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

[Heroic Liberator]

"Bioware" no longer exists.

Nobody who worked on the BGs is at the company anymore.
Nobody who worked on NWN, KotoR, Jade Empire, the original DA and ME games, is at the company anymore.

This is an empty shell bearing the skin of a company that used to make decent games.

Quoted for posterity, JarlFrank admits he considers NWN a decent game.

I don't, I just had to include it in the list for timeline reasons

I'm guessing that you do like NWN2's MotB though?

 

[JarlFrank]

NWN2 has much better gameplay in general, yes. MotB is a good campaign, and while it still suffers from bad encounter design, at least it's not as fundamentally horrendous to play as NWN1.

EDIT:
NWN2 and its expansions MotB and SoZ, KotoR2, Alpha Protocol, Fallout: New Vegas... all made by Obsidian, which also isn't the same company anymore.

Chris Avellone is gone, Brian Mitsoda is gone, so are several other people responsible for those games.
No company is safe from this.

 

[9ted6]

Why is this game even a thread in here, anyway? The only one that didn't suck bull was the first one, and it was released when, 15 years ago?

To reminisce about the first one while shitting on Bioware or what's left of it and whatever the unholy fuck they and Dragon Age became.

 

[Ryzer]

NWN2 has much better gameplay in general, yes. MotB is a good campaign, and while it still suffers from bad encounter design, at least it's not as fundamentally horrendous to play as NWN1.

EDIT:
NWN2 and its expansions MotB and SoZ, KotoR2, Alpha Protocol, Fallout: New Vegas... all made by Obsidian, which also isn't the same company anymore.

Chris Avellone is gone, Brian Mitsoda is gone, so are several other people responsible for those games.
No company is safe from this.

Tbh, FNV and Alpha protocol (Kotor too) are hardly good games quality-wise.

 

[Hammer Of The Heretics]

You make it seem like anything good ever came out of Canada in the first place.

They sacked Washington DC and burned the White House to the ground in 1814. They get some credit for that, even if they were part of the British Empire at the time.

 

[9ted6]

You make it seem like anything good ever came out of Canada in the first place.

They sacked Washington DC and burned the White House to the ground in 1814. They get some credit for that, even if they were part of the British Empire at the time.

No, they just beat our asses up north. DC was all Bongs.

 

[Popiel]

I have this sneaky feeling that at least some of you wish BioWare (and Obsidian and some others) to be a kind of perpetual entity making the same type/kind/genre of video games for ever and ever. BioWare changed (went to shit according to some [and it did]) and that's good, that's how it works. I really don't get this strange brand of whining which goes around here sometimes, nobody who worked on BG is in BW anymoooreeeee, yeah, whatever. Everybody knows this.

 

[Nano]

Nobody who worked on the BGs is at the company anymore.
Nobody who worked on NWN, KotoR, Jade Empire, the original DA and ME games, is at the company anymore.

Infinitron already rated this appropriately, but it should be pointed out in text that this is a myth. Unlike Obsidian, BW hasn't lost many of their veterans, including the guy who was the main writer on BG1. The actual problem is that all of them got brainwashed by wokeism.

 

[Infinitron]

Nobody who worked on the BGs is at the company anymore.
Nobody who worked on NWN, KotoR, Jade Empire, the original DA and ME games, is at the company anymore.

Infinitron already rated this appropriately, but it should be pointed out in text that this is a myth. Unlike Obsidian, BW hasn't lost many of their veterans, including the guy who was the main writer on BG1. The actual problem is that all of them got brainwashed by wokeism.

This was true in the 2010s. They have lost most of them by now - just not all.

 

[Nano]

This was true in the 2010s. They have lost most of them by now - just not all.

They still have plenty of old school writers. Luke Kristjanson, Patrick Weekes, Mac Walters, Sheryl Chee, Mary Kirby. Nowhere near Obsidian level where there are literally zero old school writers remaining.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

I remember reading dozens of pages ago that those Dredwolf leads are all young upstarts who either were doing QA shit for Bioware or basically started working only since Bioware stopped making any good games (DA:O, some would argue ME2).

The fact they need to bring someone who gtfo from Bioware as consultant to fix shit tells everything you need to know about the game.

May this be the coup de grace that rest Bioware name.

 

[Roguey]

This was true in the 2010s. They have lost most of them by now - just not all.

They still have plenty of old school writers. Luke Kristjanson, Patrick Weekes, Mac Walters, Sheryl Chee, Mary Kirby. Nowhere near Obsidian level where there are literally zero old school writers remaining.

Deadfire and Pentiment had Josh Sawyer, The Outer Worlds had Leonard Boyarsky.

 

[ADULF HITLOR FAN KLUB]

Nobody who worked on NWN, KotoR, Jade Empire, the original DA and ME games, is at the company anymore.

This is an empty shell bearing the skin of a company that used to make decent games.

Quoted for posterity, JarlFrank admits he considers NWN a decent game.

Neverwinter Nights is pretty lackluster, but the expansions (Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark) are excellent, gems even. They are the next best thing to the Baldur's Gate trilogy.

I also thought that was the consensus around here.

 

[Popiel]

Nobody who worked on NWN, KotoR, Jade Empire, the original DA and ME games, is at the company anymore.

This is an empty shell bearing the skin of a company that used to make decent games.

Quoted for posterity, JarlFrank admits he considers NWN a decent game.

Neverwinter Nights is pretty lackluster, but the expansions (Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark) are excellent, gems even. They are the next best thing to the Baldur's Gate trilogy.

I also thought that was the consensus around here.

Consensus around here is that decline progressively, through metaphysical shenanigans, claims the past and retroactively makes it shit. NWN might have been ontologically nuanced but by now it's just shit. Get with the times. It's the current year.

 

[JarlFrank]

Neverwinter Nights is pretty lackluster, but the expansions (Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark) are excellent, gems even. They are the next best thing to the Baldur's Gate trilogy.

I also thought that was the consensus around here.

The truth is that NWN's core gameplay is so abysmally, irredeemably shit that no matter how good the campaign you design for it, it won't be fun to play.

 

[NecroLord]

Nobody who worked on NWN, KotoR, Jade Empire, the original DA and ME games, is at the company anymore.

This is an empty shell bearing the skin of a company that used to make decent games.

Quoted for posterity, JarlFrank admits he considers NWN a decent game.

Neverwinter Nights is pretty lackluster, but the expansions (Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark) are excellent, gems even. They are the next best thing to the Baldur's Gate trilogy.

I also thought that was the consensus around here.

Consensus around here is that decline progressively, through metaphysical shenanigans, claims the past and retroactively makes it shit. NWN might have been ontologically nuanced but by now it's just shit. Get with the times. It's the current year.

So, by that logic, in time, even classics like Fallout and Arcanum will be considered shit?
You gotta be kidding.

 

[NecroLord]

Cool.
So, in a matter of years (assuming humanity won't annihilate itself by then), games like Cybercock 2077, Glitcher 3 and Skyrimjob will be the very pinnacle of RPG design? Even on the Codex....
Perhaps humanity deserves its bloody fate.

 

[JarlFrank]

NWN was always shit, from day one.
Its visuals were shit even compared to its contemporaries.
Its gamepaly is among the most torturously slow in the entire genre.
Its solo character D&D approach was a stupid idea from the get go.
And people back then heavily criticized it for its flaws, it's just that some fanboys were willing to look past the many layers of shit because it had a good module editor (ok cool, but none of the modules are fun to play because of how shit the core gameplay is) and multiplayer (I guess the multiplayer is legit good, but I never played it).

 

[Modron]

Neverwinter Nights is pretty lackluster, but the expansions (Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark) are excellent, gems even. They are the next best thing to the Baldur's Gate trilogy.

I also thought that was the consensus around here.

The consensus is the expansions are okay to decent and no one should play NWN OC.

 

[Faarbaute]

NWN was excellent.

It wasn't the successor to Baldur's Gate alot of people were hoping for - but so what? It was excellent in it's own right, for its own reasons. It was only bad if you went in expecting it to be something that it wasn't. IE Baldur's Gate 3, but I repeat myself.

 

[Gargaune]

Neverwinter Nights is pretty lackluster, but the expansions (Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark) are excellent, gems even. They are the next best thing to the Baldur's Gate trilogy.

I also thought that was the consensus around here.

NWN's great, it's scientific fact, some poor souls are just confused because BioWare launched it without an "Original Campaign." It was quite strange, they came out and said "here's NWN" but the install only had nwtoolset.exe, it was only when Shadows of Undrentide was released that nwn.exe got patched in.

P.S. NWN still delivers incline today, two decades after its release. For example, see how much better this thread is all of a sudden?

 

[JarlFrank]

It was only bad if you went in expecting it to be something that it wasn't.

Yeah, like a game that's actually enjoyable to play. If you expected that, you were sorely disappointed.

It's like ordering steak at a restaurant but they serve you a turd instead.

 

[Faarbaute]

It was only bad if you went in expecting it to be something that it wasn't.

Yeah, like a game that's actually enjoyable to play. If you expected that, you were sorely disappointed.

It's like ordering steak at a restaurant but they serve you a turd instead.

Weak.

 

[9ted6]

This was true in the 2010s. They have lost most of them by now - just not all.

They still have plenty of old school writers. Luke Kristjanson, Patrick Weekes, Mac Walters, Sheryl Chee, Mary Kirby. Nowhere near Obsidian level where there are literally zero old school writers remaining.

If anything it'd be better if they didn't have them, rather than only keeping the worst writers of the older games. Everyone talented left and the people in charge now were in minor roles back then and were never particularly good.

 

[Tyranicon]

I thought the codex was keeping this thread alive to gloat and beat dead horses?

In a few years, we'll probably have threads on BioWare being dissolved and RIP, and who EA gives their IPs too. Unless BioWare had some kind of clause where they keep their IPs, then super RIP.