Dragon Age 4: The Veilguard - out October 31st

[Sly Boots]

If you didn't play the Trespasser DLC before... play Trespasser. Hard to believe it wasn't part of the base game, given how fundamentally important it is to everything in Dragon Age.

Seems like the devs agree lol:

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/dragon-ag ... base-game/

[Sly Boots]

My Inquisition playthrough has slightly run out of steam lol.

TBF I've played it this time for upwards of 50 hours I think, but the issues I've had with it in the past still persist - while the story content is good, there's just too much of everything else and the side content isn't good enough to justify how much of your time it takes up. In other words, it suffers hugely from bloat. There's too many maps of too great a size with too many collectibles and side quests of the 'go here, pick up that' variety.

What I'll probably do is give myself a week or two to recoup and then just go for the rest of the DLC and story content to prepare for DA4.

I'm even more glad Veilguard is basically dropping the open world thing in favour of smaller, more impactful areas and story beats, and while the combat in Inquisition is fine (I'm playing a mage this time and... ehh...) I'm equally glad it's another area they've apparently concentrated on making fun.

[Wrathbone]

I'm even more glad Veilguard is basically dropping the open world thing in favour of smaller, more impactful areas and story beats

Absolutely this. Inquisition is a great 30 hour Bioware game draped over 100 hours of busywork. In some ways I prefer DA2 to Inquisition, as despite its many flaws it's a much tighter game. It'll never happen, but a remake of DA2 without all the repeated areas and some more life injected into the city would be superb.

[Sly Boots]

Yeah. I still maintain PCG's 94% review of DA2 was lolworthy, but it's telling that despite its flaws I've still played it to completion half a dozen times down the years. It keeps up the pace pretty well and at a breezy 30-40 hours doesn't outstay its welcome.

[Sly Boots]

I'm even more glad Veilguard is basically dropping the open world thing in favour of smaller, more impactful areas and story beats

Inquisition is a great 30 hour Bioware game draped over 100 hours of busywork.

Having forgotten that you said this before, I just came here to make the exact same point

In any case, replay of DAI complete, took me far too much time but in the end I was glad I did - I'd essentially forgotten everything about Fen'Harel, what he did, why and what his future plans are, which look to lead intrinsically into DA4, so that refresher was very useful.

I think before I'd had a fairly oppositional relationship to Solas, but this time made more effort to get close to him and see things from his point of view, and as a result I think the end of Trespasser was quite different this time to my previous run, a lot more companionship and sympathy. As a result, I'm really interested to see how his role in DA4 plays out, and to what extent my Inquisitor character from this run will get involved.

All in all, DAI remains what it always was for me, horribly bloated middle that leaves you in danger of losing interest altogether in the entire endeavour, bookended by some of the best story content for the franchise. If you were to map my interest on a graph, it would basically be an inverse bell-curve

Roll on the end of the month

[Wrathbone]

Solas’s motivations are what I find curious. From our perspective, the creation of the Veil to put an end to the elven ‘gods’ and their reign of tyranny was clearly the right thing to do. So after Solas woke up from his millennia-long slumber, why did he decide he’d made a mistake and had to restore the Evanuris? Is the world so messed up now in his view that magical enslavement under the yoke of self-made gods (who are, I imagine, quite pissed off at this point) is preferable?

And then there’s Flemeth / Mythal and whatever’s going on with her in the end credits to the main game. On the surface, it looks like Solas takes her soul or power for himself, but what if it’s Mythal choosing to become part of Solas instead? She’s done it before with Flemeth and probably others. Has her influence perhaps altered Solas and his intentions?

Can’t wait for DA4 now!

[Sly Boots]

Solas’s motivations are what I find curious. From our perspective, the creation of the Veil to put an end to the elven ‘gods’ and their reign of tyranny was clearly the right thing to do. So after Solas woke up from his millennia-long slumber, why did he decide he’d made a mistake and had to restore the Evanuris? Is the world so messed up now in his view that magical enslavement under the yoke of self-made gods (who are, I imagine, quite pissed off at this point) is preferable?

And then there’s Flemeth / Mythal and whatever’s going on with her in the end credits to the main game. On the surface, it looks like Solas takes her soul or power for himself, but what if it’s Mythal choosing to become part of Solas instead? She’s done it before with Flemeth and probably others. Has her influence perhaps altered Solas and his intentions?

Can’t wait for DA4 now!

Will spoiler-tag my thoughts:

Spoiler

Spent quite a long time talking to him at the end of the Trespasser DLC... he's motivated by regret for essentially causing the death of the elves' entire world (those living in Thedas are a poor imitation of those of his time, he barely even recognises them as kin), and wants to restore things to as they were before. As for bringing back the Evanuris, when I asked him he just told me he "has a plan" - I assume we may see more of this plan in DA4. He seemed genuinely regretful about ending the mortal world to bring back the elves though - my inquisitor told Solas he'd prove him wrong, and Solas said that he hoped he did.

At the end of Trespasser, Solas is quite obviously wielding additional power taken from Mythal (such as when he's turning the Qunari to stone), and I think that, while it's a bit ambiguous, that Mythal was willingly giving him her power so that he could be the tool for her vengeance against the Evanuris. He laid out his plans quite clearly at the end of the DLC - he allowed Corypheus to recover the orb in the belief he would activate it but destroy himself in doing so. However, Corypheus' effective immortality meant that this plan backfired, and he joined us to help us (and him) recover the orb. That's why he's genuinely devastated at the end of the main aim that it gets destroyed in the final fight against Corypheus, but still tells us that it's not our fault. The orb (which he lacked the power himself to activate after his big sleep and presumably the massive toll of creating the Veil) was his way back physically into the Fade where he could enact the next part of his plan, but I suspect he needed the extra shot of godly power from Mythal to do so without it. I don't think his underlying intentions changed at all from the start of the base game to the end of Trespasser.

[Sly Boots]

Reviews starting to appear, and... well, there's a range of opinions lol:

"Colossal disappointment":



And:

"Astonishing":



More of a middle-ground for PCG:

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/dragon-ag ... rd-review/

[Sly Boots]

Damn, after watching that SkillUp review first and then watching Eurogamer's one... Zoe's take honestly sounds like sarcasm

I can't quite reconcile SU saying it's a banal, shallow mess devoid of conflict or meaningful choices, and ZDL saying it's literally the best Bioware game she's ever played. Like better than Mass Effect, better than DAO or KOTOR... really?

[Wrathbone]

I think she’s para-narrating Bertie’s EG review:

https://www.eurogamer.net/dragon-age-th ... ard-review

I tend to gel with his opinion more than anyone else at EG, so this is a huge box-tick for me.

On the other hand, I also tend to agree with MrMatty’s opinions on lots of RPGs, and he doesn’t appear to be happy.

[Sly Boots]

I think she’s para-narrating Bertie’s EG review:

https://www.eurogamer.net/dragon-age-th ... ard-review

I tend to gel with his opinion more than anyone else at EG, so this is a huge box-tick for me.

On the other hand, I also tend to agree with MrMatty’s opinions on lots of RPGs, and he doesn’t appear to be happy.

Lol, yeah, the wildly polarised take from a bunch of reviewers I generally agree with is a bit like witnessing mum and dad argue as a kid

I get enough red flags to delay a purchase here, getting a bit of a Starfield vibe here in that initial enthusiasm could well die down considerably once the public at large actually get their hands on it for a decent chunk of time.

As for things reviewers generally are agreeing on, I like the sound of more instanced zones vs big open world maps as in DAI, the art style doesn't bother me, nor does the pivot to more of a GoW like than a traditional RPG. However, the writing sounds really dull and lifeless, the characters milquetoast, the facial animations in particular being off-puttingly bad and the combat more of a chore after more than a dozen hours or so, and those are things that I think would get in the way of my personal enjoyment.

[Wrathbone]

Needless to say, I will be diving in from day one, though I’m not sure how impartial a canary I can be.

[Sly Boots]

Look forward to your thoughts

[Animalmother]

Watched the Skill Up review...it sounds like a game made for kids. The character design is from Pixar, there's no confrontation or hard decisions to be made and the puzzles and combat are dumbed down as to not be too challenging. The fact that he turned down the difficulty just to get to the end of the game quicker pretty much says it all.

I really hope this is not the same team making the new Mass Effect game

[Sly Boots]

Watched the Skill Up review...it sounds like a game made for kids. The character design is from Pixar, there's no confrontation or hard decisions to be made and the puzzles and combat are dumbed down as to not be too challenging. The fact that he turned down the difficulty just to get to the end of the game quicker pretty much says it all.

I really hope this is not the same team making the new Mass Effect game

I think the writing will kill it for me more than anything else. I'm not a DA purist, I've enjoyed the previous games but each one has been quite different to the previous ones. And as for the combat, having recently pushed myself through 100-odd hours of Inquisition (in preparation for this lol), during which the combat felt like a test of endurance more than anything, that aspect of this doesn't bother me that much on paper.

But what Inquisition has going for it, outside of the tedious side content, is a cracking main story and, for the most part, good character writing.

But if both those elements are missing in this, and the dialogue, cutscenes and choices are as bland and safe as they appear to be, that feels like the tipping point for me.