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

[CAPTAIN HAPPY]

Apparently you can pick your pronouns in the character creator lol
What the fuck.

 

[BlankSpaceBaby]

I was pissed. All the talk about Empress Celine and it ended up just like that? Winter Palace was my favorite part of Inquisition yes but still. The thing that bothered me was that even the very first part is too much. When it gets to the point that people and devs are telling you that it is better to not do the Hinterlands in its entirety....they should have made it easier to understand. Like I'm pretty sure 'Still in the Hinterlands' is a joke meme now.

I've read the "prequel" The Masked Empire by everyone's favorite nonbinary Patrick Weekes and the "best" ending, which I guess is what it is given that its unlocking requirement needs the highest number of what's those things again, makes little sense when taken in context with that book.

Briala and Celine have a very toxic relationship, as Celine basically and sweetly sells Briala and her people out to advance her own position, and those two are supposed to have some kind of showdown... and in the game, these two are completely different people. Having read the book. I'd say that the best thing for Orlais is to actually leave it to Gaspard de Chalons. He's the only somewhat sane guy in that story, and he's my best hope of a most amusing Tevinter-Orlais war to blow up.

 

[Mega Black]

Inquisition has a lot of wasted potential. Corypheus is one of the worst ones.

I'll never understand what the fuck they were thinking making him the main villain. A guy you beat in a DLC for the second game then routinely stomp while he flails and fucks around utterly impotently the whole game is terrible, not to mention his horrific voice acting and behavior that puts him on par with a bad Power Rangers villain.

Compared to Loghain or The Arishok he is such a massive step down. Like everything in Inquisition though, the bones of a compelling concept are there, it's just been chopped down into an inoffensive stew to make the game as broadly appealing as possible.

and he's my best hope of a most amusing Tevinter-Orlais war to blow up.

Honestly I always struggled to see why Gaspard was ever considered the bad option outside of him being a heccing evil white guy and not a diverse lesbian.

Tevinter and Orlais going to war is exactly what you'd want anyway. Both nations are horrible and taking each other to task would be a net benefit for the whole world.

 

[lukewarm coffee]

Apparently you can pick your pronouns in the character creator lol
What the fuck.

That was a given in current year +9, sadly.

Boulton also does romantic audio books. Just saying.

Simon Chadwick voices Nathaniel Howe, literally the sexiest voice I've ever heard. Changed my whole personal canon when I started Awakening (sorry Alistair). I so wish he did more. Romantic audio would be... fantastic. I should just feed his voice files into AI.

 

[CAPTAIN HAPPY]

That was a given in current year +9, sadly.

Wonder what's the range with these pronouns of theirs.
Can you pick he/him, she/her, they/them only, or can you go full lunatic mode with xe/xer, shroom/shrek, witch/cunt and any other bullshit you can make up.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Apparently you can pick your pronouns in the character creator lol
What the fuck.

Does it even matter when the VA will always refer to you as Rook in a gender neutral way?

Arishok

I could never take him seriously because his name sounds like Artichoke

 

[Nonga Tork]

It requires pious Andrastians like Cassandra and Leliana to go, "You know what, this Tal-Vashoth/elf/dwarf will be the non-divisive figure to unite all Andrastians together in this time of need!"

It would be one thing if you were an Andrastian city elf, but nope, you can only be full on Dalish.

 

[Sailor Swift]

It would be one thing if you were an Andrastian city elf, but nope, you can only be full on Dalish.

Man. Imagine how it would have been if you could have been a city elf in Inquisition.

 

[Ishtar]

I liked my city elf play through in Origins. The city elves got the short shrift in DA2(Merrill apparently doesn’t even know their names) and then they barely show up in Inquisition.

 

[Tor Lugosi]

The City Elf origin is my favorite. I've always gravitated more towards working class characters.

The Noble Human origin is generic fantasy slop. I think the Dalish are boring. The human Mage origin is okay. I will never play as a midget dwarf. There was originally going to be a human farmer origin but it got axed; I probably would've liked that one.

 

[Sailor Swift]

I liked my city elf play through in Origins. The city elves got the short shrift in DA2(Merrill apparently doesn’t even know their names) and then they barely show up in Inquisition.

The City Elf origin is my favorite. I've always gravitated more towards working class characters.

The Noble Human origin is generic fantasy slop. I think the Dalish are boring. The human Mage origin is okay. I will never play as a midget dwarf. There was originally going to be a human farmer origin but it got axed; I probably would've liked that one.

"Like dogs, Shianni."

The city elf origin was brutal. I still think about that line sometimes.

 

[LovisXVI]

The human Mage origin

This one makes the most sense as a "canon" character because the Human noble is boring, and I just assume trad swamp-wife needs to be a thing because otherwise Morrigan just kind of has nothing to do.

 

[Ishtar]

Morrigan's entire purpose was getting the old god baby, she tells the Warden this outright if asked on the eve of the battle.

As for which Origin is canon, I feel like the human noble, the dwarf noble and the human mage are, given the options available to them at the end and their more direct relationship with the antagonists.

That said, the Dalish origin is the only time the song Leliana sings plays (Uthanera I think?), the dwarf commoner origin and city elf origin feel a bit more disconnected. The dwarf commoner's biggest antagonist is...Jarvia, and the alienage is just part of the Landsmeet quest.

That said I like my city elf origin the most.

 

[BlankSpaceBaby]

It's mage origin for me always because nothing beats an Arcane Warrior in shiny heavy armor mass paralyzing everyone and then hacking them to pieces while glowing like a neon stick. Plus the lopping head animations are soooo cool.

 

[Weltraumfürst]

I'm gonna be that guy and say that I liked the Human Noble origin the most. I do acknowledge that the other origins are better (apart from Dalish elf, maybe) and tie into the story more (the only thing Human Noble has going for it is revenge on Howe, really). However, I do like my generic fantasy slop.

It's also criminal that you can't become king of Orzammar as a Dwarven Noble.

 

[SIMIΔN]

I think someone mentioned before that encounters also got massively reduced compared to DAO, where deciding which enemies to target was extremely important. Then in the later games it's just fighting waves like a hack and slash. This is going to be the same thing but 1000x worse, and the way its designed if you do actually want to control your party to target enemies it is going to conflict with the faggot real-time action combat by having to pause every couple seconds to do so. Something that is otherwise expected in an actual RTwP system like previous games.

This doesn't even consider the fact that in reality this crap will barely work and your companions will be getting stuck and bugging out 90% of the time.

When the companions basically just extra abilities for your effectively solo PC, it doesn't matter if they get stuck, when they can teleport off screen back into place.

Hey, remember how in previous games, you could kill your companions? Or kick them out? Or they'd disagree so much that they would leave themselves?

Baldur's Gate allows you to piss off your companions so badly they'd rather turn into octopus demons than spend another minute with you.

It's also criminal that you can't become king of Orzammar as a Dwarven Noble.

It'd be too perfect an ending I guess. It was a choice between a traditionalist who was slowly strangling the city or forgiving the a radical who would do anything to save it.
It does feel bad though. They branded you a Paragon, (Living saint) but didn't allow you to take up the throne you were the rightful heir for.

 

[DagothUr]

It's also criminal that you can't become king of Orzammar as a Dwarven Noble.

You can get de-exiled and return to house Aeducan if you help Bhelen. But that's it.

It was a choice between a traditionalist who was slowly strangling the city or forgiving the a radical who would do anything to save it.

This is one of the things that shows you how leftist NPC writers had already sank their claws in, even back in the Golden days.
In the epilogue they make it so the traditionalist/conservative candidate is the wrong choice who destroys Orzammar, while on the other hand, the reformist, progressive guy makes Orzammar great again despite his terrible personality and ruthlessness.
It's not even a debate at which is the intended "good option".

You can only guess at how much worse it would be if they did the same thing nowadays.
(I guess they did that with the Winter Palace shit, but I don't even remember anything about it. I helped the guy with the mask tho)

 

[SIMIΔN]

In the epilogue they make it so the traditionalist/conservative candidate is the wrong choice who destroys Orzammar, while on the other hand, the reformist, progressive guy makes Orzammar great again despite his terrible personality and ruthlessness.

Rigid adherence to the old ways was killing the city. Well behaved Manlets seldom make history, so Bhelen isn't too jarring.

Orzammar's traditions make Brasil look sane. Slumdog women could only advance in status if they had unmarried sex with a privileged dude. Anyone who goes overseas is quarantined from polite society, poor people couldn't join the regular military. They went from being a continent spanning empire to a few isolated cities, change was needed.

 

[Sailor Swift]

Rigid adherence to the old ways was killing the city. Well behaved Manlets seldom make history, so Bhelen isn't too jarring.

Orzammar's traditions make Brasil look sane. Slumdog women could only advance in status if they had unmarried sex with a privileged dude. Anyone who goes overseas is quarantined from polite society, poor people couldn't join the regular military. They went from being a continent spanning empire to a few isolated cities, change was needed.

I remember Bhelen opening up trade with the surface or something, too. Or more trade. There's also the fact that he gives casteless dwarves rights in exchange for fighting darkspawn. Kinda similar to the legion of the dead.

 

[Janusz z Gliwic]

Rigid adherence to the old ways was killing the city. Well behaved Manlets seldom make history, so Bhelen isn't too jarring.

Exactly this. Bhelen, his ruthlesness and his reforms make perfect sense within the story. On top of that, it's pretty clear he craves power above all else, and it could be argued that his reforms are byproduct of his heartless pragmatism. With modern BioWare, he'd likely be queer dwarf woman of color that's held back by evil dwarfish patriarchy and can do no wrong, and the only thing player could do would be screaming "you go girl!"