#dai was... kinda worse in a lot of respects (mostly templars and dalish and like

[jellyfishline]

I've been really, really breaking my own rules when in comes to Veilguard. I don't like making opinions on media until I've experienced it in full, especially when those opinions are negative, and double especially when it's a piece of media that's part of a series that has such a.... long and proud tradition of truly insane takes, to put it lightly. And I know for a fact that there is character writing in this game that would appeal to me, characters that I would love, and maybe some of the less than stellar plots would roll right off me in the face of that.

BUT!

I was prepared to cringe at parts of this game. I was prepared for, idk, discourse about the fumbling of certain sensitive topics. I was prepared for controversial lore revelations, for a lackluster/controversial villain or two, for some janky bits of story or mechanics. If it was just (and god, this feels awful to say) things like "Taash's gender is handled respectfully but there’s no attempt to make being nonbinary feel integrated into the setting" or even "Taash's quest massively drops the ball on being multicultural and forces the player into a gross binary choice about which culture to encourage Taash to explore" that would be like, what I expected. I can accept clumsy writing, even hurtful clumsy writing, to a degree.

But the SANITATION of it all.

Taking out the teeth of the Crows. Making pirates have a code of ethics about not stealing elven artifacts and not turning that into anything INTERESTING (say, internal strife between the pirates who care about plundering from oppressed cultures and pirates who don't, or making this a recent change after an, idk, elven captain takes charge of the organization and showing the struggle of it, or making the pirates all staunch individuals who have completely disparate individual moral perspectives, or SOMETHING.)

Setting your game in MOTHERFUCKING TEVINTER and not talking about anti-elf prejudice???? What the fuck???? Being an elf doesn't radically change how the Imperium sees you?? There aren't elven slaves in every corner of this society??? You’re going to set your game in the place where Fenris came from and just.... not address anything that was part of his story???

And this is all shit I KNOW about the game, because even though I haven't played it I have seen screenshots and banters and dialogue choices. And I just.

Do the folks at bioware/ea/whoever was responsible for this understand that by taking the "problematic" elements out of the world they haven’t made it friendlier or kinder or less problematic. They've actually made it worse, imo. Because it makes the struggles of previous characters and the systemic institutional problems they raged against in previous games feel unimportant, silenced, removed. The most charitable explanation is that these characters' struggles have been retconned out of existence. The least charitable is that they have been reduced to being outliers, which in turn makes their insistence that the problems are indeed SYSTEMIC and not just the result of one "bad villain who was operating totally alone, no really" seem irrational or overblown.

I just. DAI fumbled a lot of shit but at least there was shit to fumble.