Dragon Age: The Veilguard - A woke disaster? Yep!

[Foltest]

I need to look into the eyes of Dragon Age II and say "I am sorry for calling you the worst DA game".

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

There is nothing in there worth playing aside from the boobies, and even then I have seen better. Gaming is dead, both sides are to blame.

I definitely disagree with this. My only issues are, #1, it's too difficult. Maybe not to a Souls-like degree but still very much on the difficult side. #2, it wasn't very original, it's no secret that it's very similar to Nier Automata in many ways. But it's still a very well made game and it didn't exactly have much competition in 2024.

View attachment 6940062
You mean this pile of dung? Yes, it's as HIV+ as it looks.

Whew, that's some mighty fine slop. They've really been ass raping this IP huh.

 

[The Honkler Cometh]

There would probably be a quest arc around "returning" the Vegas Strip to the native tribes that House "colonized".

Don't forget that we'd never get the absolutely based storylines about how each of the 3 Tribes on the Strip are secretly still barbaric, violent, treacherous desert rats and House has to regularly beat the third world mindset out of them.

 

[Oliver Onions]

which I honestly think was part of the reason it didn't sell enough (on top of being too expensive for what it was due to all the unneeded changes).

I think the main reason Dead Space Remake sold poorly is you can play the original on Game Pass for "free", upscaled with better loading times and it remains a near-perfect game. PC too, though others have told me they have trouble running it on modern hardware (ran fine for me with v-sync disabled).

The handful of quality of life upgrades the remake added were absolutely not worth $70.

 

[Mettaur]

This is amazing. In an opposite day kind of way, I thought four would be like Dragon Age: Origins (a good game).

Guess again. Basically everyone who worked on DAO left the studio years prior. (Fun fact David Gaider said recently that a Dragon Age Origins remaster will most likely never happen because nobody at the studio knows how the Eclipse engine worked). When EA forced Bioware to transform it into a GAAS game the last stragglers like David Gaider left as a result. It was going to be "Destiny + swords" for 6 or so years of its development up until recently where they hard pivoted to being a singleplayer only game.

 

[Haftag]

I think the main reason Dead Space Remake sold poorly is you can play the original on Game Pass for "free", upscaled with better loading times and it remains a near-perfect game. PC too, though others have told me they have trouble running it on modern hardware (ran fine for me with v-sync disabled).
The handful of quality of life upgrades the remake added were absolutely not worth $70.

The original trilogy is not perfect performance-wise, but I'd take any of them over any game made with the absolute pos that is Frostbite. It can produce some good visuals at times, but for the most part, it's a one trick pony that only its creators know how to tame, and even then not all the time. Catalyst was pathetic.

 

[Male Idiot]

Tho it would be funny to see all of the BG3 normies buy BG4 only to be utterly dismayed by Owlcat's dysfunctional slavjank. I hope rogue trader ends up in a better place once the DLC cycle is complete.

Imagine all the fujo meltdowns when the romance is just written text while 2 guys with 2005 era graphics stare at each other on screen.

 

[The Ugly One]

Overall, though, I think their influence was already waning by the ’90s. It wasn’t so much “pandering” as it was “networks and studios being scared of angering Christian moms”, which led them to tone down overt politics.

There's a huge difference between having a stranglehold on entertainment and being a large enough demographic that entertainment has to appeal to you to make money.

 

[Mystery Spy]

There's a huge difference between having a stranglehold on entertainment and being a large enough demographic that entertainment has to appeal to you to make money.

I do think it's strange companies these days are stubborn enough to waste millions of dollars and end up bankrupt just to try to appeal to a tiny minority that never buys their games (tumblr, Twitter etc).

I am not surprised activists are making terrible products. But the biggest difference is that they used to be kept in check if they had any talent, or fired if they didn't. What surprises me is that company owners are letting them go so far, not minding losing everything the worked so hard for years. Their companies, time, and their money

Ignorance was an excuse early on when the wave of woke shit products started tanking. But by now after the multimillion failure of so many games and movies, they really should know better. Get woke go broke has been a mantra for years.

 

[regalterry]

What surprises me is that company owners are letting them go so far, not minding losing everything the worked so hard for years. Their companies, time, and their money

CEOs are transitory entities at best, their sole goal working for a company nowadays is to make the numbers go up so they'll get their fat bonuses. Whatever long-term consequences their decisions have on the health of the company are not their problem, since they'll have bailed long before then.

This encourages them to do anything in their power to make numbers on a spreadsheet look good every quarterly, regardless of what the real situation is. Investment capital helps by giving loans at low interest rates to companies that pander to the mentally ill sodomites and troons, since Fink and those like him are beyond monetary concerns, their sole purpose now being playing God and leaving behind a "legacy". Nothing more dangerous than a moneygrubbing midwit that suddenly gets a savior complex.

Also, many a CEO are well-aware that if they don't show enough zeal towards the woke agenda, this endangers their future employment prospects. Additionally, keep in mind that many of these CEOs have gone to woke Ivy League universities and might even be true believers in the woke.

Feel free to call me out on how wrong I am, I am genuinely interested in other people's explanation of why so many companies have developed suicidal business practices in the past two decades and keep making decisions that make no conventional business sense and consistently hurt their bottom line.

 

[The Ugly One]

I do think it's strange companies these days are stubborn enough to waste millions of dollars and end up bankrupt just to try to appeal to a tiny minority that never buys their products.

When you put it that way, evangelicals outnumber trannies 30 to 1.

I am not surprised activists are making terrible products. But the biggest difference is that they used to be kept in check. What surprises me is that company owners are letting them go so far, and not minding losing everything.

The "company owners" are the shareholders. There are two aspects to this. One is that ESG has been a shareholder mandate for a long time. The other is that objectively, America is getting browner and gayer, and it's been received wisdom for 15 years now that if you want to grow your market, you'd better figure out how to appeal to more than just white males, because we're a dying breed. The only people claiming to have an answer to how to do that are the woke dangerhairs pushing representation theory. Nobody else even has an answer.

 

[Weltraumfürst]

Weren't they attempting a DA film or series too

Rumor has it that ended up turning into Rings of Power.

Regarding BioWare, their first failure, and what got the doctors booted was The Old Republic. Sure, it's still chugging along and reliably printing money, but some of you might remember the TORtanic threads on /v/, back in the day. From what I gathered, that had little to do with EA meddling, but the doctors were eager to climb the corporate ladder and tried to appeal to their corporate overlords. So, ultimately, what turned BioWare into what it is today wasn't EA, it was BioWare.

 

[Dixieland Buckaroo]

Feel free to call me out on how wrong I am, I am genuinely interested in other people's explanation of why so many companies have developed suicidal business practices in the past two decades and keep making decisions that make no conventional business sense and consistently hurt their bottom line.

I would just say this is true for public companies, where generally the CEO's duty is to create a return for their shareholders. I don't want to go down the whole, "Who is the game for?" argument (ie to milk gamers or to create return customer gamers). You get interesting cases like Valve, but there are very few private companies in any industry / sector that uphold their original vision across generations. Maybe Lego, but even they're getting a bit pozzed these days. Aldi is maybe the closest I can think of that's held pretty close to their original vision.

America is getting browner and gayer, and it's been received wisdom for 15 years now that if you want to grow your market, you'd better figure out how to appeal to more than just white males, because we're a dying breed. The only people claiming to have an answer to how to do that are the woke dangerhairs pushing representation theory. Nobody else even has an answer.

This is what happens when you throw out the melting pot - you get a diaspora.

 

[Oliver Onions]

I am not surprised activists are making terrible products. But the biggest difference is that they used to be kept in check if they had any talent, or fired if they didn't.

They also used to be capable of making products that were entertaining despite being propaganda. I watched Captain America as a kid and didn't realise til I was an adult that it was supposed to promote environmentalism. I just liked the cool rings.

Now there's zero effort and nothing is allowed to be cool or fun. Modern writers treat scripts like a Tumblr blog to vent about their personal problems, so even if it could be something relatable for certain demographics they still won't enjoy it because it's so preachy and depressing.

 

[regalterry]

America is getting browner and gayer

The "gayer" part is actually a lie. The vast majority of people that make up the "growing" number of LGBT freaks are actually women that identify as bisexual, all being simply performative consensus seeking.

In reality the percentage of mentally ill groomers has remained the same as it always was.

 

[Ishtar]

At the same time, the more brown and gay(performative or otherwise) the country gets, the more the logic of appealing to such demographics grows stronger.

Tumblr BPD women and Afro Hispanic mystery meats probably aren’t buying video games in large numbers-but even if say a few dozen do, well they are going to complain about not being represented or racist tropes or whatever.

 

[Kane Lives]

The "company owners" are the shareholders. There are two aspects to this. One is that ESG has been a shareholder mandate for a long time. The other is that objectively, America is getting browner and gayer, and it's been received wisdom for 15 years now that if you want to grow your market, you'd better figure out how to appeal to more than just white males, because we're a dying breed. The only people claiming to have an answer to how to do that are the woke dangerhairs pushing representation theory. Nobody else even has an answer.

There's probably another side to this. Companies and especially gaming companies tend to treat their customer base as static, seeing them locked into the franchise for some reason. This results in them chasing gay rabbitholes to "grow" their market share because they expect their core demographics: the white, adult males to continue to eat up the slop they serve regardless of how tranny-gunted it got.

 

[Ishtar]

To be entirely fair, when you look at CoD fans or sports gaming players that assessment is entirely correct.

 

[AnOminous]

Ultima has been dead for 25 years and is from an era when 250,000 sales was a big number on the PC. The only people who even remember it are in their 40s and 50s today and wouldn't buy a woke remake.

Can confirm, and played it from the first one to Underworld, skipping a couple installments. I'd be as likely to buy an EA fuckup of Ultima as I would be to buy Faggot Age: the Guntguard.

About the only idiot proof franchise they have is FIFA or whatever the fuck they're calling it now. Retards will buy the same game repackaged year after year. Unless they somehow figure out how to woke it up, anyway.

Until EA beats the fact that BioWare is a business that needs to make money into the workforce, and the only way they can make money in the cRPG is by pandering to the vile heterosexual male, BioWare will keep failing as a company.

I've really never grasped how any company continues to exist when its business model is find out who buys its products, tell them they're a bunch of Nazi rapist scumbags and the game isn't for them, then try to sell them shit they don't want anyway, then blame the people who didn't buy it for not buying it, which is what they told them to do, while on top of that insulting them on social media.

How does this sell hamburgersvidya?

Then again, notice I said "pander". No need to remind me that Disney obviously couldn’t care less about Christians or family values—in fact, that’s what made their approach so shallow. J

I'd say the closest you get would be stuff like Passion of the Christ, but I wouldn't call that pandering at all, even though it clearly would appeal to a Christian and specifically tradcath audience. I have my bones to pick with it, but it is clearly a sincere expression of Mel Gibson's actual religious views with an intended audience of both those who agree with Gibson and those he wants to persuade.

(And whatever else you might say about its messages, overt and otherwise, the cinematography is magnificent and Gibson is criminally underrated as a director.)

(Irrelevant but fun fact, the cinematographer is Caleb Deschanel, and yes, that's Zooey Deschanel's dad.)

If being a liberal = "liking jews" then I guess Tolkien isn't a conservative.

My point wasn't specifically that anti-Semitism is "conservative," but that it was more associated with conservatism at the time, and "progressive" social views were liberal, but if you look at the totality of his opinions, while he was politically affiliated with the Tories, he wasn't some easily pigeonholed "sports team politics" guy.

Intelligent people rarely are. They generally don't view the platform of political parties as some kind of checklist of acceptable beliefs. Those who do (currently SJWs are most notable for this) are generally incapable of interesting art, whether their politics are left or right, because they insist on inserting it, overtly and crudely, into anything they do.

There are exceptions to this. For instance, Dalton Trumbo was a fanatical Communist but other than expressed pacifist statements in Johnny Got His Gun, or his otherwise traditional Hollywood fare, would not have overtly seemed to be one. In a hilarious irony, after the Soviet Union was involved in a war he approved of, he did a total 360 and moonwalked away from pacifism into practically being a modern tankie, even going so far as to try to withdraw his own book from circulation and even turn in fans asking where they could get a copy as "fascists."

So I wouldn't state it as an actual rule, since some objectively politically terrible people (like Trumbo and as another example Louis-Ferdinand Celine) have managed to create enduring works of art, but there does seem to be at least some correlation between simplistic political beliefs (left or right) and bad art.

To use an example of a right wing artist using artwork to express his feelings towards the world: Steve Ditko.

Rorschach is basically The Question, a more intense version of Mr. A. While Moore parodied Ditko's politics in his portrayal, he generally admired him as an artist, and probably recognized himself to some extent in Ditko. Despite their extreme political differences (although lolberts and anarchists share a general loathing of the government), they were both rather abrasive and antisocial assholes who would fuck themselves over on what would seem to most people to be almost autistic points of personal ethics.

The "company owners" are the shareholders.

And minority shareholders are basically niggers. Sure, there is such a thing as a derivative action by which shareholders can sue the corporation, but the so-called "business judgment rule" in most cases completely immunizes the board of directors for using corporate assets to push some bullshit political agenda by just claiming they thought it would be good for business, without nearly overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

There's probably another side to this. Companies and especially gaming companies tend to treat their customer base as static, seeing them locked into the franchise for some reason.

And this is as dumb as dogshit, because if you compare dead to alive franchises, the dead franchises that used to be top of the world are numerous enough to populate a necropolis. And very often, they were killed by utter stupidity, not just going out of fashion.

 

[PB & Banana Sandwich]

About the only idiot proof franchise they have is FIFA or whatever the fuck they're calling it now. Retards will buy the same game repackaged year after year. Unless they somehow figure out how to woke it up, anyway.

I think the normalfags have reached their paypig limit on FIFA as it also under performed alongside Veilguard. Since now that FIFA and other EA sports games have incorporated gacha elements it means that your gacha "progression" is reset with every yearly release.