#Once again not maintagging because this is closer to me organizing my own thoughts than anything else

[chronurgy]

I think my number one concern going into veilguard is that companies never set out to make bad games. They're never hoping and planning to make a bad game. But bad games are nevertheless produced, often for structural reasons (and those structural issues tend to be self reinforcing). Bioware has recently made two bad games (Andromeda and anthem), so the structural issues that result in the production of bad games are definitely there. And unless bioware as a company really sat down and worked very hard to mitigate those structural issues, they will have impacted the production of this game. Those structural issues are not easy to fix. They often require a great deal of time and money - things we can be pretty confident bioware was short on during this period.

Veilguard had a 10 year development with three full refreshes, including a conversion from a live service multi-player game to a single player rpg. Extended and troubled productions can produce great games, but they usually don't. Because the same structural issues that result in troubled developments tend to result in bad games as well.

I'm not saying that veilguard is doomed to be a bad game or that I'm not excited for it. I am, actually, cautiously excited for it given the gameplay showcase we saw today. It looks beautiful. Every environment we saw was stunning and the characters look great as well. I'm certainly more hopeful than I was even just a few days ago. But I am being cautious because of everything I said above. This is part of why I've so consistently been asking for plot details - it's really easy for the plot to get shafted in the scramble to redevelop a game. Combat looks fun, the characters look good, but it's much harder to get a grip on the breadth and depth of the story and the missions we'll be running, especially when they really haven't shown us any of it. So that's sort of my manifesto about why I'm still so cautious when it comes to this game. The issues are structural and we're still missing one big piece of the whole. I don't think we'll really know for sure whether or not they've pulled it off until we actually get the game. So it's basically wait and see at this point.