It’s tough to express how much of a bummer this whole mess has been. Veilguard is such an embarrassingly lazy, shallow experience.
Placing all of the blame on Busche isn’t fair, as she was brought in at the end of the development process, but it was her leadership that prevented the game from getting the extra time it needed.
The creative and design aspects of the game’s failure falls primarily on John Epler’s lap.
BioWare was so special for such a long time. Watching them fumble the ball directly into the deepest part of the toilet three times in a row feels completely insane.
Fuck EA forever, man.
Most people I talked to have refunded the game on steam. Nobody really had fun with it, except for one person that was completely new to dragon age. However, I don’t think she finished it either.
The best thing about the game for me personally was the music which was really good for the most part. But that’s not why I buy AAA games.
I don’t think so. The writing of Taash was so bad and uncomfortable for the most part that I genuinely didn’t know if they were trying to mock trans-people with this representation. It felt like they were just looking at a terminally online twitter user and modeled the character after that. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that taash is the worst character I’ve ever experienced in a triple A production.
Breaking with an established formula can be a big detriment to a franchise. We saw that with final fantasy, where FFXII was considered pretty bad for most FF fans, me included. The combat just seemed really weird at first. However, the combat got significantly better later on if you have access to more tools, but it takes a while to actually get to that point, so many people were very on the fence about the game.
Veilguard, on the other hand, doesn’t get better. It just stays bad and even confusing at times.
All time peak on steam is 90k - that’s horrendous. Obviously, that’s not the total sales and it’s also sold on other platforms, so we do not know the real number. However,the game went on discount not even 2 months after release, and a pretty hefty one at that, 35% I think. I don’t think it’s exaggerated to claim that the game didn’t hit 2 million sales yet which would be really bad. We don’t know the budget, but a figure that’s thrown around is 250 million dollar which is not unrealistic for a AAA production.
Meanwhile, the 3 people I know who played it all enjoyed it. Anecdotes!
Taash’s scenes seemed okay to me. The storyline with their mother is pretty close to what a friend of mine is going through now.
I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I kind of don’t believe what people say. I mean, I think sometimes they dislike a thing for reason A, but the words that come out are reason B. They say a character is badly written (B), but really they find the queer subject matter uncomfortable (A). This may or may not be the case, but fundamentally I do not believe the average internet video game fan has the introspection and honesty to say “A” here. There’s no way to know.
My problem with Veilguard is the difficulty fell off a cliff and never climbed back up. Other than that it was fine.
I disagree. The writing of Taash, while basic, has a lot in common with folks early in discovering their trans identity. Yeah, it is awkward and uncomfortable. Guess what, self introspection often is. I would say with Taash we see a lot of what would be internal struggles being vocalized. The good news is that Taash isn’t the only character you can interact with.
Of course it can, but it doesn’t solely make it a bad game.
I disagree. I really like the gameplay. It gets better almost immediately after the tutorial, though the tutorial is a little long for my taste.
Yeah, again, I don’t think the numbers are great, but 90k on 1 of 4 or 5 big platforms isn’t dismal. And the discount could be telling, but (I just looked it up) it was around 29%, which is still $50. Part of that could be backlash to the $70 AAA price tag. All that being said, all of this is speculation without numbers being released from EA