Let’s All Work On Our Issues
I was originally going to pass on Veilguard because I wasn’t that interested in the franchise, but holiday boredom plus a holiday sale led to me giving it a try. Once I got into it, I remembered that I really liked Anthem. Wandering through these levels really reminded me of some parts of the map in Anthem.
What I don’t like about the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games is the relationship simulator part. I like wandering around, exploring, getting into fights, solving puzzles and quests. I don’t like navigating a four choice tree to listen to an NPC tell me their story and in doing so improve our relationship. It always felt to me like these moments really killed any momentum the game had built up. I do think my view of these games is a little skewed due to posts I see on Tumblr that seem to treat these games as really more dating simulators than RPGs.
Cleverly, in Dragon Age, improving your relationship is how you level up your NPC companions. This gave me an incentive to talk to the characters. It didn’t make it less boring, but gave me a reason to do it. And I’m not disparaging the characters. The writing is crisp and top-notch, and the art work throughout the game is amazing. There were several moments where I felt like I had wandered into the cover of an 80s fantasy paperback. The quality of the game overall is breath of fresh air; it’s delightful to have a AAA title be so polished and relatively bug-free.
The combat is crisp and punchy, much more like Anthem than Inquisition. The real reason I started to care about leveling the NPC companions was to take advantage of the primer/detonator system of actions, where one NPC can apply an effect to an enemy that the second NPC can detonate with their action, doing massive damage across an area. As you level your character, you can build a set of actions that suit your play style, and then tune a set of companions that work with it.
The story has been pretty good so far, and I had a lot of fun spending all my free time over the past couple of weeks exploring the different areas. But I may have just hit the shelf point. I’m not quite sure. We just concluded a major chapter of the story, and the take away of the conclusion seems to be that all the NPCs failed in some way due to unresolved issues, and now we have to resolve our issues. It feels like the game is forcing me into what feels like to me to be the boring content.
Anyway, I could probably ignore it for a while. There are still of plenty of areas to explore and puzzles to unlock. It’s just every so often the game kind of forces you to go back home and check in with everyone, and I’m getting a little tired of that.