DemonKing
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 5, 2003
- Messages
- 6,520
LOL - wait till she sees the user reviews in a couple of days.
Looks like one of A Wyatt Mann's depictions of AIDS bugchasers.
You're so fucking retarded you don't even understand how much we agree. It's almost easier to deal with a tard you half agree with, because the lines are easy to draw. The problem with chimp brains that you meet 95% of the way on, they gibber and froth and scream over that 5% like it's scissors coming after their dicks.Fellow, human-oids, we must ignore the "wokes" and let them continue to do what they do lest we prove them right that we are nazihitlergoebbelsincels!I'm getting the feeling that where ever I look, the troons and their pets outnumber the based by at least 10:1. I thought the pendulum was supposed to be swinging back. There's not a single place outside Codex where you could be safe from their insipid bullshit. They can't be that numerous.
Could this indeed be some kind of media manipulation via bot armies and paid shills, or just a bunch of permanently online social warriors coordinating their attacks?
This is what no one gets here. We are an echo chamber minority just like Resetera but on the OTHER side of the culture war. However! The vast majority of normies are absolute fucking retards and are easily swayed by propaganda. Basically NPCs, they can form no opinions of their own.
So anyone under say, age 40, is a dumb ass consoomer and will gladly consoom product with little thought or care about the messaging. "Things are just this way now" is the extent of their cognition regarding this absurd agenda. That is your blackpill for today, swallow it down you are surrounded by midwits and the brain damaged and it gets worse every decade as IQs drop like a stone.
Spot on on the echo chamber part, because jesus holy christ you people are twisting yourself into sobbing balls of hysterics as if this shit game matters in the course of western civilization. Fucking everyone is on their period throwing money at the cracks in the wall to keep the joos away because Veilguard means that the spooky wokes are out to get them.
This game will suck, yes, and and it will also sell fine out of the gate. Bioware will do a victory lap, and be on the lookout for whether they announce that it's "their biggest launch ever" like they did with Inquisition (the market is bigger now, so I don't know how much that means anything, but if they don't the silence sure will be conspicuous). I still think there's an outside chance it snags a GOTY nomination, but that'll depend on how the game is received on launch, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it launched to mixed reviews even from normals. I know a lot of people are planning to buy it just to review bomb it and then refund the game later, but for god's sake have the sense to not sound quite so fucking unhinged. If there's anything that normals hate more than a bad game, it's people spamming all this deranged conspiratorial political nonsense. Just focus on how it fails as a game, there should be plenty of meat on the bone there - running around screeching about the wokes are hiding under your bed is just going to play right into their hands and "prove" that the only people who don't like it are unfuckable hate nerds.
Still, for chrissake sake, perspective. Saint's Row reboot had the same caliber writing. Bomb. Forespoken had the same quality writing. Bomb. Immortals of Aveum might be the worst written piece of shit I've ever seen, cost EA 120 million goddamned dollars, and it fell off the face of the earth, taking well over 100 million dollars with it.
"Consoomers" seemed to gauge the quality of those products just fine.
The only thing worse than the trannies shilling these games are the "neutrals" that always show up to tell everyone to stop being big bad meanies. Oh no, the Redditors(whom you think are normies for some reason) are going to call you an incel. The world is coming to an end, surely.
Here's the REAL PC Gamer review: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/drago...k-fantasy-roots-and-become-biowares-avengers/
With The Veilguard, Dragon Age has forgotten its dark fantasy roots and become BioWare's Avengers
Bloodless, perfunctory and broad.
When BioWare started working on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the world was in love with Marvel. We wanted more Avengers, more bants, more Nick Fury recruiting super-powered heroes. This must have felt serendipitous to a studio which had, for years, been designing RPGs where players put together a wise-cracking, good-looking squad to stop the world—and sometimes galaxy—from imploding.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is BioWare's Avengers, fully leaning into the idea of a heroic team of powerhouses protecting everyone from the worst of the worst—between bouts of exposition and lots of banter, of course. But unfortunately it's now 2024, the Marvel formula has become exhausting, and BioWare's latest RPG—which I'm now around three quarters of the way through—feels both perfunctory and behind the curve.
Maybe we would have ended up here even without Marvel's huge influence on modern entertainment. While the series began as an exceptionally grim fantasy adventure in a grounded medieval world, Dragon Age has never been comfortable sitting still. Dragon Age 2 preserved much of the tone, despite the switch to smaller stakes and a more focused setting, but Inquisition then put you in charge of a high fantasy version of SHIELD in a game full of absurd stakes and magic spectacle.
But it also still felt like a Dragon Age game. A different style of Dragon Age game, sure, but one that still featured nuanced characters who pushed and questioned you, set in a world that, for all its vibrant colours and flashy magic, still felt tragic and sorrowful. It served as an interesting counterpart to Origins, where you played a hero (or anti-hero) trying to thwart a tyrant. As the Inquisitor, there was always the sense that you might become that tyrant yourself. In The Veilguard, however, Dragon Age's legacy is nearly invisible.
Thedas's questionable glow up
The Veilguard sheds most of the series' nuance and darkness, fully committing to bloodless, broad high fantasy with a Marvel veneer—less Thesdas and more Asgard. It's even got that gaudy Marvel colour palette, where everything glows and sears your retinas. It's all just so over the top—constantly trying to show off and elbow you, forcing you to look at one ostentatious set piece after another.
This perseveres even when The Veilguard impotently attempts to showcase some horror. When you explore a Blight-infested village in an early section, the pulsating neon-red cysts and gratuitous use of tentacles is so cartoonish that it's impossible to feel the revulsion that the story wants you to experience. The Blight is ultimately left to just become a momentary obstacle, blocking paths until you destroy a bunch of connected nodes. It's just a mechanical nuisance that rears its head countless times throughout the game.
The Veilguard even takes Marvel's sci-fi-tinged approach to fantasy. Bellara, your elven archer, swans around with a massive golden gauntlet that splices magic and tech, is a talented engineer, and is part of a mostly-elvish organisation which studies and preserves ancient, arcane technology. Even their name, the Veil Jumpers, feels like something drawn from a sci-fi comic. Where previous games presented the elves as a race brought down by human colonialism, pushed to the fringes and constantly struggling with racism and ostracisation, The Veilguard's elves are primarily represented by an organisation of fancy magical scientists.
Magic, broadly, has a very different tone this time around. Some of this is down to the switch from southern Thedas to Tevinter and the surrounding areas, where mages have a lot more influence and aren't kept on a tight leash, as they are in Ferelden. But the loss of tension between mages and Templars is felt keenly, and The Veilguard doesn't give us anything to fill the gap. Instead, mages are just—like so much in this game—generically cool.
Narratively, there's not much to them—they're just another class, and most of the time the only distinction between a mage and a warrior is how they handle in combat, where the former fights like an amalgamation of Iron Man and Doctor Strange, with staffs that might as well be laser cannons and big glowing shields that surround their bodies like a force field. Whenever they pull off some spells, it turns the battlefield into a rave.
There's just nothing here that feels connected to the grounded world BioWare originally built. One of the first things you see when you start the game is a flying Tevinter citadel, you have to participate in a jailbreak where the prison is under the sea, your HQ sits on a floating island inside the Veil and you're literally fighting a pair of gods—something everyone largely takes in their stride. There's nothing inherently wrong with this. Lots of The Veilguard's elements also exist in Baldur's Gate 3, the best RPG around, but here it leaves me feeling so detached from the world, and there's not much actually beneath the spectacle—it's just vapidly showy.
Let's use the underwater prison as an example, since it features in both games. Once you arrive in BG3's Iron Throne via a submersible, you realise you've already been discovered by one of your main adversaries—now you have to rescue the prisoners before the trap is sprung, drowning you all. It's a timed jailbreak where the underwater location is actually important, and even informs the kind foes you'll encounter. In The Veilguard, on the other hand, the underwater conceit is largely ignored beyond the initial surprise. Once that wears off, you'll just fight your way through a ruin that looks like any other, defeating the same enemies you'll have already encountered, only to find the guy you're trying to rescue is already free. There's nothing really to it: just a cool idea that goes nowhere.
Teambuilding
And then there's your companions—not a found-family full of weirdos, but rather a group of highly-skilled individuals recruited for a specific purpose. The very first quest you embark upon sees you recruiting Neve, whose status as a crime-fighting detective places her more in the Justice League pantheon than the Avengers. Following the prologue, you start being handed more quests to build your team—the brilliant engineer, the possessed assassin, the stoic Grey Warden—each of them with a connection to one of the main factions.
This isn't the first time BioWare's given us the role of Marvel's eyepatch-wearing super spy—both Mass Effect and Inquisition tasked you with recruiting operatives with special skills. But it's perfunctory and mechanical this time around. You're not a military officer or the commander of a crusading order—you're just some rando that Varric picked up a year ago. This might be the most efficient way of putting together a team, just pointing you in a direction where you offer someone a job, but it's so rushed, just like the relationships themselves. It feels like you've been handed a script and must now pretend to be BFFs with these people you just met.
Each companion can be effectively described with a couple of keywords. OK, maybe I'm being unfair here. I could say the same about a lot of other BioWare companions. Liara the naive scientist, Isabela the horny pirate, Morrigan the abrasive witch—but the problem with The Veilguard is that the keywords are both the start and end of most of these characters. Like so much of the game's cast, from its villainous gods to its staid faction representatives, the companions rarely deviate from their broad archetypes.
Emmrich plays against type, as a warm, kindly necromancer, and Taash's struggle with gender and identity is a novel story for a fantasy RPG, but aside from a couple of standout moments, the crew feels like a bunch of made-to-order companions. They're designed for a specific purpose: to help you save the day and occasionally solve some environmental puzzles with their unique abilities. Where are my chaos goblins and my arseholes and my left-field picks? My Seras and Morrigans and Shales? Where's my friction? There just isn't any.
Going back to the Avengers, Marvel had to make it completely clear who all these characters were as quickly as possible because it had about two hours to get you to give a shit about this ensemble cast. They had to be broad and make their intentions and motivations clear from the get go. Not very subtle, but at least understandable. It's a bit more jarring in an RPG that will take you at least 40 hours to complete.
The Veilguard's cast largely just tells you their whole deal from the outset. Lucanis is literally an abomination, something that you might expect him to want to keep secret from his new friends, but you discover his nature before he utters a single word. He's an open book. And while his nature causes a wee bit of tension, it's mostly short-lived and extremely polite. Bellara, meanwhile, spends maybe 10 seconds pretending that her backstory is too sad to talk about, before giving an entire monologue about her tragic past, why she does what she does, and what's motivating her to help you on your quest.
Sweet nothings
And don't get me started on the romance dialogue. If you choose to do some very light flirting with a character once or twice, the game tries to fast track you into a relationship—complete with all the cliches. In a single hour I had not one but two stammering, bashful romantic encounters that turned the game into an antediluvian romcom. You know the ones: the "It's a date… no, I mean, not a date date" variety. There are some solid romantic encounters, eventually, but you have to trudge through a lot of rote rubbish to see them.
The Veilguard tries to create funny, silly, awkward and sincere conversations—the kind you'd have with your pals or potential partners—but it just spits them out so rapidly, and with so many cliches, that I started to dread my post-adventuring downtime, where I'd need to go from room to room having uninspired chats with some very nice but very boring people. That's ultimately The Veilguard's biggest stumbling block when it comes to the companions: they are simply good people. Thoughtful, open-minded, friendly—great for a group of mates, not so great for a story-driven RPG.
In Origins, you had Alistair and Morrigan constantly winding each other up, in Inquisition you had Solas lecturing you and being disappointed that it wasn't sinking in, and in BG3 you literally have companions trying to murder each other—conflict adds texture to an adventuring party. Heck, even the Avengers ended up fighting each other in Civil War. But the Veilguard gives you friendly automatons with very little agency, which makes any relationship you build with them feel hollow.
I'm not really feeling very connected to my version of Rook, either. Though maybe "my version" is the wrong phrase. BioWare has stuck with the system it introduced in Dragon Age 2, where your responses are all clearly connected to a specific personality style or emotion—snarky, aggressive, positive, upset, that sort of thing. Despite being a bit limited, the system has worked well in the past, but this time it seems impossible to develop a character who isn't just a very brave, very generic hero. Maybe yours will be slightly gruffer, or a bit more sarcastic—but not that much. No matter what options you pick, it's going to sound broadly like something a hero would say. Actually impactful choices, meanwhile, are few and far between, offering no real opportunities to take Rook in different directions. You might as well be Captain America.
Inquisition was already going in this direction—you're always being nudged towards heroism—but The Veilguard completely ties your hands for most of the game, and the lack of proper roleplaying is so much more noticeable due to the other RPGs that have appeared in the interim. Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, Pathfinder, Rogue Trader, Disco Elysium, Divinity: Original Sin, Baldur's Gate 3, The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077—they've all felt like progress, leaving Dragon Age behind.
Pillars, Pathfinder and Rogue Trader all build on the legacy of the Infinity Engine games of BioWare's past, but they bump up the flexibility and character development potential considerably. Tyranny and Disco are more cerebral, experimenting with how RPGs handle the complexities of ethics and philosophy, ultimately letting players make choices that eschew the genre's conventions. Divinity and Baldur's Gate smash sandboxes and CRPGs together, giving us RPGs that boast the unparalleled permissiveness of their tabletop counterparts. The Witcher and Cyberpunk raise the bar for quest design and storytelling, showing us that expensive and flashy blockbuster RPGs can still be smart and evocative.
What does The Veilguard do? It is a polished and competent BioWare action-RPG that follows a safe, conventional pattern. The old BioWare magic has been codified and sanitised, and now feels dated—even more so than BioWare's actually pretty old RPGs. It is as broad, predictable and inoffensive as a crowd-pleasing Marvel movie, all flashy, clean and easy to digest; so it has the power to be entertaining, but never in a way that will stick with you. There are no big swings, no risks, no shocks, and while I have enjoyed some of it, for most of my fourth trip across Thedas I've been left pretty bored.
As opposed to those already out, huh?pre-emptive damage control LMAO
It was a typo, he meant Chud Stevens.Chances are she is Chad StevensMakes sense. Chad Stevens writes the code while she just larps as programmer.
positive spin on this:
- Acceleration can lead to a favorable result. Turbo-cringe poz like this grosses out normies.
'Subtle poz' is much worse since normies give it a pass.
I agree mostly however I will say this good (eg quality) pozzed propaganda is rarely called woke take BG3 for instance and how many braying sheep like that game because it wasnt complete shit vs this getting normies to attack it
Accelerationism is the biggest cope.
There's no such thing because normies are never going to wake up. Accelerationism just means losing even harder.
You make some good points here, end of the day this is just a game created by a former highly admired development studio that has decided to create the female characters in a woke and disappointing wayYou're so fucking retarded you don't even understand how much we agree. It's almost easier to deal with a tard you half agree with, because the lines are easy to draw. The problem with chimp brains that you meet 95% of the way on, they gibber and froth and scream over that 5% like it's scissors coming after their dicks.Fellow, human-oids, we must ignore the "wokes" and let them continue to do what they do lest we prove them right that we are nazihitlergoebbelsincels!I'm getting the feeling that where ever I look, the troons and their pets outnumber the based by at least 10:1. I thought the pendulum was supposed to be swinging back. There's not a single place outside Codex where you could be safe from their insipid bullshit. They can't be that numerous.
Could this indeed be some kind of media manipulation via bot armies and paid shills, or just a bunch of permanently online social warriors coordinating their attacks?
This is what no one gets here. We are an echo chamber minority just like Resetera but on the OTHER side of the culture war. However! The vast majority of normies are absolute fucking retards and are easily swayed by propaganda. Basically NPCs, they can form no opinions of their own.
So anyone under say, age 40, is a dumb ass consoomer and will gladly consoom product with little thought or care about the messaging. "Things are just this way now" is the extent of their cognition regarding this absurd agenda. That is your blackpill for today, swallow it down you are surrounded by midwits and the brain damaged and it gets worse every decade as IQs drop like a stone.
Spot on on the echo chamber part, because jesus holy christ you people are twisting yourself into sobbing balls of hysterics as if this shit game matters in the course of western civilization. Fucking everyone is on their period throwing money at the cracks in the wall to keep the joos away because Veilguard means that the spooky wokes are out to get them.
This game will suck, yes, and and it will also sell fine out of the gate. Bioware will do a victory lap, and be on the lookout for whether they announce that it's "their biggest launch ever" like they did with Inquisition (the market is bigger now, so I don't know how much that means anything, but if they don't the silence sure will be conspicuous). I still think there's an outside chance it snags a GOTY nomination, but that'll depend on how the game is received on launch, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it launched to mixed reviews even from normals. I know a lot of people are planning to buy it just to review bomb it and then refund the game later, but for god's sake have the sense to not sound quite so fucking unhinged. If there's anything that normals hate more than a bad game, it's people spamming all this deranged conspiratorial political nonsense. Just focus on how it fails as a game, there should be plenty of meat on the bone there - running around screeching about the wokes are hiding under your bed is just going to play right into their hands and "prove" that the only people who don't like it are unfuckable hate nerds.
Still, for chrissake sake, perspective. Saint's Row reboot had the same caliber writing. Bomb. Forespoken had the same quality writing. Bomb. Immortals of Aveum might be the worst written piece of shit I've ever seen, cost EA 120 million goddamned dollars, and it fell off the face of the earth, taking well over 100 million dollars with it.
"Consoomers" seemed to gauge the quality of those products just fine.
The only thing worse than the trannies shilling these games are the "neutrals" that always show up to tell everyone to stop being big bad meanies. Oh no, the Redditors(whom you think are normies for some reason) are going to call you an incel. The world is coming to an end, surely.
Pretty much everyone here is on the same page (except for that one dude, shine on you crazy diamond).
Let me break this down into pieces so they're easier to swallow:
A) Is this game woke as all fuck? Yes. Absurdly, hilariously so. Hell, that's half the fun, they were so eager about their agendas they let it run right over the need to make an actual game (same for a lot of reviewers, methinks). I think there's a very strong possibility of profound backlash when this game his shelves - not because normies are torn up about the politics, but because the game won't be there. And man, I'm sooooooo here for that.
So yeah, tear it a new assholle. Tear it five new genders. That's all part of the fun.
B) That said, a buncha y'all get fucking deranged with this weird-ass conspiracy nonsense, like Veilguard is breaking the seventh seal and the eight rainbows of the apocalypse are coming to get you. I'm not saying to get a grip because the politics upset my oh-so-gentle feelings or the ruffle the feathers fragile messes, I'm saying to chill because it's fucking boring and clutters shit up. I want to laugh at the game, not get derailed by a bunch of tards posting excerpts from their mass shooting manifesto.
Look, people have obviously been around longer than me, so I'm not going to put claims on what the site has always been, but back when I joined I put up a question "What caused The Decline?" Got a lot of really interesting and informed answers, a lot of people had insight into problems and transitions in the industry, mainly the pressures coming from producing with HD quality and the decline in PC sales. Just game and industry talk, not a word about people's freakish politics. You ask that question today, you might get insight, but you'd have to dig through pages of hysterical crybabies screeching about about how the woke monster barged in and raped their grandma. Are politics an issue? Yeah, fucking duh. But acting like it's the sole bogeyman in a complex industry, I'm sorry but all y'all on this train are fucking dumb. Posting about it endlessly is dumb. Worse than dumb.
It. Is. Boring.
C) No buddy, nobody is trying to censor you on this site or protect redditors from your ability to regurgitate mid-2010s 4chan in all its glory. The main point I'm making, my advice, if you want this game to fail, is to keep your derangement in your pants when you fan out into normie spaces. Because it will backfire. That is reality. And I'm sorry if it hurts your feelings.
Quite frankly, though, I care more about hurting Bioware's feelings and all their media enablers than yours.
So you gotta ask - what do you value more, for this game to be publicly humiliated, or the chance to crawl out of this safe space to gibber and froth in the town square? Because if you do, don't be surprised if Bioware and all their enablers point a finger directly at you and say "see, our haters are gibbering, frothing retards." Your fucking stupidity will be their shield. So no, it's not about protecting them, it's about defeating them. What's matters more? You want to fight smart or fight dumb?
Me, I'm just annoyed when I have to scroll past so many conspiracy nutters. It'd be nice for them to touch grass, sure, but my greater hope is for this game to fail, or at least encounter some serious backlash, and I'm just telling y'all the most effective way to make that happen.
Keep it in your pants.
Looks like 3 Body Problem, its a series, only the first season out, pretty good though.What movie is this from? The lady looks so hot
It was not, in fact, pretty goodLooks like 3 Body Problem, its a series, only the first season out, pretty good though.What movie is this from? The lady looks so hot
oh, it's some western series, I thought it would be a Chinese production about cultural revolution.Looks like 3 Body Problem, its a series, only the first season out, pretty good though.What movie is this from? The lady looks so hot
This scene and the associated plotline was removed in the chinese (not Netflix) series, based on the same book.oh, it's some western series, I thought it would be a Chinese production about cultural revolution.Looks like 3 Body Problem, its a series, only the first season out, pretty good though.What movie is this from? The lady looks so hot
Its an adaptation of a chinese science fiction.oh, it's some western series, I thought it would be a Chinese production about cultural revolution.Looks like 3 Body Problem, its a series, only the first season out, pretty good though.What movie is this from? The lady looks so hot
Bioware is soon-to-be Biowere
This kid banned me from his site simply for stating "you can't have played many Bioware games"
Well, it was a lot better then The Witcher and many other Netflix literature adaptations IMO.3 Body Netflix was dog shit.
Not a high bar really, netflix Witcher was garbage-tier tvWell, it was a lot better then The Witcher and many other Netflix literature adaptations IMO.3 Body Netflix was dog shit.