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alongtidesoflight · 2 months ago

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so here's my honest thoughts on dragon age: the veilguard, after ~40 hours of playing. i finished the main quest after having finished all companion quests and major faction quests. just to clear up what content i saw, i played as an elven transmasc rook who is a member of the lords of fortune. he romanced lucanis (although after finishing the game i'm now leaning towards taash). i don't know what's happening in playthroughs that have a different race, gender identity, romance or faction going on.

full spoilers ahead, i mean it. don't read further if you want to avoid them. i don't want complaining about it in my asks.

oh and also, if you're worried because of a few negative reviews online i can comfort you by saying don't give a fuck about a certain big name youtuber who is very much tied to bethesda franchises giving this a negative review. i'll explain why.

i'm starting off with the things i liked

the game looks really pretty. i was worried it wouldn't feel like thedas anymore (with them trying to "focus on northern thedas only" i thought they'd make a clear cut in environmental design. they do and they don't. it's complicated. i'll elaborate on it when talking about the negative stuff). anyway it does. minrathous feels like kirkwall. treviso enchanted me like the winter palace did. the hossberg wetlands reminded me of the hinterlands and a couple other inquisition maps. arlathan looked like... arlathan. the crossroads were different, but familiar. overall i like the way it looks and feels. it's thedas, with a twist. it's a good one, and gives everything a solid but unique feel.

combat is top tier. if you're a hardcore dragon age player you WILL miss the tactical aspect of it for a bit, but i promise you, once you're used to the way the combat works, you will be lapping that shit up. and once you get to ability combos you'll mourn the control you used to have over your companions in battle a bit less

the MAIN quest and its story. i expected worse, way worse. and for a while the game even had me tricked (harr harr you'll get it in a second) it is Really That Much Worse. but holy shit was it good. i walked away satisfied ngl.

your choices have SOLID weight. there's consequences, good AND bad. i got minrathous blighted, ruled over by venatori, and the leader of the shadow dragons ultimately died because of my decisions. i made those at the beginning and throughout the game. he died at the end. DAVRIN died because i didn't expect what i was saying to have that much weight. i thought i was in the clear. he had hero status. well turns out, your choices can still get your companions killed even if you do everything right. i fucking love him. he shouldn't have made that sacrifice just because i told him to do everything it takes once.

the inquisitor, morrigan and dorian being there, surprisingly. there's also negatives to this though, see below.

speaking of companions dying and the inquisitor playing a bigger role: the final quest feels like me2's suicide mission. i was blown away by it and the fact that i got to see the results of all my efforts playing out in front of me.

bioware are NOT trying to redeem solas. they love him as a character yes, but i wasn't forced to see any good in him. he betrays you. he fucked my rook over twice. he fucked him over right back, for good this time (the veil wasn't torn down, i anchored it by binding him to it, he's doomed to uphold it). but solas really lives up to his name as the trickster elven god. rip to all the people who grew really attached to him over the years.

varric died. if you like him that's probably as hard reading it as it was watching it. varric died and the game lies about it until the very end. when the realisation hits, it hurts. but in the very best way.

the amount of care they put into gender expression and trans identities this time around. (i'll add onto this with negative points as well too).

rook feels very much ingrained in the world of thedas. he doesn't ask questions that expose the player to lore through dialogue as if he's stepped foot into thedas for the first time. those conversations feel very solid and good. i hope other faction players got as much joy out of this as i did.

and the things i didn't like and boy there's a lot unfortunately

the music. let's just get that out of the way holy shit. it doesn't feel like it belongs in this universe. it gets so incredibly sci-fi-y at times you'd think it's taken straight from mass effect andromeda. there's not a single song unique to veilguard that i really enjoyed. it broke my immersion, real bad. hearing a busker play the tavern songs from inquisition on a lute right after i killed some venatori with wobbly bass songs playing in the background is just odd. weird tonal shift. don't like it. it's made for people who like flashy light-weight cinema.

tevinter nights is required reading. the podcasts are required listening exercises. the game is so fast paced, especially at the start, that there's no time to introduce you to characters and how much weight their names carry in-game. i would not have known who half these people are if i hadn't skimmed over tevinter nights. i'd care even less about them than i already did. there is no time to get properly attached to them. people will act as if you're talking to a legend personified and you'll be thinking man goddamn which chapter of tevinter night were they in again and what did they do???

there's a weird mismatch with the animations. you'll have beautifully fluid ones, like emmrich casting spells. and then you'll have rook's face animating in the most unnatural manner that's sorta reminiscent of mass effect andromeda's "my face is tired" addison, when their emotions SHOULD be landing with the player rn instead.

i'm not vibing with the art style. sometimes it works. most of the time it doesn't. at points i felt like i was watching tangled.

that also brings me to some of the dialogue. same issue. i am watching frozen. i am watching tangled. someone on the writer's team really likes the adorkable trope. bellara is its victim.

for all the talk about identity, bioware sure doesn't like theirs. the grey warden armor got a redesign again and it just makes them look like a generic army. i hate it lol

in general, i don't like the armor design. the wardrobe/appearances system is fine, but it's just not helping if all the armors are just... kinda bland or downight bad looking? and don't get me started on the lords of fortune armor. that is orientalism personified.

the world states should have been carried over, full stop. i know they said they didn't because they want to separate what happens in the north from what happens in the south, which... i could have lived with that. but the inquisitor sends you letters that keep you up to date on... the south of thedas. you learn that there's a blight again, that people are standing strong but it's difficult, denerim's fallen, the rulers are taking care of it, orlais is fighting and they're successful for a while, etc etc. what's good bioware. i thought we don't care about the south this time around. why are you feeding me so much boring generic information. if you're not gonna show any of it and just write letters, then carrying the world state over should not have been an issue. i have a game dev background. those few lines of code would not have broken your budget or pushed your engine's limits. fuck right off.

this gripe of mine carries over to all the cameos. as a lord of fortune you have to deal with isabela a lot. it's fun. i missed her. you get to go drinking with her and taash and bellara! also my hawke romanced her. she's not mentioned once. they had the opportunity to put a sentence or two about her in there with not a lot of effort, trust me.

when varric dies, all she has is a single line about it. for gold, for fortune, for varric. she only says it if you interact with her on your way to the final push. that's not mandatory.

morrigan is there. kieran isn't. the old god soul that mythal and then solas absorbed? who cares at this point, the gods are dead now and solas is locked away for eternity. i suppose? why is morrigan there. she feels unneeded. i wish they'd just left her down south, at least that way i wouldn't have had to witness her god awful redesign.

dorian at least feels as if he belongs in this story. the shadow dragons are a crucial part to protecting minrathous. he's also weirdly underutilised. isabela and morrigan had more lines than him in my playthrough.

on the topic of romance: bro that was underwhelming. no, genuinely. you know when romance picked up a bit? after the point of no return. i heard maybe two lines of companion banter about it before that. maybe i missed something which i honestly doubt, but romance did not play much of a role in lucanis's storyline. i saved his grandmother as he wished me to (and if you read tevinter nights you know she was rather abusive and their relationship not the healthiest) and told him to focus on his family. a reunified family my rook wasn't even introduced to as a partner at the end of all that.

really, do not buy this game if you're only in it for the romances. others might be better, lucanis's basically gave me nothing. except for an outing (the second coffee date i had with him, it was getting repetitive) all of it played out once i committed to the final quest. the sex scene was a fade to black. annoyingly right after davrin died. if you're looking for well paced and good spice, pick up something else. the sweet talk and the final goodbye were nice though.

for all the good the ever-presence of gender identity does, it is brought up in such a disruptive manner too. it doesn't even play out naturally if you CHOOSE the lines that are meant to be said. hearing the words trans and non-binary in this setting doesn't feel right, and i'm saying this as a trans guy. i think it could have been handled more gracefully. the amount of times my rook went "i'm a MAN" as if he's about to start drumming on his chest and roaring any second now got super nerve-grating. "i'm so glad you're into me... the me who is trans. remember?" just. tell me one trans person who'd talk like that to a person they've grown close with and are trying to romance. this game doesn't handle sexuality well, so all this hey my body might not look like the way you're expecting it to look talk amounts to nothing anyway. i feel about this the way i feel about krem: this is partial exposition to trans experiences... packaged up for cis consumption. the ONLY exception to that is interacting with taash. holy shit was all of that heartwarming and bro did it feel good and natural to talk to them about theirs and rook's gender.

rivain and nevarra are new locations added by veilguard. they're also incredibly underwhelming, small and constricted maps. rivain is a coastline with a few ruins. the hall of valor is a partial ruin nestled into a cave on a beach, with a fighting pit. isabela is there in her skimpy outfit commentating your pit fights. that's it. i'm sorry if you were looking for a bustling pirate cove or whatever. you're not gonna get it. the nevarran crypts btw are a long ass dungeon crawl. that's it.

speaking of maps. i thought people were being dramatic when they said you're gonna be fighting the same enemies on them again and again. i thought they were figure of speeching it. they're not. you WILL fight the same amount of enemies. in the same spot. every time you reload the map. best to stay on a map and clear out the enemies and do as much questing on that map as you can before leaving, because you WILL have to do it all over again once you return.

the three choices i made for my inquisitor didn't matter lol she didn't have to face solas and therefore couldn't stop him at any cost as she had sworn (maybe because my rook tricked solas into binding himself to the veil, there was also an option to fight him. would she have stepped in? who knows). blackwall wasn't mentioned. and either her using a small amount of her forces in the final fight was the reason the civilians of minrathous fared so well..... or it just didn't matter. ultimately i think she had very little impact on anything

#datv #datv spoilers #dragon age: the veilguard #oh wow i hit a limit typing this #anyway to tie this up a bit: the good and bad to the environmental design being that well-known architecture like minrathous and dwarven #ruins look fire and remind me a lot of the previous games #but newly added locations are very... generic... very bland #i was very excited for rivain. i thought we'd get to see ships. not a bunch of ruins and a fighting pit and that's it #and why did i say to ignore a certain guy's review? bro because he was complaining about taash being ace and that taking up their screentim #and them being too up in your face about their identity. he did all this while she/her'ing them constantly #but my man they're trans. nb. not ace.#y'all need to be careful about bad reviews. they're coming from people who are upset about gender identity being handled as a topic in this #game. meanwhile they have no clue what they're even talking about. i don't think matty knows the difference between ace and trans #and neither do the hundreds of people who are one star rating this game currently #i liked this game. it's not top tier. it's not something i'll sink hours and hours and hours of my life into #it has tonal issues and it's moving away from what made dragon age stand out for me #but i do think that it's a genuinely fun play and people who are very invested in dragon age will squeeze joy out of it wherever they can #i had a hard time warming up to the new characters (taash and lucanis being the exception because they have an older bioware air about them #but solas's and varric's story (and don't get me wrong that's what veilguard is about) is GOOD. that is how bioware used to be.#and i wish they'd given us that energy all over the game. that direness. that grit. serious and mature writing.#that consistency is lacking #and whether you're gonna enjoy this game or not is entirely dependant on what you came here for and how well the game delivers on it #i think their weakest points are ironically the thing they advertised the most: the new companions and their writing #you won't find nuanced and good enemies here (i already reblogged something about this. you can go scroll around a bit and catch up on that #really the only thing that had me super invested and emotional was the main quest.#so make of that what you will. ultimately i was more frustrated with the game than i got enjoyment out of it. i was close to just put it #aside for now... until i went to minrathous to end ghila'nain's and elgar'nan's ritual. that all blew me away. still on a high off of it.#anyway yeah that review got cut short by the character limit maybe i'll add more to it tomorrow but rn... i am heading to bed #thanks for coming to my ted talk. also i'm sorry. zevran REALLY isn't in this.#dragon age

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abronzeagegod · 1 year ago

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WIP: Eldritch Tech Support Chapter 1: Helping a Spider Aspect

[Author's Note: this is the first chapter of a long, multi-chapter story that is likely going to be longer than all the other eldritch tech support stories combined, probably north of 20,000 words. As of writing, I'm just under 8,000 words and I haven't even hit the main plot yet. This is also being written in third person because it feels very necessary for story and scenes, I do plan on redoing some select parts in the traditional second person to see how it flows. Please enjoy and thank you to everyone who has read and supported me so far!]

Tech support is hard, this is a known fact, not a secret.

To be good at tech support you really need to have intelligence, charisma, and lots of faith.

Luckily Aeth knew that they had intelligence, well as much as they could know that about themself. They knew how to code and use some of the languages of computers, including the notoriously complex and silly C++- (C Plus Plus Minus). They had a degree from a local university attesting to that effect. Intelligence also governs knowing how computers interact with each other, and how the hardware within a computer interacts with the computer as a whole.

They're also fairly certain they have charisma. At least that's what their best friend Lyta keeps telling them.

"You have such an easy charisma about you. You're nice, easy to talk to. It's why I like you so much," she says at least once a week.

Charisma for tech support is a must because people can be weirdly cagey with their personal electronics, and they often refuse to tell the whole story from some combination of shame, self interest, and ignorance. The people themselves are a puzzle that require trust to solve and get them to reveal what insane, stupid, nonsensical things that they did to the whole system to get it to function this way.

However, the most crucial skill to have in tech support is faith.

Faith is key to figuring out exactly what the hell is going on and why the client believes that this whole thing is working, and why the working thing suddenly stopped working. Why the things that should work, do work.

They all have to be something of a priest with no god. They become a priest with every job, a priest that believes in this specific code, a priest of servers and computers and cold dead things imbued with the power of lightning and math.

Every job is a little bit different, a little bit stranger than the one before it. Every role of a priest ever so slightly different.

And Aeth has been accused of having too much faith at times. Faith that has to go somewhere, so it goes into the job.

Aeth was out in the field today. Luckily their rotation was pretty easy, they had two days out in the field, two days in the call center. Not that bad, all things considered. This was their last day before their thankfully long weekend which couldn't come soon enough.

It had been a busy day, crisscrossing their district in the northeast of the city, bouncing between several different tech support calls. Mostly internet related things, lots of outages and router trouble, at least one person was having their router haunted by his mother-in-law.

If they were lucky they'd only have two more calls to do before they called it a day and finally went home.

But that's the thing about their luck, it was always bad.

The penultimate job was for an underearth spider aspect god. They couldn't remember the exact religious denomination they belonged to, but it mattered little.

It is the nature of priests and tech support personnel to be superstitious.

They changed in the work van before heading to the third floor walk up the spider aspect lived in.

The rules for spider aspects were to wear colors, but not super bright, anything that attracted too much attention was either predator or prey. A nice pastel blue to signify that they weren't aggressive but also that they weren't something to be consumed.

There were plenty of rules and restrictions on the entities that lived in the city, and they knew that their job would never willingly send a tech support person into the lair of a giant person-eating spider, but they still had that fear, and that fear fed the superstitions.

Thus they changed in the van and before they went into the den of the spider, they grabbed a small vial of an anise solution, something that was supposed to be abhorrent to all spiders.

It was just in case, they told themselves.

They reached the door and knocked a few times, calling out to announce themselves.

"It's Tech Support," Aeth called out.

A few moments later the door cracked open and out spilled some darkness.

"We called for you," the entity just beyond the door said in a raspy voice with several clicks as they spoke.

"My name is Aeth," they say as they hold up their work ID to verify that they are there to help.

"Come in," the spider aspect said.

The door creaked open, and Aeth stepped beyond it to the apartment. It was dark and dry in there, it smelled faintly of some kind of incense, but they couldn't place exactly what kind. The darkness felt almost like a blanket draped over everything.

"You've had some issues installing some hardware?" they say as the spider god closes the door.

The spider was tall, almost seven feet but that was with all the hunching over and keeping their many limbs tucked in close. If they were to straighten up and spread out they would be almost oppressive. They were dressed simply, with a t-shirt that had a very detailed train on it that said, "My One True Love The A57-19 Commuter".

The spider nods it's great, large head.

"New keyboard, won't work," the spider said as it led Aeth towards the area where the desktop sat. "Requires new drivers, very frustrating." They can't help but notice the awkward way the spider can't quite pronounce the s's in their sentences, and how they have been deliberately avoiding them.

"Should be an easy fix," Aeth said as they sat at the computer and took out their own equipment.

The second they said it, they knew that they shouldn't have.

---

Fifteen minutes into the job, they knew that things were much much dumber than they should have been.

The new mechanical keyboard need some kind of new driver installed but it wouldn't give any indication into what driver it needed. Aeth spent a decent amount of time looking up the exact make and model of the keyboard on their own equipment, but it seemed that the company that made it flamed out very hard a few months ago.

("Found keyboard preowned, very cheap, in great condition, am on budget," the spider explained.)

The company wasn't the best or the most trustworthy, thus their sudden and total collapse.

As they were very close to locating the problem suddenly a small train that they didn't notice on a track hidden in the darkness of the apartment all but thundered in. The track was elevated near the ceiling, and the small model train was bright and loud in the dark and quiet room. It looked like some kind of Immortal Dancer party train with bright, flashing neon attached to all the train cars.

The entrance came as a shock to Aeth, but it really shouldn't have. They had a look at the computer and saw the icons on the desktop.

The spider aspect had three different train simulation games and they might have peaked and saw that they had logged close to 800 hours on one of them.

They tried to apologize to Aeth for the interruption and the train was on a timer that they had forgotten about, but honestly, whatever brings people joy, even if they are an underearth spider god aspect that would give some humans nightmares.

"I'm not here to judge," Aeth assured them and returned to the problem.

Eventually, they found the fix when they took the keyboard apart and found the little add-on that shouldn't have been there.

After examining it closely, and double checking their work, Aeth turned to the spider. "I think I found the problem. NDIVISION, the company that made this keyboard went out of business a few months back under a lot of customer complaints and bad business practices. They had, apparently, installed a keylogger in their keyboards to nominally track the use of their keyboards and when things needed to be replaced but was a massive security and privacy risk, so the complain exploded essentially so that suing them would be very hard to do. The keylogger is trying to reach a server that doesn't exist anymore."

The spider looked incredibly disheartened. Aeth privately congratulated themself on recognizing the body language of a spider god aspect.

"I can, probably, fix it. But the trick is that this will 100% void any warranty that you got with the keyboard, but since the company that would fulfill the warranty doesn't exist anymore."

"What can be done?"

"I can fix it, if you tell me I can violate the warranty. It might break later down the line, but this will work for all your day-to-day needs."

"Streaming?" The spider looked eager. Aeth had recognized the setup of a new streamer, trying to get their thing off the ground.

"Absolutely."

"Go ahead."

Aeth nodded and in a few short moments, removed the keylogger, then quickly wrote some code into the driver for the keyboard to bypass the keyboard trying to call the server of a defunct, terrible company.

The whole job took an hour.

Before they left, Aeth left the name of a very good company that made excellent keyboards when the spider was ready to upgrade to something new.

The spider thanked Aeth profusely, and almost didn't let them leave to get to their next job.

It was still early enough to make it to their last job of the day.

Hopefully this one would be much easier than the previous one.

Hopefully Aeth's luck would hold out.

if you like this check out my kofi page where you can read subsequent chapters early and find a bunch of my other stuff

#eldritch tech support #chapter 1 #this is going to be long and hopefully good #it takes a while to get going but that's because everything is necessary #we need a lot of setup and a lot of character #that way you feel something when i take it all away and put them into one of the many many hells #if you need more of this i've got plenty of other ETS stories and this is set in my Cold Black Iron and Green Fire world so read those #i like them a lot

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