From what I heard, the writing isn't as good as previous games, notably Origins. Very light-hearted in general.

For what it's worth, even the bad reviews agree that it's bug-free and feature-complete at launch. It also seems to be at least competent as an action RPG, although not doing anything new with the genre. Where opinions wildly diverge is whether it's a good Bioware and more specifically Dragon Age game.

Breath of the wild did the same for me with open worlds.

The funny thing for me with CRPGs: DOS2 was the first one I played and I really liked it. Followed up again with BG 3 when that came out. Since then I’ve tried a bunch of other CRPGs and… I don’t think I actually like CRPGs. I just like Larian. The one exception is Disco Elysium, but that’s so far removed from most others of the genre because it has no combat.

What probably happened is Corporate ~~overlords~~ leadership opted for an easier-to-create game direction while also attempting to diversify the game's base. Basically, and I may be eating my words as we learn more about the game, I'd expect them to have reduced the cost to create while also attempting to increase profit.

I base this off of other games which have attempted similar feats, and I'm not sure of a single one that was part of a larger series that has turned out well.

La-la-la-larian!

It's been at least 20 years since video game "journalists" or "critics" were actually honest. Companies will blacklist anyone that doesn't write a positive review for their games, so everything published before or on release day is advertising.

If you want honest reviews you need to wait 24-48 hours after release for real reviews. If you actually want opinions from those that completed a game you need to wait even longer.

Apparently, EA/Bioware will withhold early access review codes if you are critical of the game. So they are incentivized to write glowing reviews even if the game doesn't deserve it.

I know it sounds bad to say it now, but games journalism has always been terrible. You can find examples decades ago of access journalism and journalists who didn't even play the games they reviewed. Sure, back then they were usually harsher than they should have been, but i feel like that was healthier for the industry.

Based on some other coverage I've seen, specifically from reviewers who were denied early review copies, it looks like BioWare/EA is doing what most companies do and shopping around for reviewers who will be especially positive. They're just being especially aggressive with it this time around. It's not a good look, but it's expected for basically any major publisher.

It sounds like after the early press only event they did a while back, a bunch of reviewers who were critical of the game then got ghosted by EA's PR people and never received early review copies.

So, like all pre-launch reviews take any reviews you're seeing now with a grain of salt and wait until a week or so after launch to see the reviews that weren't cherry-picked by EA's corporate PR.

There's definitely some sketchy stuff going on, but in general, reviews are mostly an opinion. A lover of the original versus a hater of the original will probably not give the same score to this game. It really depends on the reviewers history, preferences, ability to investigate, empathize with other demographics / types of players, patience, endurance, willingness to forgive bad gameplay/graphics/story/music as long as the gameplay/graphics/story/music is good, etc.

Imo it's just that SkillUp is a good reviewer and many others are not.

When BF2042 was released many big papers said it was super good when it was utter garbage.

Either go the metacritic way and average things out or stick to a few reviewers you know share your taste.

Skillup started the video saying that other people can have other opinions on the game. He didn't like the combat, the art style, or the new tone. Those are all subjective things that other people could have enjoyed. Purely just in the video, he talked about how he didn't like the necromancer character, but every clip he showed I liked. It's just different tastes.

By then, real reviews will make themselves known.

This is the way. There are corpo/early access reviewers who are giving it 10/10s, and I'm also seeing morons screeching about review-boming it because of the DEI/Woke Agenda™️ and that you can make a non-binary player character. It's gonna be a shitshow on release.

Feel bad for the Dragon Age fans, they've been waiting for this for ages.

Either they have an unshakeable faith in the game, or they have so little faith it isn't even worth protecting to them. And i don't see a reason to have faith.