It doesn't even look like it plays like DA:I though, it looks like it plays like God of War. Aside from the story, terrible writing, dialogue and facial animation or lack of, You're saying if I buy this on sale I'll have the same experience as DA:I... I highly doubt it from the footage I'm seeing but I'm open to it. Did you play DA:I on easy mode? What difficulty are you paying this on?

Just look at this..., it's better in every way accept for the audio quality and general graphics but the style makes up for that. Look at the pause combat, something you need onnhigher difficulty. I'm sorry but I don't agree, you're misremembering DA:I. I put it 380 hours on two pkaythroughs for the platinum. 

You're part of the mob, too.  The degree that people are attacking the game is no more remarkable than the degree to which people are attacking those who are unhappy with it.  A large group of defenders have circled the wagons in support of EA and BioWare, which is more than a little odd, especially considering this game would have generated a substantial amount of dismay among potential consumers regardless of the diversity stuff.  So many people White Knighting this game with such conviction is definitely not normal.

Looking over Reddit, I see a lot of posts dismissing any and all criticism getting upvoted and posts that discuss what they don't like about it getting downvoted.  Youtube reviewers who did not like it are getting shredded and people are acting as if the "journalists" at the well-known sites are suddenly bastions of truth and wisdom.  What I really find alarming is the way the access journalism allegation is being swept under the rug as artificial controversy. 

That's also mob mentality.

Plus I'd like to point out that you have no legs to stand on when it comes to "extreme hyperbole" after claiming that there were "four pages" of people arguing about a character's breasts.  That was so weirdly untrue that it stuck out like a sore thumb.

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. 

Studios do it all the time and consistently. Rockstar, Larian, Fromsoft, Insomniac, the Like a Dragon devs, Atlus's games etc. If they can manage big teams then Bioware should be too but no, cause it's a lack of talent probably from the roots up. 

People's memories are short these days. Look at that footage, it's night at day to DA: VG. All they had to do was Dread wolf and just basically continue the Inquisition. What was the point of the Solos reveal at all ffs.

You've misunderstood what I was meaning.

I didn't say any of this was impossible. I said it was incredibly hard. You're ignoring the other several thousand studios that haven't been able to do anything close to that. 

We're saying thr exact same thing so, Broware lost their talented devs over the years and they don't have the talent anymore to pull off what is expected of them. You're just wording it differently. 

You're best off not engaging with them. Otter's response to me was setting up for an excuse for previous convictions and then using my own sexual preferences against me as a shut-down gambit (which is not in good faith, I don't care what he says, he's wrong and using it as a shut down card was a bad move to make). 

The fact he never apologised for calling a good chunk of people in this thread "cesspit" tells me all I need to know. he's just going to vilify everyone else, instead of self reflecting.

Last I checked, we weren't a mob, we were discussing and talking about what we dislike about current events happening within the games industry, from the review process, to journalism, activism and DEI, but to him it's just more convenient to call everyone a cesspit or an angry mob to sweep it all under the rug.

Also speaking of access journalism, this came to my front page about an hr ago:

(Personally don't care about the V guy he's talking about or Grummz, but the part about access journalism and the bias surrounding it and what powers we as consumers have left was worth me listening to the author).

It is hard, but you also really, really need to keep your ship together and keep it going forward.

Having tendencies happen, like feature creep or letting the scope explode beyond it's original design, is naturally going to make it difficult to really pen down a consistent game.

We've seen Rockstar spend years on getting all their systems right, their story beats lined up one after another and yes, that is hard, but it's also worth doing. It also helps when you hire and maintain writers with a proven track record, not hiring writers that have a poor track record, or ones that butt heads with other writers often (which can and does happen in all industries).

Indie games over the years have also taught me something when it comes to storytelling. You don't need a thousand or even 500 cooks in the kitchen to write compelling stories, let alone systems to teach the player how to go about playing your games (look at Dark Souls, people love that franchise and yet it doesn't hold you by the hand and lets you find the stories for yourselves, and it's proven to work, and FromSoft aren't as rich or as big as EA, and their games aren't graphically superior, and they still manage to nail it). 

Sony manages to get out some good story-based games with good writing. MS has had a few of it's own, Nintendo has for years. Then you look at how Japanese studios have handled their forms of storytelling, and a lot of them manage to make it work well.

But then we come back to the likes of Ubisoft and EA, two corps that hire a lot, churn out whatever they can roll with on a high end budget, and then we get games that just end up being "meh" from them, or just bad. Look at EA's recent BF game, that has no story campaign for customers to indulge, the lack of a new C&C game, which has always been known for it's whacky writing (which again, isn't as hard to write for, but it's worth something). 

Besides writing and all that, the other publishers are also in this state of "hire whoever can fit the bill, then boot them later", which is demoralising for devs, because they're being treated like cogs in a machine, and their talent doesn't get used to the fullest extent. There are game devs in recent yrs who literally just gave up and left the industry, because they were tired of corps like EA dicking around and firing them, misusing their talents.

You have to step back and think "why is it hard, and what is causing it to become more difficult?". I see multiple factors, but not one of them is "it's just hard because it is", no, it's factors like I mentioned above that add to the problem over time. When EA and co don't allow for good enough time, or just keep hiring people based on silly checklists, or firing ppl left and right, then of course it is and will get harder to make a good game or write a good story (this goes beyond just writing, I'm talking animation dept, animation direction, project scope management, etc). 

One of my art friends in the furry community actually used to work for Toys for Bob, way back when they worked on Skylanders. I asked him what it was like working under a studio that was under Activision at the time, and he told me it was hell, because of the way Activison demanded changes here and there, which of course caused internal clashing and people leaving, and well... look at how Skylanders turned out.

DA I is nothing like Veilguard, making such a comparison means you never played the former (it was decent by the way).

I am the only one that think these little fights between game journalists/influencers is extremely childish? I expected more from Colin.