Dragon Age: the Veilguard
Dec. 2nd, 2024 05:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porticoa lot has been said about the new dragon age game. i haven't seen most of it, just gotten a sense of the scale of the discourse like someone on a boat watching the shadow of a blue whale pass beneath them. i've read a few posts on tumblr, but otherwise haven't delved in--nor do i intend to. in general, my enjoyment of a game is not affected by other people's opinions of it. and i did enjoy this game! i played it all the way through once and have already embarked on a second play-through. despite this list of grievances, there is a lot in it to recommend it. the character creator is wonderfully diverse (you can be fat!) and i loved that your options for rook's voice went beyond male vs female and american vs british. the clothing and armor is wonderful. i loved just about every single companion character. that said.
is it a GOOD game? no. the combat is fun, the level up system is fine, there's no laborious crafting to be done, and visually it's a treat! but narratively, it's not great. for perhaps the first time ever, a game is bad because of woke.
i'm not going to talk about the lack of continuity from the previous games, although i know this is the primary complaint a lot of folks have with veilguard. this game does NOT care about dragon age lore. i don't much either so this largely didn't bother me, beyond its implications about the wider aims of the game (for example, in past games there were clear and thorny differences between city elves and dalish elves. in veilguard, there are only the dalish. city elves are not mentioned). my primary complaints about veilguard are that it has puritanical morals and a kindergarten teacher's concept of conflict resolution. also nobody is even a little bit an asshole. except for solas, but he's grandfathered in from inquisition. and, y'know. the villain.
i've played all of the previous da games (although origins was once and so long ago that i couldn't tell you much about it) and the mass effects, most of them multiple times. the thing that kept me coming back wasn't just the strength of the relationships in the games--although that was a big part of it--but how complex the characters were. in dragon age 2 and inquisition, your party is full of prickly, opinionated people--people who are decidedly NOT on the same side on many issues. they've joined your cause for their own reasons and while some of them leave having been irrevocably changed, that's not true of all of them! in da2, anders commits an act of terrorism and there's nothing you can do in the game to change that. vivienne joins the inquisition out of a desire to strengthen her social and political position, and she leaves having done that. her pro-circle mage politics are the same. there's a realism to these games' relationship building that i always enjoyed. none of that is present in veilguard.
i like the companions, but all of them are Good People. i saw a tumblr post about how each companion comes across as a character someone made for a dnd campaign, and i think that's a really good way of putting it. everyone has these very interesting backstories and are clearly the person in each of their factions with the most protagonist energy. and that's ok! boring, but ok. can't hold a candle to my best friend Dorian Pavus the slavery apologist*, but it's alright. they still have opinions that clash, right? yeah! i mean. sort of.
the game has a clear outline that goes:
1. Act One
2. First Big Choice--bad thing happen
3. Build relationships with your team!
4. Uh oh, there's conflict! Better resolve that.
5. Build relationships with the various factions.
6. Make your team a Good as they can be--resolve all those lingering personal issues!
7. Point of no return.
8. Second Big Choice--different bad thing happen!
9. End game (this takes a very long time)
and you know where you are within that outline, because characters will tell you. like, quite literally your companions will say shit like "we should probably work on our issues first" during team meetings. your companions will also offer up advice unprompted while you're doing puzzles, and not like. you've failed at this 10 times so the game is throwing you a bone advice but like "you've lit two torches! only one to go!" advice. depending on the companion, this was sometimes very condescending, to the point that i snapped "i'm not new here" aloud at scout harding at one point. if the goal in making this game was to achieve a dragon age for babies who've never played a game before, they haven't gone far wrong. except having been a baby who'd never played a game before, i think this still would have pissed me off.
also, to circle back: team meetings! where nobody is even getting drunk. when the game decides that it's conflict resolution time you will know it because you will encounter two of your teammates having a mild disagreement and then be given the opportunity to say something like "have you considered thinking about this issue from each other's points of view?" even when the issue is that one of them is an assassin** and the other one thinks that's morally on shaky group. but this is enough, the game assures you, and at a certain point a little message appears at the left side of your screen informing you that these two have resolved their issues. nobody hatefucks about it or anything.
and that's the other big issue: the puritan morals. the fact that you can toggle nudity on or off in the settings is the biggest tease--if people are getting naked in this game, i certainly did not encounter them. my rook and neve hooked up with undies firmly on. and getting to the hooking up took FOREVER. getting to a KISS took forever. despite being given quite a few chances to flirt, nobody is even holding hands. we are progressing at a middle school pace here. i only encountered one romance between companions (i know there's another one, plus one between a companion and a non-companion npc) but even it was carried out in an oddly formal way, with that same little pop-up informing me at one point that the two had decided to Embark on a Relationship. gone are the days when you find out that Dorian and the Iron Bull are together when Bull mentions that Dorian left his silky undies behind while you're trekking through a wilderness. i miss those days. they were good.
the game has a peppy, upbeat tone to it, definitely aided by the increased cartoonishness of the art style as well as the voice direction. (what there is of voice direction--some of the line reads frankly don't make any sense.) you start the game with harding, who was relentlessly upbeat as a side character in inquisition and whom the years have not dulled in that respect, and shortly encounter bellara, who has the energy of a zooey deschanel character circa 2003. it's VERY twee and even neve, who has essentially stepped out of a noir, can do little to darken it. that said, the game WANTS to be a serious game with consequences. the two big choices you make involve major character deaths, and the second one in particular i found really upsetting! i fully admit i am a softie so ymmv, but it felt very disconnected from the tone of the rest of the game.
finally, i gotta talk about the queerness. i mentioned to a friend who is also playing it that this is like the ultimate monkey's paw of a very gay AAA video game. like, the previous da games were queer (especially dragon age 2) but in a very implicit way. this is explicit. no, not like that. not only can you romance every character as any gender rook, but bellara has an ex-gf, lucanis tells you about having pursued a man. these characters are explicitly queer. the biggest queer storyline in the game, however, belongs to taash. taash uses she/her pronouns when you meet them but over the course of the game comes out as nonbinary. every conversation you have with them about it, or letter or other written lore you encounter reads like it was lifted straight from Being NonBinary 101. this is not wholly a complaint--in inquisition, you straight up ask the single openly trans character why he wanted to stop being a woman and it's not a good time! but this felt like over-correction. at one point taash writes about whether they should spell it "nonbinary" or "non-binary." what are we doing here, people.
this game feels like the inevitable achievement of directionless diversity. all of the characters are queer, therefore none of them are queer. by sacrificing those individual preferences, by abandoning or smoothing over the lore, what's left is something that is certainly less challenging, less likely to offend, but also a whole lot less interesting. i don't pretend to know what the making of this game looked like. i know it changed directions a few times and involved mass firings. i'm not ascribing my criticisms to any insider knowledge. i am condemning it as a worrying example of recent trends in genre fiction. i realize that this review makes it sound like what i wanted from this game was assholes slinging slurs, drinking heavily, and fucking explicitly. that's not true at all. but dragon age games used to be a bunch of jerks in a bar. i miss that.
*you discover pretty quickly that he's changed sides on that, but it's hard to even be glad about it when it feels less like earned character growth and more an indication that he's in a new world now, one where anybody holding a morally grey view will be promptly exiled. even the lords of fortune, the treasure hunters, are actively repatriating artifacts.
**veilguard is entirely uninterested in probing the morality of being an assassin. it's just a normal job.
is it a GOOD game? no. the combat is fun, the level up system is fine, there's no laborious crafting to be done, and visually it's a treat! but narratively, it's not great. for perhaps the first time ever, a game is bad because of woke.
i'm not going to talk about the lack of continuity from the previous games, although i know this is the primary complaint a lot of folks have with veilguard. this game does NOT care about dragon age lore. i don't much either so this largely didn't bother me, beyond its implications about the wider aims of the game (for example, in past games there were clear and thorny differences between city elves and dalish elves. in veilguard, there are only the dalish. city elves are not mentioned). my primary complaints about veilguard are that it has puritanical morals and a kindergarten teacher's concept of conflict resolution. also nobody is even a little bit an asshole. except for solas, but he's grandfathered in from inquisition. and, y'know. the villain.
i've played all of the previous da games (although origins was once and so long ago that i couldn't tell you much about it) and the mass effects, most of them multiple times. the thing that kept me coming back wasn't just the strength of the relationships in the games--although that was a big part of it--but how complex the characters were. in dragon age 2 and inquisition, your party is full of prickly, opinionated people--people who are decidedly NOT on the same side on many issues. they've joined your cause for their own reasons and while some of them leave having been irrevocably changed, that's not true of all of them! in da2, anders commits an act of terrorism and there's nothing you can do in the game to change that. vivienne joins the inquisition out of a desire to strengthen her social and political position, and she leaves having done that. her pro-circle mage politics are the same. there's a realism to these games' relationship building that i always enjoyed. none of that is present in veilguard.
i like the companions, but all of them are Good People. i saw a tumblr post about how each companion comes across as a character someone made for a dnd campaign, and i think that's a really good way of putting it. everyone has these very interesting backstories and are clearly the person in each of their factions with the most protagonist energy. and that's ok! boring, but ok. can't hold a candle to my best friend Dorian Pavus the slavery apologist*, but it's alright. they still have opinions that clash, right? yeah! i mean. sort of.
the game has a clear outline that goes:
1. Act One
2. First Big Choice--bad thing happen
3. Build relationships with your team!
4. Uh oh, there's conflict! Better resolve that.
5. Build relationships with the various factions.
6. Make your team a Good as they can be--resolve all those lingering personal issues!
7. Point of no return.
8. Second Big Choice--different bad thing happen!
9. End game (this takes a very long time)
and you know where you are within that outline, because characters will tell you. like, quite literally your companions will say shit like "we should probably work on our issues first" during team meetings. your companions will also offer up advice unprompted while you're doing puzzles, and not like. you've failed at this 10 times so the game is throwing you a bone advice but like "you've lit two torches! only one to go!" advice. depending on the companion, this was sometimes very condescending, to the point that i snapped "i'm not new here" aloud at scout harding at one point. if the goal in making this game was to achieve a dragon age for babies who've never played a game before, they haven't gone far wrong. except having been a baby who'd never played a game before, i think this still would have pissed me off.
also, to circle back: team meetings! where nobody is even getting drunk. when the game decides that it's conflict resolution time you will know it because you will encounter two of your teammates having a mild disagreement and then be given the opportunity to say something like "have you considered thinking about this issue from each other's points of view?" even when the issue is that one of them is an assassin** and the other one thinks that's morally on shaky group. but this is enough, the game assures you, and at a certain point a little message appears at the left side of your screen informing you that these two have resolved their issues. nobody hatefucks about it or anything.
and that's the other big issue: the puritan morals. the fact that you can toggle nudity on or off in the settings is the biggest tease--if people are getting naked in this game, i certainly did not encounter them. my rook and neve hooked up with undies firmly on. and getting to the hooking up took FOREVER. getting to a KISS took forever. despite being given quite a few chances to flirt, nobody is even holding hands. we are progressing at a middle school pace here. i only encountered one romance between companions (i know there's another one, plus one between a companion and a non-companion npc) but even it was carried out in an oddly formal way, with that same little pop-up informing me at one point that the two had decided to Embark on a Relationship. gone are the days when you find out that Dorian and the Iron Bull are together when Bull mentions that Dorian left his silky undies behind while you're trekking through a wilderness. i miss those days. they were good.
the game has a peppy, upbeat tone to it, definitely aided by the increased cartoonishness of the art style as well as the voice direction. (what there is of voice direction--some of the line reads frankly don't make any sense.) you start the game with harding, who was relentlessly upbeat as a side character in inquisition and whom the years have not dulled in that respect, and shortly encounter bellara, who has the energy of a zooey deschanel character circa 2003. it's VERY twee and even neve, who has essentially stepped out of a noir, can do little to darken it. that said, the game WANTS to be a serious game with consequences. the two big choices you make involve major character deaths, and the second one in particular i found really upsetting! i fully admit i am a softie so ymmv, but it felt very disconnected from the tone of the rest of the game.
finally, i gotta talk about the queerness. i mentioned to a friend who is also playing it that this is like the ultimate monkey's paw of a very gay AAA video game. like, the previous da games were queer (especially dragon age 2) but in a very implicit way. this is explicit. no, not like that. not only can you romance every character as any gender rook, but bellara has an ex-gf, lucanis tells you about having pursued a man. these characters are explicitly queer. the biggest queer storyline in the game, however, belongs to taash. taash uses she/her pronouns when you meet them but over the course of the game comes out as nonbinary. every conversation you have with them about it, or letter or other written lore you encounter reads like it was lifted straight from Being NonBinary 101. this is not wholly a complaint--in inquisition, you straight up ask the single openly trans character why he wanted to stop being a woman and it's not a good time! but this felt like over-correction. at one point taash writes about whether they should spell it "nonbinary" or "non-binary." what are we doing here, people.
this game feels like the inevitable achievement of directionless diversity. all of the characters are queer, therefore none of them are queer. by sacrificing those individual preferences, by abandoning or smoothing over the lore, what's left is something that is certainly less challenging, less likely to offend, but also a whole lot less interesting. i don't pretend to know what the making of this game looked like. i know it changed directions a few times and involved mass firings. i'm not ascribing my criticisms to any insider knowledge. i am condemning it as a worrying example of recent trends in genre fiction. i realize that this review makes it sound like what i wanted from this game was assholes slinging slurs, drinking heavily, and fucking explicitly. that's not true at all. but dragon age games used to be a bunch of jerks in a bar. i miss that.
*you discover pretty quickly that he's changed sides on that, but it's hard to even be glad about it when it feels less like earned character growth and more an indication that he's in a new world now, one where anybody holding a morally grey view will be promptly exiled. even the lords of fortune, the treasure hunters, are actively repatriating artifacts.
**veilguard is entirely uninterested in probing the morality of being an assassin. it's just a normal job.