Veilguard is Pretty Great

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Hey Folks! On Friday I talked a little bit about my very early experiences starting a new character in Dragon Age The Veilguard… or I as I seem to keep shortening it to just Veilguard. There was a heap of negative press surrounding this game ahead of its launch and if you spend time on Reddit or YouTube you would be convinced that this is quite possibly the worst game on the planet. Ignore these voices and press forward if you were someone who enjoyed Dragon Age in the past and just want more fun adventures with eventual romance options. It has been wild how every internet pundit seems to be screaming about this game… but all of my actual friends who are playing it seem to be enjoying themselves. If you want to watch a video that is not hyperbolic I recommend this one from my friend Dusty. I’m roughly twenty hours into the game at this point and am going to attempt to give you a low-spoiler discussion about what I like and dislike so far.

Probably my single favorite aspect of the game is that during character creation you are asked to make a choice between six different factions. These factions all play important roles in the story and aligning your character with one of them, also presents a bunch of unique options that play out during a single play-through of the game because of how your character was aligned before the events of Veilguard. I’ve been wanting to play another Grey Warden ever since the second game, and of course, I absolutely chose that path going into Veilguard. I’ve seen so many quest options that only really make sense because I am a Grey Warden, and I am certain that choosing any of the factions will have similar ramifications on your time spent with the story. This means that at a minimum there should be six different really interesting playthroughs of the game before it starts to feel a bit stale. One of my criticisms of Cyberpunk 2077 was how the origins only really made a difference at the very beginning of the game, but this seems to keep pushing forward with the story.

Another thing that I really dig is that as soon as you have completed the first mission in the game and have your base of operations, you have access to the Mirror of Transformation. This allows you to edit your character’s appearance completely at any time. Dusty talked a bit about this in his video, but there have been many times that an option that I chose during the character creator looked cool at the time… but annoyed me after seeing three hundred cutscenes. For example, I had some weird facial tattoos going on with my first playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 and they annoyed me from that point forward. Similarly in Inquisition my first character just felt off, and I didn’t really get into the game until I completely rerolled from scratch. Veilguard just lets you do this as often as you want without needing to spend any resources.

Similarly, you can undo your talent choices and the choices that you make for your companions at any time. Decide you like running with a specific companion, but you really need some sort of healer? You are in luck because pretty much every companion has some sort of healing line that you can invest in. There are a bunch of options that lock off other branches of the tree, but you can just undo all of those choices and try the other branch if you decide you don’t really like it. With your much larger character tree, there are a bunch of times you might want to shift your optimization because you decide that you want a different sort of ability in your loadout, which invalidates a bunch of other choices you made. The game uses a tagging system similar to ARPG games, so if you are using a bunch of abilities with the “Control” tag then you might want to pick up a bunch of other things in the tree that do things for those abilities.

One of the things that I do not love, however… is the gearing system. Namely, my brain interprets the little green sparkly icon as being that there is an upgrade that I should swap to. It is very rare that you will find items that are complete upgrades to other items. Instead, you are going to find a lot of items that are of different item bases, to borrow another term from ARPGs. I wish they clearly identified what sort of base an item is so that I could be on the lookout for new higher-level versions of that base item instead of having to futz with every single item I find. The other weird thing is that you level up the quality tiers of an item… by finding more copies of it. So for example I have a white quality sword… if I find another copy it will turn into green quality, and if I find another after that blue and so on. There is a crafting system but it only increases the bonuses of the item, not the base quality. There is also an enchanting system, but it essentially determines which of several fixed bonuses on an item are unlocked at any given time.

Something that I wish I had noticed sooner was that I could pop over to the world view of the map and fast-travel to any Eluvian without having to go through the crossroads. At first, I was venturing forth into the crossroads anytime I needed to go anywhere in the game, and while this was mildly interesting… it was a bit maddening. I do however need to spend a bit more time in the Crossroads because there are a ton of things to unlock there. There are also a bunch more mirrors than I currently have access to, so I am curious where the campaign will eventually be sending me. Some of them seem to be specifically used for a single mission, and others like the main faction zones are repeatable content that you can visit at any time and explore fully.

One of the things that is a bit weird about the game, is that every companion has some sort of gimmick that they can do to help unlock areas of content in an almost Metroidvania-style manner. Initially, I thought that this meant that it would just give me strong reasons to take specific companions to specific zones so that I could complete puzzles and unlock different areas of these maps. However, once I collected my full set of seven companions… my magical dagger MacGuffin started allowing me to do all of the abilities that related to whoever I did not currently have in my party. Annoyingly I can also do these abilities much faster… than actually having that companion in my party. So this weirdly actually colors my preferences towards never grouping with anyone other than my favorite two companions. Assan the Griffon… responds SO MUCH faster to me when using the dagger… than to Davrin when he is attempting to give commands.

The World is extremely gorgeous and we are getting to see so many areas that we have never been to before. The Antivaan Crows are just as great as we always thought they would be, and it has been interesting seeing the Mourn Watch… a group of Necromancers that feel plucked straight out of the Locked Tomb Series of books. Probably both the coolest thing… and the most jarring is that the game is littered with characters that have appeared in other Dragon Age titles. It is amazing to see these characters again and interact with them again… but the different art style means that generally speaking, they feel like AI Art versions of those characters because the only thing that is really recognizable is the outfit they are wearing. Morrigan for example looks nothing like Morrigan from the other games… Dorian is only vaguely familiar based on his outfit and his mustache. There is a character that I just met that I swear was one of the Deathwatch Dwarves or whatever they were called guarding the bridge and constantly fighting off the Darkspawn in Origins, but I am not finding any references to him.

The world exploration is also quite a bit of fun. There are puzzles but they are basic enough that you can solve them relatively quickly, and won’t be something that you spend hours trying to figure out. I think some of the things that I am enjoying about the game, are some of the aspects that other players are annoyed by. I like that things are relatively light and fast-moving, and do not get bogged down in too much detail. Then again… honestly I remember the other Dragons Age games being fairly similar. They were fun popcorn games, that had enough interesting choices that would allow you to play them multiple times. As much as players talk fondly about it… I don’t really love the extreme number of fail conditions that were laced in the Mass Effect series because it made me feel like I had to follow a guide to make sure that I did not end up losing half of my party permanently during a single quest chain.

I have been having a blast playing through the game, and honestly… I will probably give it a couple of different playthroughs just to see how the other factions shake out. My friends who are also playing the game seem to be enjoying it as well. Essentially my advice is not to allow the internet negativity surrounding this game to color your opinions. I find internet reviews to be less and less valuable these days when it comes to giving me information that actually makes a difference to my enjoyment of something. This honestly… might be my game of the year pending they manage to stick the landing. I went into the experience with fairly low expectations, given how long it took to turn out this game, and how many seeming restarts it had. I have been pleasantly surprised at just how polished the game experience is and how rich the options for playing the game the way you want to play it have been.

Have you been playing Veilguard? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.

AggroChat #498 – Rogue Missle Command

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Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! We are back after a week off last week due to too many being out. When we do one of those weeks missed we have a truly stupid number of topics to discuss, and this week is no exception.  We start off talking a little bit about Xenoblade Chronicles X getting a Switch release date, and Utopia Must Fall the game that you get when you make Missile Command a Roguelike.  Related we also talk a bit about Nodebuster which is going for a somewhat similar thing.  Bel and Grace talk about their experiences with Wayfinder, a game that completely changed its business model from freemium cash grab to buy the box. Tam talks about an interesting situation of being in a deeply collaborative “competition” and how cool those moments are. Ash shares his thoughts about Windblown the new co-op ARPG from the folks behind Dead Cells.  Tam shares his thoughts about I Am Your Beast and Kodra in a bit more detail about Tactical Breach Wizards.  Bel talks about his recent adventures in Return of Reckoning, a fan-run Warhammer Online server that itself has been up and running for a decade now after the official game closed down in 2013.

Topics Discussed:

  • Xenoblade Chronicles X Switch Announcement
  • Utopia Must Fall
  • Nodebuster
  • Wayfinder
  • Competitions that Aren’t
  • Windblown
  • I Am Your Beast
  • Tactical Breach Wizards
  • Warhammer Return of Reckoning

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Landing Sufficiently Stuck

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Morning Folks! Last night I wrapped up Final Fantasy XVI and I have to say for the most part it wrapped things up in a satisfying manner. There are a few things that happened that I would prefer not to have happened, but that is going to be the case with pretty much any story-driven game where you are not given any real control over the narrative outcome. Did I complete everything? No, as I got closer to the end I stopped doing side quests because I wanted to push through the story and see how things wrapped up. The game has a newgame+ mode that I might partake of at some point, and there are two DLCs that I have yet to explore. Will I actually do that? Potentially not given my track record with actually returning to narrative games that do not have variable bioware-esc outcomes.

The last chapter of the game was pretty freaking dark and maybe overstayed its welcome a bit. This is a problem that I have with a lot of games where they feel like they need to escalate the amount of nonsense that the game starts throwing at you, as you get closer to the finale. The escalation in the number of encounters didn’t feel terribly meaningful… just more busy work that I had to complete in order to move on to the final encounter. This is not an FFXVI-only problem, as pretty much every narrative game seems to feel like quantity is needed to make you feel like you have accomplished something. In the last third of the game, I would have honestly been perfectly fine if it was just watching the story unfold before me because that is why I was playing not for anything on a mechanical level. I pretty much standardized on the Phoenix Power Set as the one I enjoyed the most and rarely ever changed tactics. I am that guy who usually completed Doom using nothing but a shotgun because it was the weapon I enjoyed using the most.

The game was gorgeous and the story was fairly lavish. It feels sufficiently Final Fantasy in that it hits a lot of the high points that are always there. There is a Cid and a Mid and we have a ship named the Enterprise, etc. We fiddle about with Crystals, though the interaction with them is pretty much the inverse of every other Final Fantasy game. The world however also feels sufficiently unique, in that It would be interesting to see more content set in this universe. I would love to see another game follow up after the events of this first game, to see how the world has changed in lieu of the ramifications of the final chapter. I guess however, that is probably the sign of a good story… that you end up wanting more of it.

Was it my favorite Final Fantasy game? Honestly… I am not sure. It is certainly up there in the upper echelon of them, but I am not sure it will dethrone the way Final Fantasy VI made me feel the first time I played through it. I do however really love the characters that we were presented and the subtle nuance of them. I said before that this was a much more adult tale that was being told, and I still feel that. As fantastical as the wild kaiju battles were at times… the story itself was grounded in the human condition and the struggle to live a life free of tyranny. The best stories are essentially fables, and this tale could absolutely be abstracted into a bedtime story. I am extremely interested to see where the next mainline Final Fantasy game goes from here.

Yesterday was also the launch of Dragon Age Veilguard, and while I wanted to wrap up Final Fantasy XVI first… I did get a bit of time with the game. I thought I would be terribly clever and sit through the lengthy shader compilation process that took roughly thirty minutes. However… each time you boot up the game you have to go through a similarly annoying shader verification process. It went much faster but it is still really frustrating given how much I hop in and out of games. I am hoping given time they will patch the game to improve this process a bit. The positive however is that once you are in the game, it appears to be running smoothly as you shunted all the shader nonsense to the start-up process.

There have been a lot of YouTube videos in the lead-up to this release lamenting how Dragon Age is a bad game for one reason or another. Largely I think this is folks that simply cannot cope with the stylized graphics. While I agree that they did the Kunari wrong with this graphical treatment, the Humans, Elves, and Dwarves all seem perfectly cromulent. I was able to create a sufficiently “Belghasty” character complete with a nice beard, black hair, green eyes, and a scar over my left eye. I was also able to play my favorite Dragon Age faction the Grey Wardens again, so already the game is getting pretty high marks for me in the things I really care about the most.

Combat has been fun enough, and the world is really nicely rendered. Overall I am pretty pleased though admittedly I am only about an hour into the game through what is essentially the initial call to action. I can play a sword and shield Warrior type, and combat feels fluid enough thus far. I am not looking for some irrational challenge level, I just want something that is snappy enough to feel like it is not dragging down the story. Basically, I am in “pleasantly surprised” territory because I had some significant fears about what this release was going to feel like. Essentially if you are a Dragon Age fan and are in it for the story and the romance options, then I would say ignore the YouTube doomers and play away.

I am not sure how active I am going to be blogging my journey. I always feel weird when I am playing single-player games because I don’t really want to go full spoilers… and there is only so much vague posting that you can truly do on a game without giving away core details. I took a break yesterday for this sort of reason because I did not have any sweeping summary of my thoughts about the adventure yet in Final Fantasy XVI, nor did I really want to talk about details about where I was in the game. I figure the same is probably going to happen with Dragon Age Veilguard. So fair warning… the blog posts might be a bit spotty for the next week or so.

Delays are Good

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Path of Exile II Three Week Delay Announcement

The community had noticed that recently GGG was curiously radio silent regarding the upcoming early access launch for Path of Exile 2 and the plans for the 3.26 Path of Exile 1 league. Yesterday we found out why when this video dropped informing us that there would be a three-week delay in the start of early access from November 15th to December 6th. There has been a spectrum of reactions from content creators, but I think for the most part the majority have been relatively positive. Sure there is a certain amount of disappointment and a modicum of frustration around changed plans, but clearly it seems like they understand the scope of what is about to be released into the world and how popular it is likely to be. I personally suffer from an abundance of things vying for my time, so I will not lament having a few more weeks before I am pulled in by the sirens song of Path of Exile II.

New World

What I want to talk about this morning however is how game delays are generally always a positive thing. Last week I groused about how I struggle to find unbridled joy in gaming anymore, and I’ve come to the realization that in large part this is due to the fact that games keep releasing in an unfinished state. There are so many games that I have played where given an additional year of reworking the game, are actually in a pretty great state. I have my issues with the recent rebranding of New World but had that game been delayed six months to a year… I think it would be a far more successful game than it is currently. The game that I played when they launched Fresh Start servers, was a completely different experience than the buggy mess of a game that I played on launch. It almost hit a million concurrent players at launch and has never managed to attract more than a small fraction of that number after that point. You only get a single chance to make your first impression with players, and it becomes a massive uphill battle to convince them that the game is worth trying again.

Mass Effect Andromeda

Similarly, the poor performance of the game and the weird graphic glitches of Mass Effect Andromeda during press previews and early access effectively turned what was a pretty good offering into a constant meme. Within a week or so of the launch, every major issue with this game was fixed and I had a blast playing through the campaign. However, because of the poor rushed state, it was thrust out the door… it became the laughing stock of the internet and effectively killed the Mass Effect brand. Sure there is some attempt to continue the lineage of the original trilogy, but it will be once more an uphill battle to try and interest players in the franchise again. Had the game been delayed by a few months… we would probably be talking about the sequel or even a third game in the Andromeda series by now.

Diablo IV

More recently we have the tale of Diablo IV, which admittedly is probably a bit different. The core problem with the game was that the developers had a flawed vision of what ARPG players actually wanted in a game like this. “D4 Bad” has become a catchphrase that has been turned into countless AI Slop song parodies… but has legitimately infected at least the Twitch audience. You cannot watch a single YouTube video on the game without someone commenting that. The thing is the game is honestly in a pretty great state right now for core gameplay. I didn’t like the campaign for Vessel of Hatred, but have had a blast playing through the endgame content on the new Spiritborn class. Do I think another year would have helped the game? Potentially… because that is essentially what it has taken to rework all of the bad systems. However, I am not sure it would have made much difference because it was the extremely negative feedback that forced a change in direction.

Baldur’s Gate III

I think there are studios that have managed to balance the need for pushing a game out there and getting some revenue with wanting to make sure the final release of the game is a polished product. The early access incubation period certainly helped Baldur’s Gate III turn into the exceptionally polished product that we all enjoyed, and that broke concurrency records at the time for a single-player experience. I think had something like Diablo IV launched into early access and then later had a 1.0 release once the majority of the system changes were made, it might have been less of a meme. This is essentially the model that Grinding Gear Games is trying to follow with Path of Exile 2, and I am hoping it bears similar fruit. There already seem to be a number of significant shifts in the gameplay from the first game, and I am uncertain how those will shake out. I am hoping an extended early access period will give them time to react to player feedback and solidify the game experience. I know at least mentally I treat an early access game a bit differently than I would a AAA Game launch, and that extra bit of forgiveness gives a game the chance to potentially improve for the better.

Path of Exile II – Returning Uniques

So if Grinding Gear Games has come out and said that they need some more time to make sure the servers are stable, then I am of the mind to give it to them without grumbling. While this is an early access release, there are still going to be a heck of a lot of eyes on the game and expecting something playable. I know the Last Epoch 1.0 release was severely hampered by server problems, which has I think kept them from hitting anywhere near the same concurrent numbers of subsequent releases. Anyways I am good with the delay, and it seems like we have officially entered spoiler season for the upcoming POE2 Early Access. Yesterday they released the above image showing off some uniques that will be returning from POE1 and that have received a bit of a “glow up”. While I cannot think of a single build that would want all of these items, it has been interesting to see just how much better they look in the new client. There is a Reddit thread that compares the graphics of what a character in POE1 looks like wearing all of these versus the above image.

For me… I am hoping to be able to wrap up Final Fantasy XVI either tonight or tomorrow night and then likely start on Dragon Age Veilguard after that. I might take a break from all of this to play through the new Alan Wake II DLC on Halloween night in honor of the “spooposicty”. I also still want to return to Wayfinder at some point with Ace, but our schedules have not just lined up recently. Mostly the point of this morning’s post is to say… Delays are generally a good idea if a studio thinks it needs one. I am almost always going to be in support of this.