Dragon Age: The Veilguard - A woke disaster? Yep!

[30+GameOvers]

I really cannot stand this fucking normie defense for swallowing slop. Nigger, what "story?" You want to see what happens to Solas? You really want to see trannies utterly annihilate a setting and storyline you used to care about?

Anything to justify eating shit, I swear. I just don't get it.

You forget that normalfags eat Marvelslop up like it's pigfeed, and guess what this game tried ripping off?

I told him I hope he has fun with what story is left.

Should have told him "Good luck with the surgery scars" to see how he reacted.

 

[spacko]

Zombi Shepard. Xiro of the They/Them Citadel, returning again to spread gender awareness!

splice in some gender reassignment surgery footage into the lazarus project cutscene, there's your opener for ME4

the lazarina project

 

[Kane Lives]

The game is settling around 70k for now which is unimpressive considering this is a AAA project.

It's only barely beating Mass Effect Legendary Edition's peak, and that's a compilation rerelease, and it's never even breaching Starfield's 330k peak (and we know how quickly that game collapsed into nothing).

Not blowing up on the launchpad like Concord is not an achievement, and I really doubt a AAA game from an established IP would disappear from notice the same way Dustborn did.

I don't think it's surprising at all. Dragon Age has always been a pretty niche franchise even in the small pool that was CRPGs. Sure, it's bigger than Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny or whatever, but it also has been ten years since Inquisition.

And people forget: Inquisition wasn't THAT fondly remembered to begin with. A modest success at best, considering it went from what was considered RPG gangbuster numbers from Mass Effect 1/2/3 and Dragon Age Origins.

 

[Frosted Snowflakes]

 

[LazyLizard]

The way the Qunari are handled is honestly par for the course. Even in DAI and Trespasser, the narrative goes out of its way to show the Ben-Hassarath and Viddasala as separate from Qunari society or at least acting on their own initiative.

did they though? sure the triumvirate leaders claim so but can you really trust that? had the plan to bomb every major city in the south and kill all their leaders worked out do you really think they wouldn't have invaded? i'd say it's more likely they just saw the writing on the wall and threw the viddasala and her people to the wolves

 

[Ishtar]

IU yes. But as a function of the narrative? The game never allows the player to engage with the Qunari as a whole, just a segment of their society or renegades.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

Mark me late if it has been spoken already, but I heard something and upon checking it out found it to be true. Something really unusal about the Portugal IGN review of the game. You know the rumor about reviewer being explicitly told to use the "return to form" talking point? Well the IGN Portugal also uses the term, except they say "Regresso a forma" which makes no sense whatsoever because form/forma is not really used in this way in portuguese at all, not in the Brazilian lexicon, not in the Original Portuguese and not on the African side either. A regular person would say instead "Regresso a fórmula" or "Retorno ao formato". He also uses the term "regresso em grande do Bioware" at one point which sounds really weird and unnatural, but this one could be a case of Portugal speak as they all sound kinda weird to other Lusophones.

 

[bort420]

people who finished me3 on release got different endings from people who played it with the DLC. they retconned a bunch of stuff.

the original ending of ME3 was a complete shitshow and there was a lot of people shitting their pants at how badly executed it was. people were mad that all the buildup of "your choices matter" turned out to basically be "which one of 3 buttons do you press" (there was never going to be a satisfactory ending to ME3 unless they took another 5 years in development)

i cant remember the details so it may not have specifically been the leviathan DLC, but i do remember the exposition dump of leviathan retconned some of the lore at least

Basically what happened with Mass Effect was the same thing that happened with Dragon Age. Drew Karpyshyn wrote the OG mass effect story. Karpyshyn left mass effect during/after ME2's development eventually to leave the studio in 2012. The decline of the series and the dogshit parts of ME2 and ME3, namely Kai Leng + the awful endings are an artifact of Mac Walters taking it over: they ditched the more interesting and original story for a generic humans v robots in space scenario. The story changed from the dark matter / element zero connection to the biological/synthetic conflict. Tali's first missions in ME2 still have the old plot line which never gets brought up in later ME2/ME3. Apparently Walters banged out the endings himself in a few hours just to get ME3 out the door.

There's older reddit posts from 2012 but this is a decent summary:

https://www.reddit.com/r/masseffect/comments/megb00/blame_mac_walters_for_kai_lengs_implementation_in/

I think it all traces back to Mac Walters screwing everything over from what Drew Karpyshyn built.
It was Drew that created Kai Leng in which he made his introduction in the Ascension novel. He described him as being a former N7 Alliance soldier who was kicked out for doing immoral things. In the book he was described as having a buzz cut hair style and his overall look and demeanor was almost entirely stereotypical Soldier/grunt look...not long hair ninja with a blade.
Then when Mac Walters got his hands on the character, a lot of things became lost in translation and as a result we got the long hair ninja with a blade Kai Leng. Not the military N7 veteran with a rifle and buzz cut.
In Ascension which was a pre ME2 novel. Kai Leng was one of the main villains in it and he was more fleshed out. We got to learn why he was the way he was and in some cases even how he became to despise Shepard. We learned why he joined Cerberus. I think he got kicked out of the Alliance for murdering an Alien or something like that. In Retribution which is a pre ME3 novel, his character was further fleshed out. Both Ascension and Retribution were written by Drew Karpyshyn however it was Mac Walters that was the lead writer for ME3 as Drew left to go work on SWTOR.
In ME1 Saren was exactly how he was in the Revelation novel which was written by....Drew Karpyshyn. Drew Karpyshyn was also the lead writer for ME1 so the translation of Saren from Novel to Game worked out well. People like to bash Drew for his proposed Dark Energy ending for ME3 that never happened by saying it sounded cheap and unoriginal. However I still believe ME3 story and characters and of course.....ending would have been more cohesive had Drew stayed on to be the ME3 lead writer. This means Kai Leng's implementation would have had more quality and care because Drew had already worked the character for 2 previous novels and is now translating him over to game the same way he translated Saren from Revelation to ME1 and the same way he translated The Illusive Man from Ascension to ME2.

 

[spacko]

flatlined and starting to drop, will probably pick up again when the nighttime shift starts but peaking at 70k, maybe 75k sounds about right

9 years development, estimated 250m-500m production cost

lol

 

[Rudolf's Friend]

Troon Lolcow Kidd Bandit has been claiming that the series has always been woke and gay and you just weren't realizing it. I just want to verify if this is true or not.

He also says that he took his new tranny name from the series.

 

[Terror Sandwich]

>Faggots pretending that these number are impressive to discredit "go woke go broke"
It not a flop, but it's selling despite the woke, not because of it. It's a big IP with a lot of fans.
Inquisition sold over 12M copies, and it was decently well received by the majority of players. So it's not surprising that a bunch of people return for the direct sequel.

I think the giga flops of some live service games has skewed the numbers perception of some people, so let compare this release with some similar AAA games:

Spoiler: All-time peak dump comparisons

Other RPGs released this year:



Some other millennial slop:

Ports from games that were over 1 year old once they came to steam:




Dark Souls 2 (released over 10 years ago, when steam's userbase was considerably smaller, and sold fewer total copies than Dragon Age Inquisition, which was released on the same year. So it's safe to assume that Inquisition would have had higher peak had it been released on Steam):


A chudKino RPG released 7 years ago:


Whatever the fuck this coomer shit is (these numbers were bots, right?):

 

[Mr. Zed da Robot Poon Fed]

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I would die for a Gayniggers From Outer Space video game.

What really irks me about the exchange over "misgendering" the enbie character is the way they didn't even try to cleverly disguise it with fantastical terminology or lore that makes sense within the setting - they jumped straight to using modern lingo i.e. non binary and the transgender experience, because for all they go on about their identities in an almost mystical way - "my gender is a swirly mass of sparkly cosmic energy beyond normal human comprehension" apparently the pronoun people are too dumb to infer that a fictional character is sharing the same wacky starry eyed nonsense thoughts, it has to be explicitly spelled out for them that this character is a they/them!

In regards to the non binary they/them and trans stuff, I gotta say something I saw on Twitter: this is fantasy right? I’m pretty sure you could get away with this if you just added some language or mythology to establish how a species/race/world/culture has something that establishes how this LGBTQ setup is a thing. Instead all we get is the same exposition dump that only the most hardened of leftist and left wing culture warriors think is how humans interact.

They really could have done something creative with the they/them concept.

Pocket from Deadlock seems to use they/them pronouns, Valve was clever and creative enough to make them three sentient beings (the human, the coat and the satchel). Or Frankie Stein from the recent Monster High film, since she's made of both male and female parts and isn't particularly one person.

But that's asking for creativity and thought, which is lacking from recent games, unfortunately.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

I get the impression that grifters bitching about it as if their lives depended on it (well, they do, kindof - very productive people) signal-boosted it and saved it from falling into the wastebin of history by getting it on everyone's minds for a hot minute.

I haven't seen a reason to give a shit about this franchise since Origins, and Veilguard looks like something decidedly different. With Dreamworks' Vincent Price in tow. Of course it'd sell pretty well in the modern moment - if the goal really was to put Bioware into septic shock, it'd have been wiser to mum-say it.

 

[Mola Ram]

Troon Lolcow Kidd Bandit has been claiming that the series has always been woke and gay and you just weren't realizing it. I just want to verify if this is true or not.
View attachment 6584215View attachment 6584248
He also says that he took his new tranny name from the series.
View attachment 6584253

Some of this is accurate. Some of it is not. Yes, Leliana is bisexual in the original game (and quite likely leaning more lesbian; all of her canonical relationships are with women unless a male Warden romances her). No, Shale is not nonbinary; it isn't even clear that Shale used to be a dwarf until you finish her personal quest, at which point you can remark on her gender and never realizing she was female and she'll snark that she didn't think it was necessary to point it out. Amusingly, Shale herself deliberately misgenders everyone, insisting on referring to all other characters as "it."

You also never had the actual word "non-binary" used, and you never saw anything as hamfisted as Taash's storyline, not even when Inquisition retconned trans qunari into existence, and that was pretty bad. As is so often the case, "wokeness" is a matter of tone -- of emphasizing agendas over storytelling or character. But don't expect someone like this to grasp subtlety or nuance or even understand what they are.

 

[BlankSpaceBaby]

Cringe vids are up. Here are some I found, and no, I didn't watch them, just read the titles and shudder. Press play at own risk.

WARNING: Looks like Troonari sex

 

[Anon88]

He also says that he took his new tranny name from the series.
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So is anybody going to tell this guy that Aveline is from the second game and not origins. He changed his name to match hers but doesn’t know which game she’s from lol.

 

[Welsh Catgirl Enjoyer]

It was wishful thinking to think that it would crash and burn like Concord. The only times that happens is when it's not just a bad game, but a spectacularly bad one (something like Tony Hawks Pro Skater 4 for example, where the game only had two levels complete and the rest were patched in).

The real test of this game will to see how well it keeps up those sales, and what the general legacy it leaves is. I think we're in the early days where the culture war is covering for the fact that the game just isn't very good. Once people calm down and the game has time to sit, I expect we'll see people just go "you know what, that was actually just pretty shit". We'll almost definitely have some more cringeworthy dialogue and pandering too.

Honestly though, this is the game that killed Bioware now imo. When it was Andromeda, people were saying "it wasn't their main studio". When it was Anthem, people were saying "well they were made to develop an MMO FPS and that's not their wheelhouse". This time there really isn't any excuse you can give.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

Honestly though, this is the game that killed Bioware now imo.

In the broader consensus, you mean? I think most people who actually like RPGs have recognized the studio as producing content postmortem since... what, ME3?

Maybe that's me speaking, though. I took about a five-second look at Inquisition and thought it looked vapid.

 

[Three Gorillion Dollars]

Basically what happened with Mass Effect was the same thing that happened with Dragon Age. Drew Karpyshyn wrote the OG mass effect story. Karpyshyn left mass effect during/after ME2's development eventually to leave the studio in 2012. The decline of the series and the dogshit parts of ME2 and ME3, namely Kai Leng + the awful endings are an artifact of Mac Walters taking it over: they ditched the more interesting and original story for a generic humans v robots in space scenario. The story changed from the dark matter / element zero connection to the biological/synthetic conflict. Tali's first missions in ME2 still have the old plot line which never gets brought up in later ME2/ME3. Apparently Walters banged out the endings himself in a few hours just to get ME3 out the door.

Not quite. That's part of it, but there's more to it. Look up the posts by Chris L’Etoile ("Stormwaltz") who wrote all the codex, Legion, and many of the best parts of ME1 and ME2. The genius of Mass Effect 1 came from all the writers trying to do their own thing and having their own idea on what the universe should be, making it feel varied and deep, and the departure of Karpyshyn and L'Etoile basically left Walters in charge, and Walters and Hudson are basically called out by L'Etoile as being unimaginative and generally unable to grasp the ideas that L'Etoile was interested in playing with. Walters and Casey Hudson were the ones who banged out the ME3 endings without any consultation or peer review from the other writers on the team. Patrick Weekes once called Hudson a very intelligent writer who has no idea that most people don't see things like he does.

 

[Mola Ram]

So is anybody going to tell this guy that Aveline is from the second game and not origins. He changed his name to match hers but doesn’t know which game she’s from lol.

The Orlesian legend of Aveline -- from whom Aveline in DA2 got her name -- is told in Origins. I'm willing to bet this dude is autistic enough to know that.