#they've been retaining their staff for like 15 years and you can SEE them building and progressing from each game and learning from it

[sunlight-shunlight]

thinking about veilguard and bioware in general, i think we are reaching a point where people need to grapple with the inherent limits of what stories can be told in our Current Society and in AAA gaming companies.

on a labour level: mass layoffs, tons of developers leaving despite previously talking about how passionate and happy they were to be involved, not even paying severance, and crunching employees to the point of burnout. this is unfortunately pretty standard for AAA game companies.

on a cultural level: it is SO white and SO centrist-ly Canadian. i wrote up these asks outlining how. it is a repeated pattern of writing in which they go into tortured racial oppression allegories at best, while constantly peppering in a "but BOTH SIDES were wrong and made mistakes :( :( :(", in between their fictional atrocities that are clearly mirroring irl genocides and enslavement. or at worst, it's "the qunari are radical islamic borg" which has even less nuance. i personally thought, since dai came out in 2014, and a lot has changed since then about the world and in public awareness, that this would have filtered into the narrative and resulted in more satisfying and historically grounded writing. unfortunately not the case. it's shocking if you compare it to how sharp and aware and unflinching something like disco elysium is.

so what does this mean?

under these conditions, it is unavoidable that we get development by people who are rapidly cycled out of the company or demoralized into burnout. we get digestible, easy little soundbites of lore without much substance, because any complexity needs more time and coordination rather than the process of "quick, we have these assets, a lot of people involved in making them just got laid off, we need to make Something by next quarter to show the CEO". we get very little cohesion between games, despite the clear intent from dai to have so many plot points set up to follow through in a sequel, because the team and development are so chaotic that they can't hold onto a vision and complete it.

we also get this inherent caution and "conservatism" from the narrative, because on an ideological level, they're largely white people who want cops to be included in pride. so any major change to even a fictional society is Bad and Scary, and shouldn't be done without making sure that every character finger-wags appropriately at non-state violence. there is clearly not much ideological or even ethnic diversity within the leadership; or at least not enough that anyone there felt comfortable even speaking up on minor issues like the Incredibly Orientalist Isabela Outfit, let alone anything larger.

i don't personally think there's too much value in trying to analyze veilguard's plot or lore at this point. the final product is chaotically developed and does not seem to reflect the goals of the creators as set up in prior games, it's basically a ship of theseus in terms of the people and ideas involved in making it. this is sad for all of us, who were interested in the story, and attached to the characters, and were creatively fulfilled by engaging in the fandom. it's probably worse for the developers who have lost their jobs, burnt out, or feel unhappy with the game that they spent years of their life working on. it's certainly miserable as an indictment of The Industry, as well as the general societal climate of white Canadian centrism.

the solution is to create a society where people can develop games in peace and prosperity and stay on projects for longer, rather than constantly getting turfed out without severance pay. and to get some genuine leftists, poc, and indigenous people on staff who can weigh in and provide significant input, rather than a Council Of Liberal White Edmontonians every time.

in the meantime, at the very least, let's please stop preordering AAA games and supporting companies who notably abuse their employees.