Topic: Dragon Age: The Veilguard

@Pizzamorg sometimes taking a small break can help if you are genuinely burning out on it. Even just a couple of days where you can take in what you've done so far and go back in refreshed.

To me, what you described kind of sounds like how their games are, tbh. Inquisition was definitely nowhere near as good as other games in the genre, but it won Game of the Year. They design combat encounters in much the same way, right? Just endless waves of nonsense monsters, and some crystals to whack, and that's all you get. I can't speak on the other games as I haven't played enough of them.

A weird comparison would be Forspoken. That is a game I thought I was really ready and waiting for, but I knew I'd not like it as soon as I saw the gameplay where you just fight a generic rock monster 6 times in a row, and it probably shares a lot of its DNA with Dragon Age games, tbh.

Good fantasy games are quite rare, and we're lucky to have had a few classics as it is. At least now we have modern benchmarks for games in TW3, BG3, Elden Ring, because maybe Dragon Age coasts a little too much on its nostalgic reputation, and too many other games are inspired by the wrong things.

The next big hope is Crimon Desert, and that is "inspired by"... absolutely everything 😱 which makes it hard to know how it will turn out.

You are probably right that I do just need to take a break to be honest. But I'm just concerned if I don't log in for a couple of days I will never have the motivation to log back in again and finish this 😂 Especially as this has got me itching to replay Mass Effect again.

@Yagami, Origins is absolutely my favourite DA game. I am one of those THOSE Dragon Age fans 😂

@Yagami I did boot it up on game pass last week or so. But I just don't have the drive to commit to a very large and blurry old game rn, even if it is really good 😅 I might chip away at it at some point, but I mostly tried it to see if it made me want to play DA:TV, like I did with DDDA and DD2. But I've gone for Hogwarts instead, now.

@Pizzamorg haha the key is to not leave it for over a week... My mountain of half finished games can attest to that 😬😭

I actually beat this the other day, but have been struggling to really know how I felt about this. It is one of those ones where it feels like people scoring it a 7 are too low, those scoring it an 8 feels too high and using a .5 seems like fence sitting.

Act 3 is absolutely some of BioWare's best work. An emotional wreckingball leaving me in pieces and realising my emotional anchoring into this series ran deeper than I realised. It is probably my favourite Dragon Age game since Origins. And one I do want to play again, at some point.

Those saying choices don't matter or this isn't an RPG are straight up wrong. This might be the most reactive game since Origins for having choices that reverberate to moments that pop up hours later. I get this is far more Mass Effect in how choices work than Origins, but we haven't had another game like Origins since Origins. The big choices are mostly isolated to the first and final acts, and the choices in between are built on the smaller details changing based on what you have done previously.

And while all of this hopefully sounds positive, I think the underlying game beneath the story, and characters, is pretty weak and even at my on the shorter end playthrough of 60ish hours, the game felt way way too long for me.

You can also tell this game went through absolute hell to get released, and I think it is a problem, that you can always feel it. From the very obvious multiplayer bones this was built out of, to how all over the place the game is tonally, to the point where you can almost feel where one writing team were laid off and another one took over. This feels especially true of the romances, which all seem quite underwritten.

I also never understood why they wanted to both create a direct sequel to Inquisition and an on ramp for a new audience at the same time. Well I do know why, money. But they surely had to understand that these two approaches would inherently contradict one another and its a contradiction they never quite solve.

Solas and the Inquisitor's role in the story is large on paper, but in practice they feel like minor characters for huge portions of this. Despite the Inquisitor's importance to the story, I feel like Hawke did far more in Inquisition than the Inquisitor ever does here. As such the approach basically boils down to awkwardly sidestepping around 90 percent of everything which came before so new people joining wouldn't be lost, but then it seems to overcorrect because rather than throwing long time fans a bone, it instead throws them a pin pulled hand grenade of a canon altering reveals that tie all the way to the first game that will leave existing fans reeling and new people joining utterly lost. Just an odd choice.

I've been silently following this thread @Pizzamorg and your thoughts so it's good to hear a more levelheaded take on things. Glad to hear you enjoyed it overall even if it has some underlying problems due to the development hell it's been through!