Comment on Corinne Busche, director of Dragon Ave: The Veilguard, departs BioWare
tymon@lemm.ee 2 days agoIf the discourse I’m seeing on dev/gaming twitter/bluesky is anything to go off of, It hasn’t made anywhere near the hoped-for sales target. I think a lot of that has to do with the blowback to its initial appearance as a glorified hero shooter, coupled with the lack of a strong franchise identity, then further compounded by the saturation of disappointing (if not outright disastrous) big-budget drops like Redfall, Forspoken, and Concord creating a wave of fatigue
Vodulas@beehaw.org 2 days ago
It’s probably not. Everyone I know that has actually played has found it to be quite fun. It’s not perfect, but highly enjoyable 7/10. Most of the negative reviews I have seen are 1 of 3 things:
So the first one can be thrown out. 2 is true, but doesn’t make it a bad game. 3 is true for the tutorial portion for sure, but after that things open up. The story isn’t amazing, but it suits the gameplay well.
EA hasn’t released any sales numbers, so hard to say on that part, but probably not in the multiple millions. From what I can find it is probably selling fine. Not amazing, not bad, but fine. That also could be due to a variety of factors like marketing clarity or using an IP in a way that fans of the IP did not want. It does not necessarily mean the game is a bad game
Realitaetsverlust@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Most people I talked to have refunded the game on steam. Nobody really had fun with it, except for one person that was completely new to dragon age.
I don’t think so. The writing of Taash was so bad and uncomfortable for the most part that I genuinely didn’t know if they were trying to mock trans-people with this representation. It felt like they were just looking at a terminally online twitter user and modeled the character after that. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that taash is the worst character I’ve ever experienced in a triple A production.
Breaking with an established formula can be a big detriment to a franchise. We saw that with final fantasy, where FFXII was considered pretty bad for most FF fans, me included. The combat just seemed really weird at first. However, the combat got significantly better later on if you have access to more tools, but it takes a while to actually get to that point, so many people were very on the fence about the game.
Veilguard, on the other hand, doesn’t get better. It just stays bad and even confusing at times.
All time peak on steam is 90k - that’s horrendous. Obviously, that’s not the total sales and it’s also sold on other platforms, so we do not know the real number. However,the game went on discount not even 2 months after release, and a pretty hefty one at that, 35% I think. I don’t think it’s exaggerated to claim that the game didn’t hit 2 million sales yet which would be really bad. We don’t know the budget, but a figure that’s thrown around is 250 million dollar which is not unrealistic for a AAA production.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 1 day ago
Meanwhile, the 3 people I know who played it all enjoyed it. Anecdotes!
Taash’s scenes seemed okay to me. The storyline with their mother is pretty close to what a friend of mine is going through now.
I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I kind of don’t believe what people say. I mean, I think sometimes they dislike a thing for reason A, but the words that come out are reason B. They say a character is badly written (B), but really they find the queer subject matter uncomfortable (A). This may or may not be the case, but fundamentally I do not believe the average internet video game fan has the introspection and honesty to say “A” here. There’s no way to know.
My problem with Veilguard is the difficulty fell off a cliff and never climbed back up. Other than that it was fine.
Realitaetsverlust@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I think both is true. I said it in another comment, but veilguard is just not the correct environment for this type of character arc. It doesn’t have anything to do with being queer, a pubescent teenager who acts like a dick all the time would be equally annoying. People just don’t want to play with annoying characters.
This topic would be great for a dontnod game that could appropriatly handle that topic - not an RPG.
Vodulas@beehaw.org 2 days ago
I disagree. The writing of Taash, while basic, has a lot in common with folks early in discovering their trans identity. Yeah, it is awkward and uncomfortable. Guess what, self introspection often is. I would say with Taash we see a lot of what would be internal struggles being vocalized. The good news is that Taash isn’t the only character you can interact with.
Of course it can, but it doesn’t solely make it a bad game.
I disagree. I really like the gameplay. It gets better almost immediately after the tutorial, though the tutorial is a little long for my taste.
Yeah, again, I don’t think the numbers are great, but 90k on 1 of 4 or 5 big platforms isn’t dismal. And the discount could be telling, but (I just looked it up) it was around 29%, which is still $50. Part of that could be backlash to the $70 AAA price tag. All that being said, all of this is speculation without numbers being released from EA
Realitaetsverlust@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Maybe it is, idk. Doesn’t really change the fact that the character is absolutely unlikeable. There’s also no real explanation on the “why” - it’s just a disrespectful, rude and arrogant character, and that’s how most people saw that character.
This topic would be great fot a dontnod game in the style of life is strange where the background of the character is represented appropriately so you actually have a chance to understand the character and why these negative character traits exist in the first place.
Veilguard was just the completely wrong platform for this kind of character development.
Dunno where you saw that, steamdb (steamdb.info/app/1845910/) has it listed on 38.99€ at a 35% discount, which is horrendous for a not even 2 month old release.