This is a continuation of my previous post about how I gave up on Dragon Age: The Veilguard after 15 hours of seriously trying to like the game and not allowing all the controversy about it being "woke" be a reason for me liking or disliking the game.
I made it to 15 hours and after a very frustrating portion of the game where I was shouting at people that are not there and nearly tossing my $60 controller across the room, I realized that this game has got to go.
Some time has passed and I can calmly give my honest opinion about this game and why I feel it is a waste of most people's time to even give it a try despite the fact that it is "free" on most platforms right now.
I was to preface this by saying that this game is not hard and this is not a question of me disliking the game because I refused to "git gud." It is not soulslike in any capacity, if anything it is considerably easier than most new releases these days. That being said, combat is just categorically bad and to me it looks as though they finished an alpha design, found out that it was far too easy like that, and instead of going through and completely overhauling the system, they threw in a few lines of code that just gave everyone an absolutely massive pool of HP. Everyone that is, except for you.
Take one of these guys for example. They are some sort of mage character enemy, therefore, if basically everything that every game and every story that has ever been told in a fantasy setting has any sort of bearing on this encounter, they should at least somewhat be a "glass cannon" of sorts as this is the very essence of being a mage. Not in Veilguard they aren't. Once you make you way past all of their magic missiles and do a combo sword strike on them that would absolutely rip anything apart you look at your enemy and see that you have reduced their HP by 20% or so, which is just ridiculous.
Once you start dealing with heavy armored foes this level of damage sponge ability gets even worse. Again, none of these enemies are difficult in that you do figure out their attack patterns rather rapidly but having this knowledge in no way enhances the fights, all enemies except truly trash mobs just soak up damage for ages and this is just wrong. All this accomplishes is that battles take longer and you end up spamming dodge roll so much that you are going to wear out the coating on your circle button. Seriously, my thumb started to hurt from constantly pressing dodge. It's nuts!
As is the case with most games these days, parrying can really turn the tide of an individual showdown and I feel as though this is one thing that Bioware actually did quite well. The parrying indicators are done nicely and the timing isn't the same on every enemy and this encourages you to get to know each enemy type individually and have a real strategy for how you are going to take them down. Parrying awards you with something called "momentum" which enables higher order skills so this is all wonderful.
However, once again the design flaw of combat shines through and ruins this part of the game as well. Parrying one blow has no impact on the potentially dozens of others that are heading your way at the same time, so even when you do successfully parry, chances are your counterstrike is going to be interrupted by some wayward blow or thrown spear that is headed your direction from some other enemy. So a potentially great aspect of combat is made moot and once again, we find ourselves just dodge rolling constantly rather than even trying to parry.
God help your patience if you find yourself in a battle withe one large heavily armored foe, and several ranged foes in the distance. The ranged foes will throw at you with precision accuracy endlessly and constantly interrupt any sort of momentum that you build up towards the heavily armored foe whose HP pool is so damn large that there isn't really any good way to handle this battle. Your decisions about how to attack these groups of enemies doesn't seem to have much impact on their relentless assault either. I was hopeful that like in other games you could keep an annoying ranged combatant busy by instructing one of your NPC partners to attack them and "keep them busy" long enough for you to focus on the main threat, the heavily armored one in the middle of the battlefield.
Just general logic and sensibility would kind of insist that if you are someone who is charged with throwing spears at the battlefield and some enemy is now up close and focused on killing you that instead of continuing to throw spears into the distance that you instead would become primarily focused on mitigating damage from the enemy combatant that is now engaging you up close and personal... but that is not the case in Veilguard. Your sidekicks seem to be completely incapable of drawing aggro and the spear chucker will still be focused on you despite the fact that there is someone stabbing him constantly that is standing right next to him. The interrupt that you, the player, experiences as far as ranged options are concerned when being stabbed mid-arrow-draw doesn't apply to the enemy, who will continue to throw spear after spear at you endlessly, until you go and engage them yourself at which point you will have the aforementioned heavily armored warrior bashing you in the back of the head and throwing off your attack sequence with this strategy as well. There basically is no good strategy because the combat is just very poorly designed.
I think that Bioware was aware the combat was poorly designed, realized that it was going to take a complete overhaul in order to address/correct this, and decided to just release the game anyway.
Combat was the main reason why I walked away from this game or I should say the reason why I rage-quit.
Another aspect of the game that really got under my skin was the story and your involvement in it. When I play an epic story-focused RPG I kind of expect my dialogue choices to have some sort of impact on how the conversation goes, or even better, to have some sort of impact on how the overall game progresses such as it would have done in FarCry, Fallout, or even previous Dragon Age games. But in Veilguard you are just given the illusion of choice and no matter what you do the story progresses in the same linear fashion. You are not given the opportunity to be ruthless and mean and that is a real disappointment to me. Normally I am a pretty nice guy in games because I have this silly mentality about not wanting to hurt the feeling of the friendly NPC's
The choices you can make are too friendly, despite this being a fantasy game where various races are at ends with one another (as you would expect in a fantasy story) but there is no racism or animosity between the races at all. This is where the real-world ideology kind of infested the story here. You are not allowed to take sides really, you have to be a "love everyone equally" sort of character and you do not have the choice to be an asshole if you want to. While I normally wouldn't do this I have at times in the past really found that this enhances the gameplay and encourages multiple playthroughs. Going through a game and being an absolute tyrant, come on now, that is kind of fun isn't it? You don't even have that as an option in Veilguard. Even your "aggressive" dialogue options are rather tame and rarely have any impact on any part of the story aside from one of your useless sidekicks "disapproving" and it negatively affecting your relationship and therefore, their abilities in combat which still suck even if they are as high as they can be.
DA: The Veilguard has a massive story and you are forced to watch it with seemingly endless cutscenes. Unfortunately, since the dialogue is so cringe and rather meaningless, I think most people end up skipping most of it - I know that I did.
How did they go so far away from the good storytelling in the past at Bioware?
So a story-heavy RPG has a story that is not interesting and your dialogue choices which are forced upon you have no bearing on how the story progresses - so what's the point? For me, if my choices in dialogue aren't going to have any impact on anything that happens, I would prefer that they not even be available. This to me just seems like common logic. I don't know what the hell they were thinking with this.
I get annoyed when my gameplay is constantly interrupted by cinematics and cutscenes (two words my spell checker is insisting are not words) but i am willing to endure it if the story is actually good. The Veilguard is a non-story, it's not interesting and they eliminate the immersion but putting modern-day "morality" into the conversation and even including modern-day slang in the conversation. It's tiresome and uninteresting.
I did my best to try to keep this short but as you can see, I failed badly at that because when something irks me this much, I tend to run off at the mouth about it. The Veilguard is one of the most frustrating experiences in my entire gaming existence and when you see all the professional reviews online by IGN and others like them, it is impossible to not come to the conclusion that the entire professional game-review world is completely compromised. The amount of 9 or 10 out of 10's that this game received is absurd.
I wouldn't say that this game is terrible, but maybe a 6/10 would be fair. The reason why I am so harsh on it is not because it is terrible compared to all that is available out there, it is just terrible compared to what I and many others have come to expect out of a company like Bioware.
There is now talk that the upcoming Mass Effect game is going to be Bioware's last chance to salvage their name and if that too fails to meet and exceed corporate expectations, Bioware will cease to exist and well, if that ends up happening, I suppose it will be for the best.
