#when da2 manages to have a compelling narrative despite having even less in terms of time and resources when it came to its development

[yali-the-sloth]

I thought I had nothing of substance to add to this post. However, after internally seething about it for the whole day, I actually have stuff to say.

I take great offense at the stance some people in the fandom take on how ‘BioWare delivered what the fans were asking for all along’. You’ll have to thrust my face into it directly because after spending nearly 50 hours in the game I see none of the ‘narrative’ which is supposed to drive me through it. This game is a hollow husk with none of the substance of the previous entries, a mediocre candy wrapped up in a really pretty cover.

And the worst part? The writing team is not the victim here, they are complicit! They knew what the approach to the writing will be from the get-go - see Gaider’s tweets on why he left. What we got with the veilguard’s writing now in 2024? Exactly the reason he left back in 2016.

8 years, 2 reboots and nothing’s changed. And these people sat through it all and then had the gall to try to actively lie when promoting the game in order to try and appeal to the older fans. Nothing about this game is about the narrative, the quests feel like there were stripped out of like 3/4 of the lines that were initially written for them, characters are one dimensional and are never ever allowed to have any sort of strong opinions and reactions, the world, writing wise, never reacts to anything that is happening on the screen. Don’t even get me started on how they treated the foundation left by the previous games.

And why should I be happy about receiving the single player game? Duh, it should have been like that from the very beginning! The one and only reason we got it is because EA saw that it’s gonna be more profitable than the life service shit they wanted initially! It was a purely business decision on their part and I don’t see why I should be thankful to the team for it.

The writers left on the team knew what it would be like, accepted it and then tried to sell it as their best work possible. Moreover, they already got paid, nothing I can say on social media will ever change that. And I already paid 60$ for this game so I’m not gonna pretend I got my money’s worth. They can just ignore all the criticism like they’ve always done, it’s none skin off their backs.

We’re not in kindergarten, they do not get a golden star for ‘trying’.

Reminder to be kind to the writers/devs as they’re beholden to a much larger company that makes the big choices as far as what they do with the final product. Don’t forget, we almost got live-service online multiplayer DAV. They remade it from scratch, YEARS into the production just to give us what we actually wanted, a single player narrative-driven game.