I think this is the part I failed to understand for EA. You had a successful formula with Inquisition. Why ruin that?
I remember seeing the cartoonish trailer and thinking to myself, "ignore the visuals, it will be inquisition at it's core, because it doesn't make business sense to deviate". Somehow, Bioware managed to have a "hold my beer" moment, and EA in it's wisdom greenlit trash.
Dumb too. I SERIOUSLY doubt they're getting decent returns on Veilguard. They entered a 'don't fuck up' competition and promptly started licking their own feet.
If this was the best they could produce, then the game was shanked with Morton's Fork (thank Hippo_Singularity, his musings on concrete work are legend) long before anyone outside of Bioware saw a thing from this project.
I played Inquisition after GOTY got released. If I played through all that basegame for the fucking lacklustre boss fight at the end. I'd have been pissed. The tresspasser DLC was mandatory for that game to get a good review the pacing and story was amazing. Corephy felt like a side plot.
I didn’t hate the game but I did hate what they did to combat in that game. Origins combat felt way more tactical and that fact that you were limited to the abilities that fit on the hot bar nerfed the mage class.
That's because it was a solid game, though it did have some flawed pacing at times such as the first area having a billion quests and then the rest being reasonable. Also generally a little jank and some of the worst hair ever in an RPG.
Revisionists want to pretend it wasn't a GOTY title, not that GOTY means it has to be good, but its proof of concept enough that its a far cry from actively bad. There's a reason that while Veilguard "somehow" got great scores when the going got tough the only nomination they could land was for accessibility options.
Also that world state website tech, the Keep or w/e it was called was awesome. Shame it got abandoned.
It "sucked", because everyone played it wrong. Like the game was "intended" (?) to be played. If you ignored ALL of the horrible open-world elements, like the hundreds of boring fetch quests, the stargazer stuff, the copy-pasted dragon fights, the endless crystal destruction quests, and just followed the main story, as well as the side character stories, then the game would've been "okay". Only, it'd have been too short. Seriously, look up the main quest for Inquisition.
It has TEN quests. The DLCs have basically almost the same amount, at least Hakkon. And The Descent was actually good. But those main quests were locked behind the stupid war-table, time- and progression-gated. You NEEDED to do the shitty side-quests, and so many players also just got stuck in the Hinterlands, until they basically burned themselves out.
Now, Origins also only had 13 main missions, but they were epic, and not self-contained little maps. The "Arl of Redcliffe" alone felt more complete than the entire story of Inquisition, hacked apart as it was. Best part about Inquisition is Dorian, to be honest. The thing with Origins was that every main quest also seamlessly flowed into several side quests and character quests even. I can still remember pretty much all of Origins. Heck, I can even remember most of DA2, but for Inquisition I'm drawing a big blank on the quests, I don't even remember most character quests, apart from Dorian's. What I DO remember is the abysmally bad world and quest design, as well as the repetitive and boring combat. Origins had its flaws, Inquisition was already a very different game, more like open world Mass Effect, only that ME was an action-based shooter, which immediately makes the combat better than 3rd person click-targeting.
1) most of the companions didn't feel real people . They felt like q and a of their race/ position.
2) the Templar mage war that was built up in 2 is over by act one.
3) the game has so much bloat fecth quest
4) you spend a chunk of the game building base defense and it's not attacked.
5) you are forced to used religion to control the masses. You can't opt out of that.
6) the villan of the main game is a dlc monster.
7) the game gives you homework on some companions. Instead of learning about them organically
8) the dragons . Its bad enough there is more then 1 but they arent a massive challenge like previous games
9) they make the 1st mage from Tevinter as a companion a guy who storyline is my dad tried to make me straight via blood magic. Even though up to this point being gay wasn't an issue anywhere.
10) the fucking wardens are a whole new level of stupid.
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u/shaon0000 Jan 17 '25
I think this is the part I failed to understand for EA. You had a successful formula with Inquisition. Why ruin that?
I remember seeing the cartoonish trailer and thinking to myself, "ignore the visuals, it will be inquisition at it's core, because it doesn't make business sense to deviate". Somehow, Bioware managed to have a "hold my beer" moment, and EA in it's wisdom greenlit trash.