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

[Ishtar]

How dangerous mages are in Dragon Age is basically the “is crime caused by poverty or does crime exist independently of poverty” debate in a fantasy context.

Mage defenders will argue until they’re purple in the face that mages would be totally fine and happy without the chantry and Templars oppressing them. On the other hand-we see what mages do-with or without the Circle leaves a lot of room for doubt. For every Malcolm Hawke you have a dozen blood mage covens in the wilderness. Connor and Amelia(Meredith's sister) are great examples of what happens when Mage children exist independently of the circle.

The problem IU is mages are always at risk of possession-it requires discipline and constant vigilance to prevent it(that's the entire point of the Mage origin). OOU-its more that the writers weren't really ever clear on what precisely the answer is-only that its a fundamental problem of the setting.

Importantly though-in DA overall lore, magic destroyed the world. It was the evanuris taking on physical bodies and waging war against "the pillars of the earth" that produced(or at least initiated) the blight, it was Solas creating the veil that fucked up the way Spirits behave in relation to mortals, and it was the Magisters' Sidereal entering the black city which verifiably started the actual blights.

Also Magic in DA while not being as uber overpowered as say Warhammer Fantasy is still vastly OP in a medieval/renaissance society. The Hero of Ferelden is a verifiable army killer-and that's when they aren't a mage. A Post Awakening maxed out Amell or Surana is a walking nuke. Hawke and the Inquisitor are less powerful(mostly for game balancing reasons) but are still insanely dangerous people(even moreso as mages)-Veilguard somehow has even more magical hax bullshit and I don't even want to try to quantify a comparison.

So my view is-you have four options.

The Southern Chantry and Southern Thedas' approach-Magic is contained and policed, sometimes with abuses(templar rapes and beatings, tranquility, etc...)
Tevinter-Mages rule, the rest of society is ground down by people that use their blood as fuel for power ups
Qunari-mages are treated as beasts of burden and are even more viciously repressed
Just kill any child with magic.

TLDR: "The mage question" is perhaps the heart of Dragon Age' narrative dilemmas, and Veilguard only makes it worse because we have god mages actually fucking up the world at a mythic-foundational level.

At the same time-the writers' present cases like Rivaini seers, the Dalish keepers, and the Avvar augurs-showing that smaller scale tribal societies seem to be able to include mages more functionally, and Nevarra is a mess of inconsistencies in basically every game. So its both intentionally ambiguous and a case of different writers handling the problem in such a way you get contradictions as to just how dangerous or amenable magic and mages are to society.

*Anders strikes me as the sort of person who even if he were born into a soporati family in Tevinter he would somehow be made tranquil or exiled because he can't help but piss off and alienate everyone who ever tried to be his friend. Do remember this is a guy who in a scenario where Hawke supports the mages and spares his life-can't keep fellow mages from kicking him to the curb because he's that insufferable.

 

[Balr0g]

At the same time-the writers' present cases like Rivaini seers, the Dalish keepers, and the Avvar augurs-showing that smaller scale tribal societies seem to be able to include mages more functionally, and Nevarra is a mess of inconsistencies in basically every game. So its both intentionally ambiguous and a case of different writers handling the problem in such a way you get contradictions as to just how dangerous or amenable magic and mages are to society.

In case of the dalish you can even bring this point up if you are an Elven mage Inquisitor. But your point gets shut down by Vivienne who argues that unlike a small elvish tribe human society is much larger and therefore has to deal with more mages or rather children born with the gift of magic. How do you deal with those?

Also worth of note: in the Origins lore it is noted that when the Quanri started their attempt to conquer more lands the Chantry started an Exalted March and in their bid to counter the Quanri's technological advantage (explosives in particular) they used combat mages (it is kinda easy when you have people who can throw "grenades" that are conjured "out of thin air"). From what I understand is that the most dangrous and therefor eDemon attracting is Blood magic because you literally have to make a pact with a demon to even use that type of magic. The other part that makes mages so susceptible to demons is the fact that they feel the Fade differently then the rest. They are in essence closer to the danger and as you said they need more training / discipline to keep their head. And as Demons are often the embodiment of the deadly sins (as seen in the Mage harowing trial of Origins) you can see how they can fall for that

 

[Ishtar]

One thing the games(especially origins but DA2 and Inquisition as well) make clear is children are not immune-demons prey on mage children, offering them things they lack the understanding or maturity to know are poisoned chalices.

(Inquisition has that memorable haunted house side quest in the Emerald Graves). Connor is another fantastic example. In a modern society-the resources and state capacity to deal with this might exist, but in Thedas' the Chantry's system is really the best that can exist above say-Avvar or Dalish tribal systems where populations don't exceed at most a few dozen to a hundred people.

At the same time...Anders has a large fandom precisely because the Circles are in fact prisons. We hear ambient dialogue in DA2 about mages made tranquil, and being used as sex slaves, about beatings and tranquility being applied for basically whatever the templars feel like on a given day.

Mages' committing suicide is so common that templars literally joke about it.

Templars are trained to see their charges as walking demon portals, not to mention the reason why God turned his back on humanity. So I wouldn't want to be a mage in the Gallows or White Spire. Your jailers are going to vary from callously indifferent to being whatever the worst templars you meet in DA2 are.

But there just isn't a nicer alternative for larger feudal societies like Ferelden or Orlais. Either Mages rule like in Tevinter openly-or they puppet an undead king(Veilguard makes this a joke but Markus is literally being puppeteered by the Mortalitisi), or the Qun which is much harsher than anything Meredith ever did.

The games repeatedly show how dangerous blood mages can be-hell in Awakening Velanna is waging a one woman guerilla campaign that is putting Amaranthine under serious economic strain all by herself. Only templars can no sell Magic with their lyrium derived abilities and feudal societies like Ferelden would collapse into anarchy if people like Uldred were in charge.

Its a nuanced problem and to DA's overall credit, the narrative avoids easy solutions, but the Tumblr crowd being itself couldn't help but read mages as an allegory for POCs and Queers.

I tend to think magic if not contained or repressed as shown in the DA games(and being in part hereditary)-would inevitably result in a Tevinter Magocracy. If you can summon fire and lightning from the sky and puppet the minds of kings with a little spilled blood-you and people like you are going to end up in charge. Or tearing the world apart.

 

[Chuckwagon]

To my surprise I've found that the Dragon Age Total War mod for Medieval 2 Total War is still active, still updating and still highlighting new assets since it first began in 2019 and public updates tapered off in the 2020-22 period. (Though this looks like development hell, extremely long & slow dev cycles are not uncommon for classic TW mods - as an example Fourth Age Total War, which moves the original Rome Total War's setting to the imagined near-future of Middle-earth after the events of LOTR and based on Tolkien's few musings about a sequel, began development in 2004; took until 2015 to complete its final full version; and was still pushing out patches for said build until 2019.) Apparently they're more active on their Discord server, but I don't like using Discord if I don't absolutely have to and still firmly believe that old-school forums are a better place for mod development & documentation, so I wouldn't know.

This entry was posted on December 4, 2024 and besides being a general update on the state of the mod (they claim to have finally finished the majority of work for a functioning 1.0 release and express some that they can get that version out the door late this year, but they've always been careful not to commit to any hard release date so far), the devs also have some thoughts on Failguard, which they express both in their devblog article and its comment section...

The other purpose of this article was to also address the recent release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and whether or not the game will have any part to play in the development of Dragon Age: Total War. Undoubtedly a few of you will be disappointed to hear

Even more

that we possess neither any plans nor intentions at this time to incorporate any newly-introduced factions, characters, lore, or events from Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and that Dragon Age: Total War will not observe or treat the game as being a part of the canonical Dragon Age source material from which the mod derives it's worldbuilding, information, lore, characters, events and story narratives. It is fundamentally not considered to be canon by our team, and will possess no impact on, nor influence any official decision-making and planning for the mod henceforth.

OctaviaNocturnis
Author
OctaviaNocturnis - Dec 4 2024 - 1,026 comments
We tend to discuss the specifics of where the Veilguard breaks with established Dragon Age lore frequently in our Discord server. I'll only indulge in discussion regarding the game within this comment section to a very small degree.

Some of the Veilguard's more glaring breaks with the lore include, but are absolutely not limited to it's treatment of the Qun, it's portrayal of the Antivan Crows as being a group of mafia-esque freedom fighters, it's characterization of the Dalish "Veil Jumpers" as having access to Ancient Elven "Technology" which not even the Sentinel Elves were depicted with possessing in DA:I, it's portrayal of Kal-Sharok Dwarves as being highly accepting towards outsiders and not being visibly Tainted in the slightest, the game's treatment of Tevinter as not necessarily actually requiring slavery to continue to function, etc, to name literally only a few things of many.

The Veilguard was rather evidently written with little to no concern for lore consistency (as that was not a priority of the writers) and I would scarcely consider the sudden confirmation of fringe fan theories to be quality and well thought-out expansions of the lore. Many of the theories in question were also not truly foreshadowed in any fashion in Inquisition and some of them even contradict what was foreshadowed in Trespasser.

Aenarion_ - Dec 4 2024 - 1,636 comments
I'm glad you decided to keep the legacy of real Dragon Age intact by not including anything from Veilguard and pretend it just doesn't exist. That was the right decision.

ReplyGood karmaBad karma+26 votes
R.Bell
R.Bell - Jan 1 2025 - 54 comments
Yeah. The Veilguard was basically a Tumblr Narcissist's fanfiction masquerading as an official entry, and so it's best to focus on the first three games.

PepperyEarth943 - Dec 5 2024 - 57 comments
I was kinda concerned Veilguard would delay the release of this mod. And then terrified you include content from it that would ruin the mod. Thank you for showing my fears were unwarranted.

Well I'm interested to see where this goes and if the mod will indeed ever release (honestly until today I thought it had died back in like 2023), it would be very difficult - so much so as to be impressive in its own way - to do worse either as a game or writing-wise than Failguard. If it weren't for memories of the monumentally embarrassing clusterfuck that was Fallout the Frontier, I might even have been inclined to suggest that these modders could do Thedas justice better than nu-Bioware themselves. But we'll have to wait and see about that, at least these people seem to have their heads screwed on straighter than the Frontier people while working with a smaller & more obscure community (hence, generally one lacking the sorts of rabid troons, furries, pedos & other sexpests who fucked The Frontier up and would be the sort to defend DATV rather than criticize it).

 

[BlankSpaceBaby]

Took a look at Weekes's Bluesky and it seems like he's still without employment. So sad.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

Took a look at Weekes's Bluesky and it seems like he's still without employment. So sad.

6 months?
At this point he can write some Dragon Age fanfics on Wattpad and making some money.
But that could be a bad idea. I don't want to touch either Morrigan or Leliana.

 

[Snekposter]

Took a look at Weekes's Bluesky and it seems like he's still without employment. So sad.

Oh no! Anyway...

 

[BigBadBastich]

Took a look at Weekes's Bluesky and it seems like he's still without employment. So sad.

Meanwhile the tranny who headed the project got a job to make DND games.

 

[LazyLizard]

6 months?
At this point he can write some Dragon Age fanfics on Wattpad and making some money.
But that could be a bad idea. I don't want to touch either Morrigan or Leliana.

is it finally changing? can these people no longer fail upwards?

 

[regalterry]

is it finally changing? can these people no longer fail upwards?

I'd argue the number of open slots for them to fall upwards through is shrinking, so only the most elite of woketards get new cushy positions.

 

[Mola Ram]

I'd argue the number of open slots for them to fall upwards through is shrinking, so only the most elite of woketards get new cushy positions.

Weekes has nothing to recommend him. He's a shitty writer -- check out his actual writing projects; whatever successes he had in pre-Veilguard games were either before he melted his brain or due to the influence of a tard wrangler -- he has little influence, and as a white cis male he's at the very bottom of the progressive stack, no matter what color he dyes his hair or what sexual weirdness he advertises. He might get somewhere if he fully troons out, but even that is losing its luster. And of course he'll have the albatross of Veilguard around his fat neck for the rest of his life.

It's no more than he deserves.

 

[Jinn in the phone]

Former Dragon Age writer says Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Baldur's Gate 3 prove 'what's possible when a game is given time to cook'

Gaider clarified that what he meant was simply that both games are "kind of love letters to their genre that allow what they've created to translate to a larger audience than what that genre normally hits."

"Good" is very subjective, and it doesn't always add up to success: Plenty of good games are overlooked or fail to meet some arbitrary sales goal for any number of reasons, not least of which is the overwhelming number of "good" games out there. One obvious example is EA's own recent RPG epic, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which was well received by critics and players but failed to put up sufficient numbers and may well mark the end of the series, at least for now.

Gayder still kissing the booboos of his tranny friends at bioware and still screaming into the sky with them about PUUBLISHERS!!! It's extra funny too because pre-release interviews were filled with nu-bioware people constantly talking about Baldur's gate 3 and how it proved CRPGS/WRPG still had a kick in them, and I assume that connecting it with them would boost sales. Now it's success was "misleading" instead of idk, Veilguard being a bad game, with horrible navel gazing writing(remember, gayder "left" bioware because he felt "writers were resented"). "Time to cook" it was 9 years and I understand there were some sea changes but your not building the fucking Cologne Cathedral.

Hilarious that the golf troon failed upwards by getting their twitter friends to hire them while Trix Weakes is begging for change on the exit ramp. How did onboarding and sucking the dick of all those trannies work out for you "Trix"? Thrown away like an old rag

 

[Mola Ram]

One obvious example is EA's own recent RPG epic, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which was well received by critics and players but failed to put up sufficient numbers and may well mark the end of the series, at least for now.

well received by ... players

but failed to put up sufficient numbers

These are fairly incompatible statements, which is a nice way of saying lies.

Believe me, Gaider, you can find plenty of players who thought the game was dogshit, or who were so alienated by the troonslop that they declined to buy the ticket this time.

 

[God of Nothing]

I'm aching for another Origins run. Think I'll get the mod that adds awakening's skills this time. Would make two-handers a lot more tolerable as a noble gigachad.

 

[BlankSpaceBaby]

From that article:

So, is Gaider sweetheart saying that maybe his favorite game Dragon Age: The Veilguard shouldn't be such an obvious tranny-fetish game?

To be fair, the author is the one trying to push that game as comparable to those two games, but still, it's odd to see Gaider saying these things. His own games post-BioWare are full of tranny and genderspeshuls when, based on what he is saying here, he should know that his own games won't sell.

So, what is his endgame then? Trying to bankrupt his employers by making unsellable games?

 

[Kane Lives]

Former Dragon Age writer says Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Baldur's Gate 3 prove 'what's possible when a game is given time to cook'


Gayder still kissing the booboos of his tranny friends at bioware and still screaming into the sky with them about PUUBLISHERS!!! It's extra funny too because pre-release interviews were filled with nu-bioware people constantly talking about Baldur's gate 3 and how it proved CRPGS/WRPG still had a kick in them, and I assume that connecting it with them would boost sales. Now it's success was "misleading" instead of idk, Veilguard being a bad game, with horrible navel gazing writing(remember, gayder "left" bioware because he felt "writers were resented"). "Time to cook" it was 9 years and I understand there were some sea changes but your not building the fucking Cologne Cathedral.

Hilarious that the golf troon failed upwards by getting their twitter friends to hire them while Trix Weakes is begging for change on the exit ramp. How did onboarding and sucking the dick of all those trannies work out for you "Trix"? Thrown away like an old rag

Has Gaider considered that Veilguard is just a bad game and no matter how much marketing perfume you smother it with, eventually people will find out and, hear me out, simply don't buy it? Crazy, right?

Also E33 took half the time and one tenth of the headcount of what Veilguard had, so not even his own argument stands up to scrutiny. Imagine getting btfo by a bunch of frogs, most of which were first timers in game devs.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

He'll be riding that Veilguard dick til he dies won't he

 

[BlankSpaceBaby]

When you went from this:

to this:

Won't you also ride that Veilguard dick until you die?

Bet you can't wait for the next offering from Gaider...

Oops, never mind.

 

[God of Nothing]

Mods installed. Everything seems to be working fine. Have established my dominance over the knife-eared filth by bedding their nearest highest status woman in my vicinity. Origin completed. Looking forward to getting Spirit Warrior early and committing genocide against the elves again.

 

[spam crab]

Took a trip into the #veilguard_critical tumblr tag just to see how ground zero for nonsense is taking the game now that there's some months of distance and time to go through all the stages of grief - and was disappointed but not surprised to see everyone parroting the CAPITALISM BAD THE PUBLISHERS RUINED IT narrative even while criticizing the tweets/skeets Epler and Weekes are making. The evidence is right in front of their eyes how delusional the writers are and they've made long posts about bad writing but they can't accept it as simple incompetence. It's all writer burnout or studio meddling. They act as if these people weren't paid for their work and that consumers were expected to pay for the product, like it's unreasonable to expect anyone to fucking try at their job regardless of environment.

I'm glad the number of these dumbasses is dwindling so they can't keep propping up this zombie of a studio. They're dropping off because they don't have the brain cells to breathe and type at the same time.