Dragon Age: The veilguard reviews at 83 Opencritic/84 Metacritic.

[IcaroRibeiro]

Mnementh said:

the-pi-guy said:

On a semi-related topic, it is bizarre to me that people try to find reasons why something ends up being "worse than it should". Like "these politics have made this game worse" makes no sense to me. 

I usually look at it in the opposite way. I think it's incredibly hard to make anything consistently good, especially when you're on a tight schedule and you're trying to arrange hundreds of people. Whether that's writing or character models or anything else. To the point where I kind of think it's almost a fluke that anything turns out particularly good. Like I loved Uncharted 2 a lot, and none of the other Uncharteds have gotten anywhere close for me. I don't think in general that Naughty Dog, even if it was their sole goal, could consistently make a game quite like that.

It's even worse when you're trying to do new things on top of trying to make something good. 

There are plenty of very political works of art, that are fantastic. There are plenty of very nonpolitical works of art that are terrible. 

I don't think the issue is ever about the politics, it's about how it's gone about. Are these political messages being done in a way that makes any kind of sense to the world or the characters or the story, or is it just incredibly awkwardly shoved in there? 

Same issue with nonpolitical stuff. It was a big issue I had with some of the Horizon 2 writing. There was some stuff in the opening that was not organic, and it was clearly just there to remind the player. (And even more frustratingly to me, the game reiterated the same point with substantially better writing afterwards.)

I think it's just incredibly hard to make good things. If 100 studios tried to make the exact same Lord of the Rings, I would expect 50 of them to just flat out suck, and maybe 40 of them to be okay, and maybe 9 that are reasonably good, and maybe one that is legitimately great. 

This is reality, before Peter Jacksons trilogy every attempt at adaptation was generally deemed bad. And the Hobbit trilogy is also generally marked as mediocre at best. This makes it so much more strange, that so many seem to be willing to defend that train wreck Rings of Power.

Hobbit being mediocre is an understatement, maybe the first movie and maybe the second because the third one... oh boy There is no story to be told in third movie, just mindless action. Peter Jackson really had no idea of what to do to make a  8-hours trilogy from a book of slightly over 300 pages, can we blame him though? 

I belive if it was not from the same world and director as LOTR it would have the rating of a Transformer movie

For RoP, the first season problem for me was the editing and the screenplay, the story itself was OK (even if boring and with no sense of agency, with Gandalf and Dwarves plot threads advancing... well nothing) but the dialogues were very off because they tried to recapture the high-fantasy language and maneirisms from the books, but it simply didn't work in a 2022 TV show. Rewatching the Peter Jackson trilogy we can see they walked on tinny ice between respecting the high fantasy setting and having a screenplay that directly communicate to modern audiences, and worked surprisingly well, though to some degree it can be a bit cheesy sometimes, it's never jarring or immersion breaking and sometimes that are pretty beautiful and memorable quotes like "May It Be a Light to You in Dark Places, When All Other Lights Go Out" scattered in the movies

Season 2 solved the lack of urgency and actually made the plot advance, but at a very high cost: The story became nonsense at times. I will not expect lore accurate depiction of events that spam over six hundred years worth of war and machinations in a show that will shoehorn all this in maybe 3 or 4 years, but I was expecting them to make changes that at least makes sense in the context of the show. Season 2 sounds like a show that was totally rewritten. I think initially like Rings of Power that was going to be only VERY loosely based in Simarillion (like same characters and same setting but with an original story), but then they decided it was better to actually do the events as Tolkien described, but with all the constants of having to make the forge of all the Rings to happen in just a few months and the result is Season 2...

Sorry I know this has nothing to do with the Dragon Age but it was really something I wanted to take out of my chest lol