#for veilguard... idk man. maybe itll change in time but rn im like. i like these characters!!! but im just not that invested.

[orcelito]

While dragon age veilguard is so fun, I must admit. I do miss the earlier games.

(Under a cut bc I unintentionally rambled a LOT...)

It's so. *Polished*. Blatantly very beautiful. And it does have some fun conversations. I don't like the fact that you can only have 2 companions with you at a time though. I miss the inventory management stuff too... which is smth I never thought I'd say, but it does feel kinda. Low-stakes in terms of item consumption. No matter how rough a battle gets, every resource I use will regenerate given a bit of time and/or a trip to the lighthouse. The EXP system is also so strange. I love defeating enemies that are well above my level bc it usually grants me a Massive amount of exp (for the level I'm at) so it gives me a giant boost. In this game, I beat two champions and a fucking revenant like 15 levels lower than them and what did I get for it??? Some items I don't use, a bit of exp, access to a few places I couldn't go otherwise...which are nice I guess, but not rly that worth it??? I'm still fighting them bc I find it fun, but it does kinda suck a bit of the satisfaction out of it. Also fights giving exp per encounter and not per enemy??? Like if it was exp gained at the end of an encounter calculated by what you fought, that'd be fine. But it'll grant the same amounts of exp no matter how many enemies are in these fights. Really, most of the exp weight is in completing missions. *massively* more exp there. Which kinda makes me sad, bc im the type who does enjoy grinding via fighting enemies and getting stronger. (But also I like the Fast Forward option of fighting BIG things for extra boost, mentioned above). Also, no body looting?? At all??? Sometimes they drop stuff, but rarely. Most of my average item drop grinding is from breaking every box and barrel I see (which is really quite funny for how no one Ever reacts to it). Ultimately, it's lots of fun, but it's missing some of these key rpg experiences that I enjoy that earlier dragon age games Did Have. So that's kinda a bummer.

I also just. Miss the stakes of the earlier games. Like we have world shattering stakes here etc etc oh no another blight but this one's Different... it's like they forgot that you don't have to keep shooting further upward to make things interesting. Like there's only so much gravity of stakes before it starts to feel kinda... idk, boring to me??? I don't care about all this Fighting The Gods shit. I don't like how they did this plot point anyways, specifically with them establishing that the elven Gods were actually all tyrant mages that enslaved the elves & the vallaslin (an important culutral symbol to the dalish identity) were actually slave markings. It feels so massively disrespectful & dismissive of polytheistic cultures, bc they're saying the elves, a group of marginalized people with some clinging desperately to their old heritage, are all mistaken about their gods. And it's only the True god (the Maker)(100% just Christianity in a fantasy setting) that is a real actual god. Or something. I just HATE IT.... and also how they're portraying Tevinter and Antiva, especially with the rewriting of the Crows being some noble and familial order instead of conductors of child torture etc etc. And Tevinter keeps going on about the magisters and the venatori and the slaves and it talks about the Shadow Dragons' work but we don't actually. See much of anything??? At least not yet. They just look like they're sitting there twiddling their thumbs. Would love to actually participate in a slave break or something. See stuff more overtly instead of all the slaves talk being just talk??? Idfk it's Tevinter, smth that has long been a boogeyman for the series bc of its evil mages and slavery, but like... we don't even see any slaves around. They're mentioned Plenty, and they show iconography of it, but it just feels like the true horrors are off hidden... somewhere. Somewhere else. I mean aside from the stuff in like. The underwater prison, where we saw the effects of the blood magic experimentation, but EVEN THEN, slaves were only mentioned. It's like they were too scared to ever show a single actual slave. And after knowing and loving Fenris for so long, it kinda feels insulting??? Feels like the slaves are being denied their personhood. They can only exist as concepts, not actual people for us to see and know their pain. It's reductive, honestly.

Which, that's a good word. That explains this game in a lot of ways. It's Reductive. With the Crows, the magisters, how they present and have us handle the Gods + veil situation... even with all the death and destruction, it doesn't feel like there are any real stakes. Just oh no, more people are dead. I played the Treviso vs Minrathous choice today, chose Minrathous, and I was surprised by how... anticlimactic that fight was??? Like I guess I'm also pretty damn strong and that dragon was pretty challenging even for me. But not That challenging. And I didn't even get to finish the fight. And ALSO they mentioned something about the venatori marching on the magisterium or something?? But then I didn't get to do anything about it??? Just, oh fight's done, let's pop on over to the other city now. Other city is wrecked bc they just couldn't get the dragon to come down... which I know it's bc Rook has the knife that the dragon comes down to fight them, but *surely* they could've shot at the dragon with arrows in Treviso... for it to get low enough to blight everything??? And they couldn't do Anything?????? So like it does suck, there are definite stakes, I hate seeing Treviso overrun by blight like this and it's interesting that they had named characters die from it. I'll miss Heir bc I kinda liked her (WHICH IS WEIRD GIVEN SHES A TRAINER FOR THE CROWS AND YOU KNOW WHAT WE HEARD ABOUT TRAINING IN THE CROWS BEFORE?!?!?! But not this trainer don't worry she's niceys :3)(🙄🙄🙄🙄). But EVEN STILL... It just. It all just felt so anticlimactic. It wasn't a hard enough fight to merit it completely wrecking the other town like that. And the fact that i literally sent half my team to help out the other place!!! The literal only difference is that I had this damned dagger!!! It seems like such a bullshit small excuse to make me make some big difficult choice. Also the dagger being the idol that they found with Bertrand in da2???? That feels so weird. Something about purifying it or whatever but idk it just feels so *weird*.

Idk I miss the earlier games where it felt like things actually mattered. The romances were deep and complex. Again, with Fenris, we got to see how his trauma fucked with him in so many ways and how it took him literal *years* to feel ready for romance. And the passage of time!!!!! Like origins was wonderful for a classic epic rpg story kinda thing, a very good game, but da2 was amazing for how it spanned very little actually, but felt so *important*. It was just us living out a decade with this guy in a fucked up city with his fucked up friends. Everything felt like it *mattered*. It felt like we were actually part of the world.

Which that's another thing, isn't it?? The immersion, the feeling like I'm Part of the world... inquisition also struggled with this in a similar way to veilguard, though to its credit veilguard does try to tie in character backstories more... but we still don't *see* that. In origins and da2, you get a preview of your life Before everything happened. So you see how you ended up how you are. You also got to see your backstory characters at the start of the game, instead of them tossing some characters in front of you and going "Oh yeah, you know them :]" like no I dont???? Idfk it just makes it feel like it matters less.

AND ALSO!!!!!!!!!!!

The mages vs templars thing was such a central part of the games prior to this, and also the stuff on the treatment of elves. I got *one* dialog thing about how hard it must've been growing up in Tevinter as an elf (since I'm the shadow dragon background + an elf) but besides that??? Barely any mention at all. And there's next to no mention of mages with this, which I guess is largely due to the game being set in places other than Ferelden and Orlais....... but idfk man I feel like the world wouldn't be *this* different, minus like. Tevinter, obviously. Even then, we barely see mention of how elves are treated Even In Tevinter, where they are literally largely *enslaved*. I don't know if they've even mentioned that the slaves are all elves. I don't remember it at least if they did mention it (and I have a good memory). And fuck me, I do miss the mages vs templar thing, if only bc of how central it was and how Weird it feels for it to be a nonissue now. Even with us being in a different region of the world, it feels like we've just. Lost touch with the world's key influences. And reduced them all to just... oh no, here's some more death and blood magic. Which is awful, sure, but it feels like Everything awful in this game is just chalked up to death and blood magic and blight. I keep discovering letters in the field and I know they're gonna be dead. Like every time. Go out to find someone? Oh, they're dead now. Or blighted. Or they're dying and we get to hear their last words. I think the only exception for this was when we found the younger cousin in the Crows... which. Even Then. His elder cousin, who we were going after, was found dead. Where's the complexities!?!??!?! Why is everything just death and destruction!??!?!?!? There are more fucked up things to do with characters than just killing them or throwing darkspawn at them!!!!!! It's exactly this kind of thing that's desensitizing me to it in this game. Like oh no more death. Oh well, let's keep on exploring. 🙄🙄🙄🙄 it is, yet again, Reductive.

Now ALL THIS BEING SAID.... I am still obsessively playing veilguard and am having a ton of fun with it. But it just... doesn't Really feel like a dragon age game to me. It's fun, but only really when you assess it on its own. If you look at it in the context of the world at large and the earlier games, its writing just feels so, so weak. I've rambled for forever now and I still have more things I could complain about, but I will not. Because this post is long enough.

I just really miss origins and da2....