Its great. You meet treasure hunters who share artifacts with the cultures they’re from so that those cultural leaders can decide what to do with them. You help a character come to terms with their gender identity. You encourage people to build community in more than just a “we can win with the power of friendship” kinda way. I’m only on the first half of the game too.
It reviewed kinda mid but honestly these touches have totally sold me. It’s actually feels like the writers of this game were a multicultural group of people who put thought into making it inclusive.
Is anyone else playing? Is this the experience others are having? Is all this based-ness why people are review bombing it?
Glad it’s inclusive, but it also doesn’t look great
Just because all the reactonaries are review bombing it doesn’t make it good. Bioware these days has an amazing talent for turning everything they touch into shit
I dunno I’m enjoying it for what it is. It’s not earth shattering but it’s been a fun ride so far.
I’m playing it too rn, and I agree with the stuff you said. Also, yes, the review bombing is all-out based-ness for the most part (~90% from what I’ve seen). But there are other criticisms that I think are valid.
I’m personally not enjoying the game, to put it mildly, for multiple reasons:
- the writing: the dialogs are flat, the lines are so repetitive that at some points I’m just zoning out, bc I don’t want to hear again that “dwarves don’t dream” or that “Elgar’nan and Ghilan’hanin” escaped their prison. I got the impression that there’s little love or even interest in the stuff they’ve been writing. It feels heartless and lifeless, which is incredibly sad given how interesting the plot actually is (bunch of guys trying to prevent the end of the world)
- the lore inaccuracies: it’s as if they started writing this game and went like “All that lore we created for and in the first 3 games? Shredd it, we don’t need that”. One instance would be the “dwarves don’t dream” thing. Dwarves sleep and dream. They just can’t enter the Fade in their dreams. (That’s just one, but there’s so much more.)
- the (voice) acting/tone of the game: I’m blaming this mostly on the dialog, but some voice lines are delivered in such unfitting tones of voice. Like, guys, how tf are you so cheery, you’re trying to stop the end of the world? That’s not per se a bad idea, but given that dragon age has always been so dark and sarcastic, it feels so out of place for all these characters being so annoyingly cheery. (Maybe I’ll get used to this, Idk)
- Bellara: perfect example of how to butcher a potentially amazing character. First of all, this character feels like a horrible stereotype of someone with ADHD, like “omg, sorry, I’m rambling and so random”, like fr, this is not how it works. Second, her backstory is actually great which really doesn’t shine through enough. And third, whoever decided to give her the Garrus line (“calibrations”)??? It feels so out of place and not funny at all.
I like the combat system, it’s somewhat refreshing to see an action rpg setup in dragon age, so that your mage finally doesn’t die immediately in close combat scenarios. I’m also madly in love with the hair animations. I keep entering the character creator to swoosh around the hair lol.
All in all, I wouldn’t recommend (buying) the game, but it definitely has its moments.
for voice acting i really recommend setting the audio to a dub in a different language and using english subtitles. I haven’t tried the french audio but I’ve been using the german one and I’ve found that the voice acting and tone is much more appropriate and natural sounding in most of the contexts.
They actually added specific conversation options in specific moments if you’re trans or non binary. I couldn’t believe it. Like they explicitly call out that’s why you have those conversation options.
And then they didn’t fuck up the execution of those options.
I’m just amazed a TRIPPPLE AAA GAME could manage something like that
Is all this based-ness why people are review bombing it?
I haven’t tried it, but yes.
i’m really really loving veilguard. i’m not that far into it (i think i just got past the tutorial sections??), but i just never played an rpg that allowed me to choose how my character views his trans-ness and his relationship with that part of his identity. I just really like that they gave multiple avenues and you can genuinely tell that trans and genderqueer people were involved because of these choices.
