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alias_sqbr) wrote2025-01-17 02:34 pm
alias_sqbr) wrote2025-01-17 02:34 pm
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Why I didn't get into Dragon Age: Veilguard
I'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.
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Yeah it's a lot /o\ I mean technically, afaict there's still supposed to be slavery etc happening... offscreen, somewhere, done by very bad people, and in no way affecting the attitudes of anyone else. But... yeah.
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Honestly, it just feels like such a huge difference from 'there were some continuity issues between DA games' and 'we are treating this like a sterile hyper-sanitised environment and writing fanfiction in it.' They possibly didn't have time to workshop the storylines they wanted to, but as a writer myself, it feels like just basic writing to have even a handful of derogatory 'your gods are the ones ruining the world but we're *not* supposed to keep you as slaves?' from some villains, or something. (If you play an elf, anyway, which I did).
It's funny because I specifically gave my elf a slave background, like literally 'freed himself from slavers and now frees elves from slavers and works with Dorian and crew' etc. So it was extra jarring to have zero acknowledgement, not of my specific background, but of the fact that it's reasonable to assume that an elf working in Tevinter to free slaves might have a difficult background with slavery of *some* description like *any elf in Tevinter.*
For me, the worldbuilding is just totally insipid for cultural/ethnic/global events. For matters around personal grief and acceptance, it does pretty okay. But on the broader scale, it really ran the whole thing through the 'try to remove anything problematic and become quite problematic by doing so' lol
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Yeah I can't believe they took the SLAVERY out of TEVINTER. I was expecting it to be handled badly but that possibility didn't even occur to me. And yeah, the series has always had issues with consistency and ignoring inconvenient implications but this is a whole other level.
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You're definitely hitting it. So I've played all the way through once and most of the way through a second time to see other outcomes. I've enjoyed it, in that I like the gameplay I like the lore stuff. My first playthrough started a lot of thoughts for me about the game, and my second playthrough is as much about letting me think on them as it is seeing the other outcomes of choices.
All that said, I agree it does not feel like Thedas. Building on the expectations we've been given of the north from the previous games, I would expect there to be some playing expectations of people, especially Tevinter. But other than the Wardens and maybe Nevarra (for whihc we knew very little previously), the other locations all feel bland. Tevinter is a slave culture and we see no slaves. I know dock town is supposed to be the bottom of the barrel, but there's no hint of that slave culture in the environment or NPCs. In Antiva, we're coming in on the Crows side, and they're all sanitized. Zevran was kidnapped as a child and pressed into service with the Crows. They effectively owned him. The Crows in Veilguard are assassins of the people, which is nice for the player's moral conscious I guess?
It's not like Dragon Age has had deeply moral choices for the plot, but there's not even characters/NPC who push things into the gray area.
The other thing that bothers me is the Chantry - or its lack of meaningful presence. It's so central to the story in the South, and in the North it is effectively non-existent, and there's nothing equivalent to fill that gap.
All your points about the elves and their representation stand too, especially in Tevinter.
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This is frustrating to hear. I thought there would be a chance for DA:V after watching the cartoon, because that addresses the slavery in Tevinter directly, so to hear it dodges the topic like this is a disappointment for sure.
It from the post and comments here it seems I made the right choice giving the game a pass, but I wish that hadn't been the case.
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it seems I made the right choice giving the game a pass, but I wish that hadn't been the case
Yeah :(
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Mann... and from all earlier accounts people in Tevinter are mostly Andrastian, just following their own off-shoot of the religion. There's so much interesting stuff you could dig into with the conflicts between the types of Andrastianism, and then how they both react to the revelations about the Maker etc! OH WELL.
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In fact it was often very ill-considered
lmao, agreed very much on this, but also on not being able to just handwave it away.
This post and the links are good forewarning whenever I make it further, thanks! At least I liked the character creator. Anyway, this makes an interesting trajectory from DA:I, which I thought was a big step down from the way DA:O and DA2 (in different ways) made the PC's background matter.
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Ha, yeah, I did like the character creator too. I hope you have fun with the game it is, forewarned.
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And I boggled a bit at the Crows being totally okay now, according to the first post. They're assassins! I love a sexy assassin in power as much as the next person (possibly more than), but it only works if the narrative is self aware about what it's doing
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Yep they only kill BAD people, that is definitely a sustainable model for paid assassination.
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I'm sorry it's turned out that way for you and Dragon Age, though! Sigh.
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Yes! I took a little longer to entirely go off the MCU but when I did it was for the same reason, and it does feel similar.
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Since my Rook is a Veil Jumper, it makes sense that the group in Arlathan would be willing to help her, but I'm sure it feels weird from other origins. I may see in the future.
Much like DA2, though, I feel like the draw here for me is going to be the companions, and I'm going to just roll around in their dialogue and be like "huh that's a funny AU Bioware wrote, bye". but that's me.
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Ha meanwhile one of my problems with DAI, which I have heard is also a problem with DAV, is that the large amounts of elf related content means that if you are an elf it's especially glaring how often the writers forget to take into account what species you are. So it's kind of no-win.
I hope you do have fun regardless!
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I am definitely enjoying the companions. Love a good disaster polycule in the making. :D
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Ha yeah once I got into games writing myself I definitely had more sympathy for how hard it is to balance this sort of thing.
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But yeah, all your criticisms sound 100% in line with everything I’ve heard about it. :/ The swerve in tone and worldbuilding is just bizarre. Sanitised slavery-less Tevinter feels downright eerie in light of the series as a whole - like some kind of weird in-universe propaganda effort. Why even set (part of) the game there in the first place? Same with the Crows and Isabela’s pirate faction - why include them if Nice People With Fully Functional Moral Compasses are all you want? (Both those essays were excellent, but I especially like the Fenris one.) DA hasn’t always handled *isms, politics, and social issues well, to say the least, but ignoring them completely is the opposite of a fix.
Ugggh I probably shouldn’t judge a game I haven’t played this hard but so much of what I’ve seen just IRRITATES me. I was actually having similar thoughts the other day about Mass Effect Andromeda and why I still had fun with the bits I played despite glaring flaws - setting it in another galaxy with an entirely new cast was a sensible move. Veilguard sounds almost like they tried to combine a soft reboot with a direct follow-on to a previous instalment, and that’s… not going to work.
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Good news: I haven't tried it, but afaict you can just download the character creator and play with it sims style! It's on the veilguard steam page.
I will defend the writers if not the writing: afaict they were told to make a sequel to Inquisition, then to make it multiplayer, THEN to make it a single player game. I can only assume this is one reason there's so many bland Factions Of Nice People to choose from.
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Oh, I don’t blame the writing team themselves for the current state of things - it sounds to me like they did the best they could in the midst of chaos. In light of everything going on behind the scenes, I’m impressed we got a complete story at all (even if it’s a messy one).