Dragon Age: The Veilguard arrived with pretty solid critic scores, racking up an 84 on Metacritic, translating into what appear to be pretty solid sales, at the very least, putting up the highest playercount EA or BioWare has seen on Steam, with seemingly good console performance as well.
But after the critic reviews come in, user scores go live, and it was exceptionally easy to predict how they were going to split between players who had played the game, and ones that likely hadn’t. See if you can spot the difference.
- Steam – 77% “Mostly Positive” scores
- PlayStation – 4.45/5 stars
- Xbox – 4/5 stars
- Metacritic – 3.4/10
You can guess which three platforms there require you to own the game to rate it, and which one does not.
The vast majority of angry reviews about Veilguard I’ve seen are from people who have never played the game, and god is it what I hate about gaming right now. It’s so much rage and anger, and frankly it’s all just jumping on the bandwagon for it because who doesn’t love raging against EA.
Except… Bioware pulled it off in my opinion. I withheld judgement because I was real nervous about how it’d go. It could either be great, or it’d be a dumpster fire, and unfortunately I figured that EA would determine Bioware’s fate based on it. But… Bioware did it. I’m a good 15 hours in and I’m having honestly a lot of fun. The story continues well after Inquisition, the companions are growing on me, the areas are fun to be in. EA said they would stay out of Bioware’s way and… I think they did. It took the Jedi games to finally let them just let Bioware do their thing… but it appears so. If you know the Dragon Age franchise, it’s officially safe to buy in my book, and I recommend it.
My only caveat is that as with all franchise games - judge it on it’s own. Especially with Dragon Age it’s very easy to compare to it’s predecessors, and to some extent of course you should, but at the same time, gaming is in a very different place than it was in 2009. People expect different things. What was popular then would not work now, and vis-versa. So, as a game that is coming out now in the 2020s, I’m fully into the story, I enjoy the environment, the gameplay is fun, and there appears to just be a fuckload of content.
i am also having a blast. i was afraid when I heard some things like exploration got streamlined, but after playing I relaxed. they nailed it.
I’m so glad that EA took the shackles off and let Bioware cook. cause I’m already planning another playthrough after the first one.
i agree with judging it on its own. it has some strengths from other games in the series and improves on so many areas. even little improvements to things most people don’t even notice.
its great and I’m having fun.
Appreciate your comment. A lot of youtubers’ opinion were not matching my experience and some of them were those who I actually respected like the critical drinker, legendary drop, hero hei. I feel like they think obligated to condemn anything even vaguely ‘woke’.
I just want to play a good game, not get in some crappy ‘culture’ war. I arbitrarily selected a character with vitiligo. I only realized it after tutorial. It felt neat to me that it can be done. Instead, I have seen mrmartyplays criticize that there was an option to give trans surgery scars to the character. Why? This game show them for hypocrites they are.
I like the game overall, but the criticisms are definitely legitimate. The dialogue is so overwhelmingly cringy sometimes and that’s coming from someone who just beat the new Life is Strange. For some people, including me, that’s not a dealbreaker and the rest of the game is pretty solid. For others, this is understandably too distracting to make it worth playing.
Edit: before I get accused of not playing the games, see screenshots below.
In this day and age you don’t need to own the game to be a able to experience the story and graphics and nearly everything else perfectly legal. Thousands of people are playing it on Twitch and YouTube and other streaming platforms.
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