3 New PS Plus Essential Games Live Now, Including PS5 RPG Dragon Age

Finally! Can’t wait to boot DA tonight!

It's still wild how DAV is in PS Plus less than 6 months after release. How big of a commercial bomb it must have been.

"Dragon Age: The Veilguard isn't quite BioWare back to its absolute best, but it is the most cohesive and emotionally engaging RPG that the studio has delivered since Mass Effect 3."

The word "quite" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here given how Mass Effect 3 wasn't being given away for free six months later.

Looking forward to giving DA:V another chance, my time with it was perfectly alright but it didn’t light any fires for me. But I hadn’t played DA:I in years and I’d just spent £70 on it, so traded it in after about 15-20 hours. Now it’s free and I’ve replayed DA:I, maybe I’ll get more into it.

@LifeGirl ah, yes. Because success = quality

Play Turtles in Time! In couch co-op! Now!

@naruball If you have a recognisable brand and publisher behind you and yet still sell so few copies that your product is being given away after six months, then yes, in this case, sales do indeed indicate quality.

@LifeGirl once again. Nope. Plenty of good games haven't sold many copies and plenty of terrible games have sold well.

As for the brand, I'll give you two examples: Prince of Persia reboot and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Both great games that didn't sell well.

And let's not even forget how different ps+ was when ME3 came out. How many AAA games that had only been available for 6 months did Sony offer via ps+ in 2012?

@LifeGirl And that it did so badly it killed the franchise and decimated the developer. It was an enormous misfire. And I say that as someone who actually bought it and initially enjoyed it despite reservations, so I'm not just jumping on the hate bandwagon.

@naruball Sure but this is one of the most famous and beloved WRPG franchises. Even unfinished, half-baked games in the same series like DA2 sold well because of the love for the series. This is like if the next CoD, GTA or FIFA flops and kills the franchise. Inquisition was controversial amongst fans and criticised in a multitude of ways but still sold 12 million and became Bioware's best selling game.

Those Prince of Persia games came after the series had faded into near obscurity thanks to various bad games and after the cultural peak of the series was all the way back in 2003 or so. They also weren't advertised much. They had an uphill battle. Veilguard could have simply been mediocre and would've sold well. Instead it killed the franchise and the dev team, it didn't simply sell badly.

CORRECTION: One of the biggest PS Plus Essential games for some time, TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection, is available to download now for all active members, along with two additional PS5, PS4 titles in Sonic Colors: Ultimate and Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

@djlard This is the way.

If sales indicate quality and the game being in a subscription means it's crap then does that mean any games that get added to gamepass and playstation plus day one mean the same? 🤔

Being added to a subscription means absolutely nothing about the games quality, you're better off using metacritic for measuring a games quality and Dragon Age Veilguard has a metacritic of 82 on PS5 and 85 on Xbox, which means it's a good game.

Pretty excited to try out dragon age after work

@Bentleyma But Inquisition was already terrible! Filled with silly mmo like quests and blant characters.

Dragon age series is riding on the success of Origins, which is only a testament to how phenomenal that game was.

If you have been on the fence about DA and you have playstation plus nows the perfect opportunity to see it's for you.

I enjoyed it for 5 hours, plodded on for another 5 or so then couldn't be bothered.

Some may try it and hate it, some may try and love it. Most will likely be somewhere in between but it would be madness not to at least try it

@species I liked Inquisition. You know what they say: opinions are like a*seholes.

There is a lot of misinformation & controversy surrounding DA: Veilguard mostly from folks who didn't actually play it. So I hope folks with PS+ will take the time to give it ago so they have something solid to base their opinion on, for good or bad.

Me, I played 100+ hours on Xbox with a run on each class and enjoyed myself immensely. I won't be doing that again on Playstation though. I have no reason to as I cleared the game on the other console.

Other two game are of no point interest to me personally.

@get2sammyb Turtles is great. Not as good as Shredders revenge but i still got the plat for it. Turtles in time is the standout classic imo.

Won't even bother adding Veilguard to my PS+ collection. Looking forward to seeing Avowed for free next month, that one looks more like a slightly more playable game.

@UltimateOtaku91 Veilguard has 3.9 on meta so it is not even average...

I was looking forward to the turtles game then found out my country doesn’t get it. We got a game called Relayer instead

@LifeGirl @Matroska The game is fine. The only reason for poor sales was the review bombing by people that never even played it. Period. No debate to even be had.

Downloaded Turtles and Dragon Age, I'll give them a proper go later today.

Dragon age veilguard what a mess! Smash clay pots for health potions and five gold the game.

Gotta love all the bioware defenders in the comments who haven't even played the game yet somehow believe the "haters" are wrong, I've played the EA five hour or so trial and that game is an insult to dragon age and intelligent humans, game has terrible combat, companions that are forced upon you no options to deny recruiting them like in prior games and the writing/character creation, a game literally made for redditors.

@djlard You mean user score? From people being salty about it being woke and didn't like it taking a different direction.

@Matroska

Inquisition was controversial amongst fans and criticised in a multitude of ways but still sold 12 million and became Bioware's best selling game

Inquisition only sold around 2m in its first year though, launch was in line with Dragon Age II. It’s been available in sales for under $5 for like 7+ years. I think people don’t really understand how to compare that 12m number to new releases. Dragon Age is really not that big a brand.

I really enjoyed Dragon Age, much more than I had anticipated. It had some good exploration, expansive skill trees, and really nice loot system. Sure the story was nothing special and some characters were poorly written, but the gameplay was fun, it was a fun game. There are other recent games, FF16 as an example, with similarly bland story and characters which weren't even fun to play. Even after I had unlocked the platinum I was kinda close to start again as a new class. People have different reasons for playing games and this one with its flaws will not appeal to everyone, but the hate it's gotten is kinda staggering

@Matroska Sorry, but the examples you provided don't work. The difference between games like Cod/Fifa and Dragon Age is massive to say the least.

As for Prince of Persia, the reboot came out when the main series was still popular.

@djlard It’s an 80 on OpenCritic, that’s probably the fairest representation of it’s quality form an objective standpoint, don’t be a clown quoting Metacritic User Scores as if anyone in the world takes that seriously.

@djlard coming from people who didn't even play it? Sure, buddy. Let's trust that over reviewers.

I will download all of the games. So it's all good. I been wanting to play all of thdm.word up son

@naruball @UltimateOtaku91 It has same weight as official reviews. So truth is somewhere in the middle and that is 60 of 100. Still average.

I can’t wait to add two good games to my digital library, Sonic and Turtles! Though Turtles should count as multiple…

As for the third one…well, when EA can’t say what the actual sales numbers are and has to use words like “engagement” in their numbers…that’s a big ol warning sign. The devs being laid off almost immediately added flashing neon around said sign. PS plus in four months added a novelty siren on top, constantly sounding an alarm.

@djlard no it doesn't. Steam reviews? Sure. But when someone can leave a review when they haven't even played the game, whatever userscore the game gets is completely useless.

@naruball As same as those, who get paid for positive reviews... There is no objectivity here on both sides.

Getting Dragon Age for free when it’s ordinarily €80 feels like an honest to god life hack.

I'm happy I dropped to the lower tier as I only play Helldivers 2 online I still get discounts and these monthly games im happy

@djlard yes, because it's very likely that reviewers get paid. Which would explain all AAA games getting high scores, right? And I assume the lower scores are from reviewers that didn't get paid, because the publishers forgot to pay them?

Make it make sense.

Dragon age is not available on my plus using the ps app. Do you know what time these become available in the US?

I remember when i play the first dragon age, and now for sure will be playing this new D.A game.

@djlard Do you have any evidence of the claim that reviewers are paid in exchange for good review scores?

Here's to adding DA:V to my backlog for FREE* (paid subscription haha) will be awhile before I get to it, just now finally started GOW: Ragnarok. Inquisitions is still one of my favorite games, just hit all the right notes for me.

Just played through the character creator in DA:V and I’m excited to begin. Damn you having a job!

@Jey887 Try to read some reviews of biggest game flops, DOA games, or just any controversial game. It doesn't much differentiate from user reviews. They just praise positives (if any) and don't speak about cons, while users rather point out cons forgetting to mention positives.

@djlard So no you don't.