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veiled in flesh the godhead see
Monday, 16 December 2024 10:17 amLast night, having after several weeks of play flogged my way through the entirety of Dragon Age: The Veilguard (the new Bioware game), I arrived at the climactic battle in my characteristic gameplay state: having duly and grimly maxed out all my companions' levels, completed all their individual angst-ridden storylines, refined my and their equipment to the highest quality, secured my romance of choice, massaged my allies to the greatest possible functionality, scoured every local map for quest markers, and knocked off every quest listing in my journal. Then I clicked on the fateful doorway to enter the final confrontation, and the game crashed to desktop. At which point I thought "Thank fuck!" and went to bed in a state of relief that the cosmic wossnames were, for once, looking out for me and, probably, my blood pressure.
What I am saying is, having finished the damned thing this morning in a state of fulminating irritation, I am now going to launch into a full-fledged rant on how much this game annoyed me from the vantage point of someone who both dropped a bucketload of money to upgrade my computer to run it, and has damned well played it to the hilt, if only more or less out of sheer bloody-mindedness.
I am a Bioware fangirl. I have played all the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games multiple times, some of them over and over and over again (probably nearly twenty run-throughs of Inquisition). I love their worldbuilding, their ethos of character interaction, their ability to present difficult choices and actual consequences, their humour and pathos and even their gosh-darned political sweep, this last being something I usually hate in my fluffy down-time pursuits. The last few weeks have consequently been marked by rising anger, betrayal and grief as I realised, incrementally, just how far the makers of Veilguard have departed from the previous games in the series: not just in the sense of ignoring or contradicting huge swathes of backstory and event and history and build-up, but in their clearly shifted goalposts, their determination to make, at base, simply a different kind of game.
How different? let me count the ways in which it has repeatedly made me swear, rage, cry or succumb to ennui.
What I am saying is, having finished the damned thing this morning in a state of fulminating irritation, I am now going to launch into a full-fledged rant on how much this game annoyed me from the vantage point of someone who both dropped a bucketload of money to upgrade my computer to run it, and has damned well played it to the hilt, if only more or less out of sheer bloody-mindedness.
I am a Bioware fangirl. I have played all the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games multiple times, some of them over and over and over again (probably nearly twenty run-throughs of Inquisition). I love their worldbuilding, their ethos of character interaction, their ability to present difficult choices and actual consequences, their humour and pathos and even their gosh-darned political sweep, this last being something I usually hate in my fluffy down-time pursuits. The last few weeks have consequently been marked by rising anger, betrayal and grief as I realised, incrementally, just how far the makers of Veilguard have departed from the previous games in the series: not just in the sense of ignoring or contradicting huge swathes of backstory and event and history and build-up, but in their clearly shifted goalposts, their determination to make, at base, simply a different kind of game.
How different? let me count the ways in which it has repeatedly made me swear, rage, cry or succumb to ennui.
- I get that setting it in Tevinter is necessarily a shift to an area we haven't seen before other than by implication, but Veilguard simply abandons or ignores too much history from the previous games. The mage rebellion has dropped off the map entirely, which, fair, Tevinter didn't experience it, but given the carry-through of the Inquisitor and Varric and Harding, too many previous decisions and characters are simply not referenced. Hawke and the possible stuck-in-the-Fade outcome? The Hero of Ferelden's search for a blight cure? various romances - Solas/Inquisitor (particularly!), Dorian/Bull? I know that that's a lot of possible ramifications given different player choices in different games, but they managed the world-state specifications and brief acknowledgements in DAI, why can't they here? What about Tevinter and slavery and Fenris's whole crusade? we don't even see slaves. And blight contact used to be a death sentence, see: whole basis for the DAO warden thing, and now it's not an issue? Despite relying on player investment in previous games as a marketing tool, they have surgically detatched Veilguard from a lot of what's gone before, and it feels like a severed limb.
- Veilguard gameplay presents a huge loss of what I can only call interactive texture, a sort of cut-price flattening of environments and radical slimming of NPC interactions. Compared to Skyhold, the Lighthouse feels bland and rather cold; there is a lack of connection to supporting allies who are dispersed to different allied bases rather than existing in a community. It feels like a related problem that quests are often tickboxes, in which motivations are often insubstantial and outcomes perfunctory. High-stakes choices feel unearned, decisions made for companions are unscaffolded and based on insufficient information. Too often it feels as though the game is paying lip service to agency. Losing or blighting a companion based on an arbitrary choice is maddening, I strenuously object to being blindsided by losses I have no way of predicting or avoiding. I play games to feel instrumental, not helpless.
- The overall feel of the game tends to a deliberate darkness and nastiness, environments and events have a relentless emphasis on grimness and destruction - not just metaphorically, actually, too often the visuals are too damned dark to see properly. The blight in particular is disgusting and depressing. If I wanted to wade through squelching tentacles and pulsating boils I'd play a horror game.
- The escalation of stakes was ridiculous - not just another Blight, but gods? TWO gods? Multiple blighted dragons? multiple Archdemons? they trashed the world. It was all so over-the-top I couldn't really get invested in the actually interesting reveals in lore and history and what have you.
- I realise these have never been open-world games, but previous iterations did not lead one around by the nose quite as egregiously. Inquisition managed a wonderfully open-world feel, the rollback on that is heartbreaking. Too much of Veilguard felt like blindly following the little diamonds towards the next quest objective, through often confusing landscapes that were painted backdrops rather than a real world.
- if I wanted to play timed or dexterity challenges (which I do not at all in any way) I would play a fucking console game. If I wanted to repeatedly solve stupid blight-node puzzles I would play stupid puzzle games. The puzzles are not intelligent and are often not properly scaffolded. I have never resorted to walkthroughs so often in my life, mostly because I simply didn't care enough to work it out for myself.
- If I wanted to micromanage tactical combos I would fucking look for that kind of game. Skill improvement felt arbitrary and opaque, trees were too complicated and new bonuses felt meaningless, combos were too fiddly to bother with, I ended up leaving companions to do their own thing. Playing on the lowest difficulty meant that button-mashing was actually fine as a strategy, but I do not like feeling that significant development time went into combat refinements I don't care about, at the cost of character and narrative interactions I do actually care about.
- I do actually want to micromanage equipment bonuses, I do not want to acquire random arbitrary gear with constellated bonuses I cannot optimise for myself. Nor to I wish to accumulate huge quantities of gear I cannot sell, or remove from my inventory, or give to my companions. Or even look through easily, they could have given us a damned sort function so I wasn't wading through irrelevant armour types every time I picked up something new and tried to work out if it was worth swapping.
- I actually loved the companion personalities and stories, but too often your own choice of response wasn't actually meaningful - in fact, a lot of the time I felt that choices on the conversation wheel were making no damned difference to anything. I can only speak personally to the Lucanis romance, which was deeply unsatisfying because it basically dropped off the map as soon as you'd made the conversation choice which was explicitly supposed to trigger it. It felt tick-box and unsubstantial, with too huge a gap between "you're in a romance!" and any actual narrative payoff. There was no supporting background detail, banter, romance interactions; hell, Fallout 4 did a better job of making a romance feel organic and scaffolded, and that's an FPS.
- Overall the writing actually wasn't brilliant, interactions often felt immature. Egregious example: Taash's nonbinary story was great, except it wholesalely dumped the idiom and structure of contemporary gender identity - in fact, of an extremely recent, narrow and specific idea of gender identity - on top of a fantasy setting, and made absolutely no attempt whatsoever to integrate it into any of the Thedas cultures, either linguistically or conceptually. I loved that they included it so respectfully, but the implementation in a weird way felt particularly young - it needed a more objective perspective and more nuanced consideration of the cultural implications in the Thedas setting.
This game gave me the same feeling that recent Marvel superhero films have done: that I have just bought into a marketing exercise whose point is to maximise sales to the broadest possible demographic, one which is defined, in sharp contradistinction to previous efforts in the genre, as being significantly composed of people who do not share my tastes or interests. This has resulted, primarily, in a glossy, high-production-value product focused on action and combat, onto which gestures at narrative, world-building, fidelity to previous products, and any other loci of consumer investment, have been pasted as superficially as possible. If we're talking gods, this is not the thing itself, this is a meat-puppet avatar waved on the end of a tentacle, an extrusion prettily shaped, but glassy-eyed and vacant. When I play Dragon Age, I want to play Dragon Age, goddammit, not this ersatz, lobotomised thing.
