#im a firm believer that if they wanted to do a soft reboot by destroying and fundamentally changing Thedas

[displacer-beasts]

Yeah the parallels between Venat sundering the world vs Solas creating the Veil - both fundamentally changing the world and the people in it so deeply that it's basically like they destroyed the old world.

Emet Selch and Solas both trying to undo that and bring the world back to what it used to be (and inhabitants that used to be immortal and more magically powerful)

The destruction and death toll that it would cost for either of them to succeed. The fact that their idealized view of the past is flawed due to their grief at what they lost, so they ignore or forget the bad aspects of that time.

The inhabitants of the current world fighting for their survival, since bringing back the old world means invoking a calamity with a huge death toll, and the 'ends justify the means' argument doesn't exactly work for the people who will die in the transition to this supposedly "better" world.

Although FFXIV did a much better job at convincing me that the current world is improving and worth saving. Since it had a lot more time to show the injustices and terrible side, but it made the way the world was changing for the better feel more impactful. To be fair, they had multiple expansions to set this up and so the payoff felt earned. Seeing everyone the WoL helped coming together to help them defeat the Endsinger was incredible.

Also seeing the Unsundered World and seeing the events that led to its downfall (and seeing the Dead Ends which showed a similar utopian world that fell to despair eventually just the same) makes its fall seem inevitable.

In Veilguard it seemed like they were afraid to openly have that debate, making Solas's plans so vague and undefined, ignoring the plight of the elves and mages. That memory where Mythal talks about the modern elves "don't deserve to have the world they love ripped away to sooth [Solas's] guilty conscience" kind of falls flat if you played the other Dragon Age games and know how the elves are treated.

And since Veilguard didn't want to make it seem like Solas has a point, they ignored all the slavery and segregation and mistreatment. And so they end with keeping the status quo without actually improving anything or hinting at the situation improving eventually. The opposite in fact, since the South gets overrun by the Blight and is implied to be basically destroyed.

I need to make a 5 hour video comparing FFXIV Shadowbringers + Endwalker to Dragon Age: Inquisition + Veilguard, and then you'll see

the wildest part is that, writing-wise, there's an equivalent scene or situation or character to almost everything they were trying to do in Dragon Age, except it was actually pulled off with cohesion in FFXIV. So it would be hard to gather all the comparative examples.