Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024)

Picked this up and put a few hours into it. It’s…. Fine? Granted it’s been eons since I played Inquisition, but things are pretty simplistic so far. That said, It’s entertaining enough I suppose.

What is getting me though is the constant inane chatter. Having characters constantly babble useless dialogue is one of the worst design decisions you can make for a game’s atmosphere. It’s like they were afraid having even a single moment of silence would make people get bored and quit the game.

Was gonna say that it felt like Rogues were being railroaded into a parry-focused playstyle if they wanted to optimize damage, but taking a deeper look at the skill tree it turns out they can get most of the same benefits elsewhere. Which is lovely news, since I find the wait-and-parry playstyle to be dreadfully boring outside of Sekiro.

Still tweaking details here and there, but I think I'm basically happy with how my Rook turned out!

Haven't played enough to form any real opinions just yet, but mapping sprint to L3 remains the single most cursed button assignment in videogames. It's especially bad here since rogues have a long range dash attack that makes you constantly re-toggle sprint to use it.

Surprise surprise, both MetaCritic and OpenCritic have been hit with review bombing and now this game has an overall negative user score.

Meanwhile on steam, positive scores outnumber negative scores three to one.

Metacritic and OpenCritic don’t require you to prove you bought the game. Steam does. That should speak volumes to anyone paying attention.

Sadly, I’m old enough to remember that there is an active contingent of gamers that hate every BioWare game even before it drops and make the same complaints each time. And just like every BioWare game before it, the loud haters were declaring the game a failure days before it launched. And when the critics and other games didn’t support that view, they turned to review bombing. This isn’t new, and the review bombing really isn’t a surprise.

So far 4 hours into it (paid EA Pro Play Tier to play it).

Technically speaking, the game runs like a charm: it does not stutter neither does have any glitches. I haven't found any bugs that broke my experience which is more than welcomed in the 2024 landscape of hellish Day One 12gb patches.

The environments are amazingly rendered and the stream-lined nature of the maps appeals more to those people who found themselves stuck in the Hinterlands for hours on end (but, for me, it lacks the same charm as the semi-open world I could revisit anytime I wanted).

Frostbite's issues with active combat that were present in Dragon Age: Inquisition present themselves again in the shape of sluggish primary attacks that feel so much slower than Inquisition's and the parry/block is a hit or a miss. Sometimes it does work, sometimes the attacks pas through you anyway, sometimes it's delayed and sometimes it's not in the right timing it wants you to do but the combat is engaging enough and it isn't too bad to work with it.

Main gripe I have is the writing: it feels... flat so far. Hard ass, jokester and brute/forceful options have no bearing of how a character reacts to you minus the "approves/disapproves" that has happened when a choice is very specific to a want/will of a character (such as leaving the mayor to die in the blight) and there is never much contention between how you reply and how they respond to you (when I told off the Veil Jumper from being aggressive towards us, he basically just said 'alright, you did that' and left it at that, despite the reply being rather confrontational on both sides).

Everyone seems to "know"/"know of" one another but you get no introduction on how Rook or Neve even came to be and without following on the podcast or the visual novel, it makes it hard to follow the story, mainly when you have no background (if not for a meager codex entry) on who the Veil Jumper and the Shadow Mages are.

I'll keep chipping away at it, but for now I'm particularly unimpressed by it.

It's remarkable that twenty people have already played this game enough to give it a rating here on Grouvee in the couple of hours that the game has been out. Do ya'll not want to at least pretend you played enough to arrive at a conclusion about the game?

Same thing on Steam, hundreds of reviews already, both positive and negative. And I'm supposed to trust player reviews because they are somehow "unbiased"? 🤦🏼‍♂️

Everything I hear about this game makes me angry, for some reason. We've gone through the developers trash talking the prior games as if they didn't do anything right, to parading around Veilguard as if it were the best title of the series, to locking preamble and why and how behind comic releases and an in-character podcast (which, last I heard, was silently ret-conning a bit of choices).

Now we're missing all choices from Inquisition but three of them, one of which was a dialogue made in passing before Solas both betrays and abandons you. We don't know anything about Morrigan's fate, about Dorian (since you can either shun him and chase him away or recruit him fully), we don't know anything about Orlais too which I would guess is pivotal to the politics of Thedas and, more importantly, some of the choices that should carry GREAT significance (such as the Grey Warden's fate post-"Here Lies the Abyss") aren't even included.

Some of the choices you made as the Inquisition were pivotal to the landscape which makes no sense as to why not carry the majority (or the most important of them) through World States.