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acealistair · 5 months ago

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Dragon Age: The Veilguard GameInformer Article Transcribed

I saw some people lamenting that they had no way to read the GameInformer article, and while MVP dalishious posted screenshots of the article here, I figured that might be a little difficult to read, plus people with screen readers can't read it of course. So I've gone ahead and transcribed it! Full thing below the cut!

As a note, I transcribed it without correcting any typos, capitalization errors, etc. that the article itself had (as much as it pained me, omg the author capitalizes so many things that shouldn't be and vice versa). There may be some typos on my part as I did this as quickly as I could, so apologies in advance for any you might encounter.

I have also created a plot-spoiler-free version of the article for those who would like to learn more about the mechanics of the game without learning more plot info than they want!

Throughout my research and preparation for a trip to BioWare’s Edmonton, Canada, office for this cover story, I kept returning to the idea that its next game, Dragon Age: The Veilguard (formerly subtitled Dreadwolf) is releasing at a critical moment for the storied developer. The previous installment, Dragon Age: Inquisition, hit PlayStation, Xbox, and PC a decade ago. It was the win BioWare needed, following the 2012 release of Mass Effect 3 with its highly controversial and (for many) disappointing ending. Inquisition launched two years later, in 2014, to rave reviews and, eventually, various Gameo the Year awards, almost as if a reminder of what the studio was capable of.

Now, in 2024, coincidentally, the next Dragon Age finds itself in a similar position. BioWare attempted a soft reboot of Mass Effect with Andromeda in 2017, largely seen as a letdown among the community, and saw its first live-service multiplayer attempt in 2019’s Anthem flounder in the tricky waters of the genre; it aimed for a No Man’s Sky-like turnaround with Anthem Next, but that rework was canceled in 2021. Like its predecessor, BioWare’s next Dragon Age installment is not only a new release in a beloved franchise, but is another launch with the pressure of BioWare’s prior misses; a game fans hope will remind them the old BioWare is still alive today.

“Having been in this industry for 25 years, you see hits and misses, and it’s all about building off of those hits and learning from those misses,” BioWare general manager Gary McKay, who’s been with the studio since January 2020, tells me.

As McKay gives me a tour of the office, I can’t help but notice how much Anthem is scattered around it. More than Mass Effect, more than Dragon Age, there’s a lot of Anthem - posters, real-life replicas of its various Javelins, wallpaper, and more. Recent BioWare news stories tell of leads and longtime studio veterans laid off and others departing voluntarily. Veilguard’s development practically began with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. When I ask McKay about the tumultuousness of BioWare and how he, as the studio manager, makes the team feel safe in the product it’s developing, he says it’s about centering on the creative vision. “[When] we have that relentless pursuit for quality, and we have passion and people in the right roles, a lot of the other stuff you’re talking about just fades into the background.”

That’s a sentiment echoed throughout the team I speak to: Focus on what makes a BioWare game great and let Veilguard speak for itself. Though I had no expectations going in - it’s been 10 years since the last Drag Age, after all, and BioWare has been cagey about showing this game publicly - my expectations have been surpassed. This return to Thedas, the singular continent of the franchise, feels like both a warm welcome for returning fans and an impressive entry point for first-time players.

New Age, New Name

At the start of each interview, I address a dragon-sized elephant in the room with the game’s leads. What was Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is now Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Why?

“These games are reflections of the teams that make them, and as part of that, it means we learn a lot about what the heart and soul of the game really is as we’re developing it,” Veilguard game director Corinne Busche tells me. “We quickly learned and realized that the absolute beating heart of this game is these authentic, diverse companions. And when we took a step back, as we always do, we always check our decisions and make sure they still represent the game we’re trying to build.”

Dreadwolf no longer did that, but each member of BioWare I speak to tells me The Veilguard does. And while I was initially abrasive to the change - lore aside, Dreadwolf is simply a cool name - I warmed up to The Veilguard.

Solas, a Loki-esque trickster member of the Elven pantheon of gods known as the Dread Wolf, created the Veil long ago while attempting to free the elves from their slave-like status in Thedas. This Veil is a barrier between the magical Fade and Thedas, banishing Elven gods and removing Elven immortality from the world. But players didn’t know that in Inquisition, where he is introduced as a mage ally and companion. However, at the end of Inquisition’s Trespasser DLC, which sets the stage for Veilguard, we learn in a shocking twist that Solas wants to destroy the Veil and restore Elves to their former glory. However, doing so would bring chaos to Thedas, and those who call it home, the people who eventually become The Veilguard, want to stop him.

“There’s an analogy I like to use, which is, ‘If you want to carve an elephant out of marble, you just take a piece of marble and remove everything that doesn’t look like an elephant,’” Veilguard creative director John Epler says. “As we were building this game, it became really clear that it was less that we were trying to make The Veilguard and more like The Veilguard was taking shape as we built the game. Solas is still a central figure in it. He’s still a significant character. But really, the focus shifts to the team.

“[We] realized Dreadwolf suggests a title focused on a specific individual, whereas The Veilguard, much like Inquisition, focuses more on the team.”

Creating Your Rook

Veilguard’s character creator is staggeringly rich, with a dizzying number of customizable options. Busche tells me that inclusivity is at the heart of it, noting that she believes everyone can create someone who represents them on-screen.

There are four races to choose from when customizing Rook, the new playable lead - Elves, Qunari, Humans, and Dwarves - and hundreds of options to customize your character beyond that. You can select pronouns separately from gender and adjust physical characteristics like height, shoulder width, chest size, glute and bulge size, hip width, how bloodshot your eyes are, how crooked your nose is, and so much more. There must be hundreds of sliders to customize these body proportions and features like skin hue, tone, melanin, and just about anything else you might adjust on a character. Oh, and there’s nudity in Veilguard, too, which I learn firsthand while customizing my Rook.

“The technology has finally caught up to our ambition,” Dragon Age series art director Matt Rhodes tells me as we decide on my warrior-class Qunari’s backstory, which affects faction allegiance, in-game dialogue, and reputation standing - we choose the pirate-themed Lords of Fortune.

Notably, instead of a warrior class, we could have chosen mage or rogue. All three classes have unique specializations, bespoke skill trees, and special armors, too. And though our Rook is aligned with the Lords of Fortune faction, there are others to choose from including the Grey Wardens, Shadow Dragons, The Mourn Watch, and more. There is some flexibility in playstyle thanks to specializations, but your class largely determines the kind of actions you can perform in combat.

“Rook ascends because of competency, not because of a magical McGuffin,” BioWare core lead and Mass effect executive producer Michael Gamble tells me in contrast to Inquisition’s destiny-has-chosen-you-characterization.

“Rook is here because they choose to be, and that speaks to the kind of character that we’ve built.” Busche adds, “Someone needs to stop this, and Rook says, ‘I guess that’s me.’”

Beyond the on-paper greatness of this character creator, its customizability speaks to something repeated throughout my BioWare visit: Veilguard is a single-player, story-driven RPG. Or in other words, the type of game that made BioWare as storied as it is. McKay tells me the team explored a multiplayer concept early in development before scratching it to get back to BioWare basics. The final game will feature zero multiplayer and no microtransactions.

Happy to hear that, I pick our first and last name, then one of four voices, with a pitch shifter for each, too, and we’re off to Minrathous.

Exploring Tevinter For The First Time

Throughout the Dragon Age series, parts of Thedas are discussed by characters and referenced by lore material but left to the imagination of players as they can’t visit them. Veilguard immediately eschews this, setting its opening prologue mission in Minrathous, the capital of the Tevinter Empire. Frankly, I’m blown away by how good it looks. It’s my first time seeing Veilguard in action and my first look at a Dragon Age game in nearly a decade. Time has treated this series well, and so has technology.

Epler, who’s coming up on 17 years at BioWare, acknowledges that the franchise has always been at the will of its engine. Dragon Age: Origins and II’s Eclipse Engine worked well for the time, but today, they show their age. Inquisition was BioWare’s first go at Ea’s proprietary Frostbite engine - mind you, an engine designed for first-person shooters and decidedly not multi-character RPGs - and the team struggled there, too. Epler and Busche agree Veilguard is the first RPG where BioWare feels fully in command of Frostbite and, more generally, its vision for this world.

We begin inside a bar. Rook and Varric are looking for Neve Gallus, a detective mage somewhere in Minrathous. The first thing players will do once Veilguard begins is select a dialogue option, something the team says speaks to their vision of a story-forward, choice-driven adventure. After a quick bar brawl cutscene that demonstrates Rook’s capabilities, there’s another dialogue choice, and different symbols here indicate the type of tone you can roll with. There’s a friendly, snarky, and rough-and-tough direct choice, and I later learn of a more romantically inclined “emotional” response. These are the replies that will build relationships with characters, romantic and platonic alike, but you’re welcome to ignore this option. However, your companions can romance each other, so giving someone the cold shoulder might nudge them into the warm embrace of another. We learn Neve is in Dumat Plaza and head into the heart of Minrathous.

Rhodes explains BioWare’s philosophy for designing this city harkens back to a quick dialogue from Inquisition’s Dorian Pavus. Upon entering Halamshiral’s Winter Palace, the largest venue in Dragon Age history at that point, Dorian notes that it’s cute, adorable even, alluding to his Tevinter heritage. If Dorian thinks the largest venue in Dragon Age history is cute and adorable, what must the place he’s from be like? “It’s like this,” Rhodes says as we enter Minrathous proper in-game.

Minrathous is huge, painted in magical insignia that looks like cyberpunk-inspired neon city signs and brimming with detail. Knowing it’s a city run by mages and built entirely upon magic, Rhodes says the team let its imagination run wild. The result is the most stunning and unique city in the series. Down a wide, winding pathway, there’s a pub with a dozen NPCs - Busche says BioWare used Veilguard’s character creator to make each in-world NPC except for specific characters like recruitable companions - and a smart use of verticality, scaling, and wayfinding to push us toward the main attraction: Solas, attempting to tear down the Veil.

All hell is breaking loose. Pride Demons are rampaging through the city. Considering Pride Demons were bosses in prior games, seeing them roaming freely in the prologue of Veilguard speaks to the stakes of this opener. Something I appreciate throughout our short journey through Minrathous to its center below is the cinematography at play. As a Qunari, my character stands tall, and Rhodes says the camera adjusts to ensure larger characters loom over those below. On the flip side, the camera adjusts for dwarves to demonstrate their smaller stature compared to those around them.

This, coupled with movie-liked movement through the city as BioWare showcases the chaos happening at the hands of Solas’ Veil-break ritual, creates a cinematic start that excited me, and I’m not even hands-on with the game.

Eventually, we reach Neve, who has angered some murderous blood mages, and rescue her from danger. Or rather, help… barely. Neve is quite capable, and her well-acted dialogue highlights that. Together, Varric, returning character Lace Harding, who is helping us stop Solas and is now a companion, Rook, and Neve defeat some demons. They then take on some Venatori Cultists seizing this chaotic opportunity to take over the city and other enemies before making it to Solas’ hideout. As we traverse deeper and deeper into this hideout, more of Solas’ murals appear on the walls, and things get more Elven. Rhodes says this is because you’re symbolically going back in time, as Minrathous is a city built by mages on the bones of what was originally the home of Elves.

At the heart of his hideout, we discover Solas’ personal Eluvian. This magical mirror-like structure allows the gang to teleport (and mechanically fast-travel) to Arlathan Forest, where Solas is secretly performing the ritual (while its effects pour out into Minrathous).

Here, we encounter a dozen or so demons, which BioWare has fully redesigned on the original premise of these monstrous creatures. Rhodes says they’re creatures of feeling and live and die off the emotions around them. As such, they are just a floating nervous system, push into this world from the Fade, rapidly assembled into bodies out of whatever scraps they find.

I won’t spoil the sequence of events here, but we stop Solas’ ritual and seemingly save the world… for now. Rook passes out moments later and wakes up in a dream-like landscape to the voice of none other than Solas. He explains a few drops of Rook’s blood interacted with the ritual, connecting them to the Fade forever. He also says he was attempting to move the Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain, part of the Evanuris or Elven gods of ancient times, to a new prison because the one he had previously constructed was failing. Unfortunately, Solas is trapped in the Fade by our doing, and these gods are now free. It’s up to Rook to stop them; thus, the stage for our adventure is set.

The Veilguard Who’s Who

While we learned a lot about returning character but first-time companion Lace Harding, ice mage private detective Neve Gallus, and veil jumper Bellara Lutara, BioWare shared some additional details about other companions Rook will meet later in the game. Davrin is a charming Grey Warden who is also an excellent monster hunter; Emmrich is a member of Nevarra’s Mourn Watch and a necromancer with a skeleton assistant named Manfred; Lucanis is a pragmatic assassin whose bloodline descends from the criminal House of Crows organization; And Taash is a dragon hunter allied with the piratic Lords of Fortune. All seven of these characters adorn this Game Informer issue, with Bellara up front and center in the spotlight.

The Lighthouse

After their encounter with Solas, Rook wakes up with Harding and Neve in the lair of the Dread Wolf himself, a special magical realm in the Fade called the Lighthouse. It’s a towering structure centered amongst various floating islands. Epler says, much like Skyhold in Inquisition, the Lighthouse is where your team bonds, grows, and prepares for its adventures throughout the campaign. It also becomes more functional and homier as you do. Already, though, it’s a beautifully distraught headquarters for the Veilguard, although they aren’t quite referring to themselves as that just yet.

Because it was Solas’ home base of operations, it’s gaudy, with his fresco murals adorning various walls, greenery hanging from above, and hues of purple and touches of gold everywhere. Since it’s in the Fade, a realm of dreams that responds to your world state and emotion, the Lighthouse reflects the chaos and disrepair of the Thedas you were in moments ago. I see a clock symbol over a dialogue icon in the distance, which signals an optional dialogue option. We head there, talk to Neve, select a response to try our hand at flirting, and then head to the dining hall.

A plate, a fork and knife, and a drinking chalice are at the end of a massive table. Rhodes says this is both a funny (and sad) look at Solas’ isolated existence and an example of the detail BioWare’s art team has put into Veilguard. “It’s a case of letting you see the story,” he says. “It’s like when you go to a friend's house and see their bedroom for the first time; you get to learn more about them.” From the dining hall, we gather the not-quite-Veilguard in the library, which Busche says in the central area of the Lighthouse and where your party will often regroup and prepare for what’s next. The team decides it must reach the ritual site back in Arlathan Forest, and Busche says I’m missing unique dialogue options here because I’m Qunari; an Elf would have more to say about the Fade due to their connection to it. The same goes for my backstory earlier in Minrathous. If I had picked the Shadow Dragons background, Neve would have recognized me immediately, with unique dialogue.

With our next move decided, we head to Solas’ Eluvian to return to Arlathan Forest and the ritual site. However, it’s not fully functional without Solas, and while it returns us to Arlathan Forest, it’s not exactly where we want to go. A few moments later, we’re back in the Arlathan Forest, and just before a demon-infested suit of mechanized armor known as a Sentinel can attack, two new NPCs appear to save us: Strife and Irelin. Harding recognizes them, something Dragon Age comic readers might know about. They’re experts in ancient elven magic and part of the new Veil Jumpers faction. The ensuing cutscene, where we learn Strife and Irelin need help finding someone named Bellara Lutara, is long, with multiple dialogue options. That’s something I’m noticing with Veilguard, too - there’s a heavy emphasis on storytelling and dialogue, and it feels deep and meaty, like a good fantasy novel. BioWare doesn’t shy away from minutes-long cutscenes.

Busche says that’s intentional, too. “For Rook, [this story’s about] what does it meant to be a leader,” she says. “You’re defining their leadership style with your choices.” Knowing that Rook is the leader of the Veilguard, I’m excited to see how far this goes. From the sound of it, my team will react to my chosen leadership style in how my relationships play out. That’s demonstrated within the game’s dialogue and a special relationship meter on each companion’s character screen.

Redefining Combat Once More

Bellara is deep within Arlathan Forest, and following the prolgoue’s events, something is up here. Three rings of massive rocks fly through the air, protecting what appears to be a central fortress. Demon Sentinels plague the surrounding lands, and after loading up a new save, we’re in control of a human mage.

Following the trend of prior Dragon Age games, Veilguard has completed the series’ shift from tactical strategy to real-time action, but fret not: a tactical pause-and-play mechanic returns to satiate fans who remember the series’ origins (pun intended). Though I got a taste of combat in the prologue, Veilguard’s drastic departure from all that came before it is even more apparent here.

Busche says player complete every swing in real-time, with special care taken to animation swing-through and canceling. There's a dash, a parry, the ability to charge moves, and a completely revamped healing system that allows you to use potions at your discretion by hitting right on the d-pad. You can combo attacks and even “bookmark” combos with a quick dash, which means you can pause a combo’s status with a dash to safety and continue the rest of the combo afterward. It looks even cooler than it sounds.

Like any good action game, there is a handful of abilities to customize your kit. And, if you want to maintain that real-time action feel, you can use them on the fly, so long as you take cooldowns into effect. But Veilguard’s pause-and-play gameplay mechanic, similar to Inquisition’s without the floating camera view, lets you bring things to halt for a healthy but optional dose of strategy.

In this screen, which essentially pauses the camera and pulls up a flashy combat wheel that highlights you and your companions’ skills, you can choose abilities, queue them up, and strategize with synergies and combos, all while targeting specific enemies. Do what you need to here, let go of the combat wheel, and watch your selections play out. Busche says she uses the combat wheel to dole out her companions’ attacks and abilities while sticking to the real-time action for her player-controlled Rook. On the other hand, Epler says he almost exclusively uses the combat wheel to dish out every ability and combo.

Busche says each character will play the same, in that you execute light and heavy attacks with hte same buttons, use abilities with the same buttons, and interact with the combo wheel in the same way, regardless of which class you select. But a sword-and-shield warrior, like we used in the prolgoue, can hip-fire or aim their shield to throw it like Captain America, whereas our human mage uses that same button to throw out magical ranged attacks. The warrior can parry incoming attacks, which can stagger enemies. The rogue gets a larger parry window. Our mage, however, can’t parry at all. Instead, they throw up a shield that blocks incoming attacks automatically so long as you have the mana to sustain it.

“What I see from Veilguard is a game that finally bridges the gap,” former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah, who left BioWare in 2021 before joining the Veilguard team last year as a consultant, tells me. “Uncharitably, previous Dragon Age games got to the realm of ‘combat wasn’t too bad.’ In this game, the combat’s actually fun, but it does keep that thread that’s always been there. You have the focus on Rook, on your character, but still have that control and character coming into the combat experience from the other people in the party.”

“This is really the best Dragon Age game that I’ve ever played,” he adds, noting his bias. “This is the one where we get back to our roots of character-driven storytelling, have really fun combat, and aren’t making compromises.”

Watching Busche take down sentinels and legions of darkspawn on-screen, I can already sense Veilguard’s combat will likely end up my favorite in the series, although admittedly, as a fan of action games, I’m an easy sell here. It’s flashy, quick, and thanks to different types of health bars, like a greenish-blue one that represents barrier and is taken down most effectively with ranged attacks, a decent amount of strategy, even if you don’t use the pause-and-play combo wheel. Like the rest of the game, too, it’s gorgeous, with sprinkles, droplets, and splashes of magic in each attack our mage unleashes. Though I’m seeing the game run on a powerful PC, which is sure to be the best showcase of Veilguard, Epler tells me the game looks amazing on consoles - he’s been playing it on PlayStation 5 and enjoying it in both its fidelity and performance modes, but I’ll have to take his word for it.

Pressing Start

The start or pause screen is as important to a good RPG as the game outside the menus. Veilguard’s contains your map, journal, character sheets, skill tree, and a library for lore information. You can cross-compare equipment and equip new gear here for Rook and your companions, build weapon loadouts for quick change-ups mid-combat, and customize you and your party’s abilities and builds via an easy-to-understand skill tree. You won’t find minutiae here, “just real numbers,” Busche says. That means a new unlocked trait might increase damage by 25 percent against armor, but that’s as in-depth as the numbers get. Passive abilities unlock jump attacks and guarantee critical hit opportunities, while abilities add moves like a Wall of Fire to your arsenal (if you’re a mage). As you spec out this skill tree, which is 100 percent bespoke to each class, you’ll work closer to unlocking a specialization, of which there are three for each class, complete with a unique ultimate ability. Busche says BioWare’s philosophy here is “about changing the way you play, not statistical minutiae.”

Companion Customization

You can advance your bonds by helping companions on their own personal quests and by including them in your party for main quests. Every Relationship Level you rank up, shown on their character sheet, nets you a skill point to spend on them. Busche says the choices you make, what you say to companions, how you help them, and more all matter to their development as characters and party members. And with seven companions, there’s plenty to customize, from bespoke gear to abilities and more. Though each companion has access to five abilities, you can only take three into combat, so it’s important to strategize different combos and synergies within your party. Rhodes says beyond this kind of customizable characterization, each companion has issues, problems, and personal quests to complete. “Bellara has her own story arc that runs parallel to and informs the story path you’re on,” Rhodes says.

In Entropy’s Grasp

As we progress through the forest and the current “In Entropy’s Grasp” mission, we finally find Bellara. She’s a veil jumper, the first companion you meet and recruit in-game (unlike Neve, who automatically joins), and the centerpiece of this issue’s cover image. Because our mage’s background is Veil Jumper, we get some unique dialogue. Bellara explains we’re all trapped in a Veil Bubble, and there’s no way out once you pass through it. Despite the dire situation, Bellara is bubbly, witty, and charming.

“When designing companions, they’re the load-bearing pillars for everything,” Rhodes says. “They’re the face of their faction, and in this case [with Bellara], their entire area of the world. She’s your window into Arlathan Forest.” Rhodes describes her as a sweetheart and nerd for ancient elven artifacts. As such ,she’s dressed more like an academic than a combat expert, although her special arm gauntlet is useful both for tinkering with her environment and taking down enemies.

Unlike Neve, who uses ice magic like our Rook and can slow down time with a special ability, Bellara specializes in electricity, and she can also use magic to heal you, something Busche says Dragon Age fans have been desperate to have in a game. Busche says if you don’t direct Neve and Bellara, they’re fully independent and will attack on their own. But synergizing your team will add to the fun and strategy of combat. Bellara’s electric magic is effective against Sentinels, which is great because we currently only have access to ice. However, without Bellara, we could also equip a rune that converts my ice magic, for a brief duration, into electricity to counter the Sentinels.

As we progress through Arlathan Forest, we encounter more and more darkspawn. Bellara mentions the darkspawn have never been this far before because the underground Deep Roads, where they usually escape from, aren’t nearby. However, with blighted Elven gods roaming the world, and thanks to Blight’s radiation-like spread, it’s a much bigger threat in Veilguard than in any Dragon Age before it.

I continue to soak in the visuals of Veilguard with Arlathan Forest’s elven ruins, dense greenery, and disgusting Blight tentacles and pustules; it’s perhaps the most impressive aspect of my time seeing the game, although everything else is making a strong impression, too. I am frustrated about having to watch the game rather than play it, to be honest. I’m in love with the art style, which is more high fantasy than anything in the series thus far and almost reminiscent of the whimsy of Fable, a welcome reprieve from the recent gritty Game of Thrones trend in fantasy games. Rhodes says that’s the result of the game’s newfound dose of magic.

“The use of magic has been an evolution as the series has gone on,” he says. “It’s something we’ve been planning for a while because Solas has been planning all this for a while. In the past, you could hint at cooler magical things in the corner because you couldn’t actually go there, but now we actually can, and it’s fun to showcase that.”

Busche, Epler, and Rhodes warn me that Arlathan Forest’s whimsy will starkly contrast to other areas. They promise some grim locations and even grimmer story moments because, without that contrast, everything falls flat. Busche likens it to a “thread of optimism” pulled through otherworldly chaos ravaging Thedas. For now, the spunky and effervescent Bellara is that thread.

As we progress deeper into the forest, Bellara spots a floating fortress and thinks the artifact needed to destroy the Veil Bubble is in there. To reach it, though, wem ust remove the floating rock rings, and Bellara’s unique ability, Tinker, can do just that by interacting with a piece of ancient elven technology nearby. Busche says Rook can acquire abilities like Tinker later to complete such tasks in instances where Bellara, for example, isn’t in the party.

Bellara must activate three of these in Arlathan Forest to reach the floating castle, and each one we activate brings forth a slew of sentinels, demons, and darkspawn to defeat. Busche does so with ease, showcasing high-level gameplay by adding three stacks of arcane build-up to create an Arcane Bomb on an enemy, which does devastating damage after being hit by a heavy attack. Now, she begins charging a heavy attack on her magical staff, then switches to magical daggers in a second loadout accessed with a quick tap of down on the d-pad to unleash some quick attacks, then back to the staff to charge it some more and unleash a heavy attack.

After a few more combat encounters, including one against a sentinel that’s “Frenzied,” which means it hits harder, moves faster, and has more health, we finally reach the center of the temple. Within is a particular artifact known as the Nadas Dirthalen, which Bellara says means “the inevitability of knowledge.” Before we can advance with it, a darkspawn Ogre boss attacks. It hits hard, has plenty of unblockable, red-coded attacks, and a massive shield we must take down first. However, it’s weak to fire, and our new fire staff is perfect for the situation.

After taking down this boss in a climactic arena fight, Bellara uses a special crystal to power the artifact and remove it from a pedestal, destroying the Veil Bubble. Then, the Nadas Dirthalen comes alive as an Archive Spirit, but because the crystal used to power it breaks, we learn little about this spirit before it disappears. Fortunately, Bellara thinks she can fix it - fixing broken stuff is kind of her thing, Epler says - so the group heads back to the Veil Jumper camp and, as interested as I am in learning what happens next, the demo ends. It’s clear that even after a few hours with the game’s opening, I’ve seen a nigh negligible amount of game; frustrating but equally as exciting.

Don’t Call It An Open World

Veilguard is not an open world, even if some of its explorable areas might fee like one. Gamble describes Veilguard’s Thedas as a hub-and-spoke design where “the needs of the story are served by the level design.” A version of Inquisition’s Crossroads, a network of teleporting Eluvians, returns, and it’s how players will traverse across northern Thedas. Instead of a connected open world, players will travel from Eluvian to Eluvian to different stretches of this part of the continent. This allows BioWare to go from places like Minrathous to tropical beaches to Arlathan Forest to grim and gothic areas and elsewhere. Some of these areas are larger and full of secrets and treasures. Others are smaller and more focused on linear storytelling. Arlathan Forest is an example of this, but there are still optional paths and offshoots to explore for loot, healing potion refreshes, and other things. There’s a minimap in each location, though linear levels like “In Entropy’s Grasp” won’t have the fog of war that disappears as you explore like some of Veilguard’s bigger locations. Regardless, BioWare says Veilguard has the largest number of diverse biomes in series history.

Dragon’s Delight

With a 10-hour day at BioWare behind me after hours of demo gameplay and interviews with the leads, I’m acutely aware of my favorite part of video games: the surprises. I dabbled with Origins and II and put nearly 50 hours into Inquisition, but any familiarity with the series the latter gave me had long since subsided over the past decade. I wanted to be excited about the next Dragon Age as I viewed each teaser and trailer, but other than seeing the words “Dragon Age,” I felt little. Without gameplay, without a proper look at the actual game we’ll all be playing this fall, I struggled to remember why Inquisition sucked me in 10 years ago.

This trip reminded me.

Dragon Age, much like the Thedas of Veilguard, lives in the uncertainty: The turbulence of BioWare’s recent release history and the lessons learned from it, the drastic changes to each Dragon Age’s combat, the mystery of its narrative, and the implications of its lore. It’s all a part of the wider Dragon Age story and why this studio keeps returning to this world. It’s been a fertile franchise for experimentation. While Veilguard is attempting to branch out in unique ways, it feels less like new soil and more like the harvest BioWare has been trying to cultivate since 2009, and I’m surprised by that.

I’m additionally surprised, in retrospect, how numb I’ve been to the game before this. I’m surprised by BioWare’s command over EA’s notoriously difficult Frostbite engine to create its prettiest game yet. I’m surprised by this series’ 15-year transition from tactical strategy to action-forward combat. I’m surprised by how much narrative thought the team has poured into these characters, even for BioWare. Perhaps having no expectations will do that to you. But most of all, with proper acknowledgement that I reserve additional judgment until I actually play the game, I’m surprised that Veilguard might just be the RPG I’m looking forward to most this year.

#da4 #dragon age veilguard #datv #da:v #da:tv #dragon age #dragon age 4 #da: veilguard

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chipper-smol · 4 months ago

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QUESTION what are some things you’d recommend about isat? I’ve been thinking about maybe getting it but I don’t know much about the gameplay and I’ve gotten spoilers for it just from seeing posts on here but it seems interesting!

do you like amazing quality of life measures that make playing games fun instead of a grinding slog? ISAT does this and more. Because its a time loop rpg, its easy to think that gameplay will become repetitive and annoying, but there are in game mechanics that prevent this

ITS A TIME LOOP GAME AWARE THAT ITS A TIME LOOP GAME SO IT FOCUSES ON THINGS BEING FUN AND ENGAGING

do you like object heads who serve cunt?

(also you can make fake dialogue screenshots, gifts, and more thanks to kongkrog)

are you tired of token gays being shoved in your face while at the same time being barely present at all, like Disney's FIRST GAY [insert extra here] and Voltron making Shiro gay at the last second, for kudo points? ISAT's got your back by NOT doing that. It focuses on the story first but makes time for the characters to have their moments.

speaking of character moments, this game has FANTASTIC chemistry between all of the characters. It's refreshing to follow the story of a friend group and actually be able to believe they're friends by how they talk and act with eachother.

Also the things i've reblogged are unfortunately from a small portion of the game. theres SO MUCH

It has more words than all of Lord of the Rings. This is not a short game (unless you play it straight for 3 days without breaks)

canonically there's no britain

idk theres just... so much... good stuff...

it's a game i'd come back to. repeatedly. It's not the sort of game where you play it once and go "huh that was neat!" and shelve it because you did everything in it. It's dghmghmdgdm its good m sorry my brai n is getting tired im definitely missing stuff but i've been sent so many asks of people blaming me for getting them to buy ISAT so maybe you could become another?

#g muses #asks #isat

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readypanda · 6 months ago

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Indigo Park Spoilers (and very long post) ahead

Since Indigo Park is the newest fandom I've been dipping into, I figured I might as well make my own analysis for the game. The question I'll be discussing today is,

WHAT EVEN ARE THESE THINGS?

(sry for bad picture quality lol)

The thing I find interesting about these mascots (Molly, Lloyd, and what we've seen of Finley) that kind of sets them apart from other monsters in the mascot horror genre is...they almost seem like they're just animals. (I'll go over evidence for this in this post)

Think about it. In other mascot horror games, we've gotten:

animatronics possessed by dead children

employees/kids surgically(?) turned into toys

people mutated by a giant ink machine

animals/people who have had their DNA spliced with a mutagenic chemical

A little girl somehow turned into a monster (I think??)(really sorry Amanda I don't know what you are)

etc.

(I'm not up to date on all these properties and I know there's many more, so forgive me if my lore understanding is less than adequate. you know how it is with indie horror)

The important note about all these is that for the most part, these mascots are intelligent, or at least have the capability of intelligence. Almost everything on this list was at one point human, in fact.

So why do I think Indigo Park is any different? What leads me to believe they aren't intelligent? (at least, the animal versions of the characters that we run from in the game. Whether they are separate from the versions of the characters Rambley interacts with is something I'll touch on later)

I think the most obvious piece of evidence in regards to Molly and Lloyd (again, not much info on Finley yet) is how Lloyd acts. He doesn't talk at all, he just stalks the main character and attacks like an animal might (with the exception of a couple times he stands on two legs or props himself up here and there).

As for Molly, I hear you saying, "But she talks! We hear her speak!" And yes, dear reader, you are right. Molly does speak. This would disprove my argument of the mascots being purely animalistic, if it weren't for this kill screen.

Now, do we ever actually hear Molly say something that isn't a repetition or couldn't reasonably be a repetition? Has she said anything to prove her intelligence at all? (genuine question here because I haven't examined every one of her voice lines lol. If I'm wrong about this then whoopsie!)

Despite the past 250 words of speculation, though, whether they act just like animals isn't actually that important. We'll see more of them in later chapters anyway (or Lloyd and Finley at least) so that will likely prove or disprove this point with time.

The more interesting question is, what are they? Like, physically?

When Molly dies, we clearly see blood around her decapitated head. At the very least that rules out animatronics or something mechanical. In addition, in the audio of the hidden tape you get when you show Rambley one of the collectables, you can hear two staff members complaining about being replaced by "new mascots" right after they "got a new raccoon costume." This could mean a few different things, but it seems to imply that the mascots we see in this chapter are meant to be replacements for actors in suits (for meet and greets, promotion, shows, etc) and/or replacements for limited, expensive, and cumbersome animatronics. If this is true, we can also probably rule out them being human. Unless Indigo Park also had a secret human experimentation lab, which I wouldn't put past them.

I think it's too early to definitively state what these mascots are, but based on the evidence of above, I have a theory.

My personal theory is that these mascots are just animals who have been changed or mutated in some way to allow the park to have more "realistic" representations of the characters (also probably to cut down on the costs of paying a human employee). That would explain why they act the way they do and why they are so violent. They literally are just wild animals who have been warped to represent these cartoon characters.

Another important caveat to this theory is that, if this is true, then the mascots who attack us in the game are most likely NOT Rambley's "friends" as he knows them. That would explain why he doesn't call attention to Molly chasing us or Molly's dead body (with the exception of one very small reaction when he talks about the mascots). You would expect him to seem a little more upset if he thought that was his friend, but maybe on some level he knows it's not really her, just a representation of her.

That brings up another question, which is a can of worms I won't fully open here: Do Molly, Lloyd, and Finley have sentient "AI" equivalents like Rambley? If not, does Rambley know his friends aren't real? I'll let you decide.

Anyway, that just about closes my thoughts on this silly raccoon game. Thanks for letting me ramble on about it, and thanks for making it to the end of the post!

Lemme know about your own theories in regards to what these things are, or if there's any key evidence I missed. Kinda threw this together lol. Most of it will likely get disproven by future chapters but hey, thus is the price of theorizing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#indigo park #indigo park theory #indigo park spoilers #uniquegeese #mascot horror #I should probably like actually play through the game myself and maybe make an addendum to the post if I find anything new #since you can only get so much info second-hand #maybe ill make a post dump about random details i noticed #it was annoying to find the tape recording #I don't know if anyone has uploaded the full clip by itself to youtube

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tanblaque · 2 months ago

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Hello Tantan, I hope that you are doing well!

I recently got obsessed with Off Valley (AGAIN;;;) since I finally decided to try out Stardew Valley for the first time, and now I am filled with so much curiosity about Off Valley's potential mechanics!

I really would like to know more about the incorporation of Off's original concepts, like, do we get to fight specters too? Or maybe become friends with them so they'll get to help out at the farm! Do we have to take care of cows only to produce meat like in the original game, or can we decide to only produce and sell milk (I am getting too concerned about animal shaped pixels, oh dear--) and keep the cows at the farm?

I am also curious about the romance! (aren't we all at this point?) Is it only about gift giving like most games until they confess, or do we have a visual novel kind of system with special endings? Aaahhh, this would be so cute, I would love to know what specific items or choices would make the characters fall in love with the player!

Thank you for reading me, I am sorry for the long rant, I just got way too excited about it, haha. Please, take care of yourself and keep on doing such an amazing job. Have a great day/night <3

Hello! The specters will only show up in the mines! But a few specters can be adopted to help you on your farm.

As for cows, it's up to you. Yes, they need to be taken cared of. I imagine you could sell milk, but as advertised, meat is going to be an important part of the game. Different types of meat/quality = money.

I'd love to have a skill tree for different farming categories, like the plastic products, dairy products, and butchering. (Maybe there could be an opt out option for this.)

Romance, yes! I'd love to incorporate some visual novel cutscenes, it would be so fun to see what route all of you will take. I'm currently juggling the idea of what gifts each character would like to get them to fall in love with you. I can't say what, no spoilers. :)) !

You're welcome, I enjoy talking bout OFF Valley, even if it's just an idea and a figment of my imagination. 😭Thanks for the ask.

#tan says #off valley #13phobos

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episims · 2 years ago

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TS2 dev comments about wants

At some point I fiddled with WantTrees and noticed there are many comments left behind by devs who worked on TS2, mostly considering how wants work for different aspirations.

Some of them seemed interesting so I started copying comments to a separate file... and then forgot about it. Well, I was cleaning my desktop just now and found the file again.

Since these might be interesting for other TS2 nerds as well, a random collection of TS2 dev commentary about the wants under the cut!

(I edited out the abbreviations and random typos to make these easier to read. Spoiler alert for, uh, exposed game mechanics?)

When a Romance Sim buys a fireplace, they want to use it. When a Family and Knowledge sims lights a fire in a fireplace, they fear fire, Family death.

Sims want to chat and send email after buying a computer. Elders fear email once.

When a Sim sees another Sim die, they want to beat the grim reaper. Must be short-lived.

Family Parents with strong personality traits will want their children to be more like them. Wants are exclusive for personality, needs min rel with child. Recurs after sleep.

After owning a lot of outdoor growing plants, Fortune Sims want a gardener.

Sloppy Sims hate changing a diaper after they have a child/adopt a child/have a grandchild. Lasts until the child is no longer in diapers.

Family Sims who have their children taken by the social worker want a baby.

After reaching creativity level 3, a Sim wants to buy a new creativity skill object.

After having a fire, sims want a fire alarm.

If a Popularity Sim has a lousy party, they want these objects which help make parties better.

Fortune Sims want to hire an exterminator when they see vermin. Family too.

Sims who buy hot tubs and double beds want to woohoo in them.

The Popularity Sim wants to make Friends, then Best Friends with another Sim after meeting them.

Teen Romance Sims who make out twice with the same sim want to meet someone new.

Sims who are sick worry about the downsides.

Knowledge Sims who have been shocked will fear being shocked again if an object breaks.

Fortune sims want the handyman to fix things.

Child's wants regarding building friends. If they lose repeatedly, and they are mean, they want to fight.

The Popularity Sim wants to make espresso for guests if they have an espresso machine; the behavior is triggered each time they entertain, play or talk.

Fortune Sims want to marry Rich if they have never worked, if they have had their stuff taken by the repo man (they are poor), or if they are getting old and are unmarried.

Makes the Romance Sim who has had a WooHoo want it in different objects, and want it again with the same sim the next day, but with less and less intensity each day that goes by.

Repeating cluster where non Popularity Sim wants to socialize with their best friend every 6 hours, strengthening as the relationship becomes stronger. This makes the Sim focus more on Sims who are their best friends.

Once having maxed the creativity skill, Sims want to write a great novel or paint a great painting. Once having sold a great novel/painting, they want to quit their job and keep doing it.

Progressive social tree for Romance Sims after being tickled. Lets the Sim who has been tickled with "binge" for a while on relatively easy, short term, high ad wants.

After eating a food prepared to some minimal level of quality, the sim will want to eat that food at the right time of day, for about as long as they are the current age, then it dies away. Sims who are "off schedule" may not have this behavior due to food type unavailability.

Wants for Sims who were Best friends/Steadies/relatives of the Sim who went to college. Drives wanting to maintain the relationship, wanting to follow Sim to college where appropriate, and wants for the college Sim to do well/fear doing badly.

Romance Sim wants to socialize with their Lover every 6 hours, weakening as the relationship becomes stronger. This makes the Sim focus more on Sims who are approaching the point of losing the Love Bit bit, making the Sim try to retain love relationships. When the relationship rises, however, the Sim will focus more on relationships which are not yet developed into Love.

#text #text post #ts2 #the sims 2 #sims 2 #random #the file was dated may 2021 #yeah this is how often i clean my desktop

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ta5tier · 5 months ago

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isat thoughts, go

[this ask is actually an excuse to ramble about whatever thing you can't get someone else to prompt you to ramble about]

i just woke up so this probably wont be too coherent but here we go!

I, like many, discovered ISAT through @jelloapocalypse’s fantastic video on the game, and by that I mean I watched the first 5 minutes of the video and immediately stopped and played the game myself.

I already liked time loops as a literary device, especially in games (outer wilds rocks, 12 minutes is interesting despite the general quality, etc) but ISAT managed to get me interested in the story and its characters before even introducing time loops as a mechanic. (Y’ALL I WAS NOT PREPARED FOR ISABEAU TO JUST COME OUT SWINGING LIKE THAT! I clocked that motherfucker before the gang even left dormont, he isnt smooth.)

ANYWAY besides the great character writing, ISAT also managed to nail its genre parody right off the bat, the literal RPS combat is so funny, Mirabelle gives off such RPG protagonist vibes, and its a neat take on the genre to center the narrative around the “edgy”rogue (HA Scissors pun). Along with the fact that Siffrin is absolutely the right amount of mentally unstable, you have all the perfect ingredients for great genre deconstruction.

Spoilers Under the Cut So be WARNED

There are tons of people talking about the story beats further so i’m not gonna spend more time here reinventing the wheel, but something I will talk about is how the game leverages ludonarrative assonance, I.e. how the game reflects the experience of the player as a part of the story.

In the case of ISAT, this manifests as the growing boredom both the player and Siffrin experience as they continue through the loops. On my first few loops I took care to avoid skipping dialogue and made sure my party was leveled up enough to succeed at any of the fights they faced. I explored thoroughly and enjoyed the process of doing so and I only reset when the game asked it of me.

But as the game continued I found myself zoning out of more and more dialogue, skipping more and more fights, and resetting whenever it would save me time. And Siffrin was with me all the way through all of it, his internal monologue growing increasingly disinterested with the affairs of his party members and the dangers they were in.

Ironically, in a game so outside my lived experience I found myself mentally aligned with Siffrin in a way that's frankly a little concerning. (im ok im not in a time loop lol)

The magic of ISAT for me was in that alignment, of feeling a shared purpose with a character, and in the breaking of that alignment in the games later acts. One of my favorite moments in any story is when I realize I can no longer fully root for the main character. Siffrin's last loop was that moment for me and I loved it. Siffrin's final trek through the House is so awful to watch but also represents the logical conclusion of his decent. The witty commentary is gone, his family is gone, the muscle memory that he and I shared in navigating the house is no longer reliable. Its all no longer necessary.

In Siffrin's mind, whats left of them isn't worth saving. And then finally, agonizingly, they are saved. Despite his best efforts to self destruct, his family come for him and they're mad and they're scared but they do it anyway, even when the world is ending around them.

Anyway yeah i love this game so much Siffrin is Stars' most mentally unwell soldier and i love them and their stupid family so much.

#in stars and time #isat spoilers #isat #this isnt even getting into loop and everything about them affasdfhasjkfas

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the-bitter-ocean · 5 months ago

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oceaaaannn hiii! let's go with 3, 5, and 15 for the isat ask game c:

(MAJOR A6SE / 2HATS SPOILERS + FULL GAME SPOILERS AHOY) Thank you for the questions @dekupalace ! Since I’m going to be talking more in depth about the game for one of these questions I’m going to put my responses under a read more:

3- favorite soundtrack?

Oh god that’s such a hard question the whole game has certified bangers. The musicians at Studio Thumpy Puppy were not messing around or pulling any punches. The soundtrack of the game elevates literally every emotional beat. If I was forced to choose only one song out of the soundtrack my favorite track in the whole game has to be “How Can You Help Me, Stardust?” aka the theme that plays when you fight Loop at the Favor tree during act six. Hearing that for the first time while getting the full context of loop’s backstory made me go crazy. It was so fucking emotional and well done. That and it’s just objectively a super intense high energy song that makes me wanna dance around. If anyone deserves the coolest fight theme in the game, it’s Loop.

5- favorite optional event?

Ooh this is also a hard one! I adore a lot of the optional story events because each of them really shed light on Siffrin’s mental state /characterization, as well as gives depth to other aspects like the other character of the world building as a whole which strengthens the themes of the story. Aside from the obvious choice (2Hats Ending/ Act six loop encounter) I think my favorite optional event would have to be the “Who Was Phone” achievement (Change God event). There’s something so fascinating about learning about the Change God. Someone who clearly adores their certified little guy (Mirabelle) and is willing to offer words of kindness and assurance in her identity even if it knows she won’t remember in one instance..and then in the very same breath tell Siffrin that they enjoy watching Siffrin in the timeloop torment nexus because they’re curious to see how they change in a situation where everything is forced to stagnate. It was so genuinely fucked. I will think about it always forever.

15- anything you’d change about the game? be it game mechanics, a new feature, a change in plot, etc

Overall I’m pretty satisfied with the game both in story and gameplay actually. I think Adrienne did a good job writing and expanding on the characters and story that was set up in the prologue. The quality of life in terms of gameplay got improved since the previous game as well ( those who played the prologue can attest to this) . The fact that it was a in universe story reason as to why makes it all the more satisfying (if you want to know what I mean by that please read my mutuals @felikatze analysis about it here.)

I just am happy that Siffrin got to be happy in the end and stay with their family, to be able to talk things out and escape the loops. I know some people didn’t like that or expected a more darker/sadder ending or wanted the gameplay to be more challenging … my response to that is Literally Just Play Start Again: A Prologue. To me it would be extremely reductive to have Siffrin just suffer with no reprieve or escape from the loops (because that’s just a repeat of what happened in its predecessor) or have the group just split off from each other immediately after everything happened. It would have been extremely unsatisfying and ultimately missing the point of the themes of the game as a whole gonna be real lol.

The only things I’d maybe change or add is like it would’ve been cute to see Euphrasie and Claude be together/ reunite on screen in act 6. They should kiss. Lol. (That and just I would’ve personally loved to see Euphrasie in canon expanded on a little more but that’s not necessarily needed she serves her purpose in the narrative. I just like analyzing her and giving her more depth and I like when others do too, but that’s what fanart/ fics and aus are for so I’m not fussed.)

I don’t mind that the game is sort of open ended and doesn’t answer all the questions. I think that gives artists, fanfic writers, Au makers and people who like to analyze the game more freedom to come up with their own interpretations for things that happened in pre canon and post canon which to me is more interesting. I know Loop disappearing at the end of the game in both endings is sad/ bittersweet but I wouldn’t necessarily change the way that was structured either. I like that their fate was ambiguous because it leads the viewer to come up with their own theories as to where they went. ( personally I love seeing stuff where loop gets to travel on their own and form a new life and identity outside of the loops and learn to heal, as well as post game getting to meet back up with the party and learn to navigate this new life/ change one step at a time. )

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pokilicious · 8 months ago

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SPOILERS FOR 2.1 TRAILBLAZE QUEST!!

Just finished the new update quest and oh my god what a quest!! So here are some of my thoughts!

I already liked Aventurine and now I like him even more! We got to know a lot about his past and motivations and it honestly made him one of my favorite characters of the game! Can we talk about how amazing his boss fight was? The mechanics and his design were pretty cool and I had to retry two times and change teams, but once I got used to the fight, it went on without a hitch! We get more Aventurine and Dr. Ratio interaction and I always love that, they have great chemistry and I hope we get to see more of them as the story grows! Also, if I had a nickel for every time a character from a Hoyoverse game I liked had a boss form with a mask, then I would have two nickels, which isn't a lot but I find it funny that it happened twice

Now onto Acheron! I thought Acheron was an emanator of Nihility ever since we knew she was an emanator and I'm so happy I got that right! She's still mysterious but I think we also learned a lot about her, even if I still haven't processed enough to have quality thoughts about it lol, we also got Acheron and Welt interaction and I didn't personally played a lot of HI3 but I could imagine the reactions of those who played lmao

WE GOT BOOTHILL'S VOICE IN GAME BABYYYY!! Not gonna lie, I thought he was going to sound a bit different, but I liked what we got hehe can't wait to roll for him and get another DPS for my collection lmao

I KNEW SAM WAS FIREFLY!! I SAID IT AND IT WAS TRUE I'M SO HAPPY AAAAAAAAAHHHH! The exchange between Sam and Acheron, Sam saving us from Aventurine's attack, the reveal! Everything was perfect!! Can't wait to see how them being the same person will affect gameplay!

And lastly, the whole exchange between Sunday and Gallagher??? Hello??? What was that???? Someone died and I'm not sure who it was? Like I was so shocked with the whole thing in general that I couldn't really comprehend what happened at the time lmao guess I have to wait to see someone's gameplay lol

All in all? An amazing quest that really hypes the next updates to come, really excited to see what happens next and how everything we learned so far will fit together

#honkai star rail #hsr #dr ratio #hsr aventurine #acheron #sunday hsr #boothill hsr #firefly hsr #sam hsr #2.1 trailblaze quest #this quest was amazing and some aventurine bits almost made me cry

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jimmyogames · 8 days ago

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Six-Shooter: The Best Part of LISA: The Painful

If you want to support me and my endeavors, please consider donating or subscribing to my Ko-fi! https://ko-fi.com/jcjimmy

*****

So,

I like LISA. Quite a lot. LISA: The Painful is not exactly but very close to my favorite game of all time (MOTHER 3 still the goat), and fan projects like LISA: The Pointless have enamored me for over half a decade at this point. To say that I "like" LISA would be an understatement so great that it wraps back around to being an overstatement. I. Love. LISA. (The Painful and Pointless the other stuff is like eehhhhh).

It was inevitable, then, that I'd end up talking about LISA here. In fact, I'll probably talk about LISA a lot, discussing aspects of both the official titles and the numerous fanworks — even the ones of middling quality.

To begin, though, I'd like to gush about a particular part of The Painful that I don't see nearly enough people talk about. I've seen praise for the game's masterful opening, how well the first few areas introduce the themes and mechanics, and much more... but no one gives this specific stretch of game its due applause. This post is dedicated to correcting that.

The part of the game I'm referring to is the gauntlet of agony that Brad must face in the interim between the first and second crossroads of the game. In six distinct events, which I will henceforth refer to as the "Six-Shooter", LISA: The Painful shows you what it's really made of. If you thought things up that point were brutal... sister, you're about to get a cold splash to the face.

I was hooked on The Painful since the intro, but the Six-Shooter section of the game is what really cemented this game as one of the most profound I've ever played... and one of the most soul-crushing, at that.

As previously mentioned, the Six-Shooter gauntlet is comprised of... well, six events. It's only natural, then, to cover each of them in order and examine the effect they have both individually and as part of the greater section.

Things start out small enough, but no less dramatic: immediately upon crossing the bridge that you spent all of Crossroads One trying to fix, you are hit by a car. Or, at least, I was. If your reaction time is sharp enough, it's possible to avoid the surprise by jumping down onto a nearby ledge, but the window is pretty tight even if you know what's coming. Already, the game has taken its gloves off. You're not given even a second to relax, to consider your adventure up to that point, or anything else. The wasteland only gets more hostile from here, and if you're not ready for it, you're gonna be roadkill. As if one obstacle barreling toward you wasn't enough, quickly following the car ambush is an attack from a luchador looking mfer who will royally wreck your shit if he gets you. This time, though, it's very easy to see him coming and get out of the way accordingly; but the fact that the game has the audacity to pull the same trick on you twice in a row I think speaks volumes about what you're getting yourself into. And for the cyanide-filled cherry on top, right next to the luchador, there's a cave where you can encounter another wonderful Lisa hallucination to feel awful about. It's a one-two mechanic-narrative gut punch, and things are just getting started.

This next bit isn't actually one of the six main events, but it's worth an honorable mention: after the previous screen, you come across a lone man resting his legs. You can talk to him, and he seems like a pleasant fellow! He asks you if you're well-stocked for the road and generally makes polite conversation. Take two steps to the right — boom, he's got a knife and is gunning for your throat. With this one little scene, the game is hammering in a nail that's been there since the beginning of your journey: you can't trust any of these d-bags.

But Cosmo Cassamassa (yes that's really the name of that guy) is nothing compared to your first actual roadblock, and the next of the big six agonies: Sweet Tea Rakeem, the man standing sentinel before your path forward. Rakeem is the first of the game's bosses — except for some of the mutant enemies, if you didn't prepare well — that will really saw your dick off and make you eat it. He has the highest health of any enemy up to that point; he hits like a train made of bricks; and to really put the squeeze on you, your choices for party members as of this part of the game are... let's just say limited. That's not to say that you aren't well-prepared for this. I think the game does a good job of giving you the tools to get through everything it throws at you, should you choose to explore and engage with it. It's just that Rakeem demands more of you than the enemies you've fought before. He wastes no turns, and he never pulls his punches. You have to get real — real quick — if you want to overcome this goliath man.

Though the mechanical challenges so far have been great, the game's upcoming emotional challenges are arguably even more intense to stomach. Case in point: as you continue past where Rakeem stood, you find Rick, one of Brad's childhood friends and adoptive uncle of Buddy. Rick has been missing since Buddy was taken at the start of the game, so seeing him again comes as a shock to both Brad and the player. What no doubt continues to shock the player is what happens next: Rick, evasive and aloof, is attacked and tied up by Brad. All of a sudden, it's as if Rick is a different person, claiming Brad is a lunatic and that Buddy is better off away from him. This, obviously, isn't what Brad wants to hear, and soon it becomes clear that something in him has snapped. When Rick refuses to answer his questions, Brad equips himself with a spiked club and... well, tenderizes Rick's face. Over and over again. By the time the metaphorical dust clears, Rick is done for, beaten beyond recognition by his own best friend; and when all is said and done, all you can do is continue ahead, leaving him to rot against a power pole. It's a brutal scene even among The Painful's cavalcade of gruesome scenes, and it's sure to stir pause in any reasonable person playing. After all, up to this point, you aren't aware of the full circumstances of Buddy's relationship with Brad and her kidnapping. You don't know anything; but Brad and Rick have history, history that you can only glimpse through their sparse dialogue with each other. Even still, watching him getting battered to a bloody pulp is hard, and though there's nothing challenging about it gameplay-wise... I can only speak for myself, but on my first run of the game, it was difficult for me to bring myself to keep pressing the action button. I desperately wanted things to play out differently, but The Painful emulates life in that sometimes, there is only one option.

That is, of course, until you are given a choice — and you wish you could go back to that scripted sequence beyond your control.

You could be forgiven for thinking that, after enduring the mechanical difficulty of Rakeem and the emotional turmoil of beating Rick to death, you'd have even some reprieve. Except, you actually couldn't be forgiven, because this is LISA: The Painful, and as you should know by now, this game will never let you get comfortable. If you haven't learned that by now, you will as soon as you walk into the next cave and have your first mandatory meeting with Buzzo, the sociopathic cross between a Mad Max warlord and the god damn Joker. So, Buzzo is here to give you that choice you were longing for earlier. Instead of being forced to do one thing with no other outcomes, you now have two different paths: you can either choose to permanently cripple Brad by chopping his arm off, or permanently lose one of your party members. A similar decision was presented to you near the start of the game, where the bully Columbo makes you pick between your "beloved" friend Terry Hintz, or all the random bullshit in your pockets. The thing about that choice, though, is that it's not too rough either way you go. If you elect to give Terry up, you're not much worse off, since he's still pretty useless at such a low level; and if you give away all your items... well, there's not too too much you can lose out on. Just a bit of money and some minor healing.

Buzzo's choice is awful either way, and there's nothing you can do to soften the blow. The best you can do is arrange your party in such a way that you sacrifice a team member you aren't using, but as you'll soon find out, even doing that isn't necessarily a good idea. This dire choice — this uncompromising fork in the road leading to two equally terrible destinations — is arguably the very crux of The Painful as a whole. Don't quote me on this, but I believe Austin Jorgenson said in an interview before the game came out that he wanted to create an experience that forces you into a corner at times. His vision was a brutal, stultifying world constantly had a knife against your hand — where there would be times when you had to select which finger it took off. I usually choose to offer up a party member to the chopping block, since I'm intimately familiar with how disposable they can be; but on my first playthrough? I froze up. I knew party members could die, but I didn't think the game would hold me at gunpoint and demand I either let one go or suffer a serious debuff to Brad, your only forever party member. It would be one thing if, as soon as you left Crossroads One, you were made to play this Saw trap as if it were a toll you needed to pay to leave the area. To buffer this situation until after all the aforementioned tribulations, though... I can only speak for myself, but I think that's fucking genius. The Painful is a game that knows how to grind a player down, to soften them up so that the biggest hits deliver the most... well, pain possible.

And we're still not done. Like all the prior events, you get no time to rest before you're thrust right into the next setpiece. The moment Buzzo unleashes you and you get to continue forward, you're plopped into the seat of a motorcycle — without a helmet, naturally — and sent off to the races. Now, I'd be lying if I said this sequence was anything other than pure badass. The music combined with the sunset backdrop makes this chopper ride something straight out of a vaporwave gif. Going fast, popping wheelies, tricking off ramps, and mowing dudes down without giving a single, infinitesimal fuck is all just... cool. A little tedious, especially if you have to redo a part over and over because of those damn rocks, but still cool as hell! Unlike the last four "bullets" of the Six-Shooter, this part is actually fun, and that's not a bad thing. If you think that a sequence like this defeats the purpose of that "never let up" attitude the game has taken insofar, don't worry; this joyride is short-lived and ends with a bang. As the enigmatic Rando saunters off and leaves you alone with some goons, you're right back into the thick of things. No more motorcycle, no more banger tunes, no more coolness. It's time for you to finally taste the blood in your mouth following the encounter with Buzzo. The battle against the Rando soldiers isn't anything ball-busting, but it reminds you to never get too attached to the little pleasures in this world; because just when you think everything is alright again, the rug is gonna be pulled right out from under you.

The game has saved the worst for last, though, and anyone who's played The Painful before will know exactly what's coming up. Before you get to Crossroads Two, there's one last hurdle you must vault — one last test of your will to overcome. Just as you exit out into the crossroads prelude, you're ambushed yet again, and the people who you meet will have you begging for Buzzo to come back. That's because your ambushers take you captive, and the only way to secure your freedom is to play Russian Roulette. This is perhaps The Painful's most infamous moment, even among such competition as the Rick scene and Buzzo's dastardly choices. The difference between the Roulette game and those scenes is that the latter are set in stone. Every time you play the game, you'll be forced to go through the same rigmarole. Whether or not you choose to cut off Brad's arm or kill a party member is irrelevant; those are always your options. You always have to beat Rick to shit. Now, you always have to play Russian Roulette, but how what ends up happening during is all up to luck.

This is The Painful at its most brilliant and subversive. It reads like a cruel joke: after everything you've endured, after dragging yourself through dismal moment after dismal moment, the fate of you and your party is left up to chance. You select a party member to spin the roulette, and they either live... or die. It's a one in six chance with every pull of the trigger. The only say you have in the matter is which of your gathered bozos will potentially have their brains dispensed onto the nearby wall. It'd be one thing if the game made you do this once, and regardless of whether you win or lose, you get to continue after; but you have to play thrice. Oh, did I say play? I meant win thrice. That means, depending on your luck, you can wipe out your entire fucking party... without even having completed the first round. On the flipside, you could breeze through the whole thing without even breaking a sweat, and that's the real beauty of it. For some people, this part will be a blink-and-you-miss-it type deal. For most, though? The Russian Roulette segment will live on in infamy as one of the sickest, most unfair things a game can sic on you; and the fact that you can choose to come back to gamble away more of your party members' lives only underlines the twisted punchline.

But the game forcing you to play Russian Roulette to continue only works as well as it does because it's the capstone to an entire saga of upsetting events. Had the Roulette minigame been something off to the side that you could participate in if you felt like, sure, it'd be fucked up conceptually, but you probably wouldn't think much of it. Having the minigame be not only mandatory, but also strike you after so much other misfortune is what makes it not just great, but a god damn diamond of game design.

The transition between Crossroads One and Crossroads Two of The Painful — the Six-Shooter — is a rollercoaster made of barbed wire, and if you think it's bad on the way up, you couldn't imagine what it's like on the way down. Every event sets up the next to be exponentially more torturous: it starts with a one-time event of getting hit by a car, then it cranks up the heat with a gameplay challenge, then it hits you in the heart with a disturbing and upsetting scene, and then... it just keeps going. It does not stop. You are not allowed a second to process just how bad things are getting. Just when you think it can't get any worse than being hosed with broken glass, the game turns on the razor blades. This sequence is gruesome; it's anti-player; it's anti-fun; it defies everything you expected about a game with cartoon nipple men; but above all, it. Is. Painful.

That's why LISA is my (second) favorite game — because it makes you hurt and doesn't apologize, doesn't help you up, and instead goes on to pour salt into that oozing wound. It's a truly draining experience that will make you want to put the game down and never touch it again.

But sometimes, that's life.

#lisa #lisa the painful #lisa rpg #painful #lisa painful #lisa the joyful #lisa the pointless #brad armstrong #buddy armstrong #buzzo lisa #buzzo buttfart #jimmy o games #jcjimmy #video games #game blogging #game design #writers on tumblr #game writing

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fraeuleintaka · 3 months ago

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Official Investigations Complete Guide

This is the 64th post in the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection Countdown: 17 days left until release!

Today's topic: the official Investigations Complete Guide!

Back when Investigations 1 first came out a Complete Guide was released in Japan about the game. I had never seen more than a few page scans from it as being Japan-exclusive (and later out of print) made it extremely inaccessible in the West. You can basically only hope to get it used and even then only if you're willing to part with an extortionate amount of money. Recently, I was extremely lucky to be able to get it for a moderate price and in very good condition so I wanted to talk about it!

First off, it's gorgeous! And I mean gorgeous! The paper is thick and high quality and the art is wonderfully crisp and vibrant, popping off the pages. It's a lot of fun to just thumb through it and look at all the illustrations.

The different sections are separated by these main character artworks, they're just the official ones for the game but they still look so pretty! (Poor Gumshoe gets shafted though. And I apparently have to correct myself on being confused why Shi-Long got a light green background in the online lottery merch as it looks like he's been associated with that background colour since the beginning. I still don't really think it fits him but oh well.)

I love the entire presentation of the guide! Even if it's just explaining the general gameplay concept to you (like in the picture below), it's incredibly fancy in how it's presented. For example, the page markings with the characters' faces from the key art, that looks epic! I also love the way the characters are constantly included, interjecting and explaining stuff to you. And with so pretty pictures, too, just look at Shi-Long here!

The guide also includes an entire introduction page for every character (or half a page for the victims), including the large full body illustrations, a short description, their age and height (!), a few pictures of their animations and one of their small sprite. I especially love the large shaded illustrations in the background. So beautiful!

Starting on the individual cases, every case has a character relationship chart at the beginning with all the relevant characters in each case and their relations shown. It's quite interesting how simple they start in the 1st case and how complicated they get by the 5th but also no surprise.

The coverage on the cases goes through every argument, rebuttal and investigation phase throughout the game pointing out the relevant stuff to look at, who to talk to and what to argue about. There are no explicit solutions given but the direction in which to take the argument or what you should think about to get to the answer, Miles often gives an additional hint in a short comment.

Throughout the entire guide Shi-Long provides additional tips and infos about various stuff in these yellow boxes. (Leave it to the top Interpol agent with the highest successful arrest rate to know all the tricks, I guess 😄) Sometimes that's about gameplay mechanics (like how you know when you've investigated everything relevant in an area) but other times it's also explanations for certain concepts that are relevant for the case at hand (like what extraterritorial rights are and the role of an embassy). Shi-Long knows all the stuff!

Towards the end there's a section of all the answers and solutions to the rebuttals and investigation phases as a handy flowchart. You can easily recognize it by the large yellow spoiler "WARNING" banners on the page top and bottom. A pretty nice idea to not directly give you all the answers when just going through the guide but should you really be stuck, you can look up what to do here.

There's also a bunch of concept art, sketches and even some interviews after the cases of the game are done with. They even show some frames of the small sprite animations of various characters. It's in the pixel artstyle, of course, so they're somewhat outdated now with the new HD chibi sprites but I still think they're nice to look at. And all the concept art with the commentaries is amazing! I will definitely go into more detail on those sometime in the future but this post is already more than long enough.

There's even an entire list of all the evidence and all the profiles in the game, separated by case. And one page I found particularly nice (also provided by best agent Shi-Long, of course) is a list of all of the background cameos of previous characters! They don't say the name of the characters outright but they give you more than enough hints that you should be able to tell who they are (if you couldn't before) and I love how they have other characters comment on it.

And one last little treat: The bottom corner of every right page has a little Miles sprite on it in different frames of his various animations so that when you flick through the book they "move" like a little flipbook! That's so adorable!

#ace attorney #ace attorney investigations #ace attorney investigations collection #aai collection #ace attorney investigations collection countdown #17 days left

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natalieleif · 10 months ago

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UPDATE: I finally got stuck and went on Youtube beat Undertale Yellow! All in all, I really liked it! It's infested that part of my brain where things go that are fun enough to invest time in, but also have enough scattered potential for some really good fanfic/art.

I do agree with a lot of the critiques, and I'm glad to see a lot of stuff added in Version 1.1 to make life easier (bug fixes, Easy Mode, recovery items, etc). I'm hoping there's a 1.2 version later that adds even more quality-of-life. That said, a lot of the critiques aren't... really... things that seem feasible for a patch update. ("Make the character art more monstrous!" You mean, redraw every sprite in the game!?!)

So with that in mind, here are some things I'd love to see in 1.2 that are maybe (hopefully!) easier for a freelance dev team. Spoilers below!

Adjusted mechanics/dialogue for bosses that have no reason to kill you. This is most obvious with Starlo and Martlet's Pacifist fights--both are friendly and reluctant towards murder, so their Pacifist fights ending in death or defeat feels... odd? Compare to Toriel or Papyrus: one will adjust her attacks to never hit if you take too much damage, and another will cut his battle entirely if you hit 1 hp. A similar form of 1-hp cutoff or "Oops, that was an accident!" Game Over dialogue would match their motivations a lot better.

Related to the above, offer a Skip option for any battle the player's lost 3+ times. This is a common video game handicap, and one I always support in story-heavy games like this. A lot of feedback I've seen is from people who want to love the story but struggled with Sir Slither's ACT pattern or Axis's breakout puzzle, so this is an easy way to get most people to finish the game.

Have Dalv gift you any items you missed in the Ruins as a "thank you" for Clover's support. This patch would solve two immediate concerns: that Dalv doesn't have a larger role, and that many players will miss items like the Golden Pear. Sure, Dalv sends a letter to Clover, but the incentive to go back to Snowdin at that point is low. Having some sort of item reward makes it an active part of an average game run and lets more players see Dalv post-Ruins.

Call the Sunnyside Farm a Ranch like it's called in the files. Okay, this one's just for me, but it being a Ranch makes way more thematic sense for the cowboy area.

Let Ace run the card game at least once in the Wild East. Seriously, it's kinda weird that he doesn't. I understand why he can't while he's napping, but the other times??

Edit Ceroba's post-Starlo Pacifist fight dialogue to make it more clear that she's taking you on the fastest shortcut to Asgore. The main critique with the third act to Pacifist route is that it very quickly becomes Ceroba's plot about finding Kanako. And because it's framed as a hunt for Kanako, the dialogue becomes a rush of info about who Kanako is and why this side-plot should matter to you, the player. But at this point we've already done a side-plot, and most players are antsy to get to the end game. Yet the Steamworks really is the only route to Hotland in that area! Having Ceroba guide the player through what they think is a spooky shortcut to the End Boss fits the story, braces the player for the finale, and lets the TALK dialogue with Ceroba build up naturally through the lab, so her betrayal about Kanako has more time to build up and hurts more as a final boss fight.

That's all I got! Thanks for reading, and feel free to reblog with your own wants for a 1.2 patch!

#undertale yellow #undertale #leif babbles #clover #dunebud

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acealistair · 5 months ago

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Dragon Age: The Veilguard GameInformer Article Transcribed SPOILER-FREE

I've gone ahead and transcribed the GameInformer article about DA:TV for those who can't read it from screenshots/on GameInformer for whatever reason. This version specifically is the PLOT-SPOILER-FREE version! I've removed all references to the main storyline of the game (even those revealed in the gameplay footage already released, just to be sure) to mostly focus on mechanics and the author's general impressions of the game. It does still include some references to companions and their personalities/mechanic abilities, as well as a couple locations that we're already confirmed to be visiting. However, further details on specific locations are hidden.

As mentioned in my full version of the article, I've transcribed it as accurately as I could, which means including typos, grammar mistakes, improper capitalization, etc.

Throughout my research and preparation for a trip to BioWare’s Edmonton, Canada, office for this cover story, I kept returning to the idea that its next game, Dragon Age: The Veilguard (formerly subtitled Dreadwolf) is releasing at a critical moment for the storied developer. The previous installment, Dragon Age: Inquisition, hit PlayStation, Xbox, and PC a decade ago. It was the win BioWare needed, following the 2012 release of Mass Effect 3 with its highly controversial and (for many) disappointing ending. Inquisition launched two years later, in 2014, to rave reviews and, eventually, various Game of the Year awards, almost as if a reminder of what the studio was capable of.

New Age, New Name

At the start of each interview, I address a dragon-sized elephant in the room with the game’s leads. What was Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is now Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Why?

“[We] realized Dreadwolf suggests a title focused on a specific individual, whereas The Veilguard, much like Inquisition, focuses more on the team.”

Creating Your Rook

[SPOILER]

Happy to hear that, I pick our first and last name, then one of four voices, with a pitch shifter for each, too, and we’re off to Minrathous.

Exploring Tevinter For The First Time

Epler, who’s coming up on 17 years at BioWare, acknowledges that the franchise has always been at the will of its engine. Dragon Age: Origins and II’s Eclipse Engine worked well for the time, but today, they show their age. Inquisition was BioWare’s first go at EA’s proprietary Frostbite engine - mind you, an engine designed for first-person shooters and decidedly not multi-character RPGs - and the team struggled there, too. Epler and Busche agree Veilguard is the first RPG where BioWare feels fully in command of Frostbite and, more generally, its vision for this world.

[SPOILER] The first thing players will do once Veilguard begins is select a dialogue option, something the team says speaks to their vision of a story-forward, choice-driven adventure. After [SPOILER], there’s another dialogue choice, and different symbols here indicate the type of tone you can roll with. There’s a friendly, snarky, and rough-and-tough direct choice, and I later learn of a more romantically inclined “emotional” response. These are the replies that will build relationships with characters, romantic and platonic alike, but you’re welcome to ignore this option. However, your companions can romance each other, so giving someone the cold shoulder might nudge them into the warm embrace of another. [SPOILER]

Minrathous is huge, painted in magical insignia that looks like cyberpunk-inspired neon city signs and brimming with detail. Knowing it’s a city run by mages and built entirely upon magic, Rhodes says the team let its imagination run wild. The result is the most stunning and unique city in the series. [SPOILER] Busche says BioWare used Veilguard’s character creator to make each in-world NPC except for specific characters like recruitable companions. [The level utilizes] a smart use of verticality, scaling, and wayfinding to push us toward the main attraction: [SPOILER].

[SPOILER] Something I appreciate throughout our short journey through Minrathous is the cinematography at play. As a Qunari, my character stands tall, and Rhodes says the camera adjusts to ensure larger characters loom over those below. On the flip side, the camera adjusts for dwarves to demonstrate their smaller stature compared to those around them.

This, coupled with movie-liked movement through the city [SPOILER] creates a cinematic start that excited me, and I’m not even hands-on with the game.

[SPOILER]

Here, we encounter a dozen or so demons, which BioWare has fully redesigned on the original premise of these monstrous creatures. Rhodes says they’re creatures of feeling and live and die off the emotions around them. As such, they are just a floating nervous system, pushed into this world from the Fade, rapidly assembled into bodies out of whatever scraps they find.

[SPOILER]

The Veilguard Who’s Who

The Lighthouse

[SPOILER] Epler says, much like Skyhold in Inquisition, the Lighthouse is where your team bonds, grows, and prepares for its adventures throughout the campaign. It also becomes more functional and homier as you do. Already, though, it’s a beautifully distraught headquarters for the Veilguard.

[SPOILER] I see a clock symbol over a dialogue icon in the distance, which signals an optional dialogue option. We head there, talk to Neve, select a response to try our hand at flirting, and then head to the dining hall.

[SPOILER] From the dining hall, we gather the not-quite-Veilguard in the library, which Busche says in the central area of the Lighthouse and where your party will often regroup and prepare for what’s next. [SPOILERS] Busche says I’m missing unique dialogue options here because I’m Qunari; an Elf would have more to say about [SPOILER]. The same goes for my backstory earlier in Minrathous. [SPOILER]

[SPOILER] The ensuing cutscene, where we learn [SPOILER], is long, with multiple dialogue options. That’s something I’m noticing with Veilguard, too - there’s a heavy emphasis on storytelling and dialogue, and it feels deep and meaty, like a good fantasy novel. BioWare doesn’t shy away from minutes-long cutscenes.

Busche says that’s intentional, too. [SPOILER] “You’re defining [Rook's] leadership style with your choices.” Knowing that Rook is the leader of the Veilguard, I’m excited to see how far this goes. From the sound of it, my team will react to my chosen leadership style in how my relationships play out. That’s demonstrated within the game’s dialogue and a special relationship meter on each companion’s character screen.

Redefining Combat Once More

[SPOILER] After loading up a new save, we’re in control of a human mage.

Watching Busche take down [SPOILER], I can already sense Veilguard’s combat will likely end up my favorite in the series, although admittedly, as a fan of action games, I’m an easy sell here. It’s flashy, quick, and thanks to different types of health bars, like a greenish-blue one that represents barrier and is taken down most effectively with ranged attacks, a decent amount of strategy, even if you don’t use the pause-and-play combo wheel. Like the rest of the game, too, it’s gorgeous, with sprinkles, droplets, and splashes of magic in each attack our mage unleashes. Though I’m seeing the game run on a powerful PC, which is sure to be the best showcase of Veilguard, Epler tells me the game looks amazing on consoles - he’s been playing it on PlayStation 5 and enjoying it in both its fidelity and performance modes, but I’ll have to take his word for it.

Pressing Start

Companion Customization

In Entropy’s Grasp

[SPOILER]

“When designing companions, they’re the load-bearing pillars for everything,” Rhodes says. “They’re the face of their faction, and in this case [with Bellara], their entire area of the world. [SPOILER]” Rhodes describes her as a sweetheart and nerd for ancient elven artifacts. As such, she’s dressed more like an academic than a combat expert, although her special arm gauntlet is useful both for tinkering with her environment and taking down enemies.

Unlike Neve, who uses ice magic like our Rook and can slow down time with a special ability, Bellara specializes in electricity, and she can also use magic to heal you, something Busche says Dragon Age fans have been desperate to have in a game. Busche says if you don’t direct Neve and Bellara, they’re fully independent and will attack on their own. But synergizing your team will add to the fun and strategy of combat. Bellara’s electric magic is effective against [enemy], which is great because we currently only have access to ice. However, without Bellara, we could also equip a rune that converts my ice magic, for a brief duration, into electricity to counter the Sentinels.

[SPOILER]

I continue to soak in the visuals of Veilguard [SPOILER]; it’s perhaps the most impressive aspect of my time seeing the game, although everything else is making a strong impression, too. I am frustrated about having to watch the game rather than play it, to be honest. I’m in love with the art style, which is more high fantasy than anything in the series thus far and almost reminiscent of the whimsy of Fable, a welcome reprieve from the recent gritty Game of Thrones trend in fantasy games. Rhodes says that’s the result of the game’s newfound dose of magic.

Busche, Epler, and Rhodes warn me that [location] will starkly contrast to other areas. They promise some grim locations and even grimmer story moments because, without that contrast, everything falls flat. Busche likens it to a “thread of optimism” pulled through otherworldly chaos ravaging Thedas. [SPOILER]

[SPOILER]

Busche [performs combat] with ease, showcasing high-level gameplay by adding three stacks of arcane build-up to create an Arcane Bomb on an enemy, which does devastating damage after being hit by a heavy attack. Now, she begins charging a heavy attack on her magical staff, then switches to magical daggers in a second loadout accessed with a quick tap of down on the d-pad to unleash some quick attacks, then back to the staff to charge it some more and unleash a heavy attack.

After a few more combat encounters, including one against a [enemy] that’s “Frenzied,” which means it hits harder, moves faster, and has more health, we finally [SPOILER]. [Boss enemy] hits hard, has plenty of unblockable, red-coded attacks, and a massive shield we must take down first. However, it’s weak to fire, and our new fire staff is perfect for the situation.

[SPOILER] It’s clear that even after a few hours with the game’s opening, I’ve seen a nigh negligible amount of game; frustrating but equally as exciting.

Don’t Call It An Open World

Veilguard is not an open world, even if some of its explorable areas might fee like one. Gamble describes Veilguard’s Thedas as a hub-and-spoke design where “the needs of the story are served by the level design.” [SPOILER] Some of these areas are larger and full of secrets and treasures. Others are smaller and more focused on linear storytelling. [Location] is an example of this, but there are still optional paths and offshoots to explore for loot, healing potion refreshes, and other things. There’s a minimap in each location, though linear levels like [SPOILER] won’t have the fog of war that disappears as you explore like some of Veilguard’s bigger locations. Regardless, BioWare says Veilguard has the largest number of diverse biomes in series history.

Dragon’s Delight

This trip reminded me.

#dragon age #da4 #dragon age 4 #dragon age veilguard #da:tv #da:v #datv

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