None of that matters. All that matters is that Dragon Age: The Veilguard is our new TIME Magazine GAME OF THE YEAR!!  

I wonder if the cost for that is added to the marketing budget?

^ What the fuck.

... Well. Alan Wake 2 was GOTY last year. They might actually be sincere.

Oh I didn't buy this abomination. I spent to many hours researching it and watching unbiased reviews. I won't buy this game at a step discount. Mods can't save this, the core product is rotten.

Here's a post release interview with the directors of veilguard

https://www.eurogamer.net/the-big-dragon-age-the-veilguard-post-release-interview-it-was-never-going-to-match-the-dragon-age-4-in-peoples-minds

It reads like it was written by AI, or at least partially.  There are a bunch of mistakes throughout.  My guess is that someone who doesn't know gaming was told to write an article and just pulled stuff from the internet.

Journalism is nothing but a bloated, rotting corpse at this point.

While the game hitting 1m sales in about 3 weeks might sound good to some, you have to remember this a modern AAA, which tend to have $200m+ budgets these days, and Veilguard's budget would be higher than most due to it's protracted 9 year development cycle and the large amount of voice acting in a big RPG. This game needed to have the strongest sales of any Bioware game to date to compensate for having the highest budget of any Bioware game to date (save for maybe the MMO Star Wars The Old Republic, which had a $200m budget from it's 6 year dev cycle and 800 devs from 2005-2011, plus the budget of developing years of expansions afterward), but instead of having the strongest sales of any Bioware game to date, it's tracking well behind Inquisition and Mass Effect 3. Mass Effect 3 shipped 3.5m copies in it's 1st quarter (which was about 4 weeks of sales) and sold through most of those, with EA reporting sales of $200m in that quarter's financials (which comes out to over 3m copies sold at full price in the first month), while Inquisition was said to have the biggest 1st quarter in Bioware's history, so higher than the $200m of Mass Effect 3, and went on to sell 12m+ lifetime, the most of any Bioware game. 1m sales in 3 weeks is substantially less than 3m or more copies sold in 4 weeks for these two earlier Bioware games. 

Not surprised that it's sales are lackluster considering the middling critic scores and low user scores and various controversies surrounding the game.

Of course not, half the actual creative team behind DA:O, 2 and I were no longer at the company.

"It does. I find it fascinating - all of the instalments have been significantly different."

Never do like this line of talk because in reality, no they didn't. Big world, 4 party team of a PC and controllable party members of various classes in the standard rogue, warrior, mage classes with varying abilities and a story driven narrative based on choices you make along the way which affects decisions and choices later.

This was the same for the first 3 but they felt like they naturally progressed from one to the next, simply comparing the menu system from 2 to I shows this. DAV is so different that if anything the story driven narrative is all it had left... oh and the name, for me at least.

I feel like this issue has plagued EA with their "choices matter", considering how ME3 ended up really screwing over player choices and regulating them to mere coloured endings, and then of course we have DAV, and again, no one even new staff, not taking into account past choices.

basically the longer a franchise that allows for player choice goes on for, the more the promises of choices being carried over starts to break down, and I'm not saying it's a "too many cooks" issue either, it's simply down to the old teams completely leaving/being booted, and the publisher not caring for their original promises to their franchise core elements (choices were important and much liked factors in ME and DA, and I always keep hearing about them in the same vein as Fallout/ES RPG's). 

It ticks me off when people bring up the changes between games as some kind of creative license to do whatever they want, as if that automatically negates any criticism on that front.  It's not a clever feature or some kind of innovative approach, they just decided that they wanted shift to a different audience and thought the best way to do that was to dumb everything down.  It's not a positive to leave parts of your audience behind while you chase dollars.

That the most extreme deviation happening just after BG3 became a smash hit is the most hilarious part.  Dragon Age could have been right there, it could have built into something grand if they had honored their own lineage.  The difference between the two games, and where they took their respective franchises, should be a start warning to other developers. 

It's, I think, a part of what the writers want vs what players play. The fact the Dragon Age Keep recorded all of our key decisions from DA:I shows they have the data but chose not to use it.

I do understand their potential reasoning. 10 years time difference, too many factors... but was there really? It's not like the choice of if you killed Connor or whatever is going to have to be included.

Which is why part of me wanted a fresh start, no big ties to the previous stories outside of some guest appearances in terms of story. David Gaider did once said that "the souths story is done" but this game felt more like an end to a trilogy story they had planned since 2 (without their original plan of having Hawke as the lead character in each part), but things changed, time passed.

DAV is safe and by the numbers. Did they think the CRPG style was too risky in the modern age? I presume they had long since set their gameplay model before BG3 released with unanimous praise and success. Like you perfectly put it, to appeal to a new audience leaving the old behind, they shifted to a new direction.

Yet, BG3 shows there is a big market for that if you put in the effort and show you care about it. I'm not of course saying the work the devs did isn't good, DAV is generally a well made bug free affair yet the sales that has come from it so far I feel are just people like me, diehard fans who waiting a decade for the next entry of their favourite series and the legs will be next to non-existant, especially as they have already confirmed there is no DLC, so outside of some fixes or adding more appearance items there is nothing to bring people back. Meanwhile, BG3 is basically a video game classic that, even if still new, will be lauded over for generations.

This said, maybe a few paid for GotY's might help DAV in the future.