Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we started with a single topic… and by the time we were finished ended up having to bump half of the assembled topics to next week in order to keep the runtime down. We start off with Bel talking about the bad news for Path of Exile players, and how there is no new league around the corner. He also talks a bit about getting sucked into the private league that Pohx created which has capped out at 20,000 players. From there Grace talks a bit about playing Heroes of Hammerwatch II and enjoying that. Kodra shares his thoughts about the Diablo IV Campaign thus far as he still is effectively in the first act. Grace and Ash share their experiences with Coridden a more narrative-driven action role-playing game. Finally, Kodra and Tam talk about their experiences playing Battletech and how Kodra is coming around to the idea of playing games for fun, rather than simply optimizing the strategy for winning.
Good Morning Folks. Last night I stayed up a bit later than normal and finished Dragon Age Veilguard. This morning I am going to attempt to walk a narrow line of talking about the events of the game without going into a lot of details. There are absolutely going to be spoilers, but I am going to try my best not to spoil exact plot decisions. I will however talk about some of the general decisions that will influence the ending that you can get. From what I can tell based on some research this morning, I seem to have managed to land upon the “best” ending. There is no “New Game Plus” mode so that is probably going to influence how fast I end up replaying this game since there is no easy path to just make different story decisions.
One of the decisions with this game that I was less than happy about, was the lack of an ability to import your Inquisitor. This was a thing that happened in previous incarnations of Dragon Age and I have played through the entire sequence importing my previous save and rolling my decisions forward. This legitimately was one of the coolest experiences because it almost always opened up options that you could not get any other way. However Veilguard is a game where there is a very clear canon set of choices made by the Inquisitor, and without that, some of the flow of the plot of the game would not function at all. You are given control over what your character looks like, but I chose a default appearance because quite honestly… I knew it was not MY Inquisitor.
One of my favorite aspects of the game however is the characters. There was a lot of spite floating around about this game and I don’t get it. The characters are all beautifully crafted and if you do not love Manfred the skeleton you have no soul. Similarly, Assan the Griffon is amazing and the best baby boy. The thing is having effectively completed all of the companion quests and quite honestly all of the side quests… the characters are amazingly well-crafted and deeply multi-dimensional. If anything… this is quite possibly the most Dragon Age game out there because for me it was always about the character interactions and never about what sort of combat was present in the game. These are games about friendship and romance set against the tapestry of a really interesting world. Veilguard delivers on all of those levels.
Another aspect of the game that I really enjoyed is how it handles romance in general. Effectively all of the characters in this game are bisexual/pansexual and can be romanced from any flavor of player character. However, the act of becoming a couple ends up happening pretty early at least compared to other Bioware games, and this has some really interesting ramifications. This frees up the other characters in the game to begin to develop their own relationships. I am not entirely certain how many NPC on NPC romance options there are, but I was given the choice to encourage other characters that obviously have chemistry to go for it, and this was super good. The thing is… the platonic options are way better than they are in other games and it felt like I was able to shape the lives of my companions more than I would normally be able to.
There is a loss in this game that cannot be avoided. The seasoned Bioware player in me tries to chart a course that allows me to save everyone. This is going to be a massive spoiler but even in a perfectly played game… you are going to lose one of your companions. The very first decision that you are asked to make in the lead-up to the final conflict… is going to lead to that companion never returning to your party. All of the other decisions are a combination of how well-suited they are for the mission you are assigning them to, and whether or not you fully unlocked that companion’s potential by completing the final chapter of their story arc. Similar to Mass Effect, if you do not go into the final mission with full companion strength and have completed all of the quests for the factions, you are going to lose more than that single required character. Essentially the first decision of who leads the second team is a Virmire-style question.
Another aspect of Veilguard that I greatly appreciate is how clear it is in messaging that you are entering the point of no return. You are given this screen indicating how prepared you are for the final battle. More than that however you are given a warning well before this point that things are getting close to the final phase. I’m the type of Bioware player that farms down every side quest possible before moving the main plot forward because I have learned the hard way that often those options will change or be removed when the world state changes. However, Veilguard is painfully clear about what you are getting yourself into before you actually embark upon that point of no return. Another thing that I really love is that the game is constantly telling you when you have reached a critical decision that is going to have lasting effects. More than that it also reminds you HOW you received this side plot point and what decision you made previously it was based upon.
Quite possibly the best part about Veilguard though is the way in which the plot wraps up. Remember how epic the final assault on Earth felt in Mass Effect 3? What if you had a game that managed to keep that same level of hype all the way through to the conclusion without fumbling it at the goal line? That is pretty much Veilguard because the final assault on Minrathos feels amazing and is filled with so many visuals that I legitimately do not want to spoil here so I am giving you the most general shot instead. The ending is satisfying in a way that Mass Effect 3 never was, and quite honestly… Veilguard would feel like a fitting conclusion to the entire Dragon Age series if it needed to be. The game as a whole expands upon the known lore of the series and wraps up so many elements in a nice little bow at the end. It reminds me of the way that Endwalker neatly wrapped up a decade’s worth of gameplay in its single final act. Dragon Age lore nerds are eating well.
This game has gotten so much bad press but honestly… I don’t get it. It makes me question if any of these folks were actually Dragon Age fans at all. What game series have they been playing up until this point, it certainly is not the series I have been playing. Veilguard is quite possibly the MOST Dragon Age game I have played in the series and legitimately makes me want to go back and play the other games again knowing where things are going to wind up. If you cannot find something that you love in this game then you have no heart. This is quite possibly my game of the year, and that comes from having just wrapped up Final Fantasy XVI right before this… and that in itself was a freaking amazing game. If you’ve ever played a Bioware game trying to engineer the perfect ending, or with the perfect romance options… then this game was created for you.
I know this post is riddled with spoilers, but I tried my best to talk about the conclusion of the game without going into a bunch of details. I have no clue if that was successful.
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.
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.
