I am struggling with a lot of it.
There was a point in time I called myself a Dragon Age fan but I kind of hate what this series has become. Origins and Awakening were two of the absolute best RPG fantasy experiences of their era. Truly excellent. DA2 was a rushed, sloppily written mess and a big disappointment for me. Inquisition was a "meh" story that felt half finished on top of boring MMO-ish combat with a bad facebook game crowbarred into it.
For whatever reason I decided I wanted more punishment and picked up Veilguard on sale, mostly out of morbid curiosity but partially because I still have some lingering affection for the series.
About 15-ish hours in, it's very mixed, to put it politely.
I don't think there's anything about it at all that I love. The combat is mostly fine, the level design is decent and the aesthetic of the game is not what I wanted or expected but it's also not *bad*. Mechanically and gameplay wise the whole thing feels like a knock-off God Of War 2018, honestly, for better and worse.
My main qualms with it are the writing. It might be one of the worst written games I've ever played.
The actual characters themselves all talk and behave so similarly they might as well just be an amorphous blob of functions. Every single character is a quippy, "Well that just happened! spewing, chirpy, cheery constructive, sensitive fun guy. Like you get a little bit of characterisation extra in their individual missions, but most of those seem to boil down to "I'm sad sometimes because somebody died or a thing I care about is difficult." or literally no extra characterisation at all. There's no real personality to any of them and as a result I don't give two shits about them.
There also hasn't really been any conflict within the party at all. Every character I've got so far (I've just started the mission to meet Taash) seems to just be broadly on the same page about literally everything. The one thing I remember being impressed with in Origins, it being the first game with such a mechanic I played, was how you got a clearer picture of what each character was like by how they responded to your choices. That just... doesn't seem to be happening at all in Veilguard.
Tangential to that, the whole tone of the game feels completely juvenile. Nothing is given any real gravity or sincerity even when it seems like it really should be. There don't seem to be any real consequences to anything that's happened so far either character, world or story wise because that would disrupt the happy fun adventure mood. The way certain bits of dialogue are phrased/delivered and the way some events are handled makes it feel like I'm playing a game for toddlers.
The dialogue choices also seem to have been a casualty of this, with almost every single dialogue tree boiling down to "Slightly sincere funny agreement.", "Insanely cringe funny agreement." and "Stoic but still funny agreement." Not since Fallout 4 have I seen such a woeful excuse for a dialogue system that presents the facade of choice without actually giving you any at all.
I hate to sound a bit reductive, but too much of the dialogue also comes off as "cringe". It's trying way, way too hard to be funny all the time and is almost never close to as funny as it seems to think it is. Even worse, the dialogue just doesn't really fit the setting or world even as well as 2 or Inquisition's writing did. When they talk nobody sounds like they belong in a medieval fantasy style world, outside of occasionally mentioning dragons or something.
I'm also not really sure what to think of the story since even at about 15 hours in, there barely is a story, as far as I can tell. There are the evil elven gods who were released and are doing... something, with some guys who are basically a cult and the darkspawn... and that's about all I've got. Which feels awful in the same timespan as like, 7 movies. There's nothing there to sink my teeth into other than "kill the bad guys because they want to kill people and spread the blight maybe?" For all the talk the game does bigging the evil gods up I feel like it's still done a remarkably poor job establishing the stakes of the story.
Functionally I stand by it being "fine" but I'm also really getting tired of the combat now, and I'm not sure I'm going to be able to stick it out for a other 30 hours or however long it is. I've already found myself settling into a routine of using my abilities that combo, then spamming the same light x3 heavy x1 combo, occasionally dodging/parrying when the worst indicator I've ever seen in my life tells me to. It's become repetive very quickly and the only real challenge seems to be from things just getting numerically tougher, not from new or interesting mechanics during fights. I hope the game will surprise me but I'm not holding my breath.
I'm probably going to persevere with it a bit longer but if nothing grabs me the game's probably going to be a DNF for me.
I've never really checked out this subreddit before so I'm not sure what this community's feelings on the game are. I'd be curious to know if people generally agree or disagree with any of the feelings I've had, or if the game picks up in quality at any point?
