Dragon Age: The Veilguard arrived with pretty solid critic scores, racking up an 84 on Metacritic, translating into what appear to be pretty solid sales, at the very least, putting up the highest playercount EA or BioWare has seen on Steam, with seemingly good console performance as well.
But after the critic reviews come in, user scores go live, and it was exceptionally easy to predict how they were going to split between players who had played the game, and ones that likely hadn’t. See if you can spot the difference.
- Steam – 77% “Mostly Positive” scores
- PlayStation – 4.45/5 stars
- Xbox – 4/5 stars
- Metacritic – 3.4/10
You can guess which three platforms there require you to own the game to rate it, and which one does not.
It is a good game, from the four ratings I would align myself with the 77% from Steam.
My biggest critic so far, 12h in, would be that the language they use and the way they speak is way to modern for a fantasy game for my liking. It often makes it a bit hard to immerse into the game for me when they use 21th century words or concepts or mannerisms.
The vast majority of angry reviews about Veilguard I’ve seen are from people who have never played the game, and god is it what I hate about gaming right now. It’s so much rage and anger, and frankly it’s all just jumping on the bandwagon for it because who doesn’t love raging against EA.
Except… Bioware pulled it off in my opinion. I withheld judgement because I was real nervous about how it’d go. It could either be great, or it’d be a dumpster fire, and unfortunately I figured that EA would determine Bioware’s fate based on it. But… Bioware did it. I’m a good 15 hours in and I’m having honestly a lot of fun. The story continues well after Inquisition, the companions are growing on me, the areas are fun to be in. EA said they would stay out of Bioware’s way and… I think they did. It took the Jedi games to finally let them just let Bioware do their thing… but it appears so. If you know the Dragon Age franchise, it’s officially safe to buy in my book, and I recommend it.
My only caveat is that as with all franchise games - judge it on it’s own. Especially with Dragon Age it’s very easy to compare to it’s predecessors, and to some extent of course you should, but at the same time, gaming is in a very different place than it was in 2009. People expect different things. What was popular then would not work now, and vis-versa. So, as a game that is coming out now in the 2020s, I’m fully into the story, I enjoy the environment, the gameplay is fun, and there appears to just be a fuckload of content.
I like the game overall, but the criticisms are definitely legitimate. The dialogue is so overwhelmingly cringy sometimes and that’s coming from someone who just beat the new Life is Strange. For some people, including me, that’s not a dealbreaker and the rest of the game is pretty solid. For others, this is understandably too distracting to make it worth playing.
Edit: before I get accused of not playing the games, see screenshots below.
The game has no DRM, it’s entirely possible that a significant portion of those players gave it a go and were disappointed and decided not to spend the money.
Personally, the game feels like a Josh Whedon film written by a team that prefers to proselytise instead of trying to capture the player in Thedas. It’s a constant barrage of immersion breaking dialogue from the get go. The combat has been dumbed down to such level that It should be advertised as an action adventure game and not an RPG. At the end of the day, the game ostensibly suffers from Bioware’s/EA choice to lay off talent like Mary Kirby and hire cheap, fresh out of college writers of dubious competence who were further mismanaged due to consistent lay offs. This was compounded by the reluctance of Connie to actually have a vision for the game.
It’s saddening because there was a small glimpse of brilliance in the final moments of the game but by that point it had already become a chore to finish it.
As a side note, my favourite game of the last few years is TLOU2. Sometimes the user reviews coalesce with one’s views, sometimes they don’t. Trying to paint tens of thousands of people with a broad stroke rather than at least listening to what they say is unfair. In this case it feels like the low user scores in DAV are warranted, since the game has significantly departed from the expectations of fans of the series. Conversely, in TLOU2, the users were mourning the loss of their favourite character and lashed out.
