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

[BlankSpaceBaby]

Yeah, my not-so-popular opinion is that Baldur's Gate 3, like Dragon Age: Inquisition, gets far more love than it probably deserves because it arrived at a time when there really wasn't anything better or even close to it.

 

[Polystyrene Glioblastoma]

David Jaffe has also gone apeshit and bragging how much of a "ally" he is. I'm surprised he doesn't have a Kiwi Farms thread yet.

David Jaffe sort of does have a his own thread. No surprise he is defending Veilguard and attacking people passionate about video games, these days at least.

Jaffe's retarded takes find their way to being discussed in various game threads and political stuff every so often on The Farmz. He claims to be the macho average Joe, but he's a haggard, washed up, and bloated pot of soy.

1990's David Jaffe would be disgusted with who he is now.

 

[FatalTater]

BG3 is loads better then Veilguard in how it handles the gay/trans stuff.

Spoiler: plot things and rambling

BG3 gaes are just like, "yeah that's my spouse, we are relevant to the game in whatever way, carry on," in the way the normal people/characters do. There's no drama centering around it. Even with Isobel and Aylin, Ketheric didn't care they were women, he cared that one was an Aasimar.

Veilguard has a spiky snowflake being aggressive about some personal pronoun thing that has nothing to do with anything else. There's even a bit where Taash was grumbling about the language around the They/Them stuff was hard to remember and deal with, yet no one said "ya know there's a way around that.."

Another Taash thing I have a problem with, her mother dies and no one can manage to carry her body away from the area? All those muscles and not a one of those goobers can lift an old lady? I call bullshit.

unrelated, but during the necromancer becoming a lich scene there's a bloody knife. The knife is sheathed without being cleaned first! I paused the video I was watching to yell at it. Messy fucks.

I do want to know what game developer met my mom then created Johanna Hezenkoss. The likeness is uncanny.

 

[Sargon's wife's son]

1990's David Jaffe would be disgusted with who he is now.

Whoa he let his son become a woman a man I really don't care to check anybody with the transgender kid is a failed parent

 

[BlankSpaceBaby]

Non-binary or not, Taash's biggest problem is that she is a fucking whiny bitch acting like a surly 13-year old whining and stomping her foot about petty things when there is supposedly a world ending threat out there.

Like, Jesus Mefareth Fucking Andraste Christ, how self-absorbed and retarded does one have to do to dwell on these things when darkspawns can easily show up the next hour to drag her down into the Deep Roads and gang rape her into becoming a Broodmother?

In comparison, Dorian's "GHEY!!! I NEED TO BE GHEY!!!! RESPECT MY NEED TO TAKE COCKS UP MY ASS!!!" thing comes up only after his father wants to meet him. If that man never showed up, he'd just be a flamboyant cheeky gay Tevinter mage with fire shooting out of his fingers.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

Well, i finished DA: Origins with all the crap being Mage.
Only thing to consideration to you all Morrigan lovers:
Having a child with her without the Dark Ritual doesn't allow you to follow her into the Eluvian portal at the end of Witch Hunt.
Which i don't fucking care, Leliana was my first this time.

 

[Sargon's wife's son]

Like, Jesus Mefareth Fucking Andraste Christ, how self-absorbed and retarded does one have to do to dwell on these things when darkspawns can easily show up the next hour to drag her down into the Deep Roads and gang rape her into becoming a Broodmother?

The first time I ran across the brood mother I legitimately was terrified that thing is disgusting and how it's created is really screwed up and then we get ****** guide which takes all the dark fantasy elements out of the game

Well, i finished DA: Origins with all the crap being Mage.

Magic magic is for ******* real men play warriors and just do 210 damage to people's faces

 

[DespotCTM]

I do want to know what game developer met my mom then created Johanna Hezenkoss. The likeness is uncanny.

Your mom is Yzma with better hair??

 

[ZMOT]

Yeah, my not-so-popular opinion is that Baldur's Gate 3, like Dragon Age: Inquisition, gets far more love than it probably deserves because it arrived at a time when there really wasn't anything better or even close to it.

larian had a lot of positive word of mouth after dos2 and the early access that ran for years.

then you have a fuckload of literal normalfags who hardly play videogames to begin with and only came for their critical role / gay bear sex fix. same demographic that plays bioware games for months to get drama and alien sex, just better adjusted socially.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

Magic magic is for ******* real men play warriors and just do 210 damage to people's faces

Man, i told you: i played first the game as a warrior, now i'm in a full mage playthrought.

 

[Tor Lugosi]

I'm not a huge fan of BG3 (act 3 in particular is trash) but I think it's easy to see why people like it so much. It's a gigantic game with tons of content and is very reactive to how you play it.

 

[DavidS877]

whoever decided it was a good idea to fight TWO dragons at the same time, deserves a kick in the balls (if the person lacks the balls, throw them in a woodchiper). the game was clearly not designed for it.

finally drooping the game on journalist mode. i just want it to be over.

That's when I just noped the fuck out. Watched the video with all the good endings(with everyone dying) and called it a day.

 

[FatalTater]

Your mom is Yzma with better hair??

Yes.
I had no chance of turning out okay.

Also why are the usual suspects on tumblr wanting to romance the lich? Skeletons have no lips, we discussed this when Undertale was popular!

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

Finished the game today. Watching everyone die was almost worth the 20 hours i had to go through. Im just glad that its over. May the series rest in peace.

 

[God of Nothing]

Finished the game today. Watching everyone die was almost worth the 20 hours i had to go through. Im just glad that its over. May the series rest in peace.

there can be no peace with dishonored remains

 

[Ishtar]

“I wish Solas had brought down the veil and killed everyone actually”.

Come to think of it, that would have been a great way to do a hard reboot. Everyone dies, magic everywhere, demons and spirits can transform their shape.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

Man, being a mage in Dragon Age is basically being pursuited to the end.
Kudos for the og devs (or what's left for) between DA: O and DA2 to put a direct reference to a Human Magi if he/she is the Warden and Hero of Ferelden.

 

[Baklava]

I'm near the last leg of Veilguard---I think---and it's an okay game. It has its merits. Some alright QOA stuff. Boring leveling system. Combat is very repetitive, which gives me some DA2 nostalgia, but some items can be picked up through side quests and such to make melting things much faster. Not that a cohesive build is terribly necessary, but it does help to pick a gimmick and stick with it. I find burning and/or necrotic works out pretty well for most enemies, but I'm playing a mage. YMMV if you're doing fighter or rogue.


Lol can't believe this fucking guy is the Black Divine

Spoiler: Some thoughts on the game, gripes about the writing/characters/setting

The writing, as many a manchild has said on YouTube, is quite toothless. This is true. There's a weird Marvelization of the setting. These guys huff Joss Whedon's farts and probably self-identify as proud browncoats or something, but really it's just a cheap way to put on the veneer of wit.

You see this kind of campy pseudo-pith everywhere: in the codexes, in the little notes you find around, in the dialogue...it's very unpalatable. They also broke a cardinal rule of Dragon Age's dialogue writing (with rare exceptions): "make the dialogue sound like it's from before 1900." Alistair was an exception for Origins, for example, and used to comedic effect. I think it's fine if used judiciously. But you will notice the lack of restraint used in the writing of Veilguard. It reeks of young adult novels.

Some bullet points:

• The dialogue is extremely repetitive, as if a lot of the script writing in was filled in using character.ai or something. It even has some of the stank of those AI chatbots on occasion, like adding, "you know that?" to the end of sentences. I wouldn't be surprised if an LLM was used to supplement the writing in this game. You will feel like you have to pay $10 a month if you want these characters to speak like normal people who can retain memories for more than five minutes sometimes. The only cure is skipping a lot of the dialogue when you notice it happening. Trust me, you're not missing out on much.
• A lot of the social and political tensions about mages and other races are basically gone. The Dalish, at least a certain number of them in Northern Thedas, are just cool with the reality that their gods are evil mages.
• Oddly enough, Solas does not have any die-hard followers you meet in-game. Felassan, one of his ancient elf lackeys that he killed in a tie-in novel or whatever, shows up in this game as a boss you can fight during a side quest in the Fade. Felassan also left many ham-fisted notes in the Crossroads about Solas, the rebellion against the Evanuris, and the elves.
• A couple of major characters are somewhat sidelined through most of the game: Varric and, to a lesser degree, Solas. Solas should have been more like a Johnny Silverhand figure: perpetually in your mind, fucking with you until you earn his respect. But you only speak with him a handful of times before the end of the game. Varric is just "too old for this shit" and laid up after the first quest with Bianca destroyed. He gets more play as a narrator as you progress through the various companion and story quests. I wonder what this game could have been like with Mary Kirby (Varric's writer) as head writer.
• One gripe I have is that, for all the people who are magic experts of some kind, there should have been more anti-magic specialists. Lucanis is a supposed mage-killer, but it hardly matters. He tells you more about being an Antivan Crow than about specifically combating mages. This game really needed a Templar or Seeker of Truth from Southern Thedas to roast the gelded Templars of the Tevinter Chantry. Maybe the lore-friendly cope is that Orlesian Chantry templars rely on lyrium to combat magic, and Ghilan'nain or Elgar'nan could corrupt the lyrium in their blood and make them into Red Templars or something; I dunno, man. A Seeker of Truth might be a better workaround for this, since their abilities usually entail manipulating the lyrium in other people, namely mages who rely on it to augment their capabilities.
• Too many blacksmiths and whatever the fuck are black chicks. Too many people, in general, are vaguely black, brown, or Chinese in a way that would make more sense in Mass Effect than in Dragon Age. As an aside, I don't know how much it matters anymore with the current state of D&D, but in Toril, at least, various races of humans are tied to different regions. Calishites are gonna be different from Chondathans, for example. But somehow, you're as likely to find melanated people in the Anderfels as you are in Tevinter or fuckin' Kal-Sharok. It's annoying, but whatever, it's just NPCs and stuff. It must rankle for Vivienne that being black is so chill now when she got roasted in Montsimmard for being a darkie.
• Who ascends to the Sunburst Throne in the Orlesian Chantry doesn't seem to matter. I'm assuming the canon is that Leliana is Divine since she's the most sympathetic to the total emancipation of mages, despite it repeatedly being shown to be kind of a bad idea. If I play Inquisition again at some point, I'll have to make Vivienne Divine out of spite.
• The companions are largely written to represent whatever faction they're part of, which is annoying but tells of the writers' perspective: that these people embody their causes rather than individuals who threw their lot in, for various reasons, with certain groups. I found myself thinking about that conservative/liberal moral affection heat map at times.
• Taash is the companion who will give you the most douche chills, but if you're fast enough in skipping dialogue, you miss out on most of the annoying parts, and none of it really matters. I did her loyalty quest and made her embrace being autistic Qunari, and I could barely tell you why it happened, but whatever, cool. I do think it's lame her mom died. Shathann was a more interesting character than Taash herself, though remember that the bar is in Hell here.
• I actually dislike Neve even more than Taash because the writing does not support her being a good detective. The game just keeps telling you that she is. She's more like Captain Obvious, on par with DSP, pointing at something in a game he's playing and snorting out, "Look at that! See that?!" It's a little grating. Her dialogue also feels the most like it was generated by an LLM at times, but everyone suffers from this to some degree.
• A friend of mine calls Bellara "Quirk Chungus," which is kinda true, especially in the early game, but she's one of the more interesting and fleshed-out characters as the story goes on. She feels a bit like she was borrowed from a completely different project that got canned and reworked to fit Veilguard.
• My Rook is boning Lich!Emmerich because fucking a skeleton is too funny to pass up, but Emmerich is another decently written character where you get a good sense of him as you play. He's no Wynne, but I did enjoy the flavor of the Mourn Watchers and the Grand Necropolis. He actually feels like a guy who's been part of a group for a long time and knows what he's talking about.
• Harding is also handled relatively well, except for the romance with Taash. That felt like a crack pairing.
• There is cringe HR conflict mediation bullshit, but it's not overly prevalent. Really, the bigger problem that Veilguard has is something carried over from Mass Effect Andromeda (and Inquisition to a lesser degree): Rook can't really be that much of an asshole. You're not gonna get a whole lot of variation with choices and consequences.
• I was a little disappointed with Lucanis, though I think it's funny that Spite is a literal retard. He and Neve are definitely boring enough normies to romance each other.
• Speaking of Spite...that plotline doesn't really go anywhere. You get him and Lucanis to kinda work together, I guess?
• Davrin is just a dude who happens to be Dalish and a Grey Warden, with a vague contempt for cities. He's not very interesting, but he's alright, in a "normie fighter doing his job" sort of way. The flirting options with him are among the most cringeworthy, though Taash and Neve's flirt options made me grit my teeth more with secondhand embarrassment.
• I think one little writing thing that *really* irks me---and part of this is head writer Patrick "Trick" Weekes's fault, I assume---is the normalization of they/them pronouns for various characters, so it doesn't matter if even small-time NPCs or quest characters are male or female. Some are inconsistently left ungendered (or are arguably they/he or they/she), while others are more explicitly non-binary (which normally just means a woman who reads too much yaoi and tries to look like an androgynous gay man). I'm only okay with they/them for people who are literally two niggas, thank you very much. I noticed this more as I went through content in the later half of the game.
• I still can't believe the man who wrote Solas in Inquisition also wrote Taash. Weekes already self-inserted at least a little with Solas and his dislike of tea or whatever (I don't really get how anyone can hate something as inoffensive as hot leaf water, but Weekes is a chubby boy, so I'm guessing it's kinda like how Jack Scalfani hates rice unless it's got two sticks of butter in it), but I imagine this tendency was compounded by death-gripping it to too much tranny porn or gay webcomics about teenage girls kissing and saving the world or something.
• A complaint I'd never thought I'd have about a Bioware game is that all the companions have too many quests, and about half of them are just...going and having a conversation somewhere. It really chaps my ass.
• I do like that the game addresses, in a bit of banter, why Antivan Crows don't take jobs in Ferelden anymore: Zevran's fuck-up in Origins was that embarrassing. I think I might play Origins after this, or BG3, so I can remember what it feels like to play a good game rather than just a mid one.

tl;dr Veilguard is not the worst game ever, but it's definitely not a great game, let alone a great Dragon Age game. It's one of the games of all time. It definitely feels like a couple of different builds of the same game stitched together to release a finished product. Not terribly buggy, at least. I wish it had taken more notes from Dragon Age 2, at least in terms of making its characters and setting somewhat interesting, to compensate for being repetitive and mediocre. This one's not gonna be very memorable, but I don't think it'll be what sinks Bioware just yet.

 

[Ishtar]

It was rebooted twice. The version that was released apparently didn’t begin development until 2021 or something.

I get the impression there was a better game somewhere-project Joplin. Really the past ten years have just shown how badly BioWare has fallen. What with 60% of their people leaving or fired.

 

[God of Nothing]

Man, being a mage in Dragon Age is basically being pursuited to the end.
Kudos for the og devs (or what's left for) between DA: O and DA2 to put a direct reference to a Human Magi if he/she is the Warden and Hero of Ferelden.

it's really not that big of a deal when you're so powerful dragons are little more than fodder to you