#why did my brain have to fixate on dragon age why couldn't i be obsessed with taxes or something smh

[ebbsea]

finished datv - this is pretty long, oops

[shoutout to bystander ghostzzy who witnessed the hit and run that was this game.]

well. the game felt without teeth, no bite. datv was wrought by a long dev-cycle, a slew of firings, and several rewrites, but i put cynicism aside because i genuinely wanted to give it a chance. unfortunately, it started going downhill pretty quickly from there.

i want to be fair, so i will start with my personal positives:

-robust character customization

-the locations were very beautiful, there were times where i just wanted to stop and soak up the visuals

-the actual gameplay was very fluid and quick, and the rhythm once you find it was fun 

-i liked the solas memories, and some more insights into felassan

-i liked that your character could be explicitly trans, but it was so jarring to hear the words trans and non-binary in this setting. i think they did it so there would be no room for plausible deniability, but it still felt so out of place. we understood what it meant when dorian said he preferred the company of other men instead of using more modern terminology. also if someone misgendered me and started doing pushups i would feel so embarrassed for them.

-there were moments where i did feel endeared to characters, even if briefly

now onto the stickier points.

i can not get over the lack of worldstates. it also puts such a sour taste in my mouth that they waited so long to announce there wouldn't be any. it gives veilguard the feeling of being grafted on.

pacing was weird, companion quest beats were at times out of place. some moments did not feel adequately built up or often had us going "that's it?"

man, oh man, do i miss trevor morris' touch. years later i still listen to the dai ost for drawing or walking/biking, and i just do not feel the same compulsion for datv's score.

the chantry has always been a presence in these games, and they're just gone. they were practically breathing down your neck in games previous - where are they now?

i was expecting to be able to go to minrathous' "high town" so to speak. we don't see any slaves or any other magisters. we don't see the black divine. it feels like they were afraid to broach the subject. after years of talking up how corrupt and hard it is to navigate tevinter life, it's disappointing to not see it. additionally it was disappointing to not explore an actual rivaini city.

major lore reveals were treated with such a blase attitude. perhaps it is the ten years of anticipation, but the way it was presented was done so quickly and no one seemed to have much of a reaction.

i hated the waves of faceless enemies that were just evil for the sake of evil. the evanuris’ motivations just didn’t feel compelling. power for the sake of power, and nothing else. was also deeply disappointed in the lack of dread wolf elven movement and the cutting of espionage plots. wish we saw more groups aligning themselves with him, even if he was only just using them. it would have been interesting interacting with an antagonistic group that wasn't outright evil.

choices (or lack thereof)

i sure wish we had the ability to make more difficult choices throughout the game and to have to carry the weight of them. seeing the ruined base and the aftermath of a dragon attack was neat, but the decision itself felt hollow. having to wait until the point of no return to get anymore just made the lack of meaningful decisions before then more obvious.

izzy asked one of the best questions ever. why is rook in charge?

the other protagonists of the dragon age games were very clearly thrust into their role. there's a blight, a betrayal, and the warden and alistair are the only ones who can do something about it. da2 didn't have world ending stakes, but we were clearly following hawke and their contained story. the inquisitor has the anchor and many eyes on them. i think they wanted rook to be just some guy, but it just feels so strange. can't get past the why them feeling.

the game tries to posture rook and solas as equals, a mirror unto the other, but i didn't feel it. other than the faction blurb we start off with, rook is not given any other difficult decisions in which sacrifice is incurred (minrathous/treviso doesn't feel earned to me). the narrative is constantly reminding us that solas got his hands dirty in the pursuit of a goal, doing whatever it takes by any means necessary to achieve it. you would think they would give us more opportunities to make more challenging decisions.

the factions could have been more morally dubious, instead of this weird conflict-free sheen they all have. they all get the sparkling-eyed-rebel retcon. it feels like they’re trying to recapture the vibe of origins, but it shakes out differently. origins gives you the context of your character’s place in the world, and veilguard doesn't. there is no meaningful change we could make within the factions themselves. they feel redundant.

i like decisions where you really have to chew on what’s being offered to you. it doesn’t have to be between being a perfect angel and the mustache-twirlingly evil option. i didn't mind the minrathous v. treviso decision in theory, but it felt too soon. too uneven. 

that in turn makes the replayability factor questionable as well. where are the major differences in choices? games previous you could play fully-fleshed out characters with enough variance to be distinct from each other. rook is just rook. no matter how you shake it. 

companions

the found-family dynamic feels inauthentic, more forced-family. many moments of sentimentality/opening up feel completely unearned. it takes the fun out of getting to know the companions when they are ready to spill their hearts out from jump. i do miss that we can't be blunt or just sometimes outright mean to our companions or the world at large.

grossly lacking in character reactivity. part of the fun of dragon age is being presented with a choice, and experiencing your companions' various povs. even those who you get along with may have wildly different ideas and philosophies than you do. 

there is no way you could miss out on any companions, just refuse to recruit them, get them kicked out, or have them leave autonomously. no one challenges you or your world view, and you can’t really do the same back. the companion quests got tedious after a certain point, and it quickly got exhausting when the bulk of them devolved into rook playing therapist. negatively impacting your companions isn’t something you do by choice, it’s only something that occurs with inaction. which, in a what's-supposed-to-be a choice-driven rpg, is a pretty boring way to negatively affect your companions’ stories.

maybe it’s misplaced nostalgia, but dao-dai companions were so human. sometimes their worldviews clashed with each other or your pc's, or they made terrible mistakes, and you had to decide whether or not you would stand by them or turn away from them. they had a choice to stand by or turn away from you.

in datv there is little friction.  there is no human complexity. it’s impossible to get on anyone's bad side. they are seemingly always agreeable. they don't have uncomfortable or ugly facets to them. they don't feel like real people with their own sense of right and wrong. but we also don't have many situations where their values can be challenged. and what are the consequences? slower level ups? 

taash's personal questline bothered me so bad. when a character's whole arc is about how they want to escape the binarism of gender, it comes off pretty condescending when, in practically the same breath, you enforce a binary choice on their culture. the choice between qun vs. rivaini comes off even more insidious when the qunari have been explicitly referred to as "islamic borg." it's implied that the non-qun choice is the "better" option. to have that juxtaposed side by side makes it that much more insulting. people have been critiquing the depiction of the qunari for over a decade at this point, so it's disheartening that they haven't paid attention to that criticism, to say the least.

lucanis. the world's softest beige-est pillow. he probably suffers the worst from flanderization - i started getting irritated with him and all his cafelitos. i expected spite to be a much more challenging character, but really it just felt like making sure the kid you’re babysitting doesn’t run out into the street. 

i think the climax of emmrich's questline was the first character specific decision i actually really liked. i liked that neither choice was the "wrong" choice, if that makes sense. it reminded me of the cole spirit/human decision in inquisition.

neve's character arc felt thrown together, kind of meandering around a crooked line. i really like how dry she is and how hesitant she is to let go of the worst case scenario. but she she feels like an afterthought to the devs. playing with a hardened neve did not feel particularly different than when we met her earlier.

with bellara i could feel my interest diminishing as soon as her baby brother was revealed to be alive. as soon as cyrian's reintroduced, it becomes more about him than her. would have been cool to see her struggle with the choice instead of him. i kept seeing ghosts of merrill whenever i had her around.

davrin was the character that felt most dragon age to me. additionally he was probably the only one that felt like we were hanging out and connecting vs. being the team's in house therapist. that being said, it did get tedious having to go walk his puppydogbird so often. i wish we had more chances to talk to him about him though. he went into weisshaupt fully ready to die, and the conversation following that felt so lackluster. like we had to hurry up and pivot back to assan.

harding feels like she regressed maturity-wise. i do like how we get some dwarf-specific content, and some more titan info, but overall it felt like something was missing. also at the back end of her questline, she shares titan-visions with the kal-sharok dwarves, and playing as a dwarven rook had me sitting there like. i would also like to see it. hello.

i think my overall issue with the companion quests this time round is how passive they feel. it feels weird that rook has the final say-so in their lives. many of their personal quests don't connect to the main issue at hand, which, when we are supposedly at the behest of a ticking clock, messes with the sense of urgency. i like the companions well enough, they just don't quite itch my brain. it could be a matter of needing more time to think on them, but this is based off first impressions.

the varric twist was goofy. we kept saying he should have died on those stairs and i guess he did but huh. he never left the room, and we immediately attributed it to bad writing instead of hinting towards a twist. we just assumed they only wanted to pay brian bloom for a day's work and didn't bother to record enough lines for him. easy to dismiss as a cheap nostalgia grab, especially when the other cameos (isabela, morrigan, dorian) illicted the same feeling of seeing those folks in cheap mascot suits.

my only real hope for this game was that it would tie up the story in a neat bow. that we would have satisfying closure before moving on - from dragon age altogether or perhaps to a different era in thedas. but with what we were given, i don't know. classic gnawing feeling of is that all? i did start off feeling very hopeful, and there were moments that did shine through to me, but eh. eh. /minor pet peeve but i don't like the trend of always upping the stakes for each installment (if i get into the executors i will simply pass away).

i don't know what would have fixed this game. it's clear from the info in the artbook that they really wanted to do more. and the waves of firings, and having to pivot so many times came at the expense of the quality of the story. headcanons can only carry you so far. when you have to fill in all of the empty gaps with your own load-bearing headcanons, there is a problem. it’s fun to extrapolate on what’s there, but it feels hollow in this instance. i have always had nitpicks with certain details of the dragon age world, but this game really knocked the wind out of my sails. i'm not looking forward to what comes next. maybe i just need time to let it all marinate, but my gut says no.

i still have a lot of love in my heart for dragon age. but still.

overall disappointing.