70 hours in, 68 actual playtime.
I’m not an asshole disclaimer, if you’ve read it you can skip to the cut.
Something came to my attention. I need to make it crystal clear that I utterly love the diversity in DAV. It’s fantastic. I’m also a heavily left leaning, non-binary, queer as fuck reviewer, editor, and author.
I’m on media blackout while I play this, so I’m only getting second-hand info on how awful it is right now in the DA Fandom. Please be safe and take care of yourselves. Arguing with incels and white supremacists is completely pointless. They sea lion worse than an actual sea lion. Your mental health is important.
Though, every single time the anti-queer brigade comes out for a new DA game, I sit there thinking ‘have you bozos ever played any DA game, like, ever?’ My guess is nope.
Spoilers for Dragon Age Veilguard and all other Dragon Age media. (I’m a lore fiend.)
(Note that these reviews aren’t edited. They’re just my off the cuff writing. I don’t have the time, energy or heart to edit them properly.)
Did I say I didn’t hate this game? I lied. I hate it so much it has become a vendetta just to finish it.
With three long games, 14 years of history, so much Lore there really never feels an end to it, 5 books. 6 comics, two or more coffee table books and probably stuff I don’t know about to use for inspiration… this game is terrible.
They’ve stripped it down to the most banal, most puerile, most boring concepts they could possibly find in all of that to use in this travesty of a role playing game.
I’ll finish it so I can see just how bad it is and how exactly they’ll fuck over Solas some more. And here I was feeling comfy that since Weekes loves Solas that they wouldn’t utterly fuck him over?
Whoooo boy, was I wrong. I wanted memories of his time before he woke up in Inquisition. I did not want memories of every cruel thing he’d ever been forced to do to protect tens of thousands of innocents. War is horrible. Those leading wars, regardless of the justified reasons (or not) get their hands bloody. They have to make hard decisions that cost pieces of their souls because no one else will.
I wanted memories of what Arlathan and Elvhen culture was like before everything went went to hell. What did we get? Memories painting Solas as the worst possible version of himself.
And the way they discuss and treat the topic of Mythal… I wonder if it’s nice and cozy so far up Mythal’s arsehole?
It’s revolting when you know everything FleMythal has done, and if you read between the lines of all the lore about Arlathan era Mythal.
I’ve been told that the third act is the best. Though how anyone even gets to the third act is beyond me. Other than sheer cussedness and a desire to escape politics and the side effects of a pulmonary embolism. Cause that’s the only way I’ve gotten this far.
Did I remember to say that they apparently forgot what aggro was and how that’s supposed to work with a multi-player team? My rogue is not a tank. (Nor a rogue because rogues pick fucking locks.) Yet for some reason, he always has aggro. Especially the bigger and harder the enemy is to beat.
Aggro, in case you’re reading my ramblings and don’t know, stands for aggression/attention of whatever your team is fighting. Whoever did the most damage last is the one who should have aggro. In any decent video game, that’s the tank, who is built to take it. They’re supposed to keep the bad guys attention so the archers and mages can get it from behind/beside.
But since your side characters don’t get skill points at the same rate your player characters do, (fantastic idea that, what utter dipshit came up with that?) Your character, whether they’re a DPS or not, always has fucking Aggro.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to fight as a Legolas wannabe when you have several tons of dragon crashing into you because you do the most damage because of an outright shitty levelling system?
I now get to go fight another fucking dragon. That’s gonna be fun. (It’s my third today) and that’ll have me into act 3.
Oh, and the much advertised ‘dragon slayer’ is a good character, but they’re shit at actually killing dragons. I never, ever, thought I would miss Cassandra Inquisition. Because I utterly loathe her as a character, but I miss having competently designed dragon fighters in a game with so many fucking dragons to fight.
…
Make that two dragons.
Kaija Rayne 