Disappointment Around Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Posted on October 11, 2024 by Tyler F.M. Edwards

Warning: This post will contain spoilers for the full Dragon Age franchise to date, including spoilers currently released for The Veilguard.

I’ve had an inconsistent relationship with the Dragon Age franchise. I didn’t enjoy Origins much at all, and if not for a free demo and a deep discount, I’d never have played Dragon Age 2. I liked its story much better, but still didn’t enjoy the combat much.

It wasn’t until Inquisition that I was fully converted to being a fan, and even then I’ll grant Inquisition had plenty of flaws, mostly in the form of way too much filler content. It was really the DLC that impressed me. The Descent was spectacular, but Trespasser was what really rocked my world.

I’m gonna say it: Solas being Fen’harel may well be the “Luke, I am your father”* of gaming in terms of being an iconic plot twist. Virtually no one saw it coming, even though in hindsight there were tonnes of hints, and combined with the focus on character relationships that BioWare does so well, it makes for an incredibly powerful narrative moment.

*(I know that isn’t the actual line, but you get my point.)

Of course a lot of people romanced Solas, which adds a whole new dimension to the dynamic, but even as someone who only had Solas as a friend, this felt like an incredibly personal conflict. My first inquisitor was also an Elf, and she became close friends with Solas. She wants everything he wants: a return of the mystery and magic of the ancient world and to rescue the Elves of today from their miserable fate. She just can’t quite agree with his methods. I can’t think of a single better implementation of this kind of tragic protagonist/antagonist relationship anywhere in fiction.

Trespasser was basically a giant ad for the next Dragon Age game, and I was sold. I’ve had lots of problems with this franchise over the years, but I was 110% invested in the conflict between the inquisitor and Solas, and I was ready to follow wherever that story took us.

I stayed hyped for many, many years, but after nearly a decade of development hell, it’s starting to look like all my hopes were for naught.

Even early on, there were some red flags. It didn’t take them long to start hinting that DA4 would feature a new protagonist. Surely they couldn’t be that foolish, I thought. The personal connection between Solas and the inquisitor is what makes this story special. If you take that away, it loses most of its appeal.

But hey, BioWare has rarely disappointed me. Even Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem were aces in my book, no matter what anyone else says, so my faith remained largely unshaken.

But it didn’t stop there. A few months back we got the bizarre news that the game had been renamed from Dragon Age: Dreadwolf to the awkwardly titled Dragon Age: The Veilguard. It was here that a real chill started to run down my spine, and since then the hits have just kept coming.

The initial trailer was just awful. Its MCU-style quipiness and general camp vibe were a shocking change in direction from the wonderfully moody teaser trailer Dreadwolf had, and while subsequent reveals haven’t looked quite that bad, my impression of the game has never really recovered.

We now have confirmation that both the inquisitor and Solas have been sidelined. The new protagonist is called Rook, and while the story starts with hunting Solas, he is quickly fridged to focus on a new threat in the form of two other returned Elven gods. Which is pretty much my worst fears about this game come to life.

We know Solas will still have a role in the game past that opening sequence, but it sounds like it’s going to be pretty small. He’s barely even mentioned in the marketing. The ads and teasers are all about the other Elven gods.

Under other circumstances, a game about fighting the Evanuris is something I’d be all for, but not if it comes at the cost of the inquisitor versus Solas game I’ve spent a decade waiting for.

The inquisitor looks to be even more irrelevant. I got some hope back when we found out Veilguard’s character creator also allows you to build your inquisitor, and I thought maybe we’d get some kind of dual protagonist twist, but it’s since been confirmed that the inquisitor is not playable, and moreover you can’t even choose their class, so presumably they won’t appear in any scenes where they might have to fight, which limits their potential role severely.

(I also want to say again that sidelining the inquisitor after they lose their arm feels very ableist, especially in a fantasy setting where they could have gotten any number of badass prosthetics. It stands out especially when World of Warcraft has just launched an expansion featuring a one-armed paladin who kicks ass and takes names.)

Even more worrying, the list of choices you can import from past games is extremely short and mostly seems to boil down to whether you disbanded the inquisition and what your inquisitor’s attitude toward Solas was. Even the Well of Sorrows decision isn’t included, and I can’t imagine how they plan to do a game about the Elven pantheon without addressing that.

It’s clear that Solas’ story is no longer the focus, and they just want a fresh start for newcomers to the franchise.

I just can’t get over what an unbelievable waste this is. They had one of the most unique and powerful stories in gaming, and they dropped it in favour of a generic evil gods apocalypse story.

There comes a time when a big franchise needs to reset a little to bring in new fans, but the direct sequel to one of the biggest cliffhangers in gaming history is not that time. Continuing the Star Wars comparison, it’s like if Return of the Jedi had introduced a whole new cast and featured Luke and Vader only in brief cameos.

This reminds me so much of Diablo IV. Both sequels to games that ended on cliffhangers. Both games that are doing their level best to pretend the previous entry in their respective franchises never existed, despite those entries being wildly successful. It’s so frustrating, and so weird.

Even more so in Veilguard’s case. While the blowback to Diablo III didn’t hurt its financial success, I will at least grant it was widespread in online discussions. Inquisition meanwhile may have its haters among the die-hard Origins fans, but it enjoyed widespread favourable reviews from the large majority of the gaming community. Trying to run from that legacy makes no sense.

There’s other things I don’t like about Veilguard, too. The graphics are very poor, for one thing. The characters all look like they’re made of plastic, and their body proportions are all wrong. The hair physics are impressive from a technical standpoint, but I’m not convinced they actually look good. Considering how cartoony everything else looks, the hyper-realistic hair creates a bit of an uncanny valley effect for me.

I’m a little iffy on the combat, too. The early previews looked pretty bad, with constant pausing to use companion abilities, but I’ve seen learned there is an option to command companions in real time, though it looks a bit clunky. I think the combat will probably be good enough, but it’s not looking like it’s going to be a particular strength of the game, either.

It’s funny because action combat and more stylized graphics are both things I’ve wanted from Dragon Age since day one, but bad execution can still ruin good ideas.

It’s a bit of a nitpick, but I’m also surprisingly off-put by the faction choice mechanic that serves as Rook’s backstory. All but one (maybe two if you count the Grey Wardens) are explicitly human organizations heavily tied to human nations and cultures. Veil Rangers seems to be the only valid choice for anyone who wants to play a Dalish Elf, and Dwarves and Qunari seem to have been given no consideration at all.

We’ve also seen the backstory blurbs for each faction, and they’re all pretty much the same. They all establish Rook as a born rebel who defies authority and breaks all the rules but still gets the job done because they’re just that good. It’s a tired trope, and one of my absolute most hated tropes at that.

So between that and their replacing the inquisitor, I’m already at a point where not only do I not care about Rook, but I actively dislike them and resent their presence in the story. That’s not a good starting point.

Finally, I do want to make mention of the prequel audio drama series, Vows and Vengeance. It’s terrible. The writing is awful, and the decision to not have a narrator in a purely audio format is baffling. The action sequences are just thirty seconds of the voice actors grunting with no context, like it’s the world’s worst ASMR video.

To be fair, Vows and Vengeance was contracted out and has different writers than Veilguard, so it isn’t necessarily a reflection of the quality of the game. But on top of everything else, it’s not helping.

About the only good news is that the companion cast still looks promising. That’s the one thing BioWare always gets right, and I have no reason to believe this will be an exception. Bellara and Emmrich in particular look like characters I’d love.

I’m not sure that’s enough on its own, though. I think Veilguard will probably work out to an okay standalone RPG, but it’s looking to be a terrible sequel to Inquistion, and that’s all I really cared about.

I take no pleasure in writing this post. I almost didn’t write it at all. But I wanted to get this all off my chest, and considering all the gushing and hopeful speculation I did on this blog after Trespasser all those years ago, it felt like I needed express how all that hope came crashing down.

It’s possible the marketing for the game has just severely misrepresented it. Maybe it will actually provide a satisfying resolution to the story that started with Inquisition, somehow. But I don’t think I want to pay $80 to find out when it’s just been one red flag after another.

You know, in the darkest depths of my depression, a conclusion to Trespasser has oftentimes been the only thing I had in my future to look forward to. Turns out I didn’t even have that.

This is one of the worst disappointments in my entire thirty years of gaming.

The Baffling Mismanagement of Age of Empires IV

Posted on October 2, 2023 by Tyler F.M. Edwards

Few game releases in recent years have brought me as much joy as Age of Empires IV. Age of Empires was one of the defining franchises of my childhood, and seeing it resurrected as a modern triple-A title felt almost miraculous. Even more miraculous is that it managed to live up to the sky-high expectations I had.

Which is what makes it so heartbreaking that the game has slowly but steadily been going off the rails ever since launch.

I was extremely happy with the game at first. It felt like the perfect mix of all the past entries in the franchise combined with modern sensibilities. Whereas AoE1 and 2 civilizations feel a bit too similar by modern standards, and AoE3 civs tended to be overwhelming in their complexity, AoE4 civilizations hit exactly the right balance of unique units and mechanics to make them meaningfully distinct without feeling like you need to relearn the whole game any time you switch.

The pacing felt just right, too. It’s still a slower paced RTS, as you’d expect from Age of Empires, but things like time to kill are sped up just enough to feel more palatable to a modern gamer.

AoE4 also boasted a level of immersion and historical faithfulness greater than any previous entry in the franchise. Of course there will always be some compromises for the sake of gameplay, but things like the documentary-style campaigns and the evolving languages of units gave the impression that the developers truly cared about authenticity.

I long-held that Age of Empires II was the best game in the franchise, probably never to be equaled, but after I settled into AoE4, I realized it had become my favourite.

I had only one major complaint at launch: AoE4 lacked content, especially for people who don’t want to play competitively. There were only eight civilizations, and only four had campaigns, all of which were relatively short.

I assumed DLC with more campaigns would be fast in coming, especially given the quick rate AoE2 has been churning them out.

In the meantime, I tried to tide myself over with skirmishes versus AI, but the skirmish AI in AoE4 is among the worst I’ve ever seen in an RTS, and they’re usually bad, so that’s saying something. Most of the time it’s hyper-aggressive for the first fifteen minutes or so, then just gives up on life and stops attacking, aging up, or doing much of anything. Other times it never attacks the entire game.

But I figured it just needs polish, right? Patches will fix it.

So I settled in to wait for DLC and AI improvements. And waited. And waited. And waited.

The first major update came about a year after launch with the Ottoman and Malian civilizations, but this proved a disappointment. There was no single-player content included, and the Malians felt more like AoE3 civilization — too different to easily parse for a more casual player.

At this point I began to despair that anything would ever be done for versus AI fans. Meanwhile the devs’ resources were spent on bizarre events like an enchanted grove biome and an in-game hunt for cryptids. If this were Age of Mythology, those might be fun ideas, but this was supposed to be the most immersive and historical AoE game yet.

These events probably didn’t take up much developer resources, but the fact that any resources were put into them at all while versus AI fans continued to be neglected rubs salt in the wound.

Meanwhile gameplay design also continued to shift away from the casual player. Multiple civilizations were given additional unique units, adding significant complexity to the game. I barely tolerate this kind of chaotic design in MMORPGs, where it’s par for the course, and I definitely don’t want to see it in an RTS.

Despite the poor AI, I was still playing skirmishes occasionally, but this pretty much put an end to that. I don’t like having to relearn the game every time I come back from a break.

That brings us to the current day and the upcoming Sultans Ascend expansion. Its announcement provided a glimmer of hope, and there are still parts of it that seem promising, but increasingly it seems to be another series of unforced errors.

Given the history of the game to date, I had modest expectations for the campaign content, but even those were not met. I expected at least two campaigns — one for the Abbasid Dynasty, one for the Delhi Sultanate. I mean, it’s in the name, right? As a stampy-boi enjoyer, the idea of a Delhi campaign excited me.

But we’re only getting one campaign, focused on the Crusades. Presumably this will be played exclusively as the Abbasid Dynasty and/or their new variant, the Ayyubids (more on that in a moment).

I have nothing against the campaign itself. It looks fun, and I like playing the Abbasids, even if they’re not one of my absolute favourites. But it’s an underwhelmingly small amount of content after two years of waiting, even if it is slightly longer than the average AoE campaign (eight missions). By comparison, AoE2’s recent DLCs have generally offered three campaigns of 5-6 missions each, for a total of around fifteen.

I enjoy AoE4’s campaigns more than most, but they’re not really any better than AoE2’s in terms of depth or quality. There’s no obvious justification for the lesser amount of content.

The new civilizations, Byzantines and Japanese, were never really on my wishlist, so they don’t do a lot for me (I grant this is purely subjective, however), especially when they don’t come up with campaigns and skirmishes are still in such a sorry state.

That brings us to the variant civilizations, a banner feature for the Sultans Ascend and possibly the most bizarre choice ever made by an Age of Empires game.

Each provides a new twist on an existing civilization’s gameplay. The concept isn’t terrible, though I think we’d all prefer actual new civilizations, but the execution looks disastrous. Age of Empires has always been about playing as civilizations, as whole nations and cultures, but these variants are based subcultures, specific organizations, or even single individuals like Jeanne d’Arc.

Worse still, historical realism appears to have been thrown out the window. China’s variant was initially dubbed “Empire of Jade,” which is not a thing that ever existed.

Following some community pushback, it was renamed Zhu Xi’s Legacy, which references a Chinese philosopher to give a bit more historical justification. The “Sultan’s Army” variant was similarly renamed to Ayyubids. This seemed a step in the right direction, but a deep-dive on the Jeanne d’Arc faction showed that historical accuracy is still not at all a concern.

Focusing on a single individual where matches are meant to represent hundreds of years is already a bit dodgy, but their interpretation of Jeanne is pure fantasy. She has a “Divine Restoration” ability that can heal allies, and she eventually upgrades into wielding a massive hand cannon.

Look, it’s a video game. I get it. I’m not opposed to her being a combat unit like she was in the campaign (though for what it’s worth in reality she claimed never to have killed a man personally). But she can be a hero unit and have powerful abilities while still respecting historical accuracy. The idea of her slinging out healing spells while cutting a swath through the enemy with a medieval bazooka strains credibility beyond the breaking point.

(Because of course some sexist trolls have come out of the woodwork to complain about a woman existing, I need to point out that isn’t my objection. The contributions of women throughout history are often overlooked, and seeking to right that is a noble goal. This is just a bad way to do it.)

Yes, it’s a small thing, but small things add up. And they present an insight into the the mindset of the developers. They could have called her heal something like “Rally Cry” as opposed to the more obviously fantastical Divine Restoration. They chose not to, and that speaks volumes.

It’s especially frustrating because some of the gameplay concepts behind the variant civilizations do sound fun, and they’re being wasted on these weirdly niche variants. I like the idea of a faction that focuses on fewer, better units as the Order of the Dragon (Holy Roman Empire variant) is reported to, but it’s such a waste not to use that as the basis for a whole new civilization. Perhaps the Vietnamese or some other culture known for triumphing over seemingly more powerful opponents.

People offer the defence that you don’t have to play the variant civs if you don’t like them, but you still have to encounter them if you play multiplayer, they still factor into the price of the DLC, and most importantly, it again speaks to poor use of development resources. Less than half the game’s civilizations have campaigns, but they can spare the resources for enchanted groves and Magic Rambo Joan of Arc?

I’ll also add that while we don’t know much about the Japanese gameplay right now, what we’ve heard sends up some potential red flags as well. An apparent focus on ninjas, complete with smoke bombs, feels much more like a pop culture view of medieval Japan than anything rooted in reality.

Adding insult to injury, Sultans Ascend is quite expensive. In my country it’s selling for $19.99, whereas most AoE2 DLCs are $10.99. As a campaign player, I’m paying nearly twice the price for about half as much content. It contributes to a growing feeling that solo and casual players are viewed as second-class citizens by the developers, expected to subsidize the game while getting a fraction of the development resources.

This all feels weirdly reminiscent of World of Warcraft’s “raid or die” issues and the slow, steady decline they brought about. I don’t know how much this is really affecting AoE4’s fortunes, but I can say there’s at least one player who feels like he’s being pushed away from the game.

There’s still a decent chance I’ll buy Sultans Ascend, perhaps on sale. The new campaign is still appealing. But in light of how much I loved the game at launch, the fact that it’s even in question is a damning statement about the management of the game.

Superior Realities

Tag Archives: epic nerd rant

Disappointment Around Dragon Age: The Veilguard

The Baffling Mismanagement of Age of Empires IV

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