EFFORTPOST Dragon Age Veilguard Let's Play II

So, this is a bit late, I celebrated Thanksgiving a week early so didn't have time to play, so let's pick up where we left off.

So it's well known that, at some point, this game was planned to be a live service title. You can see a bit of that in the faction areas.

You earn rep, there are rep grinds, and unlock rep tiers, to get new items from rep merchants. Kinda like Destiny.

The Veil Jumpers want us to find their missing remembers a check in on a town that's gone dark. All your current party members (4) come with, which makes me wonder why they reduced the party size to 3 . On the way to the village the game takes the opportunity to show case 1 of the only 2 thing your party members are good for. Puzzles, kinda, will get to that later.

I'll say this about the art direction of it really does take the bite out of the mysticism and grandeur of a lot of thrse places we've only heard about in the previous games [emphasis on games]. I guess that's an inevitability when it comes to AAA soulless slop

The blighted village segment is another talkie hallway, I guess they were trying to build atmosphere here m, but the lighting is too bright and the cringe writing prevents anything from seeming eerie like blighted infestation used to be.

It ends with what a lot of people are calling a moral quandary, it's not really as rook is hard coded as good in their background, but yeah you get to choose to either free the mayor or leave him to die.

We return to the Veil Jumpers to report that the mystery neighbors have control of and are spreading the blight. Nostalgia then makes a cameo

I saw a crow flying around throughout arlathan and suspected it was her. As one would imagine, since near not a darn thing carries over from the previous games her appearance boils down to "Remember me tis I Morrigan, witch of the wilds, I'm important!"

We're nudged to return to the ritual site to find a mcguffin. At this point the skill tree is made available to me.

It creates the illusion of depth, lots of increase by 5% and all that crap, not much in the way if actual abilities and what little there are pretty underwhelming, and doesn't nothing more than scratch the enemy. I suspect this is largely due to me playing rogue. I felt all the promotional materials leading up to the game and the stylistic choices when it comes to abilities were encouraging to player to play a mage. The mage, from what I've seen, seems to have the most thought put into it as well. You get 3 mage party members in this game though so frick that.

We encounter more new darkspawn, look how they massacred my hurlock boi. At this point enemies become more spongey, particularly the Hurlocks that engage in spear chucking. The bow is this game low key kinda shit. It's like a shitty version of the Kingdoms of Amalur bow, particularly because Veilguard combat is largely dueling, like stellar blade, where as Kingdoms of Amalur is more action packed and the bow is meant to integrated into combos with other attacks, same can't be said for the Veilguard which results in one-sided sniper battles. The ranged units aren't any softer upclose either, and the game's parry system shits itselfif a ranged enemy is compelled to shoot you point blank.

After traversing the rest of the ruins we finally corner the ghoul who to Solas' mcguffin. This boss fight was kinda tedious, not a fan of bosses dipping out for a bit and summoning henchmen to distract you especially in multiple phases. After the first phase Harding pick up the mcguffin and turn into bullshit. I DID like how she girl bosses you out the way though.

This is when the game introduces the only other feature that companions are good for, combos.

This pretty much the extent of the combat usefulness of your party members, which is what I suspected would be the case when I saw the companions didn't have health bars in the gameplay reveal. I really hated this aspect about thw mass effect games, squadmates by and large just felt like dead weight compared to party members in other RPGs and you have even less control over your party in the Veilguard, and not only that their abilities are a on a global cooldown as well, so you're resigned to watching the spectacle of your party member leaping around launching impotent attacks dramatically while doing something actually worthwhile once every 60 seconds or so. Rook's abilities are fortunately not constrained in this manner, at least on the rogue.

So we beat the boss, retrieve the mcguffin get a scene with tge mystery neighbors, which I got to say, Ghilan'nain looks pretty cool. With the mcguffin in hand you now can use it to emulate any unlocked companions unique puzzle power, making them even more useless We return to the lighthouse and I decide to change my Rook's hair.

Have another conversation with Solas and then set off following leads on the mystery neighbors around Thedas this leads us to the crossroads

which is a sort of hub area between the various zones in the game. It has side content of its own, which are mostly flashbacks of Solas' rebellion against the gods

He had hair back then. These are kinda shit, narratively, so far, they do really portray the world Solas described at the end of trespasser and as of now are only focusing on the two currently free mystery neighbors and not the rest pantheon. From the crossroads we can unlock Treviso and Dock Town for now.

Treviso is

Seems they didn't completely nerf the cake in this game The Qunari military has invaded Treviso for some reason. Antiva has now standing army, just the reputation of it's infamous assassin's guild, a reputation that's changed for the altruistic. This once pragmatic league of assassins have now take on responsibility of protecting the citizens from the qunari and disturbing le heckin' wholesome shelter and welfare.

The crows tell you of Lucanis one of their mage killers that's locked in a underwater prison. Like most underwater sections in my experience, this place kinda sucks, it's boring and tedious to navigate through (yes I'm aware it is a circle, but it's a lumpy disjointed circle. Lucanis doesn't preform any better as a melee character than the, thus far range party members I've been working with so far. The final boss of the area is the most bullet spongy enemy I fought so far and he's protected by a barrier which I'm apparently supposed to use my rubber band arrows against. After about 25 minutes of peppering this dude I finally beat him and get lucanis as a companion.

Next stopDock Town

I get Dock Town is a slum but it really doesn't live up to the hype of tevinter that the 2018 showed off with all the magical neon signs and such.

Here you help the shadow Dragons fighting off venatori and learn they can control the darkspawn courtesy of the mystery neighbors.

This mission ends in another mage boss fight, though thankfully not as bullet spongy, just henchman spamming. With these two missions complete the game opens up and let's you engage in side missions.

I decided to help out neve in Dock Town. This turned out to be another talkie hallway mission, and there's a pattern here, as all companion's first missions are like this.

Decide on ripping the bandaid off of the black character immediately, and went on the mission to recruit Davrin.

So far he's okay on his own, and I really like his interaction with shrimp fried rice, a good depiction of elves from the sane culture, but different clans and circumstances in life, for this game at least. I didn't realize however that recruiting Davrin would immediately railroad me into a major choice involving the fate of two major cities and the side quest with in them .

I spring for Neve's city and was confronted by the spongiest most bullshit boss fight thus far.

After finally chipping away at enough of this b-word's hp to trigger her retreat the gang heads back to Treviso to find it fricked up. Lucanis is surprisingly level headed about things, but leaves the party for a bit and is hardened. I'll pause her for now and hopefully pick up sometime later next week. So far the game suffers from the same slow start inquisition did, but doesn't have the mechanical depth or the filler to experience it in of that game. There are few plot hooks however the motivate me to keep on trudging along.