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

[Lacrymas]

"Dragon Age's older [combat] complexity" - DA had combat complexity?

 

[Dishonoredbr]

Hey, guys the new pathfinder dlc looks pretty neat at least. Hahhah..

 

[duskvile]

I wouldn't.

You have to.

 

[Infinitron]

Mourning for Origins: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/drago...bly-always-destined-to-be-a-mass-effect-game/

With Veilguard, Dragon Age becomes what it was probably always destined to be: A Mass Effect game​

Thedas is more beautiful than ever in the hour I spent with Veilguard, but I'm left wondering if Dragon Age has shed its RPG heritage.

Here, let me relieve you. After spending about an hour watching some very tired BioWare developers navigate the opening of the next Dragon Age at this year's Summer Game Fest, I can assure you that the weird, hero-shooter tone of that companion reveal trailer doesn't carry into the game itself.

No sir, Dragon Age: The Veilguard (née Dreadwolf) doesn't have much time for japes at all. Things are grim. Dark. Fraught, even. A sinister hard-boiled egg named Solas is trying to dissolve the protective Veil between the physical and magical worlds, flooding the Tevinter Imperium capital of Minrathous with demons as a result.

The main character, Rook, is rather against that sort of thing. So are their demo companions: magical detective Neve, scout Harding (from Dragon Age: Inquisition), and Varric (basically the series protagonist at this point). Off you go on a quest to guard the Veil.

It's precisely the kind of tense, race-against-the-clock plot you expect from a Dragon Age game, in other words. Strange, then, that once the demo was over, I kept finding myself thinking about Mass Effect, and about the possibility that Dragon Age—the last Baldur's Gates-ian holdout at a BioWare increasingly determined to make cinematic, third-person action games—had left the last vestiges of its TTRPG-inspired past behind.

Imperial mint​

The demo I was shown opened on Rook and Varric being faced with a choice. They were looking for Neve, and to find her, they needed to interrogate a bar owner. To do that, they had to get through her squad of hooded goons. The two options on either side of the dialogue wheel? Fight through the thugs, or persuade your quarry to come along quietly.

A quick aside: For the first time in the series, Veilguard lets you customise your character's body type, sliding a cursor across a triangle that can make your character stocky and chubby or tall and muscular or anything in between, and you can pick from one of six backstories for them. If you're nostalgic, you can choose to affiliate your Rook with the Grey Wardens or Antivan Crows, which you'll recognise from all the way back in Origins.

My Rook was a human rogue with a rugby player's build and an affiliation with the Shadow Dragons: Someone who seemed like she could take a beating, someone who didn't seem too interested in conversation. Violence it was, then.

Following a quick, cinematic fight cutscene and a Telltale-style 'Varric will remember that you hate diplomacy and love decking people' pop-up, we were on our way, chatting all the while.

Readers who are actually just me will be glad to hear that BioWare seems to have resisted the Mass Effect: Andromeda proclivity for gratingly quippy dialogue in this one, at least. Varric makes some jokes, sure, but people spoke mostly like (dramatic, fantasy) people in my time in Minrathous.

Man, Minrathous. Maybe it's just the Baar-Dau-pilled quarter of my brain that goes ape for any kind of floating fortress, but BioWare's art and tech teams really knocked it out the park with this one. Minrathous looks incredible. It's dark and spiky and vertiginous and awe-inspiring in all the right ways. It reminded me a lot of depictions of Valyria before the Fall, from the Song of Ice and Fire series: the dark heart of a dystopian magical empire, its skyline dominated by a magically suspended palace in the shape of a saw-toothed crescent.

Mass Age, or: Dragon Effect​

It's the kind of place—drunk on pride and power—that's destined for a fall. And oh, look, here it is. Solas' ritual to unVeil everyone is already underway, and demons have begun pouring into the lavishly rendered streets in level-appropriate droves.

Time for Rook and co to get to work, and do you know what that looks like more than anything, at least to me? Mass Effect. Specifically, Mass Effect 2 and 3, right down to particular enemies having blue and orange bars on top of their normal health bars representing barriers and armour respectively, and which you can whittle down quickly using the right abilities (or nailing a shot to a vital part with your bow, if you've got one).

There's even the classic Mass Effect ability wheel: Rook's powers and cooldowns arrayed along the bottom and those of her companions on either side of the screen, with time pausing as you use it.

Dragon Age has become more and more cinematic and action-y as the series has progressed, of course, but what I saw in my brief time at SGF really has me wondering if the last nubs of its Infinity Engine roots have finally been sanded away. At no point did the overhead tactical view—a series mainstay that let you pretend you were playing an old-school Baldur's Gate if you squinted—make an appearance.

Heck, the Rogue even has Arkham-esque parries, and it looks like everyone will have to hammer dodge to evade ranged attacks. Time was we'd let a D20 handle all that for us. You kids don't know what we've lost.

You might think I'm some embittered THAC0 lover upset at the onward march of time. You'd be right. But wait! Note that I haven't called anything I saw in my time with Veilguard 'bad'. It was actually all quite dazzling: Slickly animated and, at times, even reasonably challenging for our presumably quite experienced demo-er. It just didn't seem very Dragon Age, the series that kept some—I stress some—of its RPG roots even while Shepard went full third-person shooter and BioWare went about its doomed work on Anthem.

As someone with many hundreds of hours in Dragon Age: Origins, the most traditional RPG in the series, it's a change in mechanical emphasis that has me sceptical, a scepticism that isn't helped by BioWare's recent track record. I'm very curious to see more, but right now BioWare's fantasy RPG seems thoroughly, gorgeously fantasy, yet I'm wondering if the RPG is just hiding, or if it's gone for good.

 

[whydoibother]

"Dragon Age's older [combat] complexity" - DA had combat complexity?

 

[Reinhardt]

"and this nowhere near my neighborhood"

you should run then, nigga. local niggaz won't be amused if they see you here.

 

[Space Satan]

I extect such content to multiply after release

 

[Rahdulan]

This is more or less exactly what I expected it to play like given that old leak. I suspect they went with Rogue because it has the most dynamic and flashy looking skills so it might fool some people into thinking the combat system is better than it really is. Also, it warms my heart to see those Venatori staying true to ye old ANOTHER WAVE of just spawning into combat.

 

[ChildInTime]

Epler told me that the introductory Tevinter geography is definitely not representative of later regions. Veilguard is no open worlder, but you can expect Hinterlandy areas that are designed for exploration - and it's here, I hope, that the revised combat might rediscover some of Dragon Age's older complexity.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/th...eel-as-much-like-mass-effect-2-as-inquisition

The first 45 minutes of Dragon Age: The Veilguard feel as much like Mass Effect 2 as Inquisition​

A more focused action-RPG with the promise of complexity deeper in

Good news, everybody! Dragon Age: The Veilguard - previously Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, strictly speaking Dragon Age 4 - is not the bantzy heist romp suggested by its debut trailer. Less Good News for returning players: going by the 45 minute segment I was shown at Summer Game Fest, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is more of a single-character action-RPG plus entourage, than a proper party-based affair in the vein of 2014's Dragon Age: Inquisition. You do get a party, drawn from a retinue of seven, larger-than-life, romanceable companions encompassing a range of classes, abilities and go-faster hairdos, but control of that party has been streamlined, and there's a God Of Warlike emphasis on booting Fade demons into pits. Hmmm.

If you were fondly hoping for a top-down table-topper like the BioWare RPGs of auld, you may be disappointed. But wait, there is yet More News: the slice of the game's intro I saw reminded me of the amazing Mass Effect 2, partly because it starts in the middle of a catastrophe - as creative director John Epler put it during our presentation, "a beginning which feels like the ending of another game". Beware spoilers for Inquisition and its DLC in the paragraphs ahead.

The catastrophe is the work of Solas - Inquisition's wry and unreadable Elf mage, who is eventually revealed to be an ancient god of deceit in The Trespasser DLC. Many centuries ago, Solas imprisoned the other, even naughtier Elf gods in another dimension, the Veil, sealing them away at the cost of the magic, freedom and immortality of the Elven race. Now, Solas is performing a ritual to rip the Veil down, a change of heart that threatens to render Thedas uninhabitable for anybody who isn't an elf god or a demon.

You play Rook, a new protagonist who has teamed up with Varric, Dragon Age's velvety crossbow-fancying dwarf chronicler, to put a stop to the Solapocalypse. Thus the origins of the titular Veilguard, a fellowship of world-savers who include familiar faces like Scout Harding from Inquisition and newcomers like Neve Gallus, a rakish wizardress with a cocked hat and a stiletto wand.

Rook is a custom protagonist, and Dragon Age's character creator has seen a massive glow-up. It allows you to shape your character's body shape for the first time in the series, by twiddling around with what BioWare absolutely aren't calling "the triangle of girth", though the creator does explicitly let you customise your "bulge size". The character creator includes a suite of sample lighting conditions that show you how your Rook appears standing in blazing forest sunshine versus the glare of an underground temple.

This chance to test out your character's aesthetics is amply justified. In addition to adding posh flourishes such as newly mobile, extra-hairy hair, BioWare have revised Dragon Age's art direction to make character models a little more consistent with the series' lovely Tarot-inspired menu art. Flesh is ruddy to the point of painterly; facial features and bodily proportions are thicker and more striking, as though the characters had been cut from clay. While the saturated colours can be a bit cloying, I think the new character designs are gorgeous. Hopefully the same will prove true of the costumes, because Inquisition had some absolutely hideous armour. My warrior qunari Inquisitor dressed like a bargain-bucket Xmas tree, pretty much. It might seem a superficial complaint, but when you have to spend 100+ hours with a character you want them to look their best.

Aside from selecting a skin tone for all seasons, you'll choose your race - elf, dwarf, human and qunari - and starting class - warrior, mage or rogue, each of which has three specialisations. The warrior, for instance, can be specialised into a Reaper, equipped with lifesteal and other freaky powers, a Slayer who can wield the biggest blades, or a tanky Champion. You'll also choose an origin story and a factional association such as the nosy Antivan Crows or the Blight-busting Grey Wardens. Choice of faction may give you specific dialogue options, and also confers statistical boons - the Shadow Dragons deal extra damage to Venatori blood cultists, for example. It's very much of a piece with the character backstory ramifications of Origins and Inquisition.

Image credit: EA

The combat, though? That's more of a departure. Like chess-boxers in spiked shoulderpads, the Dragon Age games have long alternated between real-time fisticuffs and freeze-time planning. Veilguard is still about collaborating with party members and pulling off those precious synergies where you prime an enemy with an ability or spell and detonate it with another. But going by the skirmishes I saw, it's much less elaborate. Our old friend the ability wheel is back, but it only has slots for three abilities from each party member, and there doesn't appear to be much scope to position characters on the field or set up terrain traps and the like.

The ability design itself is closer to that of a purebred actioner, with quick-recover prompts, boss battles in which you roll through puddles of incoming AOE, and the aforesaid hoofing of baddies into crevices. It's recognisably a continuation of Inquisition, which also let you shove enemies into things, but it's more focussed and reflex-driven. The introductory areas - set in the mageocracy of Tevinter, where there are literal castles in the sky - support this with a brace of corridor-shooter devices such as ziplines between levels.

How much of this is a reflection of our demo being taken from the early game? I can't really comment on how the battles might evolve, but Epler told me that the introductory Tevinter geography is definitely not representative of later regions. Veilguard is no open worlder, but you can expect Hinterlandy areas that are designed for exploration - and it's here, I hope, that the revised combat might rediscover some of Dragon Age's older complexity. Veilguard also brings back base management from Inquisition, though Epler says it's not on the same level as ruling over Skyhold. Makes sense: you're leading a crack squad, not a rogue nation. I'll miss being able to choose Skyhold's curtains, though.

If I have misgivings about the fighting, it's an unambiguous pleasure to return to the comfortingly dark fantasy world of Thedas and reunite with some of Inquisition's finest. Our demo included some encounters with Solas himself, who is still one of BioWare's most engaging creations in being at once empathic and calculating and sorrowful and sinister - though he's less enthralling, of course, now that we know who he really is.

I've never liked Varric as much as BioWare does - his twinkly-eyed roguishness has always felt rather phoned-in - but he performs well as a kind of north star when navigating the saga's louder, brasher or tricksier personalities, such as Sera (who I really hope is in this one). I also approve of BioWare's classic party trick of upgrading a side character like softly-spoken Scout Harding into a front-row badass. And to circle belatedly back to those Mass Effect 2 comparisons, I like that Veilguard's opening dialogue choices engage immediately with the prospect of losing major characters. The whole game has the makings of another Suicide Mission, given that you are up against a god with the ability to collapse dimensions.

Image credit: EA
I am definitely in mourning for the less kinetic, more strategic Dragon Age that might have been, but I'm more excited for Veilguard than I thought I'd be after copping the first trailer, which makes the whole thing look like the origin story for a C-list Marvel team. It's worth remembering that Inquisition was often too knotty and expansive for its own good: its battle system is unwieldy, its story is a classic example of midgame bloat, and while Skyhold is a grand and imposing place, it's also a managerial nightmare in which you routinely forget where the crafting tables are, 70 hours in. If Veilguard can carve out the cruft without reducing party members to sidekicks, it could be the soft reboot this long-absent RPG series needs. Just, please lay off with the ghastly tinted chainmail this time. The qunari deserve better.

"Bulge size" is in, but no breast slider. Priorities in 2024.

 

[Reinhardt]

I suspect they went with Rogue because it has the most dynamic and flashy looking skills

i dunno about "dynamic" part. combat looks like someone is playing with

sloooooooooow running, "flashy" jumps barely moving your character around.

 

[Skinwalker]

Flesh is ruddy to the point of painterly; facial features and bodily proportions are thicker and more striking, as though the characters had been cut from clay. While the saturated colours can be a bit cloying, I think the new character designs are gorgeous.

What the fuck am I reading?

 

[ChildInTime]

What the fuck is wrong with these character models?

 

[Old Hans]

What the fuck is wrong with these character models?

I see they've been studying at the Rob Leifeld school of armor design

 

[Readher]

Mourning for Origins: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/drago...bly-always-destined-to-be-a-mass-effect-game/

With Veilguard, Dragon Age becomes what it was probably always destined to be: A Mass Effect game​

Thedas is more beautiful than ever in the hour I spent with Veilguard, but I'm left wondering if Dragon Age has shed its RPG heritage.

Here, let me relieve you. After spending about an hour watching some very tired BioWare developers navigate the opening of the next Dragon Age at this year's Summer Game Fest, I can assure you that the weird, hero-shooter tone of that companion reveal trailer doesn't carry into the game itself.

No sir, Dragon Age: The Veilguard (née Dreadwolf) doesn't have much time for japes at all. Things are grim. Dark. Fraught, even. A sinister hard-boiled egg named Solas is trying to dissolve the protective Veil between the physical and magical worlds, flooding the Tevinter Imperium capital of Minrathous with demons as a result.

The main character, Rook, is rather against that sort of thing. So are their demo companions: magical detective Neve, scout Harding (from Dragon Age: Inquisition), and Varric (basically the series protagonist at this point). Off you go on a quest to guard the Veil.

It's precisely the kind of tense, race-against-the-clock plot you expect from a Dragon Age game, in other words. Strange, then, that once the demo was over, I kept finding myself thinking about Mass Effect, and about the possibility that Dragon Age—the last Baldur's Gates-ian holdout at a BioWare increasingly determined to make cinematic, third-person action games—had left the last vestiges of its TTRPG-inspired past behind.

Imperial mint​

The demo I was shown opened on Rook and Varric being faced with a choice. They were looking for Neve, and to find her, they needed to interrogate a bar owner. To do that, they had to get through her squad of hooded goons. The two options on either side of the dialogue wheel? Fight through the thugs, or persuade your quarry to come along quietly.

A quick aside: For the first time in the series, Veilguard lets you customise your character's body type, sliding a cursor across a triangle that can make your character stocky and chubby or tall and muscular or anything in between, and you can pick from one of six backstories for them. If you're nostalgic, you can choose to affiliate your Rook with the Grey Wardens or Antivan Crows, which you'll recognise from all the way back in Origins.

My Rook was a human rogue with a rugby player's build and an affiliation with the Shadow Dragons: Someone who seemed like she could take a beating, someone who didn't seem too interested in conversation. Violence it was, then.

Following a quick, cinematic fight cutscene and a Telltale-style 'Varric will remember that you hate diplomacy and love decking people' pop-up, we were on our way, chatting all the while.

Readers who are actually just me will be glad to hear that BioWare seems to have resisted the Mass Effect: Andromeda proclivity for gratingly quippy dialogue in this one, at least. Varric makes some jokes, sure, but people spoke mostly like (dramatic, fantasy) people in my time in Minrathous.

Man, Minrathous. Maybe it's just the Baar-Dau-pilled quarter of my brain that goes ape for any kind of floating fortress, but BioWare's art and tech teams really knocked it out the park with this one. Minrathous looks incredible. It's dark and spiky and vertiginous and awe-inspiring in all the right ways. It reminded me a lot of depictions of Valyria before the Fall, from the Song of Ice and Fire series: the dark heart of a dystopian magical empire, its skyline dominated by a magically suspended palace in the shape of a saw-toothed crescent.

Mass Age, or: Dragon Effect​

It's the kind of place—drunk on pride and power—that's destined for a fall. And oh, look, here it is. Solas' ritual to unVeil everyone is already underway, and demons have begun pouring into the lavishly rendered streets in level-appropriate droves.

Time for Rook and co to get to work, and do you know what that looks like more than anything, at least to me? Mass Effect. Specifically, Mass Effect 2 and 3, right down to particular enemies having blue and orange bars on top of their normal health bars representing barriers and armour respectively, and which you can whittle down quickly using the right abilities (or nailing a shot to a vital part with your bow, if you've got one).

There's even the classic Mass Effect ability wheel: Rook's powers and cooldowns arrayed along the bottom and those of her companions on either side of the screen, with time pausing as you use it.

Dragon Age has become more and more cinematic and action-y as the series has progressed, of course, but what I saw in my brief time at SGF really has me wondering if the last nubs of its Infinity Engine roots have finally been sanded away. At no point did the overhead tactical view—a series mainstay that let you pretend you were playing an old-school Baldur's Gate if you squinted—make an appearance.

Heck, the Rogue even has Arkham-esque parries, and it looks like everyone will have to hammer dodge to evade ranged attacks. Time was we'd let a D20 handle all that for us. You kids don't know what we've lost.

You might think I'm some embittered THAC0 lover upset at the onward march of time. You'd be right. But wait! Note that I haven't called anything I saw in my time with Veilguard 'bad'. It was actually all quite dazzling: Slickly animated and, at times, even reasonably challenging for our presumably quite experienced demo-er. It just didn't seem very Dragon Age, the series that kept some—I stress some—of its RPG roots even while Shepard went full third-person shooter and BioWare went about its doomed work on Anthem.

As someone with many hundreds of hours in Dragon Age: Origins, the most traditional RPG in the series, it's a change in mechanical emphasis that has me sceptical, a scepticism that isn't helped by BioWare's recent track record. I'm very curious to see more, but right now BioWare's fantasy RPG seems thoroughly, gorgeously fantasy, yet I'm wondering if the RPG is just hiding, or if it's gone for good.

This is insufferable to read. How old is the author? 5? 8?

No sir, Dragon Age: The Veilguard (née Dreadwolf) doesn't have much time for japes at all.

The main character, Rook, is rather against that sort of thing

Shut the fuck up you fucking faggot and learn to write like a normal human being instead of Marvel character. The whole industry is infested with manchildren and infantile women, from devs to journos. There's no saving it.

 

[BosanskiSeljak]

I see they continued on with the "BIG, EPIC, UNIVERSE CHANGING AWESOMENESS" that DA:I had. This isn't Dragon Age, that franchise was stripped of its parts long ago, there's not one nuanced part left in the lore.

Starting with Dragon Age 2, some changes here or there. The beginning big bad chantry, the fact that the Tranquils are living in the worst hell imaginable (taken further in Inquisition), some character changes, etc.

Then Inquisition, one of the worst games of all time, stepped on the gas and went 300 down the highway. Huge, sweeping, universe defining changes in more than one major point, the complete shift into "no it was all elves all along" completely nullifying questions raised in the first game about which factions are correct about the past, heaven, etc.

Then, there's this game. That small teaser tells me all I need to know about which direction this game will go.

Also, lol at introducing "factions". Come on, you're not pulling an Origins, it'll be the same shit as in Inquisition where you get 1-5 sentences in dialogue across a 100+ game, and a -5/+5 point boost in one part of a specific quest.

 

[Reinhardt]

who the fuck writing this shit?

meeting cripple shaneekwa. dialog:

1. you are so stronk and amazing!
2. you are so amazing and stronk!
3. we need information!

after picking 3, shaneekwa: you get right to the point

 

[Gargaune]

I wouldn't.

You have to.

You really tryin' to pull the old "well then you make a better one" chestnut? Well, if I had to design a Dragon Age 4, gun to my head, I'd roll the art direction back and iterate on the Origins-era aesthetics (yes, New Shit notwithstanding) and combine that with trying to develop combat from whatever was going in Inquisition down a more tactical path with more D&D "influences", and that's without foreknowledge of Larian's more recent success. After purging the dev team of anyone who still goes to see Marvel movies, of course.

And that's neither here nor there because what we've seen of Veilguard is so comprehensively atrocious it's pointless to try and reimagine it. I can speculate on how to "fix" Fallout 4, but this one's a waste of time, you could go in any direction and come up with something better. As the stereotypical reply to your query goes, I'm not a gourmand by any means, but I can tell when someone's shat in my plate.

 

[whydoibother]

“Yeah, so it is a mission-based game. Everything is hand-touched, hand-crafted, very highly curated,” Busche says, echoing a talking point that comes up repeatedly throughout the presentation. “We believe that's how we get the best narrative experience, the best moment-to-moment experience. However, along the way, these levels that we go to do open up, some of them have more exploration than others. Alternate branching paths, mysteries, secrets, optional content you're going to find and solve. So it does open up, but it is a mission-based, highly curated game.”

Mission based game? Like, a hub from which you pick a level or something like that?

 

[Semiurge]

Right, let's get all the negative stuff out the way first. One: I'm not sure about the new name. Dragon Age: Dreadwolf was much cooler than Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Okay! Now we've got all those negatives out of the way, on to the positive.

 

[Terra]

Looked like boring AAA trash to me, whatever others are seeing to hail it as some return to form I certainly am not. Hopefully it'll keep the retards sated for a spell so we can get a few more decent games out of other studios in the meantime.

 

[La vie sexuelle]

This is more or less exactly what I expected it to play like given that old leak. I suspect they went with Rogue because it has the most dynamic and flashy looking skills so it might fool some people into thinking the combat system is better than it really is. Also, it warms my heart to see those Venatori staying true to ye old ANOTHER WAVE of just spawning into combat.

Bioware has locked itself in eternal 2014, both as a company and as people. They truly believe there's a Golden Age of Woke going on, when they're all in their 30s and Tumblr is still a thing.

Their technology has not changed except for particle effects (a little) and a slight blurring of textures. The design of the maps and characters resembles the Inquisition, only worse. In addition, knowledge of the previous game, ten years after its release, is probably assumed.

Don't you have the impression that detective will be a real tranny?

Oh, so now the Qunari invasion(s) is just an unsanctioned attack by extremist renegades and not approved of by their free loving, trans accepting and peaceful homeland.

First they changed them from philosophical barbarians to horned orcs, then from horned orcs to LGBT orcs, and now they are just horned LGBT.

Spoiler

But are they horny?

She. But is this she-she or he-she?

Hi-hi :D

What the fuck is a shadow dragon?

Check out some of these faction names. I lol'd irl at "Shadow Dragons". Sounds like an evil organization name a 14 year old would make up for his d&d campaign. How they managed to fuck up in every possible way is beyond me at this point, I don't think incompetence is even the right word.

I'm used to the fact that anglofantasy uses idiotic names. WoW has set a certain standard for kitsch here when it comes to it. Therefore, in the case of Dragon Age, I would be more afraid not of infantilism, but of the lack of vitality that characterizes fourteen-year-olds.

There is nothing cool about senile dementia.

What the fuck is wrong with these character models?

Cartoonishness, inconsistencies, too similar to Friday Night in Edmonton, DEI.

 

[Reinhardt]

WATCH FOR LIGHTNING! boss lightning hits nigga for ~10% hp...

 

[S.H.O.D.A.N.]

Therefore, in the case of Dragon Age, I would be more afraid not of infantilism, but of the lack of vitality that characterizes fourteen-year-olds.

Wise words. A kid's fantasy might be embarrassing, but it will also be earnest and vivid. The fantasy of a stunted adult pretending to be a kid will only ever be embarrassing.

 

[onemananadhisdroid]

Looks technically about competent. Otherwise, it's basically another Triple-A cinematic action/adventure game with RPG elements -- of which there are legion. Larian likes this.

 

[Dishonoredbr]

“Yeah, so it is a mission-based game. Everything is hand-touched, hand-crafted, very highly curated,” Busche says, echoing a talking point that comes up repeatedly throughout the presentation. “We believe that's how we get the best narrative experience, the best moment-to-moment experience. However, along the way, these levels that we go to do open up, some of them have more exploration than others. Alternate branching paths, mysteries, secrets, optional content you're going to find and solve. So it does open up, but it is a mission-based, highly curated game.”

Mission based game? Like, a hub from which you pick a level or something like that?

Like Mass Effect. You have a Hub that you can go back between missions , a world map that you pick a location that has a mission.