#feeling like swtor how if a character has a death in game they're written out of the story whether you chose it or not

[sheyshen]

i think the main issue i'm having with veilguard atm is that they're sharing too much. there's too many things too many spoilers (no matter how minor) too many reveals and peaks that it's kinda dampening the hype so close to release. before the peak at the CC keep people were theorizing what might be important what might come up. there was talk and people looking forward to getting their hands on the game and CC and now there's just disappointment especially from people who don't really like solas all that much. we knew he'd be a focus in the story (since it was called dreadwolf originally after all) but with the preview having such small things and the focus just being "did your inquisitor kiss him? did they want to save him?" for sure feels like a reduction of what the inquisitor was in the previous game and how they could impact veilguard's story to "does solas like like you y/n." (which feels ironic honestly)

idk. i'm still looking forward to playing but seeing the 180 from so many fans after the latest reveal is quite something. I'm not saying BW should be secretive about the details, especially after a decade of development, but yea i get how so many people have kinda started losing that excitement for the next iteration of the series after having the previous 3 be so interconnected in little personal ways and now knowing this one won't be. while i get there's a lot of choices that have been made across the games that wouldn't make sense to import, what was the point of including the inquisition portion of the keep? just to have a little sheet of what options you made? that's it?

i'm sure this has been said a million times but just kinda getting my thoughts on it out. the game will probably still be good, the story fun, the gameplay engaging, but it does feel like they're going for a sort of reset of the series with this one and i can understand the mixed feelings about it.

[three-fulm-thaumaturd]

Dawn? Trailed.

Finished Dawntrail MSQ tonight. Assorted scattershot (and spoiler-heavy) thoughts under the RM.

-I came to DT without much preexisting hype or emotional investment. All I wanted out of this expansion was to have a break from being the main character who has to save the multiverse from extinction, again, and to have some cool scenery to look at and some banger music, and we sure got that!

-There are a lot of things about how this expansion was written that didn't effortlessly or instinctively emotionally appeal to me in specific, but that are, when I think about them, really good, solid workmanlike choices re: how to construct a video game narrative.

-I know J-media tournament arcs are “well worn” in the same sense that the Grand Canyon or the Marianas Trench are, but they provide a plausible pretext for the things that MMOs are set up to do. Better than a host of supposedly highly-realized and virtuous precursor beings insisting that we repeatedly justify our existence by fighting, for sure.

-Being Wuk Lamat's mentor/emotional support Eorzean/800 pound gorilla was an interesting conceit. I think the writers carried off "non-protagonist PC" fairly well, and I've played other games where that was tried and didn't work (lookin at you SWtOR, re: KotFE). Lamat'yi feels like a more competently-written version of Stormblood-era Lyse. She's got both a core personality that remains consistent and a trajectory of increasing competence and maturity. I think she's well constructed as a protag/viewpoint character: she's primed to like things and people, her ethos of addressing conflict by seeking understanding and consensus is a good pretext to deliver exposition, and she feels/empathizes intensely but doesn't get stuck on her own emotional reactions. I wouldn’t say I effortlessly enjoy her as a character, especially early on when the writing leans hard into her immaturity and desperation to be liked and to prove herself, but I understand and respect what that’s for. It’s no different than Naruto or early-OT Luke Skywalker.

-I like the variety of Central/South American cultural inspo (Aztec, Quechua, Yucatec Maya, Pueblo, etc), we got in the setting and culture for this xpac, and the conception of Tural as a very racially/culturally heterogeneous place where power comes from the aggregate of a complicated network of relationships that have to be negotiated on an ongoing basis. It's not zero-sum, and finding solutions that benefit everyone is hard but worthwhile.

-I was excited to be able to bring Krile, my favorite Scion, along this time. I feel like the ShB/EW A-team had enough presence to appeal to people who like them and not so much that they upstaged the new characters or the change of scenery.

-I think there was effort to add cinematographic interest to the many, dense cutscenes other than wide-angle shot/reverse-shot over paragraphs of text. Some of the camera angles (switching between the faces of my minimum-height lalafell and 2m+ Wuk Lamat) and long shots of characters' expressions resulted in...sometimes-intentional uncanniness and unintentional comedy. This probably was not the devs' intention (their intention was probably a performance with emotional subtlety that the graphics overhaul alas still doesn't permit), but my instinctive read was that it felt like unnecessary padding/stalling for time.

-Re: other stuff that felt like it unnecessarily lengthened the playtime and the amount of text to read, sometimes I resent that it feels like I'm being not just spoon-fed, but bottle-fed plot and character beats that are not complicated or hard to understand. Then I see people evincing failure to comprehend what they're reading elsewhere on the internet and understand why it's done that way. :\

-There's basically one trademark Ishikawa conflict: Local man driven to extremes by inability/unwillingness to come to terms with loss, aging, and death. There's also one trademark Ishikawa sin that characterizes all of the ShB-and-after antagonists: a delusional insistence on harming the living to feed the dead. Those come up so consistently that her style is instantly recognizable...and I wonder some about what she's experienced or how she's doing.

-The hairpin turn in the plot about 2/3 of the way in and the by-now very familiar tropes aren't my narrative jam at all, but it was engaging enough to mostly keep my attention until the end. I'm beyond weary of Ascians/Ancients and shard math, so I'm glad those things were referenced (and there's some interesting stuff to chew on re: Lalafell history in particular) but not focal.

-I'm a little mad, because my pre-Heritage-Found speculation that El Dorado was going to turn out to actually be an aetherologic Superfund site (which would explain the security, the giants charging in and coming back dead, sick, or unable to reproduce, the teratogenic effects on eg Blessed Siblings etc and the fight for control of it as a putative military asset) seemed to have a lot of fun possibilities. I guess you could argue that Living Memory might be a very abstracted nod in that direction.

-*Queen Sphene*? Really, you couldn’t have named her anything at all else???

-I'm not at all satisfied that "he felt overshadowed by his father's accomplishments and wanted to prove his worth independent of his unusual heritage" is sufficient justification for how Zoraal Ja was, especially prior to his first contact with Alexandria. I figured based on his behavior and Krile's remarks, that he had to be Tempered, or affected by an equivalent kind of magical compulsion.

-The final trial, and to a lesser extent the last dungeon are an unmitigated (and unmitigatable until mods become available again) accessibility nightmare if you're photosensitive or prone to motion sickness. I hoped the devs would take the feedback they got from the ShB alliance raid series under consideration but they sure didn't give a shit. Guess I'm not doing roulettes for a while.