidequests & didn't go back and forth from the lighthouse often enough to get

the fact that the game auto-saves at key choice points too is indicative that they know this is not a replayable experience.

looking @ corinne bus.che's departure from bioware and her statements, i don't have a lot of hope for the company. i think that she's saying in the politest way that things are still bad and she's moving on to greener pastures and hopes that the studio can fix itself.

and i say this because i'm remembering the actual months of all hands meetings where execs said the same thing over and over again right before they dropped that projects were being scrapped, games were being sunset, and layoffs were imminent. and my boss, bless him, was trying to reassure me that my team was safe.

only for him to log in one day and find out that someone above his head had laid off team members without his say or input. and how this happened again, and again, until i was the one sending him a text message bc i'd been called into a meeting with someone above his head. my whole team was devastated, our already small size reduced even further, and the workload became that much more stressful to everyone left.

and it kept coming. the way the SLT undervalued anything that wasn't their own fucking jobs was disgusting. heaven forbid you don't lose your bonus. but sure, okay, hq needed that luxury spa the almost entirely remote team will never see.

i had to sign stuff saying i could never disparage the company so i could get my severance.

i remember sitting in allhands meetings with my team, watching the divide between the people who actually make the fucking game and engage with the audience & the people who call the shots grow bigger, and bigger, and bigger until we had a blowout during a meeting regarding our bonuses structure changing THREE DAYS after another project was cancelled AND THE COMPANY HIRED AN ADDITIONAL CEO.

i have been the person in meetings with an exhausted dev team, listening to the writer say they want to do more but the studio won't let them. i've seen the artists showing off work they know will never see the light of day because their project was doomed. i've seen the team lead with defeat in his eyes saying they desperately trying to explain to SLT (who had no knowledge or care about the IP what the project needed to succeed) only to be dismissed.

and like, that might not be her energy. that might be my disillusionment with the industry speaking, but it's so fucking sad. so fucking sad.

she's currently getting a lot of flack but like - it's not her fucking fault my dudes!!! the game was pushed out on a crazy timeline, there were layoffs, she inherited so many problems.

i hope she uses her title and experience to find a better studio to work at and has the chance to make the crpg she wanted to. i hope that studio understands that you can't just staple trends from other games & genres onto yours and make it a success, because bioware & EA sure don't.

i genuinely hope baldur's gate 3 and larian's entire approach to game design forces these grifting finance bros out of the industry and i wish so desperately the discourse would focus on how that is the fucking problem here. but i don't think it will.

i'm going to be so surprised if bioware isn't stripped and sold for parts after mass effect 4 drops. i've seen it too many times at this point.

ips are only as strong as the people making them. and if you have created an environment where these people are leaving in droves, or are constantly anxious for their job security, or you keep interrupting it and retooling it to chase a trend, you've fucked yourself and don't even understand why that trend is popular.

why in the fuck is someone going to pay for knockoff of a better game that's doing numbers with an active playerbase? do you seriously think that the dragon age skin you put over it does anything for that?

i am so tired of the conversations around this game centering on how 'wokeness' ruined it. it didn't. these have always been progressive games. the issues with vg came from people far removed from the writing, design & art process. i think a lot of the clunkiness of the game came from the fact that these stories had no fucking time to develop and grow naturally, they had to be shotgunned bc they had no time to do anything else.

when all is said and done, my honest impression of veilguard is that its a miracle it came out. it is. it genuinely is. few games get out of development hell after that long, let alone in a playable state with any redeeming qualities.

but that miracle isn't enough for me to forgive all of its faults. the slog that was act 2 damn near killed me. there was no narrative pacing with the companion quests. there was... no quests outside of the companion quests. it would have been one thing if i was doing a main story quest and then everybody had feelings related to that quest, but i think 99 percent of act 2 is purely fixing everyone's emotional problems so they don't die in the final battle.

anyway the last thing i'll say is i've seen a lot of people criticizing the team for fluffing the project up. and... man, i hate to tell you this, but they can't say anything about it right now. they just can't. and more than that, like... they are allowed to have pride in what they managed to pull together. the fact that game came out at all is, and it cannot be understated, a miracle.

if there are expirations on their NDAs & non-disparagement clauses, we're going to get some tea in 5 - 15 years.

#ooc.#veilguard critical

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