Dragon Age Dragon Age: The Veilguard Pre-Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Ryzer]

Is it me or there are only two armor slots? This is a joke.
Why does it look like a stupid Hack and Slash?
And Why is the inventory screen so flashy and purple ?
Why the fuck is there a Wi-fi icon? Is this a disgusting always online game?
Only 4 skills available in combat, What is this? DA2 again?
Why is there Diablo color/rarity coding equipment?
I have so many questions.

 

[Rhobar121]

More like Assassin's Creed: Deep Roads, amirite?

Spoiler

Also...

• Combat is completely in real-time and similar to a hack and slash. I'm told the guiding reference point was the God of War (2018), and that shows.

So we have action games trying to be RPGs, and RPGs trying to be like action games. Sounds like they're going more Mass Effect, especially with a 3-person party?

If it's like a god of war fight, it's not that bad. The combat was really fun.
However, I'm afraid that it will only be a poor copy that doesn't even have half the options that GoW had.

 

[blessedCoffee]

I assure you good sir I have no idea what you're talking about.
http://www.modestymods.com/?game=arcanum

In the meanwhile, the very modder which posted this, watches the animal abuse in Postal games without blinking an eye. You can physically hurt creatures, but not their feelings !

Odd how something that is not even shown in-game made him uncomfortable enough to create this. Let’s not forget it’s entirely optional, you can ignore the entire building and still finish Arcanum, normally.

 

[Elttharion]

There's worse than darkspawn on the way.

And walls wont hold it back.

 

[Tyranicon]

More like Assassin's Creed: Deep Roads, amirite?

Spoiler

Also...

• Combat is completely in real-time and similar to a hack and slash. I'm told the guiding reference point was the God of War (2018), and that shows.

So we have action games trying to be RPGs, and RPGs trying to be like action games. Sounds like they're going more Mass Effect, especially with a 3-person party?

If it's like a god of war fight, it's not that bad. The combat was really fun.
However, I'm afraid that it will only be a poor copy that doesn't even have half the options that GoW had.

I don't want to rehash the old argument between real-time, RTwP, and turn-based but the further a RPG goes real-time, the furthest it strays from RPG roots (which is tabletop).

This comes down to one fundamental problem:

1. a real-time game that does not involve some type of reaction speed and skill probably won't end up being fun.

2. a RPG is most like its tabletop ancestors when not involving a player's skills, but rather that of the character.

3. this turns most fights from being a celebreal, tactical experience more to a frenzied mix of cooldown watching and target prioritization, since most RPG devs can't grasp what makes real-time combat fun.

Which in my opinion, is less interesting combat.

 

[Nano]

Not surprised to hear they're doubling down on the consolization and action gameplay, but it's still disappointing to hear.



^ And I dunno what that dude saw, but these animations look just as stiff as Inquisition's to me.

 

[Rhobar121]

More like Assassin's Creed: Deep Roads, amirite?

Spoiler

Also...

• Combat is completely in real-time and similar to a hack and slash. I'm told the guiding reference point was the God of War (2018), and that shows.

So we have action games trying to be RPGs, and RPGs trying to be like action games. Sounds like they're going more Mass Effect, especially with a 3-person party?

If it's like a god of war fight, it's not that bad. The combat was really fun.
However, I'm afraid that it will only be a poor copy that doesn't even have half the options that GoW had.

I don't want to rehash the old argument between real-time, RTwP, and turn-based but the further a RPG goes real-time, the furthest it strays from RPG roots (which is tabletop).

This comes down to one fundamental problem:

1. a real-time game that does not involve some type of reaction speed and skill probably won't end up being fun.

2. a RPG is most like its tabletop ancestors when not involving a player's skills, but rather that of the character.

3. this turns most fights from being a celebreal, tactical experience more to a frenzied mix of cooldown watching and target prioritization, since most RPG devs can't grasp what makes real-time combat fun.

Which in my opinion, is less interesting combat.

This series has always been more or less an action game. DA:O pretended not to, but the whole tactical aspect really didn't matter much. Maybe because the game was easy once you left the first village.

The other games are full aRPG. The combat system has always been the weakest element of these games.
So I don't see a problem. I don't think it's a good idea to stick to one RPG element by force, especially if you can't make it work well.
For the ME series, moving more towards an action game definitely helped.
Even Andromeda which was total crap had a really nice combat system.
Until we see more, it's hard to judge whether it's a good move.

 

[Sordid MCA/Prosper Hybryd]

The animations look a bit better than in DAI. But the dude in full plate armor doing the double drop kick is a whole new level of cringe.

 

[Zeriel]

Both could be of interest if they were made realistically

How would you do both realistically? Genuinely curious.

This is true, but also... it kind of ignores the fact that the point of fiction is often not to replicate reality. It's to entertain. You may personally disagree, but most people are actually not looking for maximally realistic events in fiction. The way people speak in a book or even a movie is totally different from how they speak in real life, etc. It's an influence, not the gestalt.

I don't disagree at all, fiction is fiction. By "realistic" I mean writing in a way that sustains suspension of disbelief.

"Realistic" always has a hidden meaning when applied to writing characters, including romances. Can you imagine the amount of sappy and cringy stuff that happens when people irl are romancing? Real life has everything, and it is likely that no matter how you'll write your lines, whether they'll be innocent or super horny or whatever else, someone has probably uttered them in a real situation. I knew a person who actually experienced things that, when put in a visual novel, would likely be criticized as 'fanservice' or 'unattainable fantasy'.

Whenever I encounter calls for more 'realistic' character writing, I interpret them as demands for characters that are more average. Quite often I am correct in this. "These things happened" - "Oh, but they dont sound real!" - "Well, they are not average". In a field of made-up stories such calls are illegitimate. Sometimes these are poorly expressed demands of greater character depth. That is okay, but that's also something different. Life is full of extraordinary people and turns of events that come out of nowhere, enough to make an endless amount of novels. I'll only stick to average if a genre or a project demands it, and then it is simply in order to do something interesting with a trope, rather than because there is some inherent value in such "realism".

To sustain suspension of disbelief - is coherence rather than realism. Romances need a lot of this, they need to make sense on the terms which the author introduces, and somehow fit the general tone of the game.

 

[Rhobar121]

The animations look a bit better than in DAI. But the dude in full plate armor doing the double drop kick is a whole new level of cringe.

It looks stupid but it's no dumber than constantly rolling in full plate armor from other games.

 

[Zeriel]

More like Assassin's Creed: Deep Roads, amirite?

Spoiler

Also...

• Combat is completely in real-time and similar to a hack and slash. I'm told the guiding reference point was the God of War (2018), and that shows.

So we have action games trying to be RPGs, and RPGs trying to be like action games. Sounds like they're going more Mass Effect, especially with a 3-person party?

If it's like a god of war fight, it's not that bad. The combat was really fun.
However, I'm afraid that it will only be a poor copy that doesn't even have half the options that GoW had.

I don't want to rehash the old argument between real-time, RTwP, and turn-based but the further a RPG goes real-time, the furthest it strays from RPG roots (which is tabletop).

This comes down to one fundamental problem:

1. a real-time game that does not involve some type of reaction speed and skill probably won't end up being fun.

2. a RPG is most like its tabletop ancestors when not involving a player's skills, but rather that of the character.

3. this turns most fights from being a celebreal, tactical experience more to a frenzied mix of cooldown watching and target prioritization, since most RPG devs can't grasp what makes real-time combat fun.

Which in my opinion, is less interesting combat.

This series has always been more or less an action game. DA:O pretended not to, but the whole tactical aspect really didn't matter much. Maybe because the game was easy once you left the first village.

The other games are full aRPG. The combat system has always been the weakest element of these games.
So I don't see a problem. I don't think it's a good idea to stick to one RPG element by force, especially if you can't make it work well.
For the ME series, moving more towards an action game definitely helped.
Even Andromeda which was total crap had a really nice combat system.
Until we see more, it's hard to judge whether it's a good move.

If it were being dumbed down to allow more choices & consequence and story branching I'd agree it's a good thing, but let's be real, it's just gonna be them making the game more braindead while also making the story and everything else more simple too.

 

[Rhobar121]

If it were being dumbed down to allow more choices & consequence and story branching I'd agree it's a good thing, but let's be real, it's just gonna be them making the game more braindead while also making the story and everything else more simple too.

These two things are completely unrelated.

 

[BosanskiSeljak]

I don't know... I like furr, eehrm..., I mean, I watch tentac... eehhhggrhm, what I meant to say is, I like woman friendly porn as much as the next guy, but I always felt that sex in RPGs is just out of place. Like having a 2-ounce over-sweetened cake delivered instead of that extra-large pizza mexicana you ordered so you could close the curtains and rewatch all of Aliens throughout the night.

At first I was a bit confused as to why your companions would want to stop a world-ending war (the usual threat in rpgs, especially bioware's) just to fuck, but then again real life examples mirror these attitudes (the baby boom of the 40s). There's also the case of nurses and doctors, it's not a stereotype, they really are horndogs because the proximity of death brings out the most base fight or flight instincts out of human beings.

Combat is not a priority of Bioware. The only decent combat design they ever made was found in the early D&D games because they had something to prove, but as they went along it became clear that narrative was the thing people were buying their games for. When a Bioware player wants help with their game, they want to know if they're going to be fucked by the C&C of their actions, or which romance is the best. "I can't beat X" is never an issue, even though a lot of people play on Nightmare.

Finished entire mass effect trilogy without dying once on hardest difficulty. KOTORs were both easy (even 2 which wasn't bioware), Dragon Age was pretty easy, etc.

Definitely is that way. There's also no thought about if you'll get a bad outcome.

Even Dragon Age: Origins, the best C&C out of any recent Bioware games, has the retarded stuff like saving Connor at Radcliffe by taking weeks to get the mages. In mass effect, just be paragon.

Narratives are decent at best, it's just enough for fat American geeks to think it's amazing

 

[Zeriel]

If it were being dumbed down to allow more choices & consequence and story branching I'd agree it's a good thing, but let's be real, it's just gonna be them making the game more braindead while also making the story and everything else more simple too.

These two things are completely unrelated.

You may think so but experience has taught me otherwise. It's like saying theoretically smoke does not require a fire; but usually, there's a fucking fire. Usually, dumbing down in one area equals dumbing down in every area, not a rational trade-off between one and another.

 

[Tyranicon]

My only takeaway from the leak is that the Dragon Age art style (which was plenty bad when DA:O came out) has aged awfully in 2023.

Yes yes, missing textures and what not. But damn, I've seen better looking mobile games at this point.

 

[Child of Malkav]

Of course the amoebas on reddit love these changes.
I'm sure you died to know this vital piece of info.

 

[Nano]

My only takeaway from the leak is that the Dragon Age art style (which was plenty bad when DA:O came out) has aged awfully in 2023.

Yes yes, missing textures and what not. But damn, I've seen better looking mobile games at this point.

What do you mean, the "Dragon Age art style"? Origins and Inquisition look nothing alike. This series has no artistic identity (or any identity) beyond the individual games.

 

[Roguey]

https://dragonsdogma.fandom.com/wiki/Rook

Bioware shamelessly copying their betters yet again.

 

[Zeriel]

Of course the amoebas on reddit love these changes.
I'm sure you died to know this vital piece of info.

The people who exist on a Dragon Age subreddit at this point are the most diehard of BSN fanatics. It's a self-selecting group. Like asking DNC activists how good they think they are doing making the public like the Democratic party.

 

[Tyranicon]

My only takeaway from the leak is that the Dragon Age art style (which was plenty bad when DA:O came out) has aged awfully in 2023.

Yes yes, missing textures and what not. But damn, I've seen better looking mobile games at this point.

What do you mean, the "Dragon Age art style"? Origins and Inquisition look nothing alike. This series has no artistic identity (or any identity) beyond the individual games.

I disagree. One of the few things that the franchise seems to have maintained is its disgusting art direction, which governs everything from the design of weapons and armor, faces, architecture, etc.

The actual 2d art in the games is respectable, but the gameplay graphics themselves are atrocious. They are meant to be seen from far away, so everything is designed to be big and recognizable.

Sword blades look like clubs, armor has grotesquely outsized pieces. Stuff looks like its sourced from a MMO.

Also, the devs apparently can't design an attractive face if their careers depended on it.

I'm not an art guy, but I'm sure someone with the proper background could break it down more.

TL;DR: Basically whatever this style is. Also a beardless dwarf as a legacy character. Goddammit.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

DAO had a decidedly more traditional fantasy art style. There's few things, if anything at all, left from its style in DA2 or 3. DA2 went "full anime", while people point at Fenris as the most decidedly anime-looking character of the game most characters seem to have that design philosophy in mind. Ironically, though, it's also the game where every character has a clear cut personality, aesthetically speaking. The overt realism of DAI doesn't help to establish a clear visual identity for its characters when everyone has this "real person" look to them. Varric stands out because they want to make him a face for the franchise, because he ended up being an extremely popular character, but also because he belongs to another world where he was able to be recognizable, yet somehow managed to fit in the crowd.

The bit about the attractive faces is amusing -- one of the artbooks for Mass Effect (which has been understandably deprecated since then, so to speak) established that almost every female character had the concept of "sexy" as one of the words establishing their designs. Mass Effect was also the console centric franchise and the horse in Bioware's race, so they had to have some degree of... leniency, perhaps? when it came to satisfying the mainstream audience, because that's the kind of people who would buy those games. Dragon Age was the weirdo thing, and therefore they attracted weirdo people---thus creating a world full of weirdos

It's not just a problem of art departments. At the end of the day decisions are taken by engineers and engineers are well known for lacking culture and taste after all.

 

[Harthwain]

Beat the whole game on Nightmare and don't remember having an issue.

That's not even an argument.

I didn't love the whole "you have to press a button and issue commands to attack with your player character" thing, but you very quickly realize it's not terribly different than DA:O in terms of how it plays.

Actually, it is exactly why this plays terrible. And because of the camera. These two combined make the game unplayable in long term, at least in the sense of using the "tactical view".

What made DA:O way better "in terms of how it plays" is how camera works - you can easily make it isometric, even when it's centered on a character. In DA:I in is not possible to go "isometric" (so to speak), meaning you have to move the camera around in a horribly console-ish way. It also makes giving commands to other characters way too exasperating than it ought to be (including area of effect spells for mages as they require precision).

And while technically you can suffer through it and win the game on hardest difficulty possible, but that's not the point I am making. So trying to say "it's not terrible different than DA:O in terms of how it plays" is, in fact, entirely wrong. To the point that I do have to wonder whether you really played the whole game like this or are here simply to troll (as your final statement proves). Honestly? The fact that you have only 4 posts in this thread, while being around since 2012 kind of points towards you being dishonest.

AoE spells do hurt companions, but it's fucking Nightmare. That makes it more fun and adds an element of strategy. I hate it in games when you can toss a fireball and your party is unharmed while all enemies are burned.

Area of effect spells hurt companions even below Nightmare. And no, it doesn't "make it fun and add an element of strategy" when controls are fucked and when no control is present the AI is going to put on fire friends and foes alike. At least not in a tactically-oriented game.

Plus, the companions were (largely) interesting, it had a great crafting system that could actually change gameplay significantly, and it had the single most interesting villain in any Bioware game ever (after doing the fakeout with the lame generic villain you are trying to kill for the first portion of the game). Also, tons of C&C. That level where you go to that country and get to influence who becomes queen is exactly the sort of quest design that Codex always says it wants, and it had a million outcomes that influenced the game.

Shame all of this is undercut by the horrible MMO design. Somebody got too focused on extending the gameplay time and making check lists to realize what it means to have fun while playing a video game.

Codex has ignored that Dragon Age: Inquisition is a great game for far too long, but that ends now. Please continue to cope, seethe, and negative rate the pure truth I'm bringing to light in this thread.

At this point it's obvious you're either retarded or trolling. I don't have a troll rating so I am giving you the next best thing.

I knew a person who actually experienced things that, when put in a visual novel, would likely be criticized as 'fanservice' or 'unattainable fantasy'.

Fantasy doesn't have to be attainable. It has to be entertaining. Everything boils down to, essentially, whether any given fantasy suits you or not. If it does, you will be fine for a ride. If it doesn't, you won't stop noticing holes or things you dislike. This is why identifying your audience (by giving correct tags, for example) is extremely important, without even going into the quality of writing as such.

Whenever I encounter calls for more 'realistic' character writing, I interpret them as demands for characters that are more average.

In most cases when someone complains about lack of realism in reality it's a complaint about something not suiting his particular world view or opinion. Because as long as you put "fantasy" or "fiction" on the tin, you can't really use realism card too much (except when characters are acting wholly artificially).

 

[anvi]

I just started playing Inquisition again to see what it was like. It reminds me a lot of one of my favorite games ever, an MMO called Rift. But Rift is so much better than this game. If you own a PC and played Inquisition you should play Rift just to see how much better that kind of game could be.

p.s. I can't believe he says, "Supposably" in one of the many many cutscenes.

 

[ADL]

I had zero faith in Bioware operating another live service game after abandoning Anthem 2.0. Anthem was salvageable contrary to what everyone says about it and I would have been very interested in Anthem Next if they fixed the itemization and added more content. That being said, they still should have stuck with the original MP-focused Dragon Age 4 instead of retrofitting this into a SP title.

You can't just completely change direction years into production. This is going to be such a Frankenstein's monster of a game.

 

[Rhobar121]

They started reworking the game at the beginning of 2021 (maybe earlier). This means that if the game comes out in 2024, they will have a full 3 years to rework the game.
It is unlikely that they had to do everything from scratch, so a lot of work could probably be used.
Fortunately, this is not like ME:A, where they supposedly reworked the entire game within 1.5 years.

The fact that EA decided to change the game into SP probably saved the series.
It's weird that EA decided to do this. In 2024, it will be over 6 years of game development, which I bet is not cheap.