I will repeat this in the next round up for reviews with new numbers, but this is currently relevant, if I have time I might even do a Review Review since it ties into a Jimquisition:
Dragon Age: The Veilguard [
ARCHIVE], Jim gave it a 7.5/10. Metascore is 83, User Score is 3.8, and Steam All Reviews is 73%. Funnily enough not long ago the User Scores were much higher. There was some initial anti-review bombing inflating the scores and now it is swinging the other direction as people actually play the game. I also have heard that there's some aggressive censorship happening on Steam, but I can't confirm it myself.
Now I am going to point out two things in his review:
A good thing Jim did said:
OMG Bias Note: Laura Kate Dale, friend & colleague, consulted on this game
Don't be snarky about having basic ethics Jim. This is something that tells people whether or not you might be pulling punches or not and only protects you from losing even more of your income as well as helps people adjust their expectations before they spend the money they work for, something I know you're unfamiliar with doing for video games without a tax write-off. We get that you are one of the most privileged people alive, but that doesn't mean your customers are you fat pathetic ugly man, and I call you a man because I lack any and all respect for you.
Jim's Dumb Review said:
The fact you can make it very gender is a huge positive, especially since the only people claiming it’s “forced” on you are lying through their stupid teeth. It’s there to help more players feel seen, and that’s only a good thing.
Power level and nuance warning. Retards who can't form a more complicated thought than "thing I like good, thing I don't bad" move on. Also let's not derail this thread over our individual politics and beliefs. If you want to call me a faggot and argue politics please do so by quoting me in a more appropriate thread in Autistic Thunderdome. Let's keep this on topic. I don't even like this warning. I am doing it to save the jannies needing to clean up our shit later. Too many thread derailing newfags on the forums lately.
I'm a non-binary bisexual. I watched a full playthrough of this game just to see how bad it was. All the gender shit in this game? It was forced. I did not feel "seen". I did not feel "represented". I felt insulted, much like when your degenerate ass walks around talking about your tits while hiding behind non-binary labels to indulge in a public fetish. I felt embarrassed since I know the public is just going to associate people like me who work, contribute, and put in the effort to be considerate of other people and be a productive member of society with that shit.
If you cared about LGBTQ+ people and how they feel you wouldn't be sparing this game on its intent or because your friend worked on it. You'd be damning it on the execution while going "at least they tried, but they need to do better". This shit is more forced than the sexual assaults I am still confident you performed on your old editor. Fuck you Jim, and fuck anyone who defends this type of shit. Despite what site I am on I do actually
want good representation in games. In places where it fits, in stories which are mature and respectful enough to do so, from characters who are not mentally ill parodies that feel like false flag attacks. Dragon Age is
not the franchise for such things. The people who consulted and worked on this project were
not equipped to handle these topics. What they were trying to do, yes, I do
agree it was "only a good thing", but the execution and place they did it? Only a bad thing.
Maybe instead of infecting franchises with this bullshit that don't traditional have it and don't have a basis for such (unlike something like
Baldur's Gate which actually was weird for not having it back in the day considering Forgotten Realms is Ed Greenwoods degenerate Magical Realm and has been since inception, seriously that man is obsessed with girl cock and bisexuality) you should build you own settings with this stuff from the start. Actually maybe ask the hard societal questions about how a culture with these things as the norm would function and behave. Consider how the magic/super-tech of fantastic settings would affect these topics. Put in the work. I love Dragon Age, but for me I am glad it died with Inquisition, because at least I didn't need to feel like the corpse of something I enjoyed in my youth was being violated with girl cock and stink ditches. Really though, let's be honest, BioWare still can't handle a natural feeling homosexual relationship and that shit is actually easier to tackle than gender and identity issues so they shouldn't have even tried. Seriously, if you can't handle LGB, you aren't even remotely ready to handle QT+, unless theoretically if you were writing purely from personal experience and your entire writing team was QT+.