So... About 'Dragon Age: The Veilguard'...

Well, everyone, here we are: Drgon Age: The Veilguard is officially out, and it actually seems to be doing pretty well. It is currently the middle of a workday, and yet they've got 69,000 concurrent players on Steam, which is a really solid number. I know for a fact my wife and several other people in my direct friend circle are currently playing on PS5, so there's a lot of people checking out the game and trying it.

And, uh, I am one of them, so let's talk about it. I want to run through the game itself; I want to talk about that. I want to share some thoughts because this is an older save file.

I've been playing the game all day, so we'll be bouncing around to a few different save files that I have from the first few hours of the game. We'll talk about the gameplay, the writing—most importantly, because that's kind of where my biggest note is—and then we'll kind of wrap it up with whether I think this is worth you checking out. But first, of course, a huge thank you to our sponsor, Incog.

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Again, check them out at the link in the video description box below. Okay, but now that we're back in it, this is a sequence that we've all already seen. This was shown off at Summer Game Fest, and they released it shortly thereafter—the first hour or so of the game—and it is extremely high production value.

They definitely put a lot of time and polish into it. I mean, the game looks really good. I don't think anybody's going to deny that they've done a really good job on a mechanical level of enhancing the graphics, hair, all of that.

Lip sync leaves a bit to be desired. Some people don't like the art style of the way the characters look—that's fine, that's just a matter of personal taste. But I think on an engine level, it's pretty impressive, and the game is very, very well optimized, which is nice to see as well.

I will note that some people on Steam have said that they've had problems with crashes during the initial shader compilation. It seems like a lot of that has to do with whether you have your chipset drivers and your graphics driver fully updated, so if you are experiencing those issues, consider checking that. Now, one thing I will say is that I think that this game actually, funnily enough, plays much closer to, like, Fallout 4 than it does to Drgon Age: Inquisition or Drgon Age: Origins, certainly.

That is kind of surprising to me because at the preview event, they certainly were trying to lean into comparisons to, like, Baldur's Gate a little bit. They wanted you to think that this is like a big epic RPG with a ton of nuance in all of the different ways that you can approach situations and characters and stuff. And just transparently, that's it—it really just doesn't seem like that's the case.

There are consequences to be found; there are times where you'll be challenged to make a decision: kill this character or save them, or destroy this place but save that place, or vice versa. So there is stuff like that, but a lot of the nitty-gritty consequence happens off-screen. You don't really see it, and it usually.

. . happens at the end of a quest line, so like if you choose to have a character live or die, you're probably not going to see them again other than maybe a reference or a line of dialogue after that.

For the most part, it depends on your choices. You'll know that it made a difference, but it didn't really make a difference for the game moving forward. You know there's a consequence, but you never really see it or appreciate it, which again is kind of on the same level of role-playing as something like 4.

Some people love that game, don't get me wrong, but if you're looking for a really deep and gritty, meaty role-playing game, I'm not so sure Drgon Age: Valiard is going to be that game for you. I'm going to keep playing it, of course; I'm only at this point. .

. I've put seven hours in at the preview event, and I've put like five or six into it over the course of this afternoon so far. So, I'm sure there's plenty of room for it to change, but that's what I'm feeling right now.

Okay, with that said, I want to just immediately point out to people that your enjoyment with Drgon Age: The Valiard's combat system, I think, depends a lot on the class you pick. Frankly, the warrior class is really, really solid in the early game; late game gets boring as hell. When we played it at the preview event, it was actually really interesting because I had time to test out a late-game mage, a late-game warrior, and a late-game rogue, and I was able to see kind of what these different classes had to offer.

Frankly, a lot of them did not scale the same way; like warrior got super boring as the game went on, and mage was actually really good in the late game and much more interesting than anything else. But only in the late game; mage early on, like when you're seeing combat right here, is actually one of the weaker offerings and isn't particularly fun or compelling. But it's at the late game where it scales way better than the other classes.

So, I do think you need to be intentional with how you pick the class you want to pursue. Rogue, I would say, is like the safest and easiest bet; it's just going to be solid throughout. But warrior, I think, is going to get real stale after like the 10 to 15-hour mark, it seems.

That's reflected in a lot of the reviews, even the ones that were more negative, where they were saying that later in the game they were lowering the difficulty, they were changing stuff because they didn't like the combat system as it increased in like enemy HP and the sponginess of enemies. So I think you do need to be very intentional with which class you choose. Beyond that, the elephant in the room that you can see right here is that the levels are much more linear than you might be used to for a game like this, especially coming off of Inquisition.

That is a very intentional change on their part. This is, of course, made with Frostbite, which is the same engine that had troubles back in the day with Mass Effect: Andromeda, and that game really, really, really struggled with scope and scale. Even to a certain extent, Anthem struggled with it too in terms of populating areas.

So I do think it makes sense why they've pursued it this way and why they've done it this way. I certainly like big levels; I like open-world games, but I don't like bad open worlds. I'd much rather tighter levels that are well done than poorly done big levels, you know?

That's where I draw the line; that's my expectation. But going back to what I was saying, one of the benefits of the tighter levels and the more linear levels is that you can handcraft many more encounters and like specific puzzles and stuff, and you can justify putting a lot more effort into those little bitty areas because you don't have to make 1,500 of them; you can make just 15 of them, you know? As long as the scope is kept in check, you can increase the production value and not lose anything.

So you see here around this corner, and there's actually a hidden little story segment that I won't spoil too much. I'll cut away here in a second, but this is something that we even saw at the preview event where if you look around this level enough and you find this little tucked-away spot, you can actually experience a narrative sequence that other people just would never see and that they would just totally miss. And to be clear, you can do that in open-world games too, but it's much easier to pull it off on the scale and with the production value that they want to pull off in this game when you have it in tighter levels.

So it's certainly like a give and a take; it's a tradeoff. Maybe some people are going to love it; some people will hate it, but it is an interesting shift, I think, and I can understand why some people would just eat it up and love it. Oh, this is one thing that drives me crazy: they have the collect loot button the same as the jump button.

So when you find something you want, you just start smashing A, but then you end up jumping around like a dumbass. I remember when we were at like Summer Games Fest, the big thing that Jeff Keeley does after the big presentation on. .

. Stage, they do something called, uh, "Summer Play Days," I think is what they call it, which is basically a chance for media to play previews of games and to hype them up and talk about them, blah, blah, blah, you know, uh, kind of how it goes. Basically what E3 used to be, it's just Jeff Keighley's version.

There, I saw "Veilguard" behind closed doors, and the creative director of the game was playing it. Even when they were playing it, a little sliver in the first, like, half hour of the game, he was even accidentally jumping while picking up loot. I remember thinking, like, "You're not—like, you haven't fixed that?

Like, after all this time you've been working on this game for like a decade, and that's still a thing? Just reroute the button! " And even now, you could say, like, "Oh, well, you could just reroute the button yourself as the player," and I'm like, "Yeah, but like, why should I have to?

Shouldn't that be something that was already taken care of? " Like, would you think it's just—it's weird. It's weird that it's still here as a problem.

Now, as for the skill trees and stuff, the way this works is pretty standard. I mean, based on your class, you have different specializations you can pursue, so whether that's Evoker or Deathseer. This is also tied to my background because I'm tied with the Mour Watch and so it's like a whole thing.

But then you also see this down here, which is tied to the crows, of course. So you have different specializations you can pursue, and beyond that, your companions also have skill trees tied to them. So for this one, you can see Harding has two points available.

So I can come in here; I can acquire new skills or specialize into different things if I see fit, or I could pursue any of these skill trees, and they level up if they are currently in your party traveling with you. So the companions that you do a lot of missions with will level up faster than the other companions that are just sitting back at home base, which I think is a good way to do it. I think the biggest thing for me that I was hoping would surprise me is the writing, but you'll start to pick up on it pretty quickly.

The writing in the game is—I don't know how else to put it other than like, really low energy. You know, Skillup in his review said it felt like everybody, when they're having conversations, feels like HR is in the room. Other people said—I think, uh, JV said it feels like it was written by folks who have gone to therapy, and that sort of self-care language has seeped into the dialogue.

It's not constant, as some folks will suggest, but it is present when talking to companions, and that is not an insignificant amount of dialogue. Therapy language isn't necessarily a bad thing; I go to therapy. But at times, it does not work for me here.

Examples: Quote: "Let's take these problems one day at a time, that's all you can do. Look at the bright side of the situation, that's a win in my book. Let's focus on the real issues; we can't be fighting each other.

You are enough; you don't need to prove anything. " I think these are excellent messages—things people should hear—but they wear thin and lose meaning if you see them too much. Less of this kind of language would have been better, off in my book.

And I totally, totally agree. There is a ton of dialogue in this game where it's not how human beings talk to each other. Like, maybe my friends are just toxic, but like, if I'm telling my bro, uh, like, "Yeah, I've just had a long, rough day, and I'm just, I'm really stressed," like, they're going to slap me upside the head and be like, "Oh, well, loser, figure it out!

" Like, people don't talk to each other in this way. Like, "I validate you and your experience; you are loved and appreciated. We can grow stronger together; look at the bright side of life, and the flowers will bloom stronger!

" Like, nobody talks like this. I understand that maybe it's a healthy way to talk, but it's not real. Like, it doesn’t feel legitimate.

It feels, for lack of a better term, just safe, and like they are anxious to say or do anything that could offend anybody in the party, even if they're just characters within this universe. Like, there will be characters that are doing bad things that are putting people's lives in danger, and party members will just go, "Like, interesting. " It's like, "No, you should be freaking out!

" Or there's a dragon that flies over top, and people are like, "What was that? " instead of, "Holy crap! There's a goddamn dragon!

" I mean, like, you'd think they'd be reacting like that. It's just, again, low energy. It feels very low energy in the moment-to-moment gameplay, in the moment-to-moment conversations, where everybody is just so careful and quiet and brooding and soft-spoken and—oh, their accents are overwhelming!

It's just kind of frustrating. And when you add in, like, the dialogue choices not having much impact, because like in "Fallout 4," a lot of the dialogue basically whittles down to three or four different ways to say the same thing. You might have a sarcastic way of saying, "Yeah, let's just go do it.

" You might have a confident way of saying, "Let's just go do it," or kind of like a snarky way of saying it. But ultimately, you're just going to end up in. .

. The same position, doing the same thing, because that's what the game needs you to do. But listen, it's not all bad by any stretch of the imagination.

The production value is very, very high; I think the combat, at least for now, is engaging enough. It certainly does get into the realm of damage sponges, where there's just a lot of enemies that come on, and you can tell they were like, "Okay, we got to slow the player down here; have a couple enemies come in. " So there's stuff like that.

I haven't really gotten into the meat and potatoes of the companion conversations. I've seen some clips of how that can go later in the game, so I'm kind of braced for potentially some dry dialogue there or some cringe, but we'll be buckled up for that when I eventually see it. Of course, I've seen the discussions about some of the more—let's just say—modern topics discussed in some companion quest lines here.

I personally don't find that stuff compelling in the same way. Like, if I go out to dinner with a friend and they start rambling about how they're vegan, I'm like, "Cool, you do you"; I don't see what this has to do with anything, but, like, whatever. In the same way that, if I'm playing a video game and a character—like I'm playing The Last of Us and Joel starts monologuing about how he's gone vegan recently and eating nothing but mushrooms—like, yeah, that's a little funny considering the cordyceps fungus, but all in all, I don't really care that Joel is a vegan; it doesn't really matter to me.

I'm more concerned with whether the game is fun and engaging. So for me, those quest lines may be annoying or just kind of not relatable, but they aren't deal breakers, so long as the rest of the game is good. And so far, I think the game within Veilguard is good.

It's fine in parts. There are parts I like, and there are parts I don't like, and I hope that it picks up and potentially all just becomes stuff I like as I play more of it. But when it comes to those quest lines, I'm willing to ignore them or just kind of wave them aside if the rest of the game is good.

In terms of everything else, I thought that the production values are great; I thought the sound design is really, really good. I like the set design; I like how they've structured everything. It's just surprising how it's much less of an RPG than it is like an action-adventure game with some RPG mechanics.

It almost feels, in terms of the role-playing, similar to Horizon Zero Dawn, where there are choices you make that are clearly meant to point you and push you into a certain type of player or role. But it doesn't really do anything like, you know, thumbs up or the clown mask or whatever, and then the stern option—kind of like Horizon Dawn with the heart and the different things they had there. But it all ends up kind of in the same space at the end of the day.

So as long as you're not looking for super intense role play, I think you'll be fine. But again, I'm not super far in, so we'll keep an eye on it as time goes by. All in all, I've been having a good time with it, playing throughout this afternoon.

I'm going to keep playing it. You know, it's not something I'm looking for a refund for; I'm liking it. It's not my game of the year based on what I've tried so far.

You know, Metaphor: ReFantazio is still at the top of the list for me. But let me know, are you going to be checking out the game yourself? Are you going to be trying it?

Are you going to be eating it up—maybe, maybe not? Let me know. I mainly want to know if it's worth me doing like a review of the game, because it's like a 50-60 hour game, and to pour that much time into it, if I'm not loving it, it needs to be for like a review or something for me to justify it in my brain.

Because that's a whole lot of Metaphor: ReFantazio and Monster Hunter beta that I could be playing. So I need you guys to say if you want me to do like a full breakdown and review and keep chugging along. Right now, I'm having a good time, but I don't think I'd be heartbroken if you told me that I had to go play Metaphor instead.

You know, it's one of those games. As for the review drama, I don't have a ton to add to all of that. I was told we were going to get a review code; then they ghosted us and didn't reply.

We only heard from them like 2-3 days before the review embargo when they said we weren't getting a code, and I still don't know why. I don't know if they even know why. After that, we were told we could probably look forward to an early access code, maybe on the day before launch, to just give the game a shot and share it with our audience and get a video done ahead of time, but that never came.

They ghosted us once again. Maybe we were on a list and then taken off the list; I don't know. But the whole review process has been a bit of a debacle, unnecessarily so, I would say.

I don't know why. They've shot themselves in the foot so much with this, but that's, uh, that seems to be what happened. Nobody's entitled to review code.

Like I said earlier, me not getting a review code didn't really matter to me because it just meant that I could play more Monster Hunter beta, and I could play more metaphor, so I've not been that upset, uh, to be honest. But I do think it's bizarre that they have been so coy about it, and they've not wanted to be clear with what's really going on or what the motivation was. Um, it just feels like they were trying to hide something.

Whether or not that's true, I don't know, but it feels like they were trying to very carefully select reviewers, and that's just unfortunate because you'd hope that they'd just send it to everybody to get the most accurate depiction of the game. But I guess in some cases that's not what happens. So I don't have a lot to add there; it's just disappointing to see the way that they handled it, and I hope that they handle it differently in the future.

Uh, but what are you going to do? But anyway, it is Halloween. I am going to go and trick-or-treat with my two boys, so you have a wonderful, wonderful night.

You're probably seeing this the day after, um, but I appreciate all of you. Let me know if you're trying Drgon Age yourself, and I, uh, I'll be looking at those comments to see if I should make a review or follow-up thing on Drgon Age, so let me know. With all that said, thank you for watching!

I love you all desperately. Hugs and kisses. Bye-bye!