We can feel when something is done with caring and quality, and it's not necessarily related with passion to art, sometimes it's just collective work to make sure things are well done. I think Pixar movies are good example, they always have really tight and well designed world-bulding even when the screenplay is kinda sanitized (their movie Elementals is a good instance of it)

However the way I see it, even a well made movie, game or books still attracts same levels of criticism. I like using Star Wars The Last Jedi as exemple. It's an incredible well made movie, specially in technical and artistic level. Direction, visual effects, art direction and film editing comes to mind as being among the sharpest in the franchise 

But still faced criticism because the story and philosophy of the director wanted to show us did not meet what the fandom expected from a Star Wars movie

I believe more than anything the subjective value we give to art pieces is how well we can digest it. If the media is a hard pill to swallow because it causes discomfort on us, we are more likely to reject it. Think you are like me, a console gamer who has really hard time to adapt to motion controls or playing with mouse and keyboard, if a game need me to re-evaluate how I need to do even the basic things the odds is I will never like it (that's basically why I hate Nintendo Wii lol). I don't think it's any different with stories in fiction, if a story somehow start triggering your buttons it's a sign you're not going to like it 

My point was, certain franchises and studios built their success on deep story telling. That's what BioWare was and that's what made them huge to begin with. Now we've seen their franchise Dragon Age go from deep thoughtful storytelling to be insanely watered down to the point it's an afterthought.

It's just going to lose more of BioWare's remaining fans and saddening to see them lose their ways. Many studios have forgotten what made them popular to begin with. So many, including myself, are going to be very skeptical about Mass Effect being next.

Idk if you've played BioWare's older games, but many of them are always in the greatest games of all time conversation because of their narratives.

LOl, you completely misjudged me on my gaming journey, I was a PC at DOS times then started to drift away, but turned to console with the Wii (which was great). Now I start to drift back to PC. I feel mouse and keyboard is the superior input for many genres (like strategy or FPS), but with 3D action games gamepads are superior.

Anyways, you seem to hold the opinion a lot of the stuff is players holding on to older views of a game (or a movie series or whatever). And that may be somewhat true, but I think a lot of modern games, movies and so on lose also another aspect: as it is more industrialized than ever (at least in the west) managers influence a lot of work more than actual artists. Artists are often degraded to cogs in the machine of a bigger corporate idea. That is a certain difference to past games and movies, as with lower budgets the managers were more willing to give the creators more creative freedom. It is true that bad shit existed at all times though.

I won't be getting it, but that's because I never really liked Bioware games to begin with. Even when Ray and Greg were still there, my go-to western RPGs were Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Not that I really jive with contemporary Bethesda, either.

I did not write what I wanted to say, english is not my first language. What meant to say is "try to think like me, a console gamer (me) who has really hard time to adapt..."

I think I agree media is more industrialized than ever, partially because it's hard to create authoral work. Things need too much money and workers doing their job together and this can sanitize too much the story in the end of the day. 

Just wait until you see the conversation about "pulling a bharv"

Probably not a lot different from this.

I feel that's more of a question of good or bad writing and another matter entirely. Bad writing by default will lean into modernisms and clichés since that's all these writers will be familiar with.

I haven't played Veilguard yet so I can't comment on the quality of the dialogue or the characterization, so I'll abstain from commenting until then.

okay this is too much....

https://youtu.be/OCdHzvIT-NM?t=4370



1 hour 12mins into the video.

If I played and experienced that, I'd probably drop the game.
This is leaning towards a no buy now.

Oh yeah, I forgot that you go back to base and interview people in Dragon age every few story beats, it's so stuff and awkward looking back. Larian studios evolved this team building formula with OS2 by making all characters origin characters (I barely played DA: O, so perhaps that's where it started) and making discussions emergent with the story as you play the game, an exclamation point over the head every now and then and it worked perfectly or you can check in with them as you go along while adventuring, it felt fluid.