A Nuanced Critique of Veilguard

Comments · 824

• KR

  @kristie.5132 · 1 year ago

  “Every time Solas is not on the screen, I’m asking myself ‘where’s Solas?’” Relatable (in DAI, too)

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• MA

  @matthewball9851 · 1 year ago (edited)

  The difference in quality of writing and voice acting between Solas and Varric and literally every other character is insane. I don&apos;t think I&apos;ve seen such an obvious intra-quality difference like that before in a game.<br>Caroline Livingstone (Bioware&apos;s in-house Voice Director from Origins to Anthem) departure from Bioware before this game was sorely felt in this one.

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• TH

  @TheKastyl · 1 year ago

  Sir, a second multihour Dragon Age critique has hit the towers this month

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• IT

  @Itomon · 1 year ago

  &quot;I&apos;ll create anime crow&quot;<br><b>Ends up creating ginger Link</b>

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• VA

  @vanessab.s2596 · 1 year ago

  My biggest problem is how &quot;safe and sanitized&quot; made this game.<br><br>I thought that elves would receive massive hate seeing as they&apos;re already disliked and now their gods are killing everyone. Yet I was only reminded of elves being 2nd class citizens by Davrin saying that their gods attacking wouldn&apos;t endear them to Thedas.<br><br>Then the Crows. They used to buy children and torture their members as an initiation. Also, they were hellbent on killing traitors within their ranks, Zevran is still being pursued years after the events in Origins and he tells you how it was ok for him to kill this Crow girl who allegedly betrayed them. Now they&apos;re freedom fighters who accept traitors in their home (Ilario) and are ok with letting a loose (Ivenci) end survive<br><br>Mintrathous. That city was just dissapointing. Previous games establish that slavery is a common thing, blood magic is an open secret, mages had all the power and non mages were only better than slaves. Yet in Dock Town I didn&apos;t see one slave, blood magic (except this one quest where they make it seem far less powerful and dangerous than in Origins) is absent and everyone seem to be living on the same conditions. And it&apos;s even more confusing when Neve keeps going on about how non mages suffer in Minrathous, wanting slavery gone and the current Magisters not being beneficial for the common people. <br><br>The Lords of Fortune being culturally respectful while led by the woman who stole the Qunari bible and didn&apos;t care that many citizens probably died and/or were severely traumatized by them? Or Necromancers being accepted without much problem (hell, I thanked Taash for bringing up some reluctance) when previously they tell and show you that their morality and sanity are pretty questionable? Or the Wardens agreeing to become pointless murder victims because their idiotic leader told them so (hell, even the templars had a way where the 2nd in command could challenge the leader if something real bad happens)?<br><br>My choices and role playing. Such thing doesn&apos;t exist. In previous games you could say no to recruiting someone and you could play as a hero, ruthless and even evil. But here you cannot disagree with your companions (and God how much did I want to), are forced to being the therapist of adult looking toddlers, every companion is mandatory (though I feel that if they were optional most people, including me, would end up with only half or them) and you cannot roleplay because Rook is an established character you cannot deviate from in any way

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• YO

  @YoRouable · 1 year ago

  As you&apos;ve pointed out, a lot of jumps (the reactions to the darkspawn, the elves all suddenly knowing and 100% believing that the evanuris are evil and not gods)are handwaved away with &quot;well ten years have passed, we don&apos;t know what happened in between&quot; and...yall, that doesn&apos;t matter! Massive cultural shifts, complete dissolution of religons, do not happen in a decade unless active persecution is happening. There is no way all the elves would suddenly just...stop believing in their gods and all just agree that what these people told them are facts. I would believe it if the veil jumpers were framed as just a &quot;cult&quot; of people who believe that the evanuris are not gods, but we&apos;re sort of sold this world view that all the elves now know and just accept that their beliefs are bogus and need to be thrown out. We have proof that you can literally show people statistics and expert testimony irl, and if they don&apos;t want to believe something, they will ignore it or invent reasons why it&apos;s bogus. This &quot;everyone is suddenly on the same page because look, they&apos;ve had ten years to be&quot; doesn&apos;t really hold up under scrutiny if you look at literally anything in the real world.

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• MA

  @mattphoenix4702 · 1 year ago

  Veilguard kinda shot itself in the foot plotwise. It made the same mistake World of Warcraft makes every expansion or two: &nbsp;they put vital plot and lore in outside media and don’t ever actually mention it in game. <br><br>For example…<br><br>Neve is actually a returning character. She and Varric have teamed up a number of times in the comics. <br><br>The chains you find in Solas’s hideout belong to a group of slaves Solas freed as a distraction to slip out of Minrathous untracked by Neve and the Venatori. They’re a distraction. It was an opportunistic good deed. <br><br>The Veiljumpers are ALSO a return from the comics, and Varric worked with them a number of times too. They were trying to find an artifact Solas was after that was somewhere in Arlathan… but they failed. Solas got it before them. That’s why they know the truth about the Gods. <br><br>The world and factions are more developed than you see in game… which is utterly stupid. The game should be the priority when it comes to lore

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• AW

  @awkwardGardener · 1 year ago (edited)

  It&apos;s really tragic that Nevarra has so little content, cause playing as a Mourn Watcher in my playthrough I found it to be a really fascinating culture, and Emmerich to be the most interesting companion.<br>I genuinely really enjoyed learning more about it and seeing parts of it first hand, especially with how directly it contrasts the cultures we&apos;ve seen in all of the previous games, venerating Necromancy and openly using it for every day tasks.<br>I also just enjoyed the detail that more of the Necropolis opens up over time as the skeleton work crews fix and clean up areas.

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• 00

  @000Dragon50000 · 1 year ago (edited)

  I wanted to make an elven character for Veilguard who wanted her people&apos;s immortality restored, and was actually MORE willing to accept collateral damage than Solas once she finds out that&apos;s his objective, not to mention unaware of her gods&apos; true natures...<br>So of course I was way more harshly slammed against the fact that the dialogue literally never entertains any of those ideas as options you can select in dialogue. *(Which of course means a compelling reason why my character shouldn&apos;t want that was never presented either because I was never allowed to even try to want it.)

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• TS

  @tsuritsa3105 · 1 year ago

  &quot;Veilguard presents a black and white morality&quot; - and this is the biggest problem with the game. There are several problems with it, of course, but this is the overriding problem that leads to things like overly-simplistic companions. One of the other commenters here called the game &quot;safe and santized&quot; and that is exactly right, and it&apos;s even more obvious with the moral dichotomy on offer. <br><br>I do want to say that I appreciate the nuanced critique on offer here. There are legitimate crtiicisms to things that get lost behind the howling of part of the internet that is determined to market cultural rage every chance they get.

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• HU

  @Hubabuba258 · 1 year ago

  For all the little he actually appeared, I think the Butcher was fantastic. I totally buy into this brutal warlord falling in love with the most hedonistic side of Antiva, to the point where he starts feeling protective of the city he conquered. I wish he had more presence, because there is definitely something there to be explored. Honestly, I could play a DA2 style game set entirely in Treviso with Ilario, Ivenci and the Butcher being the three main forces you have to navigate as a player. Instead, we got Ilario, who is obviously a traitor, Ivenci who is SO obviously a traitor that I actually stopped suspecting him because it felt too obvious, and the Butcher that is critically underutilised.

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• BL

  @BleydTorvall · 1 year ago

  One of my favorite bits in the game is something not even mentioned, and that you&apos;d never even notice if you hadn&apos;t played Inquisition. &nbsp;In DAI, Solas has a companion quest in which he asks the Inquisitor to help a friend spirit of Wisdom that you find had been bound to a mage and forced to fight until it broke and became a pride demon. &nbsp;Turns out that Solas, the elven word for pride remember, was originally a spirit of wisdom himself, bound to Mythal and made to fight. &nbsp;It&apos;s no wonder he reacted so harshly at the end of that companion quest...

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