The problem with Veilguard is that it’s…serviceable. That isn’t to say it’s a bad game, but I’m not sure I’d be willing to call it a great game either. Everything is…fine. About the biggest standout in the game is the visuals and art direction, that’s probably my favorite thing about it.
The story is boilerplate, though oddly better than Inquisition’s story. Inquisition’s story annoyed me because it’s main villain was basically a cipher for the story, had no actual character themselves other than being ‘bad’. Also found it weird that their mainline game antagonist came from a DLC of the previous game. So whatever.
I have issues with the voice acting. At some points it’s fine, even good(at least with interactions with Solas and Varric because their VAs know what the fuck their doing), but I have a particular disconnect with some of your companions VA(Neve especially)where they delivers lines either unsure or stilted or something that I can’t quite put my finger on. It kind of gets better as your progress through the game where they feel like they’re getting comfortable with the character, but I’m also going to chalk this up to very lousy voice direction and script writing.
Which yeah, the script is just…bad. While the plot is fine, whoever wrote the script needs to get better at it. Now, I’m going to put two points of contention onto this. One, being the game was changes a couple times through it’s almost ten year development cycle, so I have no idea how many rewrites happened in that time. And after checking the writing credits on Veilguard’s IMDB, it becomes a lot more clear as to why the writing isn’t up to par. A number of people on the writing team had barely, if any, legitimate writing credits. When you factor in that I suspect some of this was happening during the writer’s strike, and knowing EA’S penchant for not wanting to pay, they probably just pulled people who had some kind of, if minimal, writing experience off another team. AFAIK, this also affected the voice direction. Is it the whole reason? Probably not, and I imagine there’s a lot more extraneous factors at play, but it’s the most glaring that I’ve found thus far.
However, not gonna lie, I actually enjoy the combat of the game, even if it’s some weird blend of God of War Ragnarok mixed with some diet Dark Souls. Which, considering how this game was in development during the time where these games were big, it’s kind of not hard to miss that they probably took inspiration from them. Which is whatever.
That said, Dragon Age has never, and I mean never figured out what it wants to be. Every time, every installment of the series, everything is changed up. Systems, combat, mechanics, etc. It’s different. It goes from one playstyle, to another, to another, to another. It strikes me as if the series is just chasing trends at this point and can’t figure out it’s own thing. It’s the core opposite to what Mass Effect did, which was just build upon and improve what they already had. Origins was fine, but some people thought it was too hard being a Baldur’s Gate love letter, so they dumbed it down to hack n’slash of an almost Devil May Cry lite. People thout that was too dumb and too easy, so it was changed to an MMO-lite…thing from Inquisition. Which was just too grindy, because goddamn was that game too grindy.
I think the devs just played it safe. There’s no conflict between your party members, everyone gets along, and it plays like it’s some kind of low-bar Netflix series you can binge in a weekend. Which if that’s what you’re looking for? Cool. Veilguard does what it needs to. And while I criticize the game, I’m still playing it. I’m still enjoying it. That’s generally my biggest though and takeaway. It’s played safe. They don’t take any kind of risk or chances with it. There was something that could’ve been really, really good. But if I’m being perfectly honest, the last Dragon Age game that had a compelling charactes and stories was probably the first two.
As for the transgender topical matter in it, I could not care. Twitter sure as fuck cares, but that’s Twitter for you. Is it written kind of…cringe? And I say cringe because it just wasn’t written well. So yeah, there are some points that does not handle that topic well, or even nuanced. To a certain point I think it does more of a disservice. But if someone is bothered by that, just go be asshole elsewhere.
I dunno, it’s a big mixed bag of shit. If you like the lore, it’s mostly consistent with the lore and adds stuff onto it. This isn’t exactly how I had hoped for the northern part of Thedas to be explored after it had been talked about for the past three games. It seems like such a drastic departure from how Trespasser ended, but again, it’s not bad. It’s just not what I had hoped for. It’s serviceable. It’s fine.