#this is my veilguard experience so far if you even care

[vronism]

Lucanis please pick me. Love me. Choose me

[hattedhedgehog]

My (spoiler-free) thoughts on Dragon Age: The Veilguard

The review embargo has lifted and I can officially say that I've played through Dragon Age: The Veilguard early! 

Here are my spoiler-free thoughts and personal opinions on the overall gameplay experience: 

Narrative:

Rook's dialogue and decisions impact SO MUCH of the game, and come into play later on. From companions remembering your beverage preferences, to whether someone you spared shows up later to help or harm you, it feels like the game is paying attention and that you matter.

The stakes are unbelievably high. The Evanuris are utterly terrifying villains, in ways that Corypheus wasn’t. You really feel the magnitude of their power on a personal level as well as a worldwide level.

Whatever your thoughts on him, Solas is FUN as a character. He’s fun to talk to, fun to talk strategy with, fun to rile up and verbally spar with and fun to grudgingly ally with. Now that he can drop his former act and appear to you as the Dread Wolf, and you get to see his memories, you and he team get to decide how to utilise his knowledge and how far your trust extends.

The setup and payoff of the story beats are absolutely superb. The emotional turmoil as a player of being ensnared by things that was foreshadowed earlier in the game is utterly exquisite. Every thread of the larger tapestry has been woven with so much love by the writing team, and every character’s arc tie into the larger story in interesting ways.

The characters feel like they have full lives outside of the player character. You frequently go exploring their home turf and can meet their friends and family. They interact with each other on their own and move about the Lighthouse to spend time together, leave notes for each other, and talk about each other even when the other isn’t there. The team feels like they all really care about each other as well as you. 

You can tell what your approval rating is with characters, but if you want to romance them you have to put some thought into it. Interactions and world events besides the heart on the dialogue wheel influence their attraction to you.

Gameplay:

The combat is very engaging, and I enjoyed how unique all the enemies were.

Abilities in the skill tree can be refunded so you can redirect to a different specialization, which is really handy if you’re indecisive and overwhelmed at first (like I get when choosing abilities).  Most companions can get healing abilities no matter what class, so you don’t have to worry about balancing your rogues/mages/warriors (most of the time).

Climbing, balancing on ledges, using ziplines and sliding down slopes made environments feel more immersive. Additionally I like how each companion has unique abilities that let them interact with the world (fixing mechanisms, breathing fire, summoning bridges from the Fade, etc), and learning their abilities alongside them helps you grow closer.

The wayfinder light makes everything feel streamlined, so it's way harder to get lost while exploring an area. I hardly had to look at the mini map at all, and usually I’m glued to it! This meant I could actually look around at the beautiful environments and appreciate how lively they were, even without NPCs.

The upgrade system is far less overwhelming than in Inquisition; there are a finite amount of weapons/armour/accessories to be found, which are designed for each specific character like in DA:O and DA:2. There's also no longer crafting from scratch. If you loot an item you already have, it automatically upgrades the single item rather than giving you duplicates.

You know that frustration of coming across higher-level armour that just isn’t as flattering as your current one? Not to worry, you can collect “appearances” which you can toggle on as the visual for the armour while still retaining the benefits of the original.

I cannot stress enough how simple and easy to use the inventory is. It's heavenly. 

Using the shops of specific cities increases your reputation within those cities, which is a good incentive to explore and use the shops. I usually hate in-world shopping but here it was simple, and thinking about it tactically worked pretty well.

Quests sometimes reach a point where you can't continue at your current place in the story, and must return to in later acts. When re-exploring familiar areas, everything feeling big enough to be fresh with each visit, and new loot and codex entires appear.

Edit: something I forgot to mention. In character creator, you get to make your Inquisitor after you make Rook. The build menus are all the same, so manage your energy accordingly for doing it all again immediately after for your Inky. I spent an hour and a half building my Rook and wanted to get right to playing, and had to re-wire my brain a bit to be patient and keep going with the CC. (Seeing my Inquisitor with new graphics was awesome though).

A couple little things I appreciated:

The control sounds are very pleasing. From the whoosh of opening the combat wheel to the clinking of upgrades to the subtle whir of holding the decision button, they're a nice touch.

If companions are interrupted in conversation by combat, they resume it afterwards with a "what were you saying before?".

Photo mode is so fun to play with, and you can adjust blur/brightness/lens/depth within the scene. You can also toggle on and off the visibility of your Rook, your party, NPCs and enemies!

Assan learns new interaction tricks at the Lighthouse as the game goes on.

Nitpicks:

Overall I had an incredibly positive experience. The gripes I had were tiny things like:

I genuinely like the new art style of the game as a whole. However, the blurriness of some of the features in contrast with some elements being very crisp was distracting.

When trying to sell valuables for faction points without using Sell All, it takes quite a long time to count up all the individual sales, and it isn't a live counter. So it's kind of annoying if you get +3 points for each item you sell, need 150 points to get the next tier of items, and over 10K worth of valuables that you want to sell to other factions. 

If you do lots of quests without returning to the Lighthouse often, occasionally companions at the Lighthouse will have dialogue pertaining to the quests you've just finished as if you haven't done them.

You can pet the dogs and cats in the cities, but Rook turns their back to the camera to do it and it blocks most of the action unless you rotate quickly.

Gender stuff:

I was incredibly moved that not only can Rook be trans/nonbinary in the character creator if you so choose, but they get options to feel differently about their identity and journey, and it impacts their dialogue and how they relate to other characters! To access this make sure to interact with Varric's Mirror in your room in the Lighthouse. There are many conversation options throughout the game to discuss your identity with other characters, or relate your change of self to other situations. Crucially, it comes up when entering a romance and you have to communicate with your partner about it, which I never even THOUGHT of including in a game because it seemed impossible to even allow trans main characters to begin with.

There are also multiple trans and nonbinary characters throughout Thedas. What I found the most realistic was that just like in life, it is a consistent presence in any character's life, and comes up in conversation more than once. I have never seen a game this forthcoming and open about the topic of transitioning, and it was so validating. 

Final thoughts:

I adore the other games in the franchise. Something about The Veilguard affected me in a way no other game has. I cried multiple times while playing this game, both from joy and sadness. What struck me most is that the people who worked on this game REALLY listened to feedback from previous games, and were very set on making a piece of art that meant something to people. Even during the last few years of me testing the game, things have been adjusted and changed in direct response to our reactions and suggestions. It's surreal and quite touching.

Mileage will vary, but my playthrough was 70 hours on very low difficulty and I haven't done every side quest yet. I could easily have spent more than 100 hours in the game if I wasn't pressed for time.

I hope you enjoy this game as much as I have. See you in Thedas.

[lesmurples]

Pretty good article by Lauren Morton - it articulates the lackluster character writing in Veilguard quite well. She brings up some of the in-universe debates of past games for comparison, and I think it really encapsulates what is missing from Veilguard:

“I really miss some of the touchstone debates of past Dragon Age games. Fenris and Anders in Dragon Age 2 are both messy loose canons who resent one another and disapprove of Hawke's leaning too far for or against the rights of mages in Kirkwall. Origins gives its hero the awful choice of what to do with a child who's been possessed by a demon, and Alistair is livid if you choose to handle it in a certain way, culminating in a steep disapproval hit. I even enjoy Vivienne in Inquisition, hotly debated as she is, for effectively being a scab who believes her fellow mages should be relegated to the Circle towers. Those are just a small sample of the ways that Dragon Age heroes have wrestled against the morals of their party in the past.

“[…] By the end, Rook's companions are all pretty much goodie two-shoes characters with uncomplicated beliefs. There's a ton of groundwork to each character that could have made them morally complex and interesting but, frustratingly, that all goes unrealized.”

I guess I wouldn’t be so hard on Veilguard if I didn’t have the far more compelling writing of the previous games to compare it to - its writing is pretty mediocre in my estimation, but I’ve seen worse. But the main thing I liked about Dragon Age was the character writing and the sociopolitically complicated lore, and both have been extremely minimized (and sanitized) in DATV to the point where it’s deeply boring.

The only thing that feels consistent with the Dragon Age Experience is that the gameplay still kinda sucks. So uh, that doesn’t help much.

[curioussubjects]

i started my mourn watch playthrough the other day, and so far it's exactly what i wanted from the veil jumper origin. don't get me wrong, im loving the mourn watcher origin, i just wish a veil jumper rook had gotten a similar treatment. honestly, this might just be my biggest complaint about veilguard.

the special interactions when you reach the necropolis really make you feel like a part of the faction. emmrich has so much special dialogue with a mourn watch rook and he doesn't treat you like you're ignorant of knowledge you should have. instead, he takes your knowledge for granted, based on your likely rank in the watch, and talks to you like a peer. there's also a real sense of kinship between him and rook as fellow necromances dealing with a world that largely misunderstands them and finds their art off-putting.

i also liked the familiarity between rook, myrna, and vorgoth. they're not as close as rook and the crows, for instance, but that makes sense considering the dynamic of the different factions.

meanwhile, as a veil jumper it seems like strife and irelin barely know rook, and bellara talks to you as if you're completely unfamiliar with the workings of arlathan. playing as a mourn watcher now, i barely noticed a difference in dialogue/interaction between rook and the veil jumpers. or even that much difference in how a veil jumper rook behaves in arlathan forest versus a non-veil jumper rook.

it's a huge disappointment too because i can see so many ways that the veil jumpers could've been more developed, letting rook shine regardless of lineage and class, and without overshadowing bellara:

rooks who are tinkerers and can "yes, and" bellara with their knowledge and enthusiasm, historian rooks who are curious about ancient elves and are more focused on the culture than the relics, fade nerd rooks who really care about the metaphysical wonkery in arlathan forest, explorer rooks who really know their way around the forest despite all its weirdness. real missed opportunities here!

and while the veil jumpers aren't as close knit as the crows or the watchers, maybe there could've been more npcs with ambient dialogue who have worked with rook before, or more general commiserating between veil jumpers and their experiences in arlathan forest. i also think it could've been really interesting to lean into strife being strict with rook and irelin being an actual friend who goes behind his back to keep rook in the loop or something.

seriously, bioware, what the hell.

i'd be curious to hear from players who did the other origins. are they as well crafted as the crows and mourn watch origins or are they like the veil jumpers?

[marybeatriceofmodena]

Spoilers for Dragon Age: The Veilguard under the cut (with a bit of criticism, nothing dramatic though)

I'm enjoying the game so far and all the lore reveals on Solas and the Elven gods (which are the best part of the game so far, hands down). I'm also liking the companions we're meeting so far (BELLARA <3), they're all very charming, but I think my one complaint is that... they're all too nice to each other? Not that there's anything wrong with that (I lied. Friends are USELESS IN MY PLANS FOR WORLD DOMINATION), but I'm really missing all the delicious little nuances the previous games had between the companions. Like, sure, players will tend to choose the "good" options for companions and make sure everyone gets along well, but you don't even get the option to, I don't know, set the can of gasoline on fire, or even get an occasion to even just put out the can of gasoline on fire.

Like, if Baldur's Gate 3 is anything to go by, players LOVE exploring tragedies, to the point there have been so many people who just replayed the game, again and again, just to see how different outcomes go. And I mean, I went in not expecting BG3 quality (as sad as it is say, because Dragon Age has been such a formative experience for me as a story). There's the nuance of Lae'zel and Shadowheart hating each other in part because of, yeah, racism, but also in part because they're much more like each other than they'd care to admit. There's the nuance of Astarion making fun of Wyll and dismissing him as an idealistic idiot, when you know it all stems from envy. There's the nuance of Karlach being hands down the most beloved person in camp, yes, but because all the companions see a little something of their own suffering in her, and see that despite it all, she decided to be kind. Like, yeah. They bicker. They argue. They might try to stab each other. But it makes them feel real, and it makes them becoming fire-forged friends all the more satisfying.

And maybe I'm just too early in the story for now, but it is... weird that everyone is just completely okay with Lucanis being possessed by a demon. Like, you'd think at least one companion would get a bit panicky about it (understandably so)? Like, maybe Neve feeling queasy around demons due to fears surrounding them/blood magic/insert tragic backstory element here? Hawke and Co. were maybe a bit too chill about Anders being a potential abomination, sure, but there was still tension there.

It ultimately feels like Mass Effect: Andromeda (except I'd argue the characters in DATV are actually interesting lol), where I just wish I had *something* to chew on lol. I'm not asking for a catfight, just something!

(There's also the fact that the Crows are way too nice as well but that's a topic for another day lmao)

[eff-plays]

Why did Veilguard give Rook so much outright forced backstory that clashes with everything else we are given for a start as a player? White woman elf Veiljumper who just has vallaslin for aesthetics regardless of what you think about it, galley slave Lord of Fortune Rook, Mourn Watcher supposedly being found in the tomb and then suddenly adopted off the streets, Shadow Dragon being specifically found on the battlefield.

Is it because qunari are a playable race and we need to twist everything into a pretzel to make shit like qunari (actually vashoth, but whatever, game doesn't care and I don't either) Veil Jumper something that doesn't want you to immediately go "get this unlore shit off my face"?

When I start to think about it, it truly could be qunari as one of the parts of this mess. None of them gel even remotely well with most written backstories and most factions would logically not accept a qunari lore-wise. They only fit as LoFs, Shadow Dragons and maybe, maybe as Grey Wardens.

The qunari were always going to be included as a playable race, ever since Inquisition, and it makes sense to me since each game builds upon the last. It would suck if they pulled another DA2 and locked you into playing a human the entire time. Besides, the dwarves can't even be mages, so half the factions accepting them makes even less sense than accepting qunari.

What's really to blame for the factions sucking ass is the multiplayer "live service" the game was initially designed to be. Every faction needs to be some flavor of good guy because every player needs to feel like they're contributing to the overall fight, while rivalries and "bad" factions would only complicate the story, and BioWare weren't gonna make this into a PVP experience afaik. And since we're designing this as a live service, restrictions based on lore like in Origins don't make sense. This isn't a role playing game, this is a live service, where every player should be able to create their own unique character and join whichever faction they want.

A lot of people have also said that it would've helped to restrict factions based on race and class, and while I agree with the sentiment, the factions would've needed to be designed this way from the go in order to actually work, which they weren't. Sure, it would make more sense for US that a human warrior can't be a Veil Jumper, but does a mage elf Veil Jumper have different personal backgrounds, voice lines, and interactions with the Veil Jumpers? Enough to justify locking that faction down to just that race and class? Not really. All the hard work of writing and voicing the in-game content is already based on the live service model, so locking everything down according to lore wouldn't help much, but it would limit "player freedom", and on the surface, that's far more important than in-universe consistency. I mean, you already have the voice lines, and none of the NPCs call you a weirdo for being a human Veil Jumper, so might as well right?

I also assume that the faction descriptions were written some time after the voice lines were recorded, rather than the other way around. I have no idea why they changed the Mourn Watch description, either. I would guess they recorded the orphan picked off the streets line, then realized "why would the Mourn Watch take in an orphan and why would they raise it if they found one?" and rewrote the description to say Rook was found as a baby in a crypt, which places them directly in the Mourn Watch's care and could be reasonably read as a mysterious sign that would convince enough of them to keep the crypt baby. Then they either forgot or thought the voice line was close enough, or they had nothing to put there in its place, so they just left it in.

It's a higgledy-piggledy hodgepodge mess cobbled together according to the whims of an uncaring publisher. I feel bad for the devs the more I look at it.

[blankd]

DA: dogguard Veilguard opinion (crossposted + expanded from twitter)

I only know about dragon age through osmosis, my friend is playing it while I sit in, and so far my major criticism of VG is that the game is flanderizing its own characters at breakneck speeds and the banter feels incredibly weak DESPITE that aspect being one of the more signature traits of DA

regardless of how the journey ultimately goes, it's an experience that I'm taking notes on as a game/narrative designer for MushRush since you will be carting around a similar number of fantastical companions

read more has more scattershot, but specific thoughts; contains spoilers up to after having JUST finished recruiting all of the companions

disclaimer: I don't know shit about DA LORE, so I'll probably misspell locations, etc., I don't care enough to correct any of it.

the early game has real "shaky first draft" issues where characters repeat themselves or say nothing insightful or at least entertaining. it's gotten better since after the mayor in d'meta, but there have still been some instances of dialogue triggering that makes rook come across as hilariously unobservant such as them noting there are "a lot of undead" in the necropolis you pick up emmrich in. dead bodies in MY NECROPOLIS???

another part that sticks out to me is that the female characters are getting shafted hard since they are all (mostly) introduced before the male characters, so the "1st draft writing pains" get assigned to them

however, neve is unfortunately the Worst Companion so far, followed by harding (will elaborate on her later).

I still don't have a grasp on what neve's companion hook even is- even AFTER letting minathrous get dragon nuked. all I got was "neve is sarcastic and dry and job-oriented, followed around by sprites???" which is a shame since a mage detective should BE ENOUGH but she doesn't have the GRIT of a noir detective or the clever observations of one who is more holmes-aligned. her room does more to characterize her, which is good for the art team but a shame to the writers (even as they try to pepper in more interesting traits about her through other characters)

so we have to fall back to what the game DOES tell us, such as approval/disapproval, of the 2 instances of her showing disapproval, we couldn't figure out WHY she disapproved. (1st was doubting varric could convince solas to stop fucking up everything, 2nd was for leaving the mayor in his fucked up town)

my friend and I formed several theories for something internally consistent:

-neve doesn't like it when you assume the worst of people (tall ask considering what solas was actively doing, but it's a BELIEF) -neve doesn't like it when you doubt/question authority/authority figures -neve believes the gods truly override people (my friend joked "SECRET CHANTRY GIRLIE??") -neve doesn't like that we are "being mean to a man" (this is a joke I made) -neve is a contrarian because when you only have two characters, someone HAS to have a different opinion (this is purely meta and still poorly executed)

whatever it is that makes neve tick, we're probably not going to find out since she's HARDENED or w/e because we chose birdbatman over her (my friend was aware of the effects of the choice locking out Neve/Lucanis content, but debated over the choice because of the LORE, the tipping point occurred when I asked if they cared about Neve content which was an obvious NO)

TL;DR: we are currently getting more mileage/chuckles out of "NEVE DISAPPROVES" during choices than from anything the game intends, UNFORTUNATELY

----

next up is harding, harding is a perfectly normal character with some obvious insecurities and now having to grapple with magic. unfortunately the writers have tipped their hand that they care more about harding's LORE ties with the titans/gods than as a character

the most awkward handing of this is when we did harding's personal sidequest of trying to get a handle on her powers (perfectly fine!), but then it just abruptly STOPS because we help some random fucking guy in the forest

the real nail in the coffin came when she (essentially) went "solas seems sad tho )8", despite being the same character that hated she didn't shoot him to stop the inciting incident. I personally would have appreciated if she had more doubts/expressed conflicts about her action/inaction, about it but as-is, the exchange feels WAY too much like the writers taking shortcuts to make solas grey (or god forbid, "GOOD", ACTUALLY). varric is already running interference, having harding do it too just tells me they're willing to throw other characters under the bus to accomplish this annoying goal.

as an aside: when this conversation occurred I said something to the effect of "Harding, no!! Don't make us throw you into the basement with Neve!!!"

----

returning back to the point of how the female characters seem to be suffering a lack of writing effort compared to the male ones- bellera is a noticeable example of this.

her characterization is purely fixated on magictech (fine), she gets more character as soon as emmrich gets introduced (not bad in a vacuum), but despite being present with harding and neve, the most conversation she seems to have is that she can cook different foods and neve wants in on some of the cooking. again it could have been "1st draft" pains, but given how fixed the party is at the start, they should have something more going on, ESPECIALLY since harding and bellera disagree with neve on how the mayor and d'meta was handled! bellera supposedly had people she cared about in this town and she glosses over it fairly quickly. also there's a relative lack of reaction to harding (or neve)'s injuries from the solas event.

----

character flanderization as mentioned WAY back at the start, this problem is (too) quickly made apparent with lucanis

I thought the mention of the coffee (WRT to dealing with spite) was intended as a throwaway line and something that would stay confined to the sidequest, instead it comes up in the banter as well, in addition to him being the demon of whatever (and now having a literal demon, har har). the 'most' interesting banter so far is when bellera asks how lucanis's situation even happened, and it's not BAD but I felt there was flavor missing to the exchange

since both characters are noted to be the "good" cooks of the companions, I thought it could hint at how lucanis's favoring of cooking is NOT out of niceness but because he doesn't trust other people to it since he is 1) a fucking assassin ("he stabs people", I don't care, poison exists and he's the grandson of the crow mafia), 2) was force-fed something that saddled him with spite

like I know there's more parts here, but SURELY something spicier and/or more natural than just the point-blank answer, the man was betrayed and landed in prison for a year AND is supposed to be operating on a lack of sleep because of spite, he can be a little snippy about how his bodily autonomy was violated

----

the last recruits:

davrin (at this time) ends up being on the upper end of characters since he's the MOST GROUNDED/NORMAL. he's fine and closest to what neve was probably intended to be, skeptical, has a dry sense of humor, but can trip up rook (our rook didn't recognize that a name davrin held a grudge against is historical). it probably helps he has assan to bounce off of so he can tread closer to have a 3rd dimension of personality (it's TOO early to tell)

emmrich is a professor of necromancy, he's polite/nice but also has no problems with magicking skellieboys into servitude, I'm hoping this old man has some spice going on. also it's a crime he puts on his human face when he has a SKELLIE FACE. COWARDS. I'll forgive it a little since at least he still gets to be OLD, instead of some freakishly smooth bishonen.

taash is a horse girl(TM) but for dragons. they also have hints of relationship with a controlling mother, I have no expectations of this. I'm hoping this isn't another lucanis flanderization situation but that's probably a different game.

the lords of fortune thing is bullshit however, "yeah we steal items but return cultural artifacts" that better be a PR thing purely b/c rook is in the room, otherwise, holy shit I'm dying. like, writers, I could understand some cultural favoritism, but ALL cultural artifacts? what the hell are you talking about??

---

now a main plot writing quibble, just to round it out:

the treviso occupation is driving me insane that they really said with their full narrative mouth that the place with NO military but an ASSASSIN'S GUILD couldn't figure out how to deal with the MOST hierarchy-based military occupying them??? like I get that wouldn't instantly (or permanently) end it, but it just feels absurd!!! what kind of assassin guild doesn't know how to kill ONE GUY, especially when he gives speeches in open areas!

it's just such a HARD SELL that the assassin guild can be so bad at assassination short of some 5d chess backdoor dealings involving the mindrape potions that the antaam were apparently cooking up while avoiding having it traced back to them or something

as for the minrathous/treviso choice, it feels like a missed opportunity to have the macguffin knife be what actually drives the dragon off

like, I KNOW that rook/the player is the center of the world, but you don't LOSE anything by tweaking that detail either, it just comes off as ridiculous that "3" (1) people really would make a difference

anyway, thanks for reading, that was a mountain, we'll see how DA:VG continues

if there's additional DA LORE you think would season my experience (baffled/piss me off/etc.), feel free to comment!

[starlightchaser]

But speaking of Veilguard -

Sure, it's definitely not a perfect game. There are things I wish had been included/changed. But also this game was a 9/10 for me. I waited ten years for this and had an amazing time between the combat and story.

I avoided almost all pre-release material, so I went in without knowing pretty much anything marketing had shared. I saw one trailer (the companion intro one). Having everything be a surprise I think really added to my experience as I didn't even know things like who the major antagonists would be. Dragon Age is by far my favorite series, and I personally am pretty satisfied with how it turned out.

I wrote a much longer review with Good/Bad/Mixed that I dumped on my friends, which I have put under the cut if anyone cares to read my full opinion, which is mostly spoiler free (as not all of my friends had started yet).

The Good:

1. The story. I feel like this will be a hit or miss with people, but I had a blast. I thought the stakes were well established, the major antagonists were compelling, and more minor antagonists left an impression. I do believe that the beginning is weaker than later parts of the story, but I also spent a lot of time fucking around so that slowed the pace.

2. Level design. The main zones all felt very different and were gorgeous, as well as easy to get around. The areas are smaller, which leads to less wasted space. There are plenty of teleport points if you want to reduce walking. The mission areas had some amazing set pieces and epic moments that took my breath away. They felt tense and dramatic and I appreciate the scale of them.

3. Faction/Area quests. These let you dive deeper and feel more connected to the groups that you were helping, and I found them to be overall very well done.

4. Boss fights. Between the main story and optional boss fights, there were some really amazing fights to experience. As an add on, the fact that optional bosses are for the most part not level gated is a bonus, because getting to drag my way through them severely underleveled made them feel very epic, like the hero facing insurmountable odds and walking away.

5. Companion quest lines. I like that each one has an extended personal quest; they have lives and important business on top of their role on your team and generally those lines are connected to their factions, which gives you more ties to them. I won't pretend I like them all equally lmao but I like how extensive they are and how much depth it adds to each of them.

6. Combat. I was uncertain about how the combat in this game would feel, but it's so fun. I like the companion skill combos, I liked the skills available to me, and I adored having two weapon sets. Just really good and satisfying design.

7. Your faction choice. I was a Grey Warden, and I felt like I got a lot of dialogue and references to Rook's role with them.  It was a nice way to tie your character into the world and I felt like that decision mattered with how characters reacted to my Rook. I have also nearly completed a Shadow Dragon run, and felt as though I had a large amount of pertinent dialogue and interactions that made me feel connected.

8. Rook as a protagonist. I am a huge fan of stories that feature protags who are just people that step up when nobody else can/would. Rook faces insurmountable odds and still chooses to stand against them, which is a really satisfying arc to me. I also like how connected to the world Rook feels since they are not entirely blank slate. Your character feels like they have always existed, rather than that they suddenly popped out of thin air to contribute.

9. Art style. From the companion reveal trailer, I thought it looked odd, but it grew on me a lot and I ended up finding the style really charming while still having room for a lot of depth.

The Mixed:

1. Dialogue. I feel like this is a real hit or miss at times. There's definitely awkward dialogue, and sometimes characters are too blunt. Like they will just say exactly what they mean or feel and it often doesn't feel realistic. Or they will repeat themselves as though they think I am stupid. There's also a lot of good dialogue too though, and I think the dialogue in the later half is a lot better than the first half generally.

2. Basic enemy/fights design. Some of the generic enemy designs are just really annoying to fight and they can make some fights drag. There are also times when there are too many enemies on the field all throwing ranged attacks and punching you, which means these fights turn more into dodgefests than getting to do damage. It can be frustrating at times.

3. Elf Rook is very inconsistent. The majority of the time, your character knows about their culture/religion, and other elves will refer to you as such. But there are too many moments where elf Rook suddenly forgets or is lacking knowledge. They also are undecided if they want your character to be dalish or not, which is grating.

5. Romances. I apparently got lucky with choosing Davrin because I thought his romance was very sweet and heartfelt, with a slow build to great payoff. But I watched some of the other romances and some were very lacking. It’s a slow burn for all of them and I wish you got more romance cutscenes or even just dialogue options.

6. Rook feels like your name, not a title/nickname/whatever. I will never think of my character as the name I gave them, they're just Rook. I don't know if this is a positive or negative but it's just an oddity.

7. Character creator. It offers a lot of options, but the triangle and I will forever be enemies. Making my character was a frustrating process.

The Bad:

1. I feel like they watered down the setting to be "safe", like they are scared of having any moral ambiguity. Hatred towards the elves is basically non-existent. Tevinter I can somewhat pass, as you spend most of your time in Dock Town, which felt like a poorer area, but it feels like they did that specifically to dance around slavery. The Crows have been sanitized to a cool group of assassins while ignoring the darker parts of their organization. 

2. Companion romances. Sorry I hate the idea that they can get together. They flirt earlier than you can commit a relationship, and in my opinion some of the pairings don't even make sense. Unfortunately explaining my issue with one in particular involves story spoilers but yeah, I dislike how this was handled. I also think that if they didn't start flirting until after you could choose a romance path it would feel better, but I dislike them flirting so blatantly when you might be attempting to romance one of them. In my second run where I was trying to romance Neve, at times I felt like a third wheel which was super awkward.

3. I feel like the dialogue is lecturing me personally at times. Like a certain character in the Lords of Fortune talks about how they may acquire treasure (never steal it) but of course they return anything culturally important to the appropriate people because that's wrong to keep it. It just felt too on the nose, and it was a trend that your allied factions had to be morally upstanding groups.

4. Facial animations. Ugh please patch them. Their expressions often do not match what they are saying, like characters smile or smirk way too often in unfitting situations. It can take you out of a scene.

5. While I didn't have many noticable/impactful bugs, my game crashed multiple times in the beginning, which soured my early experience and I had a few other annoying issues.

6. I miss being able to chat with companions and having the wheel of questions you could ask to learn more about them, like from Inquisition. You can only talk to them on their terms which feels awkward and puts a greater distance between them and Rook.

[cyborg-squid]

Veilguard is going to be real fucking weird for me, because like, I was 15~16 when Inquisition came out, and it was my first real experience being... super conflicted about a game/media. I subjected my dad and sister to SOOOO much rants about Inquisitions flaws (and merits as well). Mostly about the failed resolution of the Mage and Templar conflict. At the end of all things, I do like Inquisition, of course, and in large part due to Trespasser, but it wasn't exactly easy.

So with Veilguard, I was already let down once by the franchise, and that was with the work in itself; and now I know a lot more about how shitty and mismanaged of a company Bioware's been, and how they fired almost all of their good writers, and I see fans bring up a not insignificant amount of lore mistakes/retcons, and how talky the dev and/or PR team is being, and I see how fucking badly it wants to be the next Baldur's Gate 3.

And I know that the multitude of choices in Keep would be hella hard to export into a new game again (and it's note like the carryover into Inquisition was a smashing success either), but. Dragon Age and Mass Effect are known as sorta choice-based RPGs, and this isn't always a good thing, as I felt that even Inquisition had a fair amount of choices that don't really... do anything, that feel like they're there just for the sake of having them. There's some choices that you want to make, to have the ability to affect the world, and then there's some that the game forces you to make, that you don't want to (the Inquisition does NOT have any sort of authority over the Grey Wardens. Neither should the Inquisitor have any over Hawke or Alistair/Loghain/Stroud. That was a choice almost solely there for the 'players', yet makes little and less sense for the characters involved).

And then only ~3 choices will be present in Veilguard. and it makes you go "Ohhh, no one but me really cares about these choices then." Which has kind of always been the case, but it kinda smacks of. the current devs really just want to make their own thing with Veilguard; which does make an amount of sense given how the team has been switched up, and they likely want to make Dragon Age: Veilguard, not Dragon Age Origins+II+Inquisition. But in distancing themselves from these choices and worldstates, it feels like it's (like unintentionally, but I can't be sure) distancing itself from the rest of the franchise as well. And I might actually like that, if that was the case, in writing this out, I'd had that the thought that maybe Veilguard might be more appealing to me if it wasn't Dragon Age: Veilguard. But it seems to me now like it's in this really weird sort of Limbo, where it's not close enough to DA to be the game we've all been waiting for, but neither is it far enough away to be something truly new.

So there's a lot of things I'm pretty concerned about with Veilguard. and not pre-ordering it is a gimme, but for me, for the first time in a while, this really feels like a "wait and read the reviews" sort of release. Because, in some ways, if VG ends up being a truly bad entry in the franchise or something like that, I personally could live with Inquisition and Trespasser being my personal ending with the series. Because I'd rather go out on a high note (or at least a medium-high note) with Dragon Age than a low one. (though hopefully VG will actually be good and this bit here will all be moot).

God, posting several paragraph long posts about Dragon Age on my tumblr blog, it really is like I'm 16 again. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

(I also still think Dreadwolf was the better title)

[dekarios]

The dragon age subreddit banned me for posting a mild critique on the veilguard writing. I was not being "anti-woke" or whatever. Just voiced my opinion on some issues and veilguard ignoring previous choices and my disappointment with the racism with Taash their questline. My overall rating wasn't even that bad. I gave it a 6.7/10. Mods are ignoring me. Just a heads up if you want to post on the reddit. Guess a polite but critical sound is unwanted. Several comments of mine including one that just said "I think bioware making a poc coded person growl and sniff people is pretty sketchy" were removed. Fucking clowns.

since subreddits are all very unique to one another, reddit really is a minefield where you gotta find the right subreddit for you. and in my experience, very few gaming subreddits are chill places for critic, no matter how constructive it is. even if it's coming from an overall positive place, or a place of pure love for the series.

i do want to give the moderators there some credit, though, because they were bombarded with pure vitrol and had to scramble to keep the subreddit together, and they've now 'vowed' to ban everyone who protrays any kind of hateful sentiment, and sometimes, unfortunately, this involves guessing the intentions of the poster.

i don't know how they handle it, but i was a subreddit moderator for a few years in a gaming related community, and i would often check the posters past history on reddit to gauge what kind of person they are, and if it's a new reddit account or a low activity account, i would trust my gut which is usually 'bad faith poster', unfortunately. so if you're like that, maybe that's why they aren't trusting you to be a 'good faith poster'?

either way: i am very aware dragon age fans are passionate. they love this series so much, and a lot of them have held onto it since their early teens (hell, even i've been a fan since my teens!) and because of that there's an attachment there that is... integral to their selfhood. dragon age is important to manys own identity. we can argue how healthy this is, how far it should go, whatever, until the cows come home, but when you get passion like this it can often lead to defensiveness, a protectiveness.

and we see that a lot on tumblr. i come from the kin years. i remember when any criticism or 'negativity' would get you driven off the platform. i myself was driven off the platform by the dragon age fandom for a very long time, and this was before dai even came out. out of all the 'old' fandoms on tumblr that held any sort of power, i would say, or maybe notoriety is a better word, dragon age is the one that keeps bouncing back because they're the only one getting content still? like to me when i think of the old days, if i don't include anime (because i think this would get too long), the big fandoms were obviously like, superwholock, homestuck, steven universe, and the bioware fandom was there too. dragon age keeps getting revived because new game, or new book, or new comic, or just new news, whereas the others are dying and shriveled up.

and so much of what i see from dragon age fans NOW is 1:1 to how they were in the past. any criticism is seen as baseless 'negativity', it becomes 'drama'. hell, i was vagued about and subsequently blocked by someone i thought i was friends with because my criticism of veilguard was seen as 'negativity' and i was making them feel.. sad. and i guess that's my whole point here. a lot of dragon age fans love this series so much, care so deeply, that when it is criticised it feels personal. they get hurt or angry. it comes across as a personal attack, even if we try very hard to make sure it isn't worded like one. we become an aggressor.

and i would not be surprised if it had spread to other places people talk about dragon age. subreddits are very often super similar to tumblr fandoms, though neither would like to hear that.

i'm sorry you were banned from the subreddit, but honestly don't take it too personally or harshly. again the moderators are under a lot of pressure there, so it really could just be that pressure.

ultimately i'm gonna keep criticising as much as i want here on my blog, and if i didn't criticise it that would mean i don't like the game. i don't spend effort and energy talking shit about something i don't care about, yknow? me pointing out and discussing datv's flaws come from a place of wishing it was better because i do enjoy it, and there's pieces of the universe i care about. hell, i've praised parts to death already. i can't stop talking about how much i feel about the dwarven stuff.

but i definitely won't be going to that subreddit. thank you for the warning!

[icharchivist]

some veilguard spoilers rumination

after sitting on the horror for a while i feel more confident to say that the game wanting you to mirror Solas is pushing further something i always said about Solas, which is, that he's like a DA protagonist gone wrong, who made a choice to save the world, without being prepared for the consequences that will follow, and he's just trying to fix his mistake.

I always compared Solas' situation to In Hushed Whispers from DAI where your choice of seeing the mages led to you disappearing from one timeline and then seeing a future of horrors you unleashed into the world. while Dorian and you decide to go back in time because "none of this is real, we can fix it", Leliana will reply "it's all pretend to you, a future you hope will never happen. I suffered, the whole world suffered, this is real."

Especially the focus on "real" here, which is something that comes back with how Solas doesn't see this new world as real. He just thinks he can remove the veil, reset everything, none of this is real, the same way you would in the future timeline.

Buuuut because you fix it and the timeline was already doomed anyway people never really picked that one up.

And DA's choices so far have been..... simple. Like, wait not really, they have their emotional weight! but in term of lasting consequences? like the Mage vs Templar debate in da2 or dai? The mages are inherently oppressed by their birth, of course they rebel, while the Templars exist to jail magic, and while they're chained to the Chantry and its propaganda and its drugs and its why they can't just go back down, when you're asking "who do you want to side with? the people who just want to live, or the people who are wondering what their lives will become now that they don't have a purpose left?", it's pretty easy to pick the Mages. Sure, you're dooming the templars and they become your main enemy. But like. Better than the alternative right? It's heartbreaking if you care, but that's all.

So i don't think people specifically weighed their decisions or why it should parallel to Solas, and it's why we just had various takes about Solas being bad for multiple reasons.

In this game they confirm that the Veil itself wasn't planned, it was an aftereffect from locking down the Gods. So it's really an unplanned consequences that totally destroyed the world.

and i see the unplanned consequences of picking Minrathous vs Treviso. By saving Treviso, i came back to a destroyed Minrathous, with our leader dying from the Blight, with our enemies having made a coup, and now everywhere i go i see the corpses of my friends being hanged in the public place for insurection. that people who just helped us before are being chased to die. all of that.

Considering Ghilan'nain was attacking Treviso and the threat here was health related because of the river, and that Ghilan'nain is the specialist of making experiments in pools of liquids, i have no doubt Treviso would have suffered an even worse fate. One you would have to see nonetheless.

Those are unintended consequences from you picking what you want to protect, what you priviligize. Do you priviligize saving the people from the Blight and its experiments by stopping Ghilan'nain, or do you priviligize saving people from tyrany by stopping Elgar'nan?

Solas tried to stop both, and instead he destroyed the whole world. He woke up wanting to fix it. when you walk in the city you abandonned, don't you want to fix it? when i shared my despair with friends they asked me if i should go back to my save to do things differently. And while i'm pretty confident it would be hell either way, i can't help but chuckle how hearing the horrors make people go "go back in time! fix it by erasing the current version of the world you created!". Do you think maybe lifting the Veil would have been Solas' attempt at save scumming?

And i think it's so efficient in showing exactly the type of no winning situation Solas was in.

On top of that the game confirms that Solas was trying to minimize the damage, so it's not like the WHOLE WORLD would have burn from him removing the Fade, it's just that since the two worlds haven't existed in common for so long, there will be a period of destruction that will inherently follow, as people who weren't mage now will discover magic, as demons can now walk freely, this sort of things. In DAI there's a banter with Cassandra about how freeing people from tranquility will make them a danger to themselves and they may die in the process but it's a risk they want to take. it's not any different to Solas, who used to see this world "as walking through a world of tranquil"

He would restore "the world of the elves" aka the world where we lived in harmony with spirits. It didn't mean just that only the elves would survive it. He still would need to kill a lot of people for it to happen. but he did want to minimize the damages as much as possible.

And idk i think the lense "he is a DA protagonist trying to fix the unintended consequences" do a lot to understand why he's scrambling to save the world. He's basically trying to return to his past save, trying to work with the consequences of his actions in this new worldstate. Like how my warden put Bhelen on the throne to help the casteless, but my Hawke helped the Harrowmont's descendant to run away from Bhelen's forces who were trying to root out the last Harrowmont's supporters. You try to scramble to minimize the consequences of your actions one game to the next.

And yeah Treviso or Minrathous was a good choice to make to really make you think in how similar you are to Rook. You tried to stop a mad god, instead unleashed worse into the world, and now you have to make difficult decisions that will lead to the death of countless of people and a horrible change to the statusquo. what would you do? will you let the Venatori be tyrant over your people? because people sure said about Solas "well people are being used to the world now so it's not worth trying to restore the old world". do you say the same about what happened to Minrathous? to Treviso? "just get used to it"?

So yeah point is that i think this whole thing is meant to vindicate ME in particular as i've been fuming for years about this whole idea of unintended consequences and the loss that will inadvertently come from change.

Also i am looking at how so many spirits we meet in the fade looks like elves. Im looking carefully.

anyway, game for me fr fr. even if it destroyed my heart at least it did the best thing it could: reminding me how cool Solas is of a character as a concept.

[to-draw-time]

Im gonna respond to this response in this chain bc I think it is kind of proving my point and why I disagree:

1st: Sorry you felt that way in your gameplay. It can suck when a character doesn't react in a similar fashion as the others, but I also do think in the Veilguard specifically the companions have been some of the nicest and most chill out of the franchise and so maybe that is one reason I find it so jarring ppl find any of them to be ignoring their Rook when I stg Morrigan in DAO would all but tell you to jump off a bridge if you said something she didn't agree with.

2nd: I noted Spite recognizing the care from Rook once Lucanis was initially recruited, Lucanis being on edge with Teia flirting with Rook and not enjoying her doing that, and him flirting with Rook at the cafe and making a note of Rook's fave drink before Illario was overt about his betrayal. Never read him as ignoring Rook, more that some of Rook's flirting was "Wrong time and wrong place" for Lucanis.

3rd: Lucanis is in a pretty self deprecating state and you can see it during his companion quest and even the banter between others during the game. He flat out at some points admits he doesn't have the best experience with romance and with giving advice. His biggest skill to himself is being an assassin; when it comes to his personal relationships he makes pretty clear he fumbles at them. 4th: I think the biggest thing a lot of ppl are not adding into Lucanis's romance that does really explain his reserved nature or deflection is that Spite, a demon who until you get pretty far into his quest (if you dont get locked out of it) he does not trust or like, sees and shares every experience of Lucanis's life. Of course Lucanis is quiet when Rook catches him off guard with a flirty line or expresses open compassion with him. Of course he pulls back and hides his emotions and of course he deflects to the main subject; He doesn't want Spite to have that information. He doesn't want Spite to get to experience that intimacy that Lucanis wants for himself. Like...if you don't see that and you don't agree with me I don't know what to tell you. It felt so on the nose to me...

"I want more complex romances that are not handed to me" y'all cannot handle Lucanis deflecting your flirting bc he is currently struggling with the fact someone he thinks of as a brother betrayed him...like...

[mixupmycota]

watching the credits for veilguard made me cry, i sat through it all. they were so careful to credit as far as i can tell, everyone who had actively worked on the game including during prior stages of development? if there are people left out, we obviously won't know until they come forward, but there's a lot of "prior:" on there.

the first indie game project i ever worked on, i was so excited. i had been given the go-ahead from the pitch i gave the leads, i put in like two months of work

and then hear back that actually there wasn't supposed to be any swearing or death in this project

which had not been communicated to me, and is not something that you would ever guess from the pitch of it and the material i was provided when i signed on

taking out the concept of death drastically watered down the story they were trying to tell. i tried to instill stakes elsewhere, to build relationships between party members. i hear back that there can't be any queerness in the project either.

i finished up what work i could, gave them my outlines for prospective arcs, and left that project.

the next title i worked on was an attempt with friends to make a small rpg. the original concept was for an rpg about delivering mail. when we sat and blocked out our design document, we quickly realized we did not have the material resources or the full skillsets needed to achieve our goals. we set it aside.

the next title i worked on was with friends again, different ones, and we made it work. it's a very successful niche indie experience, and i wrote just over half the script and did overall narrative design for it. i was very grateful for the opportunity to work with and under someone with considerably more industry experience, who was very patient with me and explained the limitations of the art and animation pipelines. i had grand visions for a final cutscene that were not going to happen. we did our best and people loved it anyway, but i always think about what could have been.

i then made a bunch of twine games on my own. did some brief work for a mod for a different game. did some game jams. every step of the way i gained a deep appreciation for just how much labour it takes to make even the simplest game. the moment you have a collaborator, you need to also be a communicator. i wanted to be a narrative lead one day, and specifically i had been working since i was a kid up to the point of being able to apply to work for bioware, because their games have always been very important to me.

so i study how different fields pipelines work. i learn about audio. i learn about animation. i learn about texturing. i work on soft skills. i practice how to convey my thoughts to people outside of narrative.

my next project before an extended hiatus was considerably larger. i saw my work appear on a nintendo direct.

game development is so hard. it's so hard. that's before you take into consideration working conditions, the presence of crunch within working conditions, and the difficulty of coordinating work across multiple countries and timezones. let alone localization and dubs, oh my god. veilguard is localized into so many languages.

the devs aren't lazy, it's not that they don't care. everyone's quick ideas for how to improve stuff would be incredible fic - and they've been encouraging for so long of people writing fic!

but actually IMPLEMENTING those ideas requires creating dedicated storyboards; animations; lighting; visual effects; audio effects; new environments and props and more.

Taps sign.