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alias_sqbrI've been pondering this post for a while but it's taken me a while to be able to articulate my thoughts.
So: The world felt out of character, and that threw me out of the story aggressively. I could plausibly have enjoyed a very similar game if it was an original setting.
Also I hear it has platforming, which I am very bad at, but I'd have been willing to get Cam to help with those parts if I'd been enjoying the game otherwise.
It does a good enough job at other things that I can intellectually see how someone could enjoy it, and I'm legit happy for those people. But this post is about how it did not work for me.
I bought DA:V shortly after launch and played for *checks* 4.3 hours. And then I just... didn't feel like playing any more ever again. This post is based on what I saw in that playthrough, and the impression I have gotten from people who played further.
I really liked the character creator, it definitely had issues but was pretty inclusive and made it easy to make a cool looking androgynous dwarf which is always my first goal.
I didn't like the art style when I saw the first trailer but it grew on me surprisingly quickly, and the environments were very immersive and cool looking.
The existing characters didn't always feel in keeping with their past characterisations, especially Harding, but I was able to roll with it.
The new characters seemed likeable enough in principle.
The writing was pretty uninspiring in terms of basic quality, but not unbearable in and of itself.
But it just...wasn't Thedas. Not the individual people, not the social dynamics, not the events since the previous game. And these inconsistencies created a hollowness at the heart of the main story and every side quest I encountered.
I'm not saying the worldbuilding in the older games was always GOOD. In fact it was often very ill-considered, and moderately inconsistent. But it was what it was, and by contradicting it so aggressively, everything felt unmoored from context and meaning. I kept being thrown by people's reactions making zero sense if I considered them in the context of my existing understanding of how people from this world felt and thought. The game didn't even bother creating a NEW way to understand the world it just... expected you not to think about any of that at all.
Specifically: One of the key, consistent aspects of Thedas in the first three games is that the elves are oppressed. And that is not at all evident in DA:V. Which would be one thing if it was a background detail, but DA:V is all about elves and their history: Solas is an ancient elven god destroying the current world to try to bring back the previous world where elves had more power, and in doing so he accidentally resurrects the rest of the ancient elven gods, who go on to become the villains of the game.
How we as players in DA:V feel about Solas and the elven gods is going to be VERY AFFECTED by how we feel about and conceptualise the role of elves and their religion in current Thedas society. In Inquisition, we repeatedly see Solas express horror and grief at the way elves and their culture have been oppressed, enslaved, erased, and destroyed. So when we find out he is planning on destroying this world to return things to their past state, it's still bad but somewhat sympathetic. It's interesting.
In the first three games we see a variety of elves (and other marginalised ethno/species-religious groups) discuss how they feel about their traditions and history. Some reject them as pointless self indulgence, others see holding onto them as an act of resistance and power and maybe even a chance to strike back. When we get hints that the original elven gods were maybe Not Great people, elven characters have complex reactions and feelings about it, and have to decide how they choose to feel about it all going forward.
I'm not saying it was handled perfectly, because it wasn't. And the plan to have the marginalised species gods be the main villains is Very Unfortunate Choice that seems to have been set up over the whole series, I'm not sure there's any way that wouldn't have felt Problematic.
But that's the world I was given. That's the context I have for Solas, elven society, the relationship between elves and other species etc. This is a series which has always very strongly focussed on the relationship between society, power, religion, and culture.
And then the ancient elven gods and magic come back and the social implications are a big fat nothing, beyond a simplistic "let's make sure the world isn't destroyed/guess our gods are the bad guys now!". The previously isolationist, angry, bitterly mistreated Dalish elves set up an interspecies organisation to investigate their ancient history, happily letting humans join and being bizarrely friendly and helpful to my party of largely non-elves.
Tevinter, previously written as Elf Murder And Enslavement World aparently shows every sign of treating elves as equals. Certainly within my party, a Dalish elf hangs out with a Tevinter aristocrat and neither of them seem to think this is weird or uncomfortable.
Which makes me go... so who are these people? How do they see themselves? What is their personal history and social context? Everything I would expect to be true about them has been actively contradicted and the game hasn't bothered giving me anything convincing to replace it with, and so it's all empty and pointless.
I'm not saying a story with heavy-handed Fantasy Racism is better than one without it. But for good or ill, it was so baked into the world of Dragon Age that you can't just suddenly take it out and have anything make any sense to me.
I've also heard there's a bunch of gameplay and storytelling choices later on that I would probably not like. But those didn't affect my enjoyment because I never got that far.
Here's two posts by someone who did finish the game expressing broadly related frustrations (I don't know them I just saw both of these posts):
Fenris could never cameo in The Veilguard. Because he'd break it.
DA:I left a bunch of loose threads that DA:V did not bother to address
That second post helped me figure out why I wasn't able to enjoy DA:V even though I did enjoy Mass Effect: Andromeda, the mediocre fourth Mass Effect game.
The first three Mass Effect games form a neatly self contained story. And ME:A is a totally new story, set in a new galaxy with new characters, species, and conflicts. It was not a very GOOD game, but I was able to enjoy it for what it was well enough without being too annoyed at the ways it failed at being a Mass Effect game.
Dragon Age Veilguard does not stand alone. It is theoretically the continuation of an ongoing story, but makes no sense as a continuation of that story, and so I wasn't able to enjoy it.
It's also inconsistent in terms of tone/approach to narrative etc but I think I could roll with that if I believed it as part of the same story.
So: The world felt out of character, and that threw me out of the story aggressively. I could plausibly have enjoyed a very similar game if it was an original setting.
Also I hear it has platforming, which I am very bad at, but I'd have been willing to get Cam to help with those parts if I'd been enjoying the game otherwise.
It does a good enough job at other things that I can intellectually see how someone could enjoy it, and I'm legit happy for those people. But this post is about how it did not work for me.
I bought DA:V shortly after launch and played for *checks* 4.3 hours. And then I just... didn't feel like playing any more ever again. This post is based on what I saw in that playthrough, and the impression I have gotten from people who played further.
I really liked the character creator, it definitely had issues but was pretty inclusive and made it easy to make a cool looking androgynous dwarf which is always my first goal.
I didn't like the art style when I saw the first trailer but it grew on me surprisingly quickly, and the environments were very immersive and cool looking.
The existing characters didn't always feel in keeping with their past characterisations, especially Harding, but I was able to roll with it.
The new characters seemed likeable enough in principle.
The writing was pretty uninspiring in terms of basic quality, but not unbearable in and of itself.
But it just...wasn't Thedas. Not the individual people, not the social dynamics, not the events since the previous game. And these inconsistencies created a hollowness at the heart of the main story and every side quest I encountered.
I'm not saying the worldbuilding in the older games was always GOOD. In fact it was often very ill-considered, and moderately inconsistent. But it was what it was, and by contradicting it so aggressively, everything felt unmoored from context and meaning. I kept being thrown by people's reactions making zero sense if I considered them in the context of my existing understanding of how people from this world felt and thought. The game didn't even bother creating a NEW way to understand the world it just... expected you not to think about any of that at all.
Specifically: One of the key, consistent aspects of Thedas in the first three games is that the elves are oppressed. And that is not at all evident in DA:V. Which would be one thing if it was a background detail, but DA:V is all about elves and their history: Solas is an ancient elven god destroying the current world to try to bring back the previous world where elves had more power, and in doing so he accidentally resurrects the rest of the ancient elven gods, who go on to become the villains of the game.
How we as players in DA:V feel about Solas and the elven gods is going to be VERY AFFECTED by how we feel about and conceptualise the role of elves and their religion in current Thedas society. In Inquisition, we repeatedly see Solas express horror and grief at the way elves and their culture have been oppressed, enslaved, erased, and destroyed. So when we find out he is planning on destroying this world to return things to their past state, it's still bad but somewhat sympathetic. It's interesting.
In the first three games we see a variety of elves (and other marginalised ethno/species-religious groups) discuss how they feel about their traditions and history. Some reject them as pointless self indulgence, others see holding onto them as an act of resistance and power and maybe even a chance to strike back. When we get hints that the original elven gods were maybe Not Great people, elven characters have complex reactions and feelings about it, and have to decide how they choose to feel about it all going forward.
I'm not saying it was handled perfectly, because it wasn't. And the plan to have the marginalised species gods be the main villains is Very Unfortunate Choice that seems to have been set up over the whole series, I'm not sure there's any way that wouldn't have felt Problematic.
But that's the world I was given. That's the context I have for Solas, elven society, the relationship between elves and other species etc. This is a series which has always very strongly focussed on the relationship between society, power, religion, and culture.
And then the ancient elven gods and magic come back and the social implications are a big fat nothing, beyond a simplistic "let's make sure the world isn't destroyed/guess our gods are the bad guys now!". The previously isolationist, angry, bitterly mistreated Dalish elves set up an interspecies organisation to investigate their ancient history, happily letting humans join and being bizarrely friendly and helpful to my party of largely non-elves.
Tevinter, previously written as Elf Murder And Enslavement World aparently shows every sign of treating elves as equals. Certainly within my party, a Dalish elf hangs out with a Tevinter aristocrat and neither of them seem to think this is weird or uncomfortable.
Which makes me go... so who are these people? How do they see themselves? What is their personal history and social context? Everything I would expect to be true about them has been actively contradicted and the game hasn't bothered giving me anything convincing to replace it with, and so it's all empty and pointless.
I'm not saying a story with heavy-handed Fantasy Racism is better than one without it. But for good or ill, it was so baked into the world of Dragon Age that you can't just suddenly take it out and have anything make any sense to me.
I've also heard there's a bunch of gameplay and storytelling choices later on that I would probably not like. But those didn't affect my enjoyment because I never got that far.
Here's two posts by someone who did finish the game expressing broadly related frustrations (I don't know them I just saw both of these posts):
Fenris could never cameo in The Veilguard. Because he'd break it.
DA:I left a bunch of loose threads that DA:V did not bother to address
That second post helped me figure out why I wasn't able to enjoy DA:V even though I did enjoy Mass Effect: Andromeda, the mediocre fourth Mass Effect game.
The first three Mass Effect games form a neatly self contained story. And ME:A is a totally new story, set in a new galaxy with new characters, species, and conflicts. It was not a very GOOD game, but I was able to enjoy it for what it was well enough without being too annoyed at the ways it failed at being a Mass Effect game.
Dragon Age Veilguard does not stand alone. It is theoretically the continuation of an ongoing story, but makes no sense as a continuation of that story, and so I wasn't able to enjoy it.
It's also inconsistent in terms of tone/approach to narrative etc but I think I could roll with that if I believed it as part of the same story.
