quicked.bsky.social
Writer, gamer, reader, thinker
306 posts
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Battle Against A True Hero, Death By Glamour, King Under The Mountain, and Undertale's Main Theme have given me life in so many bad work moments.
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...you know what, I think Cloud is in the running here, too. Squall, however, is so repressed about it he's vibrating.
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The sense I have from Veilguard is that the original Bioware team turned in a golden concept for a new Dragon Age that allowed a relative break with preceding games without disrupting the overarching story, and that EA's fumbling corporate leadership reduced that concept to what we got.
29/
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But I can sense the bones of something far better buried beneath the game we got. A game that has an honest reckoning with so much the Dragon Age series and narrative, engaging with its world in new and interesting ways while revealing some of its long-lost secrets.
26/
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I'm talking about Lucanis for a reason: he's the most obvious indictment of Veilguard's largest failure.
Veilguard is emblematic of how Bioware-under-EA has stopped caring about the actual story of their games, both in terms of gameplay and in terms of actual narrative.
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As Bioware's talent pool was gutted, its brand was also tarnished as EA pushed it to explore the trends of a given moment (Andromeda to chase the Mass Effect high, Anthem to chase the live service model).
Veilguard suffered from this poor leadership repeatedly.
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bsky.app/profile/lady...
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The result is that a studio known for creating ambitious games that seem to respond to player choice gradually become something more mainstream and lackluster. Both monetary and critical success slip away as Bioware increasingly loses the talent that made them Bioware.
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EA's involvement in Bioware had been a disaster since it began in 08. You can feel them limiting the horizons and possibilities of Bioware's productions almost as soon as they become involved: DLC choices in ME2 and ME3, creative changes in ME3, rushing the production of DAII.
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There are a lot of good ingredients in Veilguard, but the game fundamentally failed because it doesn't make much of them. It's not equal to the sum of its parts.
By better accounting for both past and present events, the story would feel properly epic and consequential.
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Furiosa pulls off that oh-so-difficult expanded universe trick of being a perfect companion piece to the work that inspired it. It's a good movie in its own right, but the way it interacts with Fury Road (no matter what order you watch them in) makes it MIRACULOUS.
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These aren't mutually exclusive
The world being in a bad state doesn't preclude them from assembling real threats for rhe end-game, especially given the existence of both the Seraphim and Uranus.
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My guess is we get a Kuma-style extended flashback that really puts the story of One Piece in a different perspective. Maybe setting up circumstances to make victory over the World Government possible.
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There are a lot of good ingredients in Veilguard, but the game fundamentally failed because it doesn't make much of them. It's not equal to the sum of its parts.
By better accounting for both past and present events, the story would feel properly epic and consequential.
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But to be honest, the specifics don't matter as much as making sure each episode is genuinely consequential. Use backstory dialgoue (a la Witcher 3) and brief character design sections (a la the Inquisitor in Veilguard) to establish quick sketches of previous games that might effect the present.
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I have a lot of ideas about what that would look like, with the game being more episodic in structure, focused more on events than an open world (again, taking cues from Mass Effect).
Many of these episodes would echo those of Veilguard, though with a different focus.
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And each of these big moments echoes to an older game. We meet old companions as we explore new areas. We learn more about characters old and new as we delve into the deep lore that lies beneath Thedas. We treat Dragon Age IV as a proper finale.
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This is the throughline that unites the Dread Wolves story: as each companion takes us to explore a different aspect of the world, and stop the gods, we keep having to face how what we're doing echoes what Solas did, for good and ill.
Maybe we even come to agree with him, that the Veil should fall.
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Maybe it's a heroic tale: you can be what Solas never could
Maybe it's a tale of redemption: you show Solas a better way is possible
Maybe it's a tale of grim acceptance: you and Solas have to live with your choices
Maybe it's a tale of rejection: you will not allow yourself to become like him
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This is the central theme of Dread Wolves. You and Solas are both capable individuals, outgunned by terrible powers, forced to desperate lengths to stop them.
The choices you make, both in the game and in speaking to Solas, allow you to decide how deep those parallels run.
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And as you make these sacrifices, you're speaking with Solas, and seeing into his memories. Seeing how an idealistic Spirit of Wisdom became the Dread Wolf, and made a ruin of the world, to stop still greater evil.
And you see the parallels between the two of you.
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You can save Neve, but only by letting Minrathous fall.
You can save the Crows, but only at the cost of losing Lucian's soul to Spite.
You can save Hawke and the Warden, but only at the cost of their lovers.
The longer you play, the more you have to sacrifice to keep fighting.
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Have it be a beautiful, terrible intersection of Origins, ME2, and ME3. You're building a coalition to oppose the gods, earning the loyalty of powerful, unique allies, making decisions that shape the fates of peoples and nations.
And many of those decisions are mutually exclusive.
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Dread Wolves should feel epic and apocalyptic in scale. Every threat should fit into a larger context of a war, not just over the fate of the world, but the very nature of the world itself. You have to make choices about who lives, who dies, who becomes what.
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This change has two important functions. First, it makes the Companion quests more important, and can tie them into the overarching story more effectively. And second, we better understand Solas. Everything about the world he lives in is a twisted echo of the world he loved.
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Every word is true
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This actually squares with the lore reveal in Veilguard: that the Elven Gods are Spirits embodied in flesh. Flemythal is what that union SHOULD be: a willing host and a willing spirit becoming something greater together. The other Gods perverted the process.
And other Spirits learned from them.
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And this structure can speak to my larger pitch:
The Elven Gods need a proper host to properly incarnate. Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain are trying to resurrect their fellow gods. Every Companion Quest is built around a possible host for those Gods to be reborn.
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If the Warden survives, Gilan'nain claims them due to their Blight resilience: if not, Ghilan'nain can claim a different Warden.
Elgar'nan claims Hawke, a dark Champion to rule Thedas.
It's a compelling narrative by itself. And long-time fans are at once invested in if they can save them.
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I have one big pitch for how to make Dragon Age IV a fitting capstone to the series that both accounts for player choice and limits how much player choice matters.
The big pitch: all Elf Gods are spirits inhabiting mortal bodies. And Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain are possessing Hawke and the Warden.
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To be clear, I also think Dragon Age IV needs to do a better job accounting for player choices. My personal pitch is that there are certain conversations that should effect world state, allowing players who want to bring over certain aspects of their old games (i.e. who rules Ferelden and Orlais).
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This is one big change I feel like Dragon Age IV should have made. I understand not wanting to account for previous player choices (even if I disagree). But if you're going to do it, do it on a grand scale. Have the gods be causing such devastation that your previous choices are rendered pointless.
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Establish the scale of the threat immediately. Threaten both newcomers with abject horror and old fans with a vision of what the Blight can do in the hands of the gods.
And my two cents? Don't have it be a a random village.
Have it be Redcliffe. Hit your fans where it hurts.
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And here we start the first serious departures from Veilguard. There's no delay in realizing the stakes. You stumble into the village taken over by the Blight, and find one of the gods waiting for you. You barely escape with your life, thanks to Solas.
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The game starts roughly the same: Varric leads a party whose only goal is to find Solas, possibly to stop him, possibly to save him. You are still playing Varric's talented #2, recruited to be the muscle to counter Solas. Things go wrong when you confront Solas: the old gods are loosed upon Thedas.
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So why am I pitching a title change? Why not just pitch a reversion to the original Dread Wolf title?
Simple: because the focus of the game should be going to desperate lengths to build a better world.
It should be about a party of heroes following in the Dread Wolf's footsteps, for good and ill.
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Context makes it worse. The game is still focused on Solas, the Dread Wolf (though the ways in which the game fumbles its focus makes it hard to remember this). The name Veilguard isn't really used in universe, and wouldn't make much sense if it was: you're not really focused on guarding the Veil!
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Veilguard tells you as little about the premise of Dragon Age IV as Dread Wolf does. A person with no knowledge of Dragon Age aswould have as little knowledge from the title Veilguard as they would from Dread Wolf. And, personally? I think I would be way more interested in Dread Wolf.
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Instead, I'll be arguing that it is possible to make something better out of the ingredients that Veilguard gave us. There's good stuff in Veilguard; it's just too little, and poorly used.
And that absolutely includes the title. Veilguard is a bad title, both of itself and in context.
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So I won't be advocating that, say, Rook shouldn't exist, or that Dragon Age IV needed to use the Dragon Age Keep (even though I believe the failure to build worldstate to match previous events is one of the biggest reasons that Dragon Age Veilguard was doomed to fail).