i hardly ever agree to anything Stormwolf says but here i concur
finished the game with the necromancer and that rogue dude as companions (most of the other companions died anyway by the end). i never encountered any of the horrible woke shit that clickbait-utubers have you believe this game is all about
warrior with Reaper/shield throw build was also quite entertaining to play
It is not just the woke writing.
The writing in general, characters in general were very childish in that game. Yes, I actually BOUGHT the game, thinking I would give some money for a dev I once loved. I gave it quite a few hours to get good.
But I couldn't buy it. There was no nuance, no soul to these characters. Writing worse than Marvel. "Quirky".
They hired activists and not professionals. Big mistake.
i hardly ever agree to anything Stormwolf says but here i concur
finished the game with the necromancer and that rogue dude as companions (most of the other companions died anyway by the end). i never encountered any of the horrible woke shit that clickbait-utubers have you believe this game is all about
Earlier
pho08 wrote:
i'm only 20 ish hours in and i skip most of the dialogue and piece the story together from the unskippable cutscenes...
dunno if ill ever finish it though
...
The game is fucking garbage, just admit that sometimes you enjoy fucking garbage rather than trying to feed the sewer scraps to the rest of us.
I have a $200 print of DAO on my wall, the original game was a masterpiece
It was like the first piece of a puzzle for what CRPGs should have been after the isometric age. The perfect transition into the 3D world. It took them so long, it worked so well and you could immediately tell. You can still tell today when replaying it.
For it to consistently be followed up with utter, childish garbage makes each new entry feel like another incredibly missed opportunity
I'm almost 40 and the release of big RPGs in general has slowed down to a crawl. How many more Elders Scrolls or The Witchers will there be over the next 30 years? The current trajectory suggests 2, maybe 3 more TES games. Dragon Age can't even find its footing because they keep treating it like shit.
DAII was rushed and combat sucked
DAIII was far too simple, and it seemed like relationships were more of a priority than combat / conversations
DAV followed the trend as it also drowned itself in the woke pond
Meanwhile the perfect template for Dragon Age sits in a forgotten closet. Now it'll be in limbo until some other clowns decide to take stab at projecting their issues onto the world, or until a Larian comes along.
DAV followed the trend as it also drowned itself in the woke pond
Don't know, baldur's gate 3 seems to have also woke pond and it's far more successful , though I did not use comparison between that 2.
IMO Veilguard's failure is also more to do with tough competition and the series drifting away from it's roots.
baldur's gate 3 also changed combat but baldur's gates series always had turn based elements so 3 just moved purely to turn based combat instead of RTwP, and it's also fits with D&D rules.
BGIII also had relationship-simulator vibes and I didn't like that at all. But I'd take BGIIIs wokeness over Dragon Age's. At least BGIII comes with challenging gameplay and more complex game mechanics. When there's a decent game behind it all, it stands a better chance by default - which makes the weaker elements far more easier to look past.
It's funny because DAO probably started the deeper pursue-a-relationship-thing in RPGs. Except it did it right, and not everyone automatically wanted to fuck you. I remember having to talk to Morrigan so many times, trying to answer her in the way that helped. In BGIII (maybe this game too, I will assume) anyone'll jump your bones.
I have a $200 print of DAO on my wall, the original game was a masterpiece
It was like the first piece of a puzzle for what CRPGs should have been after the isometric age. The perfect transition into the 3D world. It took them so long, it worked so well and you could immediately tell. You can still tell today when replaying it.
For it to consistently be followed up with utter, childish garbage makes each new entry feel like another incredibly missed opportunity
I'm almost 40 and the release of big RPGs in general has slowed down to a crawl. How many more Elders Scrolls or The Witchers will there be over the next 30 years? The current trajectory suggests 2, maybe 3 more TES games. Dragon Age can't even find its footing because they keep treating it like shit.
DAII was rushed and combat sucked
DAIII was far too simple, and it seemed like relationships were more of a priority than combat / conversations
DAV followed the trend as it also drowned itself in the woke pond
Meanwhile the perfect template for Dragon Age sits in a forgotten closet. Now it'll be in limbo until some other clowns decide to take stab at projecting their issues onto the world, or until a Larian comes along.
It really sucks
DA Inquisition dialogue:
Inquisitor: We have to figure out how do deal with this incursion
Female: Yes, i have a plan for that. If we sit in the forest on both sides of the road where they'll pass and wait for the darkspawn, we can execute a pincer movement
Inquisitor: You're like super hot
Looks Like Dragon Age: The Veilguard Isn’t a Big Hit as PS Plus Freebie
PS Plus Essential March 2025 games went live earlier this week, with Dragon Age: The Veilguard among them. Despite headlining this month’s lineup, it looks like the game hasn’t quite taken off as a freebie yet either, if trends are any indication.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is an outlier in PS Plus monthly games
As a frequent user of PSNProfiles, which bases its charts on player data, I always look at the list of ‘Popular Games This Week’ to see what’s trending. Every time PS Plus lineup refreshes, the biggest games in the catalog instantly pop up in the top ten. This week is different, however, and it stands out.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is sitting at the bottom of this week’s most popular games, in the ninth spot at the time of this writing. Above it are games that were released on PS Plus in previous months, like High On Life and God of War Ragnarok. This may change as the weekend approaches, but at present, Dragon Age: The Veilguard only has 1,565 recent players.
I should note that PSNProfiles isn’t indicative of the entire PSN, but it’s fairly accurate when it comes to what’s trending. I’m one of those who added Dragon Age: The Veilguard to their library (as I do with all PS Plus monthly games) but haven’t dabbled into it yet.
Interestingly, I’m seeing a similar pattern on gaming forums like Reddit. Quite a few players have said that they have downloaded Dragon Age: The Veilguard but don’t have plans to play it yet. Others have simply claimed it.
Have our readers given it a chance?
boundle (thoughts on cracking AITD) wrote:
i guess thouth if without a legit key the installation was rolling back we are all fucking then
Despite being handed out at no cost to millions of subscribers, The Veilguard couldn’t even crack the top 10 most-played PlayStation games in March. According to True Trophies, which tracks over 3.4 million active PlayStation Network accounts, the game barely reached 15th place in player engagement. For context, it was outperformed by The Cowabunga Collection, a retro collection of decades-old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games—a humbling reality for what was supposed to be a major release from one of EA’s premier RPG studios.
boundle (thoughts on cracking AITD) wrote:
i guess thouth if without a legit key the installation was rolling back we are all fucking then
Picked it up as part of the Playstation monthly games, I miss out on some of the visuals compared to the PC version but I certainly didn't miss out on what the hell happened to the everything in the series since Inquisition?
The writing seems to do away with almost everything minus a few events from Inquisition and for some reason you can customize the Inquisitor itself in full detail for whatever reason.
Considering how especially the elves were treated in the series up until now you'd kinda expect a full on revolt on the humans going on here but nope, its surprisingly chill about the whole entire race being enslaved thing.
Very much black and white as well but from memory that is something that only the first game was more nuanced about and the sequels progressed further into action-RPG territory with less morally grey choices and consequences or questions asked.
Frostbite is lovely to look at but exploration is pretty dull overall, though the huge sprawling areas that took forever to get through in Inquisition probably saw some scaling back here since it was pretty impopular to where the first Hinterlands area turned into a bit of a meme or saw players drop the game after trying to slog through the zone.
EDIT: Oh and fuck the new Darkspawn appearance. Before I forget.
Sure its visuals again but fucking hell are they ugly and now also cartoony.
Well well well...
The wormy vulture is back to feast on the bones of this garbage:
Quote:
Inside the ‘Dragon Age’ Debacle That Gutted EA’s BioWare Studio
The latest game in BioWare’s fantasy role-playing series went through ten years of development turmoil
In early November, on the eve of the crucial holiday shopping season, staffers at the video-game studio BioWare were feeling optimistic. After an excruciating development cycle, they had finally released their latest game, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and the early reception was largely positive. The role-playing game was topping sales charts on Steam, and solid, if not spectacular, reviews were rolling in.
But in the weeks that followed, the early buzz cooled as players delved deeper into the fantasy world, and some BioWare employees grew anxious. For months, everyone at the subsidiary of the video-game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. had been under intense pressure. The studio’s previous two games, Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, had flopped, and there were rumors that if Dragon Age underperformed, BioWare might become another of EA’s many casualties.
Not long after Christmas, the bad news surfaced. EA announced in January that the new Dragon Age had only reached 1.5 million players, missing the company’s expectations by 50%. The holiday performance of another recently released title, EA Sports FC 2025, was also subpar, compounding the problem.
As a result of the struggling titles, EA Chief Executive Officer Andrew Wilson explained, the company would be significantly lowering its sales forecast for the fiscal year ahead. EA’s share price promptly plunged 18%.
“Dragon Age had a high-quality launch and was well-reviewed by critics and those who played,” Wilson later said on an earnings call. “However, it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market.”
Days after the sales revision, EA laid off a chunk of BioWare’s staff at the studio’s headquarters in Edmonton, Canada, and permanently transferred many of the remaining workers to other divisions. For the storied, 30-year-old game maker, it was a stunning fall that left many fans wondering how things had gone so haywire — and what might come next for the stricken studio.
According to interviews with nearly two dozen people who worked on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, there were several reasons behind its failure, including marketing misfires, poor word of mouth and a 10-year gap since the previous title. Above all, sources point to the rebooting of the product from a single-player game to a multiplayer one — and then back again — a switcheroo that muddled development and inflated the title’s budget, they say, ultimately setting the stage for EA’s potentially unrealistic sales expectations. A spokesperson for EA declined to comment.
The union between BioWare and EA started off with lofty aspirations. In 2007, EA executives announced they were acquiring BioWare and another gaming studio in a deal worth $860 million. The goal was to diversify their slate of games, which was heavy in sports titles, like Madden NFL, and light in the kind of adventure and role-playing games that BioWare was known for.
Initially, it looked like a smart move thanks to a string of big hits. In 2014, BioWare released Dragon Age: Inquisition, the third installment in a popular action series dropping players in a semi-open world full of magic, elves and fire-spewing dragons. The fantasy title went on to win the much-coveted Game of the Year Award and sell 12 million copies, according to its executive producer Mark Darrah — a major validation of EA’s diversification strategy.
Before long, Darrah and Mike Laidlaw, the creative director, began kicking around ideas for the next Dragon Age installment — code name: Joplin — aiming for a game that would be smaller in scope. But before much could get done, BioWare shifted the studio’s focus to more pressing titles coming down the pike.
In 2017, BioWare released Mass Effect: Andromeda, the fourth installment in a big-budget action series set in space. Unlike its critically successful predecessors, the game received mediocre reviews and was widely mocked by fans. A few months after the disappointing release, the head of BioWare stepped down and was soon replaced by Microsoft Inc.’s Casey Hudson, an alumni of BioWare’s early, formative years.
Like much of the industry, EA executives were growing increasingly enamored of so-called live-service games, such as Destiny and Overwatch, in which players continue to engage with and spend money on a title for months or even years after its initial release. With EA aiming to make a splash in the fast-growing category, BioWare poured resources into Anthem, a live-service shooter game that checked all the right boxes.
One day in October 2017, Laidlaw summoned his colleagues into a conference room and pulled out a few pricey bottles of whisky. The next Dragon Age sequel, he told the room, would also be pivoting to an online, live-service game — a decision from above that he disagreed with. He was resigning from the studio. The assembled staff stayed late through the night, drinking and reminiscing about the franchise they loved.
“I wish that pivot had never occurred,” Darrah would later recount on YouTube. “EA said, ‘Make this a live service.’ We said, ‘We don’t know how to do that. We should basically start the project over.’”
Former art director Matt Goldman replaced Laidlaw as creative director, and with a tiny team began pushing ahead on a new multiplayer version of Dragon Age — code name: Morrison — while everyone else helped to finish Anthem, which was struggling to coalesce. Goldman pushed for a “pulpy,” more lighthearted tone than previous entries, which suited an online game but was a drastic departure from the dark, dynamic stories that fans loved in the fantasy series.
In February 2019, BioWare released Anthem. Reviews were scathing, calling the game tedious and convoluted. Fans were similarly displeased. On social media, players demanded to know why a studio renowned for beloved stories and characters had made an online shooter with a scattershot narrative.
In the wake of BioWare’s second consecutive flop, the multiplayer version of Dragon Age continued to take shape. While the previous games in the franchise had featured tactical combat, this one would be all action. Instead of quests that players would only experience once, it would be full of missions that could be replayed repeatedly with friends and strangers. Important characters couldn’t die because they had to persist for multiple players across never-ending gameplay.
As the game evolved over the next two years, the failure of Anthem hovered over the studio. Were they making the same mistakes? Some BioWare employees scoffed that they were simply building “Anthem with dragons.”
Throughout 2020, the pandemic disrupted the game’s already fraught development. In December, Hudson, the head of the studio, and Darrah, the head of the franchise, resigned. Shortly thereafter, Gary McKay, BioWare’s new studio head, revealed yet another shift in strategy. Moving forward, the next Dragon Age would no longer be multiplayer.
“We were thinking, ‘Does this make sense, does this play into our strengths, or is this going to be another challenge we have to face?’” McKay later told Bloomberg News. “No, we need to get back to what we’re really great at.”
In theory, the reversion back to Dragon Age’s tried-and-true, single-player format should have been welcome news inside BioWare. But there was a catch. Typically, this kind of pivot would be coupled with a reset and a period of pre-production allowing the designers to formulate a new vision for the game. Instead, the team was asked to change the game’s fundamental structure and recast the entire story on the fly, according to people familiar with the new marching orders. They were given a year and a half to finish and told to aim for as wide a market as possible.
This strict deadline became a recurring problem. The development team would make decisions believing that they had less than a year to release the game, which severely limited the stories they could tell and the world they could build. Then the title would inevitably be delayed a few months, at which point they’d be stuck with those old decisions with no chance to stop and reevaluate what was working.
At the end of 2022, amid continually dizzying leadership changes, the studio started distributing an “alpha” build of Dragon Age to get feedback internally and from outside playtesters. According to people familiar with the process, the reactions were concerning. The game’s biggest problem, early players agreed, was a lack of satisfying choices and consequences. Previous BioWare titles had presented players with gut-wrenching decisions. Which allies to save? Which factions to spare? Which enemies to slay? Such dilemmas made fans feel like they were shaping the narrative — historically, a big draw for many BioWare games.
But Dragon Age’s multiplayer roots limited such choices, according to people familiar with the development. BioWare delayed the game’s release again while the team shoehorned in a few major decisions, such as which of two cities to save from a dragon attack. But because most of the parameters were already well established, the designers struggled to pair the newly retrofitted choices for players with meaningful consequences downstream.
In 2023, to help finish Dragon Age, BioWare brought in a second, internal team, which was working on the next Mass Effect game. For decades there’d been tension between the two well-established camps, known for their starkly divergent ways of doing things. BioWare developers like to joke that the Dragon Age crew was like a pirate ship, meandering and sometimes traveling off course but eventually reaching the port. In contrast, the Mass Effect group was called the USS Enterprise, after the Star Trek ship, because commands were issued straight down from the top and executed zealously.
As the Mass Effect directors took control, they scoffed that the Dragon Age squad had been doing a shoddy job and began excluding their leaders from pivotal meetings, according to people familiar with the internal friction. Over time, the Mass Effect team went on to overhaul parts of the game and design a number of additional scenes, including a rich, emotional finale that players loved. But even changes that appeared to improve the game stoked the simmering rancor inside BioWare, infuriating Dragon Age leaders who had been told they didn’t have the budget for such big, ambitious swings.
“It always seemed that, when the Mass Effect team made its demands in meetings with EA regarding the resources it needed, it got its way,” said David Gaider, a former lead writer on the Dragon Age franchise who left before development of the new game started. “But Dragon Age always had to fight against headwinds.”
Early testers and Mass Effect leads complained about the game’s snarky tone — a style of video-game storytelling, once ascendant, that was quickly falling out of fashion in pop culture but had been part of Goldman’s vision for the multiplayer game. Worried that Dragon Age could face the same outcome as Forspoken — a recent title that had been hammered over its impertinent banter — BioWare leaders ordered a belated rewrite of the game’s dialogue to make it sound more serious. (In the end, the resulting tonal inconsistencies would only add to the game’s poor reception with fans.)
A mass layoff at BioWare and a mandate to work overtime depleted morale while a voice actors strike limited the writers’ ability to revise the dialogue and create new scenes. An initial trailer made the next Dragon Age seem more like Fortnite than a dark fantasy role-playing game, triggering concerns that EA didn’t know how to market the game.
When Dragon Age: The Veilguard finally premiered on Halloween 2024 after many internal delays, some staff members thought there was a lot to like, including the game’s new combat system. But players were less impressed, and sales sputtered.
“The reactions of the fan base are mixed, to put it gently,” said Caitie, a popular Dragon Age YouTuber. “Some, like myself, adore it for various reasons. Others feel utterly betrayed by certain design choices.”
Following the layoffs and staff reassignments at BioWare earlier in the year, a small team of a few dozen employees is now working on the next Mass Effect. After three high-profile failures in a row, questions linger about EA’s commitment to the studio. In May, the company relabeled its Edmonton headquarters from a BioWare office to a hub for all EA staff in the area.
Historically, BioWare has never been the most important studio at EA, which generates more than $7 billion in annual revenue largely from its sports games and shooters. Depending on the timing of its launches, BioWare typically accounts for just 5% of EA’s annual bookings, according to estimates by Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co.
Even so, there may be strategic reasons for EA to keep supporting BioWare. Single-player role-playing games are expensive to make but can lead to huge windfalls when successful, as demonstrated by recent hits like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3. In order to grow, EA needs more than just sports franchises, said TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz. Trying to fix its fantasy-focused studio may be easier than starting something new.
“That said, if they shuttered the doors tomorrow I wouldn’t be totally surprised,” Creutz added. “It has been over a decade since they produced a hit.”
But I thought it was going to be a hit even if it went woke, Jase?
Where's that xeet, Jase? Why did you delete the xeet, Jase?
boundle (thoughts on cracking AITD) wrote:
i guess thouth if without a legit key the installation was rolling back we are all fucking then
He doesn't really talk about what made it fail, which renders his entire articles useless. Woke mob never able to admit to their idiotic philosophy of life being widely unpopular
He doesn't really talk about what made it fail, which renders his entire articles useless. Woke mob never able to admit to their idiotic philosophy of life being widely unpopular
So many "game articles" are now about feeling of the dev teams, struggles, mission, vision..
Lttle space is given any actual info about pros and cons.
harballaz wrote:
Hey dont be so hard the little console eunuchs, they need time to aim their lil vibratin thumbstick.
People still liked jason schreier for "real journalism" he did.
I still wonder what that was and why they still give a fuck about that.
The guy is cooked. Why take him seriously at all?
He is just another candidate for switching professions from supposed journalist to burger flipper.
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