Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Clumsy, Preachy Political Messaging Does More Harm Than Good (www.forbes.com)

submitted 1 week ago by Carighan@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

12 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Not sure how particulary I think about it.

I kinda agree though because, honestly, I genuinely like prodding at RL-issues in my video games, but if the best the writers can do is some MCU-level shit that I would expect in Forspoken or Fortnite, then I really wish they'd not. It just feels like making fun of transgender people with how terrible the scene's dialogue is (there's a video in the article).

Plus, as the update says, they couldn't even be arsed to search through the previous games for whether this was already talked about.

Sigh.

Still, the game is far better than I expected it to be, so this isn't just a rant, but I wish the dialogue in particular had decent writing behind it, it breaks immersion near-constantly even if the general scene and story were done well.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] Shadywack@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

I wish critics wouldn't even bring up the preachy-ness of it. I'm finding other tangibles really fucking annoying like the cringe dialogue itself "Who doesn't like talking about dragons?" or how fucked the companion and enemy AI is. We haven't seen AI this bad since Colonial Marines, but nobody's really talking about it because of the flashy combat animations for the main character acting as a curtain covering how dogshit the rest of the gameplay is.

My character can slam the ground and make a shit ton of visual effects, which is acting as a red herring to my companions that don't do shit the vast majority of the time at enemies barely smart enough to navigate the terrain to run at me. This is like Doom 1993 AI.

Irritating jokes less amusing than the most formulaic of trashy sitcoms, and they don't address that either. I think people irked by this article are really put off by the way it adds fuel to the fire of criticisms toward progressivism. It's well written and does bring out the irony of it, but it seems more of an attempt to undermine the progressive messaging and justify the audience polarity. In reality, there's no need for the division, people who positively react to the game are wearing rose colored glasses to a game with serious issues that don't get fixed on the technical backend.

On the technical front, if you ignore the absolute garbage AI and look at the rendering engine's performance, this is the best release of the year by far.

I have so many mixed feelings on the game. This shit going back and forth over the wokeness just gives everyone a red herring to defend or attack.

[-] Carighan@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I mean despite how I feel the linked article's author uses a type of language that makes me wary of them, I kinda agree. The utterly Marvel way the game talks about things combined with the inane inability to ever have any conflict, negatives or issues combines to essentially make a mockery of very real issues.

And I'm sorry, it's one thing to want to use art to showcase real issues and poke at them and shine a spotlight onto them. That's good, personally I want art to do that. But when you essentially use it as a joke piece due to the inherently non-serious nature of all your scenes, it just becomes even worse than not doing it. 😔 Please don't shine a light onto serious topics if the only thing you use the light for is to point and laugh and mock.

[-] CosmoNova@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Whether it has terrible dialogue, too many bugs, lacking in technical prowess, cost way too much to make or is simply too preachy. It all boils down to a single problem: corporate suits sucking the soul out of the project, devoiding it of any passion one could possibly have. It looks, feels and smells like an empty shell of a game because that is exactly what it is. Nothing stands out because every decision was calculated with the goal to moderately please everyone in the room, resulting in compromises stacked on compromises all the way down.

The often sloppily implemented progressiveness in these products quickly starts to look like an afterthought. Perhaps to shield themselves from criticism after they realized what they've created or maybe they slapped it on when they realized their story has literally nothing to say about anything and is a hollow shell of a product.

Whatever the case, soulless slob does more harm than good to anything their creators associate it with, so I totally get why someone wouldn't even want to read about that aspect of the game in a review. It's just one more of several symptomps of a bad product.