Compared to your articles on the previous games, Veilguard sounds like a group of interns wrote a parody while drunk and it accidentally got made into a game. I would laugh, except all Destiny 2 content after Forsaken was the same way. The only game I've seen not fall prey to this is Warframe, who still has the same stable of writers working on it 10 years later. Moral of the story: mill your writing team, expect decline.
Thanks for reading! It really does feel parodic, to the point it's almost difficult to do justice in writing. It sort of has to be experienced to be believed. I always hear good things about Warframe's writing, and I love the art style.
I dabbled with an early game of the Dragon Age series (I think the second) but only for a handful of hours years ago. I always regretted not putting more time into it as initially interacting with the world seemed rich and fresh post-Skyrim. But with your damning review of the latest instalment, it seems good that I didn’t as I’ve saved getting emotionally invested in this massive disappointment to fans. The state of some game studios today is shocking.
Thanks for reading! For what it's worth, the older games are still worth experiencing, though you pretty much have to impose a cut-off point somewhere to avoid retroactively ruining them.
I would highly, highly recommend playing Origins. It's a very self-contained story and has tons of replay value, so there's not as much need to play out the series as there would be in, say, Mass Effect. And it's one of the best RPGs ever made, and tied with KOTOR as my favorite Bioware game.
The thing that stands out to me the most is that none of the old characters were written to be universally likeable, everyone was opinionated and potentially divisive. There were people who thought Cassandra was too much of a Chantry apologist! There were people who thought Sera was an internalised racist! There were people who thought Fenris' mage-hate was over the line! And all of their beliefs made sense in the context of their backgrounds and what we learn about them.
Whereas with the new characters, I couldn't even tell you what any of them think about mages vs Templars, because that conflict is completely gone, as has the race politics - no-one has opinions stronger than 'I think slavery is bad.' They were written to be universally liked, but the result is that there is nothing to like about them, they have no ideas or beliefs, they can't be right or wrong about anything. (Except Taash, I guess, who is wrong about being a bully but never held accountable by the narrative).
I suspect the primary issue around this is culture, which explains the overall laziness.
There is a fantastic story from the creative lead of Chronicles of Riddick, Escape from Butcher Bay (One of the rare feats of a video game based on a movie that is so much better than its source material).
Early on in the process he held a meeting where the creative team (and a few people from the business) sat down to discuss what were the great video games in the genre, what made them great, and how they could use them to inspire the game they were making.
At one point, someone said something to the effect that this game wouldn’t be great because it was a tie in to a movie, and the creative lead shouted him out of the room.
He did it really intentionally to send the signal that this was a project aiming for greatness and he wouldn’t tolerate his team aiming for less.
I imagine that veilguard didn’t have a culture that had feedback loops that moved things in the right direction. If half the team had been laid off, and no one feels comfortable sticking their neck out to push back on bad ideas, you get a terrible game
Hardest of hard agrees. There is very definitely a cultural issue at Bioware, and has been for a long time.
This kind of links to the didactic tendency and the squeamishness about showing anything 'problematic' - whereas Origins et al were willing to depict serious issues like violence and racism, Veilguard feels thoroughly sanitised. I didn't even get into this in the post (nearly 4k words and still nowhere near enough room to digest Veilguard...), but a lot of the story takes place in a country known for slavery and the enslavement of elves especially - we do not see a single slave, none of the elves in its city appear to be slaves, and neither an elven player character nor elven companions are treated any differently there. It's like setting a story in the American South in the early 1800s, placing multiple black characters in that story, and not even alluding to slavery or racism.
In SkillUp's review video, there is a line that probably cost Bioware millions of dollars - he comments that every conversation in Veilguard feels like it was written with HR in the room, and he is right. Given how obviously afraid this team was of even fictional confrontation, I can't imagine them being willing to have anything but the most good-natured arguments in the writers' room, and we can see the result of that.
I don't generally accept the "woke" criticisms of media that most people give, but I think there is a kernal of truth in it, which is that it is incredibly hard to do genuinely creative work when you're constantly being policed for thought crimes (by yourself, by others, or by the culture you're in).
The presence of queer characters etc. doesn't make things bad, but rather a bad story is a bad story, and if it has queer characters that are highly visible, its easy for people who don't have a high degree of media literacy to think the presence of queer characters as the element that made it bad.
This is pretty much my read as well, which I will get further into in a couple of weeks.
In this particular case, it's so heavy-handed and so obviously talking down to players, that I almost have to question the intentions on the part of the creators - was the goal here really to improve anyone's perception of trans/nonbinary/nonconforming individuals, or was it to show off to your friends and receive performative praise motivated by partisanism rather than genuine recognition of your work?
I see it come up again and again, that there are these flashpoints in the culture wars where people fight a lot over incredibly mediocre art.
It happened in the all female Ghostbusters reboot, where there were a lot of sexist and gender based attacks on it, and then people on the "woke" side of the culture war moved to defend it, and it was just blah.
It also happened with The Last Jedi, which was a bad movie, but then people moved to hate on it because of its diverse cast. It wasn't a bad movie because of them, it was a bad movie because it was a lazily written soulless cash grab with nothing meaningful to say, that had a diverse cast.
And it is maddening because we're fighting over NOTHING.
Thanks for reading! The next one should be out two weeks from now, though I'm posting something else in-between so as not to give readers Veilguard-fatigue. Editing has been intensive, as I don't want to be pilloried.
Compared to your articles on the previous games, Veilguard sounds like a group of interns wrote a parody while drunk and it accidentally got made into a game. I would laugh, except all Destiny 2 content after Forsaken was the same way. The only game I've seen not fall prey to this is Warframe, who still has the same stable of writers working on it 10 years later. Moral of the story: mill your writing team, expect decline.
Thanks for reading! It really does feel parodic, to the point it's almost difficult to do justice in writing. It sort of has to be experienced to be believed. I always hear good things about Warframe's writing, and I love the art style.
I dabbled with an early game of the Dragon Age series (I think the second) but only for a handful of hours years ago. I always regretted not putting more time into it as initially interacting with the world seemed rich and fresh post-Skyrim. But with your damning review of the latest instalment, it seems good that I didn’t as I’ve saved getting emotionally invested in this massive disappointment to fans. The state of some game studios today is shocking.
Thanks for reading! For what it's worth, the older games are still worth experiencing, though you pretty much have to impose a cut-off point somewhere to avoid retroactively ruining them.
I would highly, highly recommend playing Origins. It's a very self-contained story and has tons of replay value, so there's not as much need to play out the series as there would be in, say, Mass Effect. And it's one of the best RPGs ever made, and tied with KOTOR as my favorite Bioware game.
uuggghhhh, I knoooooww. Remember Iron Bull? Cassandra? Sera? Fenris? DAI Solas? those characters made you feel something 😢
The thing that stands out to me the most is that none of the old characters were written to be universally likeable, everyone was opinionated and potentially divisive. There were people who thought Cassandra was too much of a Chantry apologist! There were people who thought Sera was an internalised racist! There were people who thought Fenris' mage-hate was over the line! And all of their beliefs made sense in the context of their backgrounds and what we learn about them.
Whereas with the new characters, I couldn't even tell you what any of them think about mages vs Templars, because that conflict is completely gone, as has the race politics - no-one has opinions stronger than 'I think slavery is bad.' They were written to be universally liked, but the result is that there is nothing to like about them, they have no ideas or beliefs, they can't be right or wrong about anything. (Except Taash, I guess, who is wrong about being a bully but never held accountable by the narrative).
I suspect the primary issue around this is culture, which explains the overall laziness.
There is a fantastic story from the creative lead of Chronicles of Riddick, Escape from Butcher Bay (One of the rare feats of a video game based on a movie that is so much better than its source material).
Early on in the process he held a meeting where the creative team (and a few people from the business) sat down to discuss what were the great video games in the genre, what made them great, and how they could use them to inspire the game they were making.
At one point, someone said something to the effect that this game wouldn’t be great because it was a tie in to a movie, and the creative lead shouted him out of the room.
He did it really intentionally to send the signal that this was a project aiming for greatness and he wouldn’t tolerate his team aiming for less.
I imagine that veilguard didn’t have a culture that had feedback loops that moved things in the right direction. If half the team had been laid off, and no one feels comfortable sticking their neck out to push back on bad ideas, you get a terrible game
Hardest of hard agrees. There is very definitely a cultural issue at Bioware, and has been for a long time.
This kind of links to the didactic tendency and the squeamishness about showing anything 'problematic' - whereas Origins et al were willing to depict serious issues like violence and racism, Veilguard feels thoroughly sanitised. I didn't even get into this in the post (nearly 4k words and still nowhere near enough room to digest Veilguard...), but a lot of the story takes place in a country known for slavery and the enslavement of elves especially - we do not see a single slave, none of the elves in its city appear to be slaves, and neither an elven player character nor elven companions are treated any differently there. It's like setting a story in the American South in the early 1800s, placing multiple black characters in that story, and not even alluding to slavery or racism.
In SkillUp's review video, there is a line that probably cost Bioware millions of dollars - he comments that every conversation in Veilguard feels like it was written with HR in the room, and he is right. Given how obviously afraid this team was of even fictional confrontation, I can't imagine them being willing to have anything but the most good-natured arguments in the writers' room, and we can see the result of that.
I don't generally accept the "woke" criticisms of media that most people give, but I think there is a kernal of truth in it, which is that it is incredibly hard to do genuinely creative work when you're constantly being policed for thought crimes (by yourself, by others, or by the culture you're in).
The presence of queer characters etc. doesn't make things bad, but rather a bad story is a bad story, and if it has queer characters that are highly visible, its easy for people who don't have a high degree of media literacy to think the presence of queer characters as the element that made it bad.
This is pretty much my read as well, which I will get further into in a couple of weeks.
In this particular case, it's so heavy-handed and so obviously talking down to players, that I almost have to question the intentions on the part of the creators - was the goal here really to improve anyone's perception of trans/nonbinary/nonconforming individuals, or was it to show off to your friends and receive performative praise motivated by partisanism rather than genuine recognition of your work?
I see it come up again and again, that there are these flashpoints in the culture wars where people fight a lot over incredibly mediocre art.
It happened in the all female Ghostbusters reboot, where there were a lot of sexist and gender based attacks on it, and then people on the "woke" side of the culture war moved to defend it, and it was just blah.
It also happened with The Last Jedi, which was a bad movie, but then people moved to hate on it because of its diverse cast. It wasn't a bad movie because of them, it was a bad movie because it was a lazily written soulless cash grab with nothing meaningful to say, that had a diverse cast.
And it is maddening because we're fighting over NOTHING.
That last line cracked me up. Release the Taash article!
Thanks for reading! The next one should be out two weeks from now, though I'm posting something else in-between so as not to give readers Veilguard-fatigue. Editing has been intensive, as I don't want to be pilloried.