Dragon Age: The Veilguard | Review Thread

@simple@lemm.ee · edit-2 27 days ago

Dragon Age: The Veilguard | Review Thread

@Shadywack@lemmy.world · 26 days ago

It depends on how you frame it. I don’t see it as “hate” as I don’t hate Bioware, but objectively speaking, the work speaks for itself. Hyperbole such as disaster, catastrophe, etc are embellishments, but to say the game isn’t bad or just so-so isn’t a scathing criticism.

Anthem was treated the way it was due to ME3 and the narrative choices, for better or worse. People wanted to tell off Casey Hudson, and the game suffered unfairly. Granted it wasn’t a good game, it wasn’t as terrible as it was made out to be either.

Now on Andromeda, however, it was fairly criticized. The gameplay was fun and engaging, but the narrative and storytelling were given their fair treatment. That stuff was just bad, and the developer responses didn’t help either. The pathetic rants amounted to “I put mah heart and souuuulll into it”, and just because people worked really hard on something, doesn’t mean it was a good thing. People worked really hard in the sewers of London to get rid of fatbergs, but in the end all they achieved was moving shit around, and that’s more dignified than the trash we got in Andromeda’s writing and character animations.

Looking at the current marketing situation and the “Bioware hate” as you refer to it, I really think there’s more EA hate at this point. EA is blatantly manipulating the review scores by means of review embargos and selectively cherry picking only favorable review outlets, and in some cases we are even spotting reused catchphrases that indicate signs of coaching by EA to say positive things about the game. They do this in light of the consumer sentiment about preorders “Not touching this or preordering, I want reviews first” is a common sentiment amongst their video comments telling their marketing engagement experts to use dirty tricks like review manipulation.

I’d honestly love for Veilguard to be fantastic, but the layoffs and staff turnover tell me they didn’t value their developers, didn’t value the product, and don’t value the art or anything really beyond making some flashy flim-flam with marketable gimmicks. The reviews I’ve read mention that the characters in the game must definitely know what Tiktok is, due to the cringy dialogue, and that’s a review that gave it a favorable score.

Just wait until the objective reviews hit and this game is widely panned. That will draw the line between “hate” and “oh, this is actually shitty”, and make things especially clear.

@Defaced@lemmy.world · 26 days ago

There have been more positive reviews so far than negative, and not a single post has shown any proof that EA is manipulating reviews and cherry picking. The only thing we’ve seen is one guy at fextralife throwing out conspiracy theories about how EA hates him, another guy who’s apparently a racist and sexist asshat, and that’s pretty much it. Mortismal has even stated he wasn’t paid off or anything by EA and would be fined and his account deleted if he was and didn’t disclose that fact, which he didn’t.

Bioware has made two bad games, Andromeda and Anthem, two. One is objectively not that bad, the other is a game in a genre they’ve never dipped their toes into, and the biggest issue is that those two releases were back to back, so that apparently means they’ve gone to shit now and everything else they’ve created means nothing. It’s really sad how petty and ridiculous some people are over bioware. As for the EA hate that’s been around forever, but God forbid someone say something positive about a bioware game.

Do you have proof that EA is forcing reviewers to use catchphrases as you’ve said? I get it, we all have our hate boners, we all have our pet peeves, but damn son…the conspiracy theories and review embargo nonsense is just stupid at this point. Like you said let’s just wait for the objective reviews but how about we simply don’t write the game off because bioware apparently murdered our puppies.

@Shadywack@lemmy.world · edit-2 26 days ago

This sure seems to indicate coaching on catchphrases. As for conspiracy theories, this isn’t a conspiracy, it’s pretty obvious. IGN, Gamespot, Kotaku, and Polygon have a long history of rating games higher based on their budget and publisher influence. Standard review outlets are inconsistent, and since 2010 have been the butt of many jokes. This seven year old video from Dunkey albeit, satire, rather well breaks down the inconsistency between review outlet staff even highlighting their own subjective contradictions from individual reviewers (look at the bit about the Sonic game in this one).

When you look at the first wave of reviews given by those issued pre-release review copies, the trend speaks for itself.

[Edit] Mass media manipulation never happens, no, never, there are no American soldiers in Baghdad

@Defaced@lemmy.world · 26 days ago

You know, I was honestly going to give you some credit for trying, but then you edited your post and decided to turn the conversation political. Your entire argument has lost all credibility, these are video games, please try not to take them so seriously, have a nice day.

@Shadywack@lemmy.world · 26 days ago

Lol, how is that political? It’s a “water makes wet” kind of thing. I’m sorry you have such fragile feelings about Bioware and don’t like the narrative. If it’s any consolation, it’s not even the same people who made the prior games. Whether the game’s a massive success or financial failure, EA’s just going to fire them all anyway. That’s cool though, we’ll see how it looks on the Steam reviews this weekend. If past experience is any indicator, whenever a publisher resorts to funny business, it’s because they have to. Nobody was needed in the defense of BG, MDK2, BG2, NWN, Kotor, Jade Empire, ME, ME2, DA:O, DA2, SW:TOR, DA:I, etc.

I don’t even really care about the studio anymore to be honest, after the layoffs and turnover, we have no idea whether this crew delivered or not, and judging from the review oddities, it paints a bleak picture. Let them sink or swim based on what EA allowed them to do, then through no true fault of their own, face a studio closure because of the obtuse fuckwads in EA corporate. Either way, the future sucks for the gaming studio called Bioware, in name only.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard | Review Thread

Dragon Age: The Veilguard | Review Thread

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