#this the game with my Blorbo of All Time with the fucking bonkers lore and I'm hhhhhhhhhhhHHHHH

[indig0trolls]

dnd campaign that's been on hiatus since march is getting kick started again on Tuesday and I'm feeling so..... so impatient orz

[sasquatchsightings]

Adding my two cents:

On the one hand, I get that they need to make the game approachable for new people. You don’t want characters spouting off proper nouns all over the place without proper context. And with it being a decade later, there are some choices that can be negated or left out as not being important. I’m not denying that. (I will set aside how many people I’ve seen streaming the series on Twitch and posting vids of their first playthrough on Twitter, due to comparisons to BG3, but I feel like there are plenty of newbies who are CURRENTLY in the process of becoming fans who are going to be very salty when they get their shiny new copy of DATV.)

Plus I feel they want to create as much of a clean cut as they can from the original trilogy to avoid what I’m calling the Pokemon Problem. Pokémon’s issue with its premise is that if each game is in a new area and new areas necessitate new characters (ie the Pokemon) to interact with as the main gameplay mechanic, then they can either make each region totally separate or constantly add about 100 new ‘mons to the roster every generation and have to juggle an exponentially growing number of possible team combinations. Dragon Age logistically can’t keep giving us ever more complicated branching paths for an ever increasing number of blorbos without spending a huge amount of dev time trying to write just those paths and how to give players an update on all those quantum characters.

But to give us so little to tie over when responsiveness to player choice has always been a key aspect of the series is bonkers. The excuse I keep seeing is “it’s 10 years later and we’re in the North, so nothing we did matters.” Excuse me, but the Waking Sea isn’t a fucking Iron Curtain. Orlais is a political powerhouse who trades with literally everyone, and the legacy of Queen Asha of Antiva ensures that all the ruling families are both connected by politics and by blood.

And to say those choices don’t matter means we won’t so much as get a Codex entry or an NPC conversion about what happened in regards to our choices without it being written in the most neutral, passive language. Like, if we’re in Nevarra, it would be pretty conspicuous for no one anywhere to comment on their neighboring country if a war hawk is on the throne or if they’ve radically changed their stance on elves.

Not to mention that “the North” isn’t just Tevinter. Antiva, Nevarra, and allegedly Rivain are all part of the SOUTHERN Chantry, so who is Divine still applies. You can’t tell me that a softened Leliana reacted to the invasion of Qunari in Antiva and responded in the exact same way as she would have had she been hardened, and in the same way as Cassandra AND Vivienne. And you can’t tell we spent all that time getting her elected only for her to abdicate the throne in under 10 years. 

The Morrigan thing, I can see how they can bend the lore to make the Well not matter, if maybe the effect was temporary due to Flemmeth dying, but it still would beg the question how Morrigan gained all her knowledge. If she doesn’t drink from the Well, she never becomes fluent in elvish. If she does, that is what gives her the ability to turn into a dragon, so if she does that in a world where she didn’t drink, that will be odd. And many people have brought up how she is going to be “surprisingly involved” in the story, so that also begs the question of where is Kieren.

And another thing! One of the choices is who you romanced, but there isn’t anything about their fate. This is probably fine for a few of the romance options, but several of them have the chance to end in tragedy, especially Bull, Cullen, and Blackwall. Plus Cassandra can be a romance option AND the Divine. If we meet the Inquisitor and they talk about loving Cassandra, is no one going to bring up that “Hey, Cassandra Pentaghast? Isn’t that Divine Victoria’s proper name?” To me, the only way of squaring this is that the romance option question is stealthily just asking “did you romance Solas: yes or no?” And I get that he’s popular in the fandom, but people who haven’t been rabidly talking about the egg for the past decade probably just remember him as the nerdy elf who turns out to be the guy who started all the bad stuff in DAI, because his romance is locked behind a subset of a subset of a subset of the players. So making two of the three choices exclusive to his story is…a choice.

Folks, I gotta be real with you: Yes I too am disappointed that there aren't more choices carrying over in The Veilguard from the last three games, but I think the current fandom rage is a little over the top. It's not the end of the world. Can we just take a breath for a second and remember that this new game is set in Northern Thedas, where 99% of decisions made in Southern Thedas ten or more more years ago of course aren't going to matter, if you think about it? And on a meta level, I imagine the goal is to make this game as friendly as possible to brand new players, not out of spite towards existing fans.