dragon age

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.

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.

DAW2016: Bioware

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Developer Appreciation Week is here!  For the uninitiated the concept of Developer Appreciation week dates back to 2010 and was started by Couture Gaming the Blogger formerly known as Scarybooster.  The idea was simple, spend a week talking about all of the things you love about various game development companies and studios.  As a blogger we spend plenty of time pointing out what is wrong in the games we love, and talking about ways that they could be better.  That said it is important to understand that for most of us this critique comes from being a huge fan of the games and genres as a whole.  So during this week we point out the things that are going right and make a point of mentioning all the things we really appreciate out there.  If you too are a blogger please feel free to join in by posting your own Developer Appreciation Week ideas.

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This is going to be a difficult one to tackle, especially since I didn’t get a ton of sleep thanks to the tornado warnings.  However I am going to give it to good college try, and hope that the end result turns out at least not too shabby.  I first became aware as Bioware as a company with the release of Baldur’s Gate, or more so the existence of what I later came to know as the “Infinity Engine”.  I have been a fan of Dungeons and Dragons since I first found a players manual abandoned in a locker on the last day of school in second grade.  Finding that book spawned a lot of things, not the least of which was trying to hungrily gobble up anything TSR related.  I played the “gold box” series of games, namely because I had read the novels behind a lot of the stories.  There was just something missing with the game, and while I enjoyed them at the time they never really felt that good.  The story that was being told felt limited by the meager technology, and while I was happy enough with the end product…  that only lasted until I had played my first Final Fantasy game.  Baldur’s Gate was the title that brought me back from my console days into once again believing that the PC was a great platform for role-playing games.

Subsequent games were released…  Icewind Dale, Baldurs Gate II and even one of my all time favorites… Planescape Torment… all using this “Infinity Engine” I have to admit I got a bit of the wrong idea behind what exactly the company Bioware really was.  In my mind it seemed like Bioware was the tools company, and Interplay, Black Isle, or later the reboot Obsidian were the game creator.  It wasn’t until Neverwinter Nights was released that I really started to understand that Bioware was both the tools division and a lot of great storytelling wrapped into one package.  Neverwinter Nights was one of those revolutionary games for me personally.  While the original campaign was awesome… it was the inclusion of the aurora toolset that set my mind on fire.  At this time I was playing a lot of Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot so I tried to replicate some of my favorite features of those games using the Neverwinter engine.  I learned the C Script language and figured out how to code things like randomly generated loot from tables when you opened chests or killed mobs.  I also eventually figured out how to create a token based system along the lines of the one that allowed you to purchase armor in the Darkness Falls dungeon.  The end result was this amalgam of the EQ Plane of Hate and DAoC Darkness Falls that I called the “Plane of Spite”.  While I never did anything really interesting with it, I loved every single moment of working on it and figuring out the inner machinations of this engine.

It was not really until Knights of the Old Republic that I hopped back on the Bioware fandom, and I remember being crushingly disappointed when I learned that the title was going to be Xbox Exclusive.  Thankfully later that year it came out for the PC and I was absolutely thrilled to be dissecting that game world as well.  I loved Neverwinter Nights for its technical precision, and the Aurora and Infinity engines for giving me this awesome framework to go out and explore worlds in.  However KOTOR was the first time from Bioware that I was completely stunned by the storyline.  Last week we went into a discussion on AggroChat about the best Star Wars stories, and by the end of that show all of us pretty much came to the consensus that Knights of the Old Republic was if not the absolute best story, it was at least among them.  There are moments in this game that had shocking revelations that I have never quite recovered from.  Even though the engine is dated, and the graphics look like crap compared to what I am used to… I can still play this game happily over and over just because it was so damned well crafted.  I’ve bought it for others, and even own the mobile port of the game.  I feel like this game more than any set the tone for the modern incarnation of Bioware.

I ultimately for one reason or another skilled Mass Effect at launch, and instead picked up the Bioware banner once again with the release of Dragon Age: Origins.  During this period of time I was raiding in World of Warcraft rabidly… but there were a few weeks where I completely dropped off the face of the planet, and it was thanks to this game.  I was just completely enthralled with the world and the setting, and the concept of the dark spawn and deep roads.  I am a Dwarf at heart, so I loved every single moment of Orzammar.  My first play through was as a Dwarven Noble, and I have to say after all of the subsequent play sessions that is still the one I cherish the most.  Much the same as KOTOR, it was ultimately the characters that set this game apart from the others I had played.  They felt so fleshed out and three dimensional, and I actually cared about interacting with them.  I am a huge proponent of smashing things with a big weapon, and games that allow me to slaughter by the hundreds… but it is significantly harder to find a game that makes me feel.  Dragon Age made me feel so much, and during this time I had a really interesting encounter.  One of my guildies invited me to tank for some friends of his, and when I popped onto voice chat we had some of the usual getting to know a new person discussion.  I mentioned that I had been playing a ton of Dragon Age… and it was at this point that they started grilling me about this character or that, or what decision I made where.  It turns out that I was ultimately raiding that night with a bunch of the writers, and you could almost hear them beaming as they proudly chimed in that they wrote this or that as I gushed about various details.

With the release of Mass Effect 2, I later went back and became an addict of that series as well.  I still wish that someone would make that into a Walking Dead style serialized television show, because the story that is being told is among the best science fiction tales ever.  It just seems a crime that the only folks that will ever see the story, are the ones who have played through the game.  Then you of course have the release of Star Wars the Old Republic, that my friends and I tore through rabidly when it launched.  I burnt myself out on that game but recently a bunch of us ended up going back and remembering just how damned well written all of the story arcs really are.  At some point soon I want to go back and finish where I left off which is the start of the Revan content, and try out the new experience fallen empire content that I have heard so much about.  For sake of time though I am going to wrap things up, because otherwise I could probably carry on for a dozen more paragraphs talking about all of the things from Bioware games that I love.  It is a great studio, and while I was scared that EA would destroy its spirit… I have been pleasantly surprised that the core values of the company and the creative might seem to keep trucking along happily.  I look forward to more adventures be it with Andromedia or the next great IP that we have yet to experience.

Deep Roads

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It’s Over

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At this point I don’t know for certain if my character is weeping tears of frustration or joy.  Which ever the case I am just really happy that as of today and by the time I get home from work… the Love is in the Air event will be finished.  I felt so damned conflicted this year when it came to this event, largely because I don’t even know why I was participating.  I really really do not enjoy World of Warcraft holiday events, because they somehow manage to make something that should feel fun an exciting… into an obligation.  Then on top of that… I don’t even like the Love Rocket mount.  However because it is the rarest mount in the game, and I do not already have one… I feel somehow obligated to try for it every year.  I wish I could understand why I do it… and to the extent of pushing aside other games that I would enjoy more just so I can haplessly farm for a chase mount.  Sure it only takes a few minutes to do an attempt at the mount… but I felt obligated to run six different level 100 characters through it. Which by the time you check your garrison and shipyard on each, and queue for a dungeon…  you are talking about roughly an hour of your night gone…  chasing a mount I didn’t even really care that much about.

We talked at length about this phenomena over the weekend on the podcast, and largely why this works… and why it also frustrates us.  Tam suggested that it was because it feels like the game is not respecting our time…  and that is absolutely part of it.  I think for me personally a good deal of my frustration is that this madness is actually working.  This game knows my triggers so well, and it feels as though I have no control in the process.  There is a certain measure of excitement in the chase, and were this something I could normally farm on my own… it would fall into the same category as my attempts to get rare mounts from raid bosses.  However the fact that it is only available for a limited time…  triggers the “fear of missing out” that if we don’t become mindless drones we might miss that one opportunity to get something cool.  Even when in this case the something cool is not something we actually wanted in the first place.  It is just frustrating to see a company working so effectively against my nature and getting me to follow along in their scheme each year in trying for “the thing”.  Now granted I know without a doubt that come Halloween I will once again be chasing like mad in trying to get the Headless Horseman mount.  At least I can rest comfortable in the knowledge that it “could be worse”.  I mean it could be something as heinous as the Rift cash box chase mounts 🙂

Dwarf in the Deep Roads

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I don’t have a whole lot to say here, because I didn’t get terribly far into it…  however I did manage to start a quest chain leading me into the Deep Roads.  The Deep Roads are my happy place in the Dragon Age universe because if it were really possible…. I would absolutely live completely underground.  If you venture into any of my Minecraft settlements, you will see a pretty simple structure above ground… that leads to a massive snaking catacombs underneath.  I just feel safe underground, and I have loved being down in every cave I have been able to.  I still think having a structure that was mostly buried in a mountain would be my ultimate situation.  I wonder if some of my reaction of safety to being underground… comes from the fact that I live in a state where the wind comes sweeping down the plains…. and takes out an entire city every now and then.  In any case… we also got into a lengthy discussion about the Deep Roads on the podcast…. and I was shocked to find out that pretty much everyone other than me… unanimously hated them.  They just seem like a badass concept… here are these roads and warrens deep underground that you have to fight the Dark Spawn which natively live down there.  That pretty much sounds amazing…  constantly having a fresh flow of Dark Spawn to fight.  Then again…. I might not be normal when it comes to combat in video games.  The Deep Roads are like the most metal part of Dragon Age, and I am hoping together to get time to venture forth again down there.