#the intoxicating wonder of 'here is a wonderful well written smart fantasy story and it dosent ignore people like you'

[asha-mage]

I have largely said nothing about Veilguard because I am not, by nature, a hater and if I have nothing good to say I try to avoid saying anything. And also because watching a beloved franchise (and a huge ground breaker for LGBT rep for me personally and games in general) utterly crater brings me nothing but heartache.

But with the news I feel like this at least needs to be said: this is not the fault of BG3, or "woke", or whatever other excuse annoying chuds want to trot out. To a limited extent it's not even really the fault of the industry- at least no more so than usual. Bioware has been on this trajectory since Inquisition. They had ten years to turn things around and they didn't. Instead they chased trends and fairytales and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow called "live service" and never considered they might just need to stick to what worked and tell a good story.

All the while they were shedding more talent and more passion until we ended up with Veilguard. The fulfillment of the promise of Inquisition: a cynical triple a cash grab meant to appeal to everyone and so appealing to no one. A game that ignores the most interesting rich parts of it's setting to serve up a calorie free action RPG that manages to say absolutely nothing about the ideas at the heart of the Dragon Age series.

No one deserves to lose their job and layoffs are an unethical bloodletting to please investors, but things didn't have to go this way. The rails had come off with Inquisition but it wasn't too late to prevent a crash.

Instead they barreled full steam ahead. And we ended up here.