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

[Pink Eye]

Game isn't even out yet, and it's already surpassed Andromeda in terms of free entertainment.

 

[GrainWetski]

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.

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!

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.

 

[Ryzer]

Except that Dragon Age 2 is fucking worse than everything on earth.

 

[Crispy]

BATSHIT CRAZY TAG! @Infinitron @Crispy

Infinitron, I believe The Wall is asking us to give him a new tag.

 

[Pink Eye]

 

[d1r]

BATSHIT CRAZY TAG! @Infinitron @Crispy

Infinitron, I believe The Wall is asking us to give him a new tag.

You should give him a completely different tag just out of spite.

 

[Melcar]

Those Goddamn neutrals.

 

[HumanTotemPole]

Turns out the leaked Guardian review was real: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2...-the-veilguard-review-bioware-electronic-arts

Dragon Age: The Veilguard review – a good RPG, but an underwhelming Dragon Age game
3/5

Developer Bioware was never going to have it easy with Veilguard. It’s been a decade since the last Dragon Age game, a decade for fan theories to percolate and expectations to rise out of control – and that’s not to mention all the strife that’s gone on at the studio after the disappointing Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem. Veilguard is by no means a bad game, with plenty of charming characters to meet and new places to see. But the writing, the heart of previous games, is surprisingly mediocre, while the new combat style gets repetitive fairly quickly.

You play as Rook, an associate of Varric, who served as companion and storyteller in the previous games. Varric and Rook have been on the hunt for elven god Solas for the better part of a year. Just when it looks as if you can stop him from tearing down the Veil between the physical and nether worlds, unleashing hordes of demons in the process, a magical mishap leads to the release of two other, even worse gods. These new villains are comically evil, but they are a disappointment compared with the compelling character of Solas, who is, after all, right there. Veilguard tells his side of the story, too, through side quests.

As we travel around the continent of Thedas, we visit places that previous games haven’t explored: the city of Minrathous in mage-led Tevinter, or the sunny Rivain peninsula. Each place is gorgeous and filled with detail, from glowing butterflies flitting around Arlathan forest to animated skeletons swinging brooms in the Nevarran necropolis. Veilguard lets you travel freely, but certain areas of each map are closed off until a quest unlocks them; this can feel jarring, but also offers freedom to explore without the overwhelm. Exploration is fun, too, with plenty of treasure to find. Each area is home to a different faction of characters, and they immediately start asking favours. There’s a lot of variety in these tasks, which unlock vital gear for each companion.

Combat is now entirely real-time. You can still order your companions to use their skills via a ring menu similar to Mass Effect’s, which I sometimes had to do because my companions wouldn’t do useful things such as healing Rook or slowing down time without my say-so. But for the most part, they act autonomously. All I have to do is attack and dodge, pressing the same three buttons over and over again, throwing in the occasional combat skill or finishing move as my companions yell at me to watch out for imminent ranged attacks or explosions. It’s serviceable, but we’ve seen it before in countless other games, and there’s not much room for strategy. Boss battles are quite challenging, however. Dodging is vital, and you won’t get ahead by blindly slashing at your enemies.

Generally, Veilguard is loth to let go of your hand for even a second. While a lot of the default damage numbers, wayfinders and blinking treasure indicators can be turned off in the options menu, the writing seems to assume no player can retain information for longer than a few seconds. Characters will endlessly repeat events that have just happened and point out things you’ve just seen, often by using the exact same words: “Our rogue necromancer might be behind that door.” “Well, I sure hope our rogue necromancer is behind that door!” In case this were somehow insufficient, there’s a written summary for each mission so you can be absolutely sure what happened. The important ones are hashed over yet again in team meetings.

Big decisions that affect the story are few and far between, and the game will tell you exactly what they lead to before you pick. Decisions do, for the most part, carry real consequence, which is nice, but it would have been nicer if the game didn’t tell you that several times before you commit. These choices get rarer as time goes on, almost as if time to implement them ran out later in development.

Rook is our hero of the hour because, by their own admission, “no one else was there to do it”. It’s good to play as someone other than a magically chosen superhero for once, but Rook hasn’t got much of a personality behind their ill-timed quips. No matter which dialogue option you pick, a lot of it inevitably ends in some sort of joke, and sometimes even mildly embarrassing pop culture references and idioms. (I never want to hear a character say a griffon is “feeling his oats”, please. Please.) Veilguard isn’t the Guardians of the Galaxy-esque jokefest fans feared it might be after its first trailer, but Rook is written less like a person with opinions and more like someone who makes witty observations.

The central story is the least interesting thing about Veilguard, both in its narrative and gameplay. Many quests have you endlessly slotting crystals into receptacles to open doors or vanquish blight-boils, pulsing, fleshy growths that keep you from travelling to a place to fight a monster. This isn’t out of the ordinary for Dragon Age, but coupled with dissatisfying cameos and by-the-numbers gameplay, it left me feeling disappointed.

The companions save the day. The quality of writing does vary wildly, but it’s fun to get to know your new team. Necromancer Emmrich genuinely cares about the dead, wielding his magic like a conductor, and Qunari dragon hunter Taash struggles with questions of identity and gender. Romantic options don’t immediately go in hard on awkward flirting and instead often just constitute the nicest thing you might say to someone who’s struggling – though the game does have a habit of ruining the fun by jumping in to say, Careful! You’re being romantic! Are you sure you want to commit to a romance? The bigger annoyance here is how they behave when you take them on a mission together, when they will make small talk like two colleagues meeting at an office party. “Sooo, Taash, you hunt dragons? I hunt monsters.” It’s a far cry from Dragon Age: Inquisition’s banter.

There is plenty to like about Veilguard, but I sometimes had to dig deep to look past its flaws, from repetitive gameplay to a story that doesn’t know how to bring everything together. It’s a perfectly enjoyable RPG, then, but an underwhelming Dragon Age game.

Judging by their previous Guardian reviews the writer was THE target audience for this game and wasn't particularly impressed. All is not well.

Here's the REAL PC Gamer review: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/drago...k-fantasy-roots-and-become-biowares-avengers/

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.

Absolutely fucking brutal beatdown for an AAA title bearing in mind it's PCG.

 

[Morgoth]

Except that Dragon Age 2 is fucking worse than everything on earth.

Even worse than Starfield?

 

[Camel]

This game is the great unifier.

View attachment 56855

Veilguard is an another battle of the culture war. The left and the mainstream media praise it, the right trashes it.

 

[Frozen]

When will out Jew master and overlord rename this thread into Failguard?

 

[Semiurge]

I will be re downloading Origins as I said that I will do. Any recommended mods? Also, I will take some dialog screenshots only to compare with Drag Age Failguard.

Advanced tactics.
Skip the Fade.
Extra dog slot(but it will make an already easy game easier).

All you need is Qwinn's Ultimate DAO Fixpack and the extra dog slot. I assume he doesn't count QUF as a mod so it didn't get mentioned, but it's absolutely necessary if you want to play Origins the way it was (probably) intended, without the broken abilities, armor or quests. Then if this is not the player's first time playing Origins, I'd look at some cutting room floor- type mods too that restore cut content. There should be plenty of those.

Additionally it would be a good idea to make the game exe compatiple with +2K resolutions, as it will crash reliably otherwise. The Denerim marketplace is unplayable already at 1440p if you use maximum graphics settings.

The strongest feeling I have watching extracts, videos, and reading reviews of this game is that the biggest issue is not the appeal and pandering to fringe minorities.
It's the fact that the game is a new avatar of the biggest the West is facing : we've become children, and mass appeal art must appeal to children.

Yes, exactly!

I genuinely expected this to be an eye-rolling wokefest like Concord but it's like... it's evolved past wokeness.

Wokeness is being made obsolete in real time way before we even started to get a grip on the definition.

Watching excerpts from the game, how NPCs talk, how companions communicate, the general vibe of it... anyone's seen One Flew Across The Cuckoo's Nest? Where Jack Nicholson gets in this mental institution where everyone is drugged up into a lethargic stupor, just walking around like zombies accompanied by a calming muzac, smiling at each other with those inane, plastic smiles plastered across their dumb faces. It's so utterly bizarro world that someone made and greenlighted this.

It was based on one old hippie's observations on the early '60s America, but indeed apathy is still the preferred mode for the masses. It makes everyone more manageable, and their spiritual wellbeing and rights remain completely irrelevant.

Trying to exist in the mini-dystopias these radicals have created will be enough to make one apathetic. Their social clout and their blatant lies will eventually have that effect, you simply give up, try to not make waves and repeat what they tell you to.

'To be woke' means that your're either blind to these events that should tell you where western society is headed right now, or utterly complicit.

'To be woke' means that you've awakened to these events that should tell you where western society is headed right now, while its enemies are accusing everyone else as woke to shut down honest discourse.

There is no "honest discourse" when every alternative view is labeled nazi-something

How is women, blacks and gays having more rights a bad thing for western society?

See, that's just another variation of the same hypothetical dishonest retort I posted. But, with the difference that you may have actually let slip that their having more rights than everyone else is a good thing. That's not equality, it's discrimination all over again. MLK did not condone that shit.

Marketing lie to get the BG3 crowd probably

We'll find out very soon.

Where's that guy who makes "visual novel is the new rpg" memes? We need a new one "LGBTQ+ is the new rpg"

At least they know their priorities

Steam tags can be voted into place afaik.

 

[Pink Eye]

Thank you for sharing this one Infinitron, it was a very good read! I enjoyed reading it! This stuck with me the most:

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.

Veilguard's folly in being "inclusive" and "diverse" whilst focusing on offending no one with its portrayal of said cast has indeed resulted in a tepid, boring, product with little to no staying power; it lacks character, personality, and entertainment value. Veilguard isn't just a mediocre RPG, it's a below average game that'll be forgotten.

 

[Edgetard]

holy shit all the cool dark shit that was in origins kinda stayed in 2 (never played inquisition so dont care) is gone
no more rape monsters just gay shit

 

[kapisi]

Commander Chud, step forward.

 

[Frozen]

Game itself from what I saw on net is even more decay and degeneracy in line with Inquisition, as expected. Stupid cards as injected in that game. Pink glow everywhere.

Same corridors larping as open world. Laughably bad textures on Super Mario lvl (just look at leaves and vegetation LEL) Juvenile art style. Facial animations do not exist. It's like German losers from bankrupt Piranha Bytes made this LOL

It's that bad and outdated looking.

Skill tree design stolen from Witcher 2 Combat wanabbe Mass Effect with melee. Cringe generic teen woke characters. No real surprises there.

Actually, what I think this game was going for is Divinity II: Dragon Knight Saga if it was a complete woke shit. (you have similar base of operations, in gameplay recorded little movie animation of skill examples, simple single player combat)

score>

zero/ 10 Gaydars buttfucked by Casey Hudson

 

[cioran]

Here's the REAL PC Gamer review: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/drago...k-fantasy-roots-and-become-biowares-avengers/

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.

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.

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...

This is how you normalise degeneracy by sounding critical and honest and still cashing in that nice check.

Well done, Brown dude, well done...

 

[NecroLord]

BATSHIT CRAZY TAG! @Infinitron @Crispy

Infinitron, I believe The Wall is asking us to give him a new tag.

Zionist Agent tag.

 

[Pink Eye]

Commander Chud, step forward.

Heh.

*pushes glasses*

You've activated my chud card.

 

[Melcar]

holy shit all the cool dark shit that was in origins kinda stayed in 2 (never played inquisition so dont care) is gone
no more rape monsters just gay shit

Not even gay rape monsters?

 

[cvv]

Commander Chud, step forward.

I don't suppose you can buy this turd, shit all over it in a Steam review and refund it? I remember it was possible like 10 years ago but I guess Gaben wised up since then.

 

[Edgetard]

Not even gay rape monsters?

sadly no we cannot give the few players this game has flashbacks

 

[Morality Games]

I wonder how the localization to any "gendered" language(Spanish, Italian, etc) will adapt this BS line.

Putting aside all questions of values and morals, I just don't see how I am supposed to take this seriously as a setting. Medieval cultures can't have these kinds of social or cultural concepts, the level of literacy isn't high enough for people to even begin to formulate or comprehend them + 20-30 other factors.

 

[Lodis]

Commander Chud, step forward.

I always find this kind of cope funny. Good chunk of the internet is making fun of the game especially all the tranny dialogue choices but the entire subreddit is trying to convince themselves that it’s just a handful of chuds.

 

[kapisi]

Tublr quoted on reddit

"I was incredibly moved that not only can Rook be trans/nonbinary in the character creator if you so choose, but they get options to feel differently about their identity and journey, and it impacts their dialogue and how they relate to other characters! **To access this make sure to interact with Varric's Mirror in your room in the Lighthouse.** There are many conversation options throughout the game to discuss your identity with other characters, or relate your change of self to other situations. Crucially, it comes up when entering a romance and you have to communicate with your partner about it, which I never even THOUGHT of including in a game because it seemed impossible to even allow trans main characters to begin with. "

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Meanwhile, for some people things just don't feel right: