#if you're mad your rook acts like a camp counselor

[subcorax]

(Caveat upfront: I do not have ZERO criticisms of Veilguard, it's still a Bioware joint and there are some issues, I definitely agree with what a lot of other folks have said about Taash's storyline and some other cultural/writing issues, so please do not read this as a completely uncritical take lol.)

BUT, okay, some slightly more cohesive thoughts:

I am actually completely okay with Veilguard deciding that few/no decisions from prior games mattered. I love my Warden, my Hawke, and my Inquisitor, but I think VG was a stronger game - and frankly, that Inquisition was a much weaker one for it. To be clear: Inquisition is a well-loved, well-remembered, well-reviewed game, and for good reasons! It was a lot of people's first point of entry into the series, and a lot of people's favourite even now, and I don't begrudge them that at all, but for me personally, it really, really did not work, and a big part of that was the scope. It was too big to be able to do what it wanted to do. The DA Keep was ambitious, but fell flat, because it was impossible for the devs to account for every possible variation of a worldstate in the same game. Whatever impact your previous choices had on the world had to be surface-level and easily interchangable with any other outcome of that choice. Most minor choices ended up being functionally easter eggs, an NPC you might happen to recognize in passing or a stray line of conversation with one of your companions or advisors. The choices that had major outcomes on the social and political landscape of the setting, like who the current ruler of Ferelden is or whether Starkhaven is currently doing a crusade in the Free Marches, had to be confined to tightly-controlled cutscenes, or war table missions. Because all of your choices had to matter, none of them could actually matter.

I think that Veilguard just deciding upfront to go, "Don't worry about southern Thedas, Inquisitor's got it covered, worry about what's going on up here" was genuinely a smart choice, because it freed them from having to worry about accounting for variations in the worldstate and allowed them to just tell the story they wanted to tell. (And for what it's worth, I think DA2 also made this choice by setting the game in Kirkwall and going "man who cares what's happening in Ferelden, we've got other shit to worry about", and I think that was a good choice for the story they were telling. DA2 did also have the benefit of being from the same console generation as DAO and therefore being able to easily port a worldstate from one to the other.)

And genuinely, I think that time and effort was better spent on building out the world they did in Veilguard. The story and setting feel concentrated and purposeful; the maps are a lot smaller than Inquisition, but have felt unique and interesting, because man, is it cool to actually get to explore the crypts in Nevarra instead of just reading a codex entry about them or having an NPC exposit to me about them! And it feels as though your character's background actually matters! The sheer amount of ambient dialogue, casual references, variations in conversation during quests, based on your character's faction and race, is fantastic to see! Like, that's where I'd rather have the time and effort of development going, to making each variation, each version of Rook feel fleshed out and established within the world, a character with a background that they and others think and talk about.

And of course, your mileage may vary on any of this. Folks are both happy with and disappointed with Veilguard for any number of reasons. But for me personally, with what I wanted out of this game, I'm glad they made the choices they did, and I honestly do think it's a stronger and more cohesive game because they deliberately limited the scope of it.

may or may not elaborate on this later but ultimately where i'm falling on this is:

if someone loved inquisition for all the reasons i hated it, they'd probably end up hating veilguard for all the reasons i'm loving it. and i don't think this is necessarily a good or a bad thing, we just probably wanted quite different things out of a game