#after the game release

[tinydiorama]

no man's sky pixel art study.

free wallpaper here!

twitter | ko-fi

[xinyuehui]

Qin Che ⸺ Sylus Reveal ࣪ ִֶָ☾.

[artofalassa]

| Don't leave me All by myself in this world |

[roscolate]

I’M LEGIT TEARING UP RIGHT NOW 🥹🥹🥹😭😭😭

MY BOIS ARE BACK THE MARIO AND LUIGI RPGS ARE BACK OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS RN 😭😭😭

[chalkrub]

thank you for a great art fight! here's some of my final attacks. had a blast, already missing it - see you next year!

[kirby-the-gorb]

[aezyrraesh]

DRAGON AGE: THE VEILGUARD [1/?]

I knew him as Solas. Smart, thoughtful, loved to hear himself talk. But long ago he had a different name: The Dread Wolf. Ancient elven god of lies, or heroic rebel against tyranny, depending on which story you believe.

[bobbiesquares]

i think sam should have gone into the dropout discord and given us bingo cards for tao, carolyn, and jess

[mtsodie]

Wondering... What does geek think about sax ruthie and dev... Do they get to meet

its kind of complicated since geek doesnt really . exist . in the telltale games universe which these guys live in 👆 but i imagine the trio comes along after the geek starts living in sam and maxes basement and they hang out together : ) she wants to dissect them

[angrykittybarbarian]

Things that bother me about Dragon Age: The Veilguard part 3 (final thoughts)

I have finally finished the playthrough. I endured because I wanted to give this game a fair chance. I wanted to see it from start to finish in the hopes it would deliver something, anything capable of redeeming it. But it just didn't. Or more precisely, not in a way sufficient to make its flaws easy to overlook. These are my closing impressions on the game. I have already done two posts about this in which I documented my observations and comments as I progressed. I will link the posts here: Part 1, Part 2.

Let's finish this ride for now.

!Spoilers below the cut!

The music

I don't know what the direction of the music was meant to take. When it was announced Hans Zimmer would compose the OST I had high hopes. Hans Zimmer is a houshold name in Hollywood and skilled at what he does. I listened to a number of movie OSTs of his making and they were all excellent. So what happened here?

The music sounds generic most of the time without a clear theme or a unique piece that got me searching for it on youtube.

The main theme has sort of a recognizable composition but isn't anything outstanding. Emmrich's theme sounds like a halloween piece written for Wednesdsy Adams and the rest of the OST seems to mimic Trevor Morris' work for DA:I, namely the Lost Temple and In Hushed Whispers themes, but without the emotional impact the original pieces created.

It's as someone has already pointed out and I agree: Bioware has bought the name Hans Zimmer but not his quality. It sounds like he didn't even seriously create something but half heartedly whipped something out of his sleeve and called it a day.

The facial animations

The main problem with these is they often don't fit the emotions the VAs are communicating.

The VAs actually did a fantastic job. The scene that touched me the most was the one Rook confronts Solas in after they escape the regret prison in the fade. That was the first time Rook felt involved, raw and real.

But what broke the atmosphere in an otherwise flawless scene was how unmoving their facial expression was. There was the VA shouting their lung out and the animation couldn't even give half a fuck about it.

I don't even see an excuse for this lack of facial animation. It was possible to do since DA:O, hell, even since the first Mass Effect back in '07. Why is it not possible in the year of our Lord 2024, when technology is presumably better?

The handholding of the player

The plot is tightly paced. This is not necessarily a bad thing as I didn't really like the Open World approach of DA:I since it stretched the main plot too thinly and the maps created weren't filled with interesting side content but boring and pointless fetch quests.

But Veilguard went into the opposide extreme as it leaves only little room for the player when and how to do things. The quests are activated and must be completed in a specific order. They have also only one outcome without room to make different decisions.

Rook can never be truly ruthless. They can never disagree and butt heads with their companions.

And I hate how on the side of the screen the game exactly tells you what you have done and how it affects your companions' behaviour. It doesn't bake it into the interaction organically. Instead it has yet again, explained to me what I did and why it has this very specific effect without any of the characters discussing it. But the beauty of consequential decisions lies in the very unpredictability of its outcome. That's what creates the emotional impact. It doesn't work if I am being warned and explained to like a small child.

It's this lack of trust the game puts into the intelligence of its players that is so experience breaking, insulting even. It doesn't trust its players to figure stuff out themselves. It assumes we are too stupid to get any of the things it tries to tell us.

The ting is though, dear Bioware writers, if you think you have to overexplain your story because you think your audience won't get it then that's a telltale sign of the story being actually badly written.

Another area where this becomes appearant are the "puzzles". I used the quotation marks because there isn't really anything to solve. The solutions are obvious and at times your companions go out of their way to tell you.

The romances

Romances have always been a nice bonus on top of the otherweise amazing game content. They added some enjoyable extra fluff purely for enjoyment and some cases even deepened the main storyline.

In Veilguard they don't do that. In almost all of them the flirting is so meaningless that your cutscene with them just proceeds as if nothing happened.

There is no shift or change to their tone towards Rook. You don't build up the relationship with them. There is no last goodbye kiss before the last mission or passionate affirmations of love and trust. It just leaves you cold.

The only romance that seems to have that old depth is Emmrich's. The rest however, they don't add anything significant. There virtually is no difference to the game without the romances.

Companion relationships

Let's begin here with the simple fact that all deeper interactions Rook has with the companions are strictly scripted which ties back into the handholding part of this criticism. Rook cannot initiate a conversation and ask them some general questions about their histories and opinions on certain matters.

Rook only gets to interact with them when they happen to want something from them. Otherwise they cannot be bothered to acknowledge Rook with more than a one sided oneliner.

And then there are the relationships between the companions themselves. They either get along swimmingly or the game feels the need to stage some immature conflict between them without any deeper purpose.

Like Harding not understanding why Emmrich brings so many books on the road despite it literally not being any of her damn business bevause it doesn't personally affect her in any way.

Or Taash not understanding his profession as a Mournwatcher as they call him names so Rook has to point out Taash in turn likes dragons which is an interest he doesn't share only to culminate the discussion with a "We need to respect our differences" sort of statement.

These are not conflicts, these are squabbles of children and like children Roik talks to them which is brought ad absurdum with Emmrich because he is literally old enough to be Rook's father.

Why bother at all with writing conflict if it is only to be something as inconsequential as this?

Varric's death

This one is a .... choice.

I won't go into why the decision to let him die or not is good or bad because I feel like this is highly subjective.

However the impact of the reveal of this fact is only partly executed well.

Why?

Because it only hits hard when the player has known and cared about Varric at least since DA:I if not DA 2. The execution of this plotpoint thus relies too heavily on nostalgia instead of building the tension up within its own setting.

When thinking about Bioware also wanting to be newcomer friendly with this game I am left to wonder then why they didn't introduce Varric properly and didn't give the players time to build up the relationship? Why would a new player care about Varric? They don't know him.

Bioware cannot in good conscience claim they designed the game to be new player friendly while simultaniously heavily relying on knowledge from previous games, dlcs, comics, novels and other spin-off media. They cannot claim this and have anything but DATV do the heavy lifting when it comes to executing their plot.

The final mission

For my final point I also want to lose some positive feedback about this game.

The ending was actually well written.

In relation to Solas it comes full circle. You can actually feel what's at stake and the decisions Rook makes actually matter.

The final questline roughly follows a Mass Effect 2 approach where it is classified as nothing short of a suicide mission.

Companion quests essentially function as loyalty missions and Rook gets to assign various posts in battle. Just like in Mass Effect 2 assigning a companion a post completely outside of their expertise may get them killed.

The dialogue is actually written well at this point in the game. There isn't really much to complain about.

But even this part is not entirely without faults.

For one I don't like the non negotiable sacrifice that has either to be made by Harding or Davrin. Rook doesn't even get a chance to save any of them. But again these non negotiable companion deaths where you only make the choice who's it's going to be isn't anything new (i.e. Hawke and whatever Warden you happen to get, Kaidan/Ashley in ME 1). So maybe a bit if a bummer but nothing experience breaking.

A stronger point however is that Rook will always keep the Veil intact in the end.

I suppose this outcome already is part of the game title itself but was it necessary to take it so literally?

With everything the elves have lost and the discrimination they faced it should absolutely have been an option to agree with Solas and tear the Veil down.

But since we don't talk about racism and slavery I guess Rook doesn't reflect on these points either. So I guess keeping the Veil intact is in line with the game's general sanitization of the world.

So in conclusion?

The game is far from great, not gonna lie. It feels like the devs actually wanted a new IP but were too afraid of the risks that come with such an endeavor and thought gutting an existing franchise that already did the heavy lifting of building a fanbase and using it as a package would save their ideas from flopping. Surely no one will notice it is actually something else if we market it as Dragon Age, right?

But we are not that stupid. This behaviour is insulting to put it plain and simple and I am heartbroken, angry and said that this was done to Dragon Age. I wanted to love this game. I was optimistic before the release. Everything looked fine, nothing in particular to worry about.

But I cannot continue to defend this without breaking my basic brain function.

The most frustrating part is that with the ending the devs showed they can write a story and meaningful dialogues. It left me wondering why it couldn't be done like this for the rest of the game and living with the reality that I will never get what this game could have been.

All in all this is not a good Dragon Age game. It is a massive disappointment and does not live up to the promises made by the devs.

I am sorry for everyone who preordered.

I am sorry for everyone who paid the full release price.

Nominating it for Game of the Year is not justified no mattee how you look at it.

If you are genuinely enjoying the game, I hope you continue to do so and all power to you.

For the rest: let's stop excusing Bioware's disrespect towards the fans and enabling them by paying them too much money for it.

Don't buy at release. Don't buy spin off media. Wait for sales. These people only understand the problem when you give them a good run for their money.

[ok-pop-1]

NEW ZELDA

[once-in-a-half-life]

"so what did you do this summer?"

i. uh. I recreated the ending cutscene of half life alyx as a visual novel in ren'py ....

it was a really cool project through! I learned a lot and am really proud of the result! I even made the G-Man sprites in S2FM (by playing his in-game animations frame by frame and rendering some stills I liked haha)

here's some screeshots!

[felassan]

context and explanation: EA's quarterly earnings conference call for Q4 and FY 2024 starts in just under 15 minutes at 2pm PT. before the calls start, some of the associated files/documents pertaining to the call get put up on EA's website. The "Core Business and FY25 Title Slate" image is from the Earnings Slides. the quote under the table reads "We have two unannounced titles in FY25: one partner title expected in Q4, and one owned IP title, which is not included in the above table. We expect to provide more details on timing at a later date." DA:D is an owned IP title of EA. The Twitter user asks Jeff Grubb (a games media person who revealed the title of DA:D) if the referenced "one owned IP title" is DA:D. Jeff confirms that this does indeed refer to Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, meaning that this slide confirms that DA:D is planned to release in FY25 (Financial Year 25). for info, I think FY25 runs from 1st April 2024 until 31st March 2025.

[source, two, three]

[lizzybeeee]

I will never emotionally recover from this

[rotisseries]

skyward sword was such a crazy insane game to make like ok what if there was a story about a great evil and a goddess. and that goddess locked away that great evil, but she knew it would come back, and it would need to be defeated again. and what if that goddess knew that for this impossible task, she would need a loyal soldier. so she reincarnates. she reincarnates into a human girl, because the best way, the most reliable way, to get a loyal soldier, is love. and a goddess is respected, and idolized, and revered, but a goddess isn't loved. not like a human girl is. so she reincarnates. and she is loved genuinely and wholeheartedly, by her family, by her peers, and most importantly, by her best friend.

and what if there was a story about a boy and a girl. this one boy loves her so much, that when she falls from the sky, crashing to the earth, and into her immortal destiny, he follows her. and she runs, because she has a destiny, because she's finding out she is part of a divine plot, she and the boy are pawns in a goddess' war plans. did she ever love him did he ever love her or were they just being manipulated by the goddess. SHE'S the goddess. was SHE just manipulating him this whole time? "I'm still your zelda" but is she really? does she know it for sure? she doubts it and doubts it and runs and runs and he keeps chasing her. and she locks herself in time to defeat this great evil and he watches her do it. and he fights because he loves her and he defeats the evil and he gets her back and they're happy.

but what if there was a story about a goddess and a great evil. the evil cursed them for the rest of time. their descendants will never be safe there will always be evil to fight and she'll always be running and sacrificing and he'll always be chasing and fighting.

what if there was a story about a goddess and a great evil. what if there was a story about a girl and a boy. what if it was about the innate mortality and humanity of love and the act of loving. ok. at the walls of nintendo hq