Posts made by Testament

@Roz I dunno about most daring narrative, but I’ve never disagreed with DA2 having had the best group of companions. Certainly better than Inquisition by leagues.

Probably better than Origins. Like, who the fuck ever used Wynn.

@Roz Meredith was a weak villain, Anders should’ve become the main antagonist since they changed the character so much from Awakenings. That’s my largest complaint beyond the issue about having recycled maps.

@Wuff The companion conversations have no fail state, no situation where one of them gets so pissed at you leave is kind of, no very, annoying.

As negative as I can be about Inquisition, there were those fail states. Treat the mages badly enough, and I distinctly remember Dorian chewing your ass out. Which also gave you the option to put him on his ass with a punch, which makes him leave.

There’s no options like that. I think I could look past everything about Veilguard if it had just been willing to commit to some kind of interpersonal conflict instead of everyone literally gets along.

As a sidethought, it’s honestly making me go back and rethink my opinion on DA2 and how much scorn I had held for it for such a long time. Say whatever you want about continously reused and recycled maps/environments, the Ashatok was a great mid-game villain and made the Qunari actually terrifying as a potentially antagonistic faction. While I really like the art style of the game, I absolutely hate how the Qunari look now. I think that’s the one part of the game’s lore that was changed too much.

Then again, the Qunari suddenly have horns from DA2 and forward and Sten from Origins being a weird exception was also a massive departure.

@Rinel Oh, I have questions about some of the plot points I’ve encountered. Ones that I will not reveal. There’s a plot device you get very very very early in the game and later Varric talks about what it is, which really made me side eye the narrative.

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.

The peeve is that I miss you. It was nice to have a place to go if nothing else to hang out.

Fuck you.

I appreciate the creation of this thread because it’s been almost a literal year with no big drama blowups, beyond some nitwit doing some edgyposting yesterday and getting their ass blasted into oblivion for it(get dunked on).

You know fall is in the air when the bears start getting fat.

@Mushling-0 said in Numetal/Retromux:

Erik or SonofThor from Arx got banned there for sexual harassment.

lmao, that fucking guy

@Pavel

@ten I don’t have the strength of will to get into another MMO. I lost four years to Elder Scrolls Online to that.

But I respect those that do.

You just read old threads here, because reliving old drama is only fun because the MU landscape is rather quiet these days? I mean, not a lot of drama. Which is probably good for a change of pace.

I have no issue with the idea of realizing that you’ve gone in the wrong direction and want to wipe the slate to start over. I can see the reason of wanting to, especially if you have a theme that’s capable of handling it. So in essence if everyone see the direction a game is going in isn’t good and wants to start over, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Maybe just call it Concordia 2 or something that separates itself and go for there.

I think the only thing that I honestly disagree with is just outright saying “We’re not answering story related requests”. Now if this applies to any story request going forward, fine. I get that. But at least give the players that have already put one in some sense of closure.

Other than that one criticism, best of luck wherever they go with the game.

Good game. Very positive environment. I enjoy running plots again.

Donald Sutherland.

https://x.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1803836937809133775

Really enjoying the new MU I was able to join and start playing again. A very welcoming and enjoyable environment.

But it really sucks that I have to live on async scenes due to my job. Feel like I’m missing every relevant plot thread to get involved in because I can only check in a couple times a day.

It makes me wonder why I got back involved in RPing again. It’s definitely a ‘my life’ kind of issue. But I also just kind of sigh.

@Juniper lol I had totally forgotten about Cleverbot. Memory unlocked.

@Jennkryst That’s oddly more descriptive than most descs I’ve read.

@ten If I wanted to be a main character, I’d play a video game. I’m here for collaboration, and I don’t view that as collaboration.

@Aria Anyone that uses ‘luminescent lavender orbs’ as a descriptor for eyes has Main Character Syndrome and you can’t tell me otherwise.