FNGC Reviews: Dragon Age The Veilguard (ft. Claineyys)

[00:00:48] Welcome back everyone. You're joining us for another FNGC Review, where we look at one game and take a deep dive into all its moving parts. This week, we're welcoming a brand new cast member to the show. She's an illustrious digital artist, as seen by a handful of our episode cover art, an aficionado for Dragon Age, Fallout, Cyberpunk, and narrative RPGs all around. Courtney, welcome to the show.

[00:01:12] Hi. So cool to see you in your element.

[00:01:14] Yeah, it's nice to be here. It's nice to have you here. You know, it's been a long time coming. I had told you that we were going to do this a long time ago and you are the reason why for both you and the listeners to know I'm inviting you on the show is because you know, you are the Dragon Age like, like knowledge holder like you are the most avid Dragon Age fan I know. Honestly, more than more than anybody else personally. Personally, I'm sure I have some friends out there that really like Dragon Age, especially in the community itself. But

[00:01:44] you're like the most avid Dragon Age fan I know. So I had to get you on.

[00:01:47] The most outspoken.

[00:01:48] Yeah.

[00:01:49] You didn't have to dig deep into the Dragon Age sycophant bargain bin to find me.

[00:01:55] Yeah.

[00:01:56] Everybody, again, this is an FNGC review. This week, we are covering Dragon Age, the Veil Guard. And I want to say thank you to the longtime guests. We have gotten out of an irregular schedule. December was a really weird month for listeners.

[00:02:10] And this is actually our first recording of 2025. Season three is still ongoing for folks. This is just a little bit of housekeeping and we're going to continue on. We have Dragon Age, the Veil Guard lined up. And then after this episode, you can expect metaphor re Fantasio and then will in myself final game of the year 2024 episode to close off season three.

[00:02:30] So keep an ear out for that and keep looking on all podcasting platforms as well as Blue Sky. We're going to be updating folks there. But let's go ahead and jump in there. You ready?

[00:02:40] I'm ready.

[00:02:40] Okay, let's do it. So Dragon Age, the Veil Guard developed by Bioware, published by EA. The director lineup, we have Corinne Bush and John Epler, who's listed as the creative director. It seemed like a 1A, 1B combo there. It was released multi-platform on all consoles. And the release date was a spooky October 31st, 2024 release date.

[00:03:01] Is this the year of like meme release dates? We got Nosferatu on Christmas. We got Dragon Age on October 31st. I don't know. It's funny though, because like you expect it to be spooky, but the Veil Guard isn't spooky, is it?

[00:03:15] Oh, but if you start off as a Mourn Watcher, it is quite spooky.

[00:03:19] That is true. That is true. That's one of the beginnings that you can have as a Mourn Watch, as a background.

[00:03:25] The Necropolis is very creepy.

[00:03:27] You're right. You're right. There's a lot of dead stuff going on in this game. A lot of conversations about death as we go on.

[00:03:34] But let's go ahead and start off with, you know, how much time we put into the game. Dragon Age, the Veil Guard. I currently have 80 hours sitting in the game. I did not go back after I rolled credits. I got the platinum in those 80 hours.

[00:03:47] The road to the platinum was arduous, but it also like wasn't super hard.

[00:03:52] Like we had a conversation before this about how Bioware kind of expects a lot out of people to complete their games from a trophy achievement standpoint.

[00:04:03] And I found this like relatively approachable. This is one where you kind of had to pay attention to a couple things.

[00:04:08] It is easy to miss getting all the trophies if you don't use a guide. I did use a guide.

[00:04:13] But yeah, I felt like I as a new person to Dragon Age as a new reviewer, I felt at a disadvantage.

[00:04:19] So I wanted to at least bare minimum cover everything that I feel like the dev team wanted you to cover to get that platinum.

[00:04:26] And that's what it took me. How about yourself?

[00:04:28] Bare minimum 80 hours seems pretty generous, but I am currently sitting at 127.

[00:04:35] Oh my goodness. Okay.

[00:04:37] At least you don't have to go through and play all of the world states and choose Treviso if you chose Minrathus the first time.

[00:04:47] Yeah.

[00:04:47] You don't have to redo anything.

[00:04:49] Right, right. Yeah.

[00:04:51] Yeah. 127 hours. I still am finding side content.

[00:04:55] See, that's so interesting. And I'd be curious to dig in a little bit later when we kind of talk about some more of the peripheral side pieces that are actually in the Veil Guard.

[00:05:04] But yeah, it's funny because I thought that that would have like the platinum itself would have covered everything.

[00:05:09] But I feel like especially knowing locations like Arlethan or locations like Hossberg, I imagine that there was lots of just like packed away little niches of the map that you're going to miss if you're not digging through every little piece.

[00:05:23] Yeah. Do you want me to give an example that's kind of spoilery or?

[00:05:27] Let's go ahead and save that. Let's save that.

[00:05:29] And we'll go ahead and jump in a little bit later if there are spoilers on the back end and we can talk about some of those good little secrets for the folks.

[00:05:37] Yeah, but let's go ahead and jump into overall thoughts.

[00:05:40] I'd like to ask you first, like, what were your top level thoughts for the Veil Guard?

[00:05:43] As a longtime Dragon Age fan, longtime, you know, what do they call the Thedas historian yourself?

[00:05:51] How did you feel?

[00:05:52] Yeah, yeah.

[00:05:53] How did you feel about the Veil Guard?

[00:05:54] Um, I went into it extremely excited.

[00:05:58] I've been waiting for this game for over a decade.

[00:06:02] Um, and I, I liked it, but I feel like there was a lot of retconning and lore sidelining.

[00:06:13] And it shouldn't have had to be that way.

[00:06:16] I feel like if a game has such rich and deep lore, they should present it to you in every game.

[00:06:24] You shouldn't have to headcanon the things that you've learned in previous games.

[00:06:28] Yeah, I absolutely agree.

[00:06:30] And the interesting thing about that is the fact that, like, you have to headcanon, you have to, like, retcon in your own mind as you're playing.

[00:06:37] The thing is that this, from a lot of reviewers, a lot of critics out there said that this game felt like a soft reboot for the overall franchise.

[00:06:46] Yeah.

[00:06:46] Especially when you look at it from what they did with a lot of the legacy characters.

[00:06:50] Which, again, we're not spoiling anything right now.

[00:06:52] But, um, just the way that the developers and the developer team kind of treated the narrative of this game.

[00:06:59] It's like, it's, it seems like an introduction, an overall, like, introduction to the Dragon Age world, to Thedas.

[00:07:08] And I just don't know if that was something that they succeeded in, in terms of doing it.

[00:07:13] I, I would say that for me personally, you know, top level thoughts, I think that the Veilguard is a serviceable game.

[00:07:20] When I'm looking at it as, like, a, as, like, a piece of the overall Dragon Age lore.

[00:07:25] Like, this game does not live up to the legacy of RPGs that I think that both Dragon Age Origins and what I surmise Inquisition and Dragon Age 2 kind of did.

[00:07:36] Even though Dragon Age 2, you know, is a hit and miss for a lot of fans out there from what I've heard.

[00:07:42] It's, it's interesting though, because it's like, I, for me, you know, the 80 hours getting the platinum.

[00:07:47] It was enough, like, the game did enough for me to be like, all right, I'm going to go full send on this.

[00:07:52] I mean, I, even before this conversation, I told you, like, I'm not guaranteeing that we're going to review the game.

[00:07:57] Just because of, you know, I, I have heard so many things and I, I try to keep myself or my opinions and emotions siloed away from, like, the internet.

[00:08:05] Capital I, internet.

[00:08:07] You do, I've witnessed this.

[00:08:08] Which is, it's hard to do.

[00:08:10] It's hard not to be influenced by everything that you see and hear that people talk about online.

[00:08:14] But when we think about this game at a top level as utility to inspire new fans, it succeeded on that front for me with the help of you and with the help of the Netflix anime that they created for Dragon Age, Dragon Age Absolution.

[00:08:29] Which, let's go ahead and just start this episode off.

[00:08:32] Like, if you haven't seen Dragon Age Absolution and you're interested in getting to the Veil Guard, I strongly recommend people first go to that.

[00:08:41] Because they have a couple of really, like, talented voice actors that are playing great characters in that, that anime series.

[00:08:46] And I feel like that anime series did a lot with getting people into interesting parts of the Dragon Age, like lore and mythos.

[00:08:54] And, like, what my opinion should be, like, the core of the emotions that the audience will want from a Dragon Age experience.

[00:09:03] Do you agree?

[00:09:04] I agree.

[00:09:05] And also, I haven't mentioned this to you, but there is a pre-existing different anime featuring Cassandra.

[00:09:12] Oh, wow.

[00:09:13] In Navara.

[00:09:14] But I have not seen that one.

[00:09:16] But in regards to looking at both Dragon Age the Veil Guard, as well as, like, the anime Dragon Age Absolution separately, do you agree?

[00:09:24] What do you think about which of these experiences kind of inspire new fandom?

[00:09:29] I think that the anime definitely would get somebody hyped to play it because the world is so rich and involved.

[00:09:37] And in rolling your character in each of these games, you get to see it from a different angle.

[00:09:43] Mm-hmm.

[00:09:44] Yeah.

[00:09:45] Yeah, definitely.

[00:09:46] And there's a lot of different ways that you can approach it in terms of getting into it.

[00:09:51] And, like, I myself, the deeper that you go into the Veil Guard, the more that they pull from snippets of Thedas lore, which I think is really interesting.

[00:10:00] But it also, like, finishing the game made me go, all right, I booted up Dragon Age Origins.

[00:10:05] And I started a mage run in Dragon Age Origins.

[00:10:08] We got you.

[00:10:09] Yeah, so I'm in.

[00:10:10] I'm in.

[00:10:11] It was successful on that front.

[00:10:12] I just, I wonder as to how many people that aren't, like, absolute nerds like myself who love high fantasy, like, is this going to be the thing that pulls them in?

[00:10:23] It's the real question.

[00:10:24] But regardless, those are kind of, like, our top-level thoughts for Veil Guard.

[00:10:28] I mean, again, decent game, not a great game.

[00:10:31] I think that it struggles with a lot.

[00:10:34] And something that I did, you know, kind of want to call out at the very beginning here, which I think is very noticeable as I was doing research for this episode and kind of going through the wiki and looking at the development of this title.

[00:10:46] The top-level developers, as well as, like, the leaders for the development team, changed.

[00:10:53] And this game was, like, in production for, if I'm not wrong, 15 years.

[00:10:57] Like, with, like, a long, long time since, like, Inquisition actually released.

[00:11:02] Oh, it was being developed before Inquisition released.

[00:11:04] It probably would have been, like, started or, like, rolled into simultaneously.

[00:11:09] It might not be, it might be an exaggeration.

[00:11:11] I don't know the specific timeline, but at least a decade occurred in between, you know, Inquisition and releasing and then what we have now with Dragon Age, the Veil Guard.

[00:11:21] But in that time, the development team has changed drastically.

[00:11:26] I sent you a note previously offline about how the idea for the Dread Wolf, which was the original title for Dragon Age, the Veil Guard, was originally going to be this.

[00:11:35] It was, like, Project Joplin, and it was this idea, it was going to be a short, tight narrative that was exploring the Tevinter Imperium, which is literally, like, word for word something you said, like, you wanted.

[00:11:47] Which is, it's amazing, too, right?

[00:11:49] Give me this game.

[00:11:50] It's a shame that we didn't get that, but at the end of the day, you know, we got what we got, and we kind of have to, like, make do with, you know, the production we have.

[00:11:58] But it is something that I feel like people should keep in mind when they listen to critics or they listen to YouTube personalities, God forbid, talk about this game.

[00:12:08] Is that, like, this game not only went through a series of leadership changes over the course of time, it went through actual genre changes.

[00:12:16] Like, they originally wanted this to be more of a live service.

[00:12:20] They were chasing that live service money bag.

[00:12:22] The Destiny types, they were going to go for, like, a Warcraft type.

[00:12:25] I don't know specifically what they were doing.

[00:12:27] And that manifests itself so much throughout this game.

[00:12:30] And so when you see that happen and it gets stuck in what we call development hell for so long, you get what the Veil Guard is.

[00:12:40] And unfortunately, that is a lot of splintered pieces that have been taped together over top of each other.

[00:12:45] And you can tell.

[00:12:46] You can tell.

[00:12:47] Yeah, it's incredibly disjointed.

[00:12:48] It runs into a lot of problems with cohesiveness.

[00:12:52] And again, as you said, like, the lore just, like, isn't there in the way that you want it to be.

[00:12:57] You can tell that, like, they had 13 different writers that were writing multiple different worlds and characters and sections.

[00:13:03] And maybe they weren't really talking to each other the way that they should have been.

[00:13:07] So we got what we got at the end of the day.

[00:13:09] That's Dragon Age of the Veil Guard.

[00:13:11] But again, like, there is good stuff to be had here.

[00:13:14] Oh, absolutely.

[00:13:15] Yeah, and there's some lore if you dig into the Codex entries or the mementos.

[00:13:21] It'll drag you further into what you might already know about the world.

[00:13:25] But you shouldn't have to dig that deep.

[00:13:27] Like, I was shocked that as an elf, I could walk through Doctown and not be stopped and asked where my magister is.

[00:13:34] Yeah, exactly.

[00:13:36] Yeah, just little things like that.

[00:13:38] It was very immersion-breaking.

[00:13:40] Yeah, and again, you know, we talk about different ideas about that going through the open world.

[00:13:45] And I'll get to this in kind of, like, some of the world-building sections, too.

[00:13:48] But there was a lot of dissatisfaction that I had picking companions to go on specific quests with me and getting nothing from them.

[00:13:57] Yeah.

[00:13:57] As you go through that experience, which is something we figured out in Mass Effect 2.

[00:14:01] Sure, yeah.

[00:14:02] And we've come so far since then.

[00:14:04] Yeah, and I imagine Inquisition as well.

[00:14:06] But let's go ahead and jump into the premise of Dragnate of the Veilguard to give people an understanding of where we're going with the story in this game.

[00:14:15] So, the Veilguard starts out with your player character known as Rook, who is tagging along with the series fan favorite, Varric, to hunt down and stop Solas, a.k.a. Fen'Harel,

[00:14:27] from destroying the veil that imprisons capital B bad elven gods, the Evanuris.

[00:14:32] In an effort to stop Solas, Rook accidentally interrupts a ritual which allows two gods to escape, both of whom promptly begin to wreak havoc and blight across Thedas in order to reconquer the world and remake it in their own image.

[00:14:46] In traditional Bioware fashion, we have to assemble the team in order to take down the baddies.

[00:14:52] And that's what it is.

[00:14:53] That's Dragon Age of the Veilguard.

[00:14:55] That's where we start off.

[00:14:56] And it takes places.

[00:14:58] Now, Courtney, with that top-level explanation of the premise laid out, we talked a little bit about lore and our overall thoughts.

[00:15:07] Could you dig in for me a little bit about what you thought about lore pieces that they were either missing or what they included here that might be inspiring to people?

[00:15:16] What did you think about how they treated this from a lore perspective?

[00:15:20] From the lore perspective, Veilguard did an excellent job of filling in questions that people might have about the lore in previous games.

[00:15:30] And as early as Origins, you get statues and codex entries pointing to Fen'Harel and other elven gods.

[00:15:40] And the plot or the understanding of the lore is all wrong based on the people that you talk to.

[00:15:48] Like even Duncan talks about the Eluvians being something different from what they actually are.

[00:15:54] He's under the impression that they are created by Tevinter mages.

[00:15:58] Huh.

[00:15:59] Right.

[00:16:00] So it's just interesting how as you play these games, this lore unfurls and you start learning the truth about different things.

[00:16:08] And by Veilguard, we figured out some really interesting things regarding specifically dwarven lore, which I thought was just the coolest addition.

[00:16:18] Because we've been waiting to hear about the dwarves for a long time.

[00:16:21] And I know you didn't play Inquisition, but there was a DLC where you went down into, not the Deep Roads, but a Lyrium cavern.

[00:16:32] Wow. Okay.

[00:16:33] And you started learning about shapers and titans and you fight a titan heart.

[00:16:39] So it's just really interesting how they've backfilled this lore.

[00:16:45] Yeah.

[00:16:45] Yeah, that is interesting.

[00:16:47] And it's hard for me too because as I'm going through it, as a new player jumping into this game, Will made fun of me.

[00:16:55] He was like, you go in in no context.

[00:16:57] You don't even know what you're talking about.

[00:16:59] And of course, he played one and two and then a smattering of Inquisition and then, you know, kind of bounce off of that.

[00:17:05] Will, you need to play Inquisition.

[00:17:07] Play Inquisition, Will.

[00:17:08] Okay.

[00:17:08] If you're hearing this, play it.

[00:17:10] Play the game.

[00:17:11] But yeah, it was interesting kind of going in and they throw a lot of proper nouns at you in this game, which is fine.

[00:17:18] I love games that do that.

[00:17:20] There are many games that do it excellently.

[00:17:22] I don't know if that was masterfully done in The Veil Guard in a way that I would personally have preferred.

[00:17:31] I think there's a lot of hand-holding that happens in this game from a lore narrative perspective.

[00:17:37] Sure.

[00:17:38] That is kind of, and you're going to hear me kind of go back to this point earlier.

[00:17:44] It's indicative of inexperienced writers, writers who are kind of wet behind the ears, writers that feel like that they need to tell and not show.

[00:17:55] And there's a lot of show in this game, but not show in the way that kind of ties the narrative in with the overall experience that drives home emotion, that drives the plot forward.

[00:18:07] There's a lot of show in this game that kind of is just like, oh, that's pretty, but it's set dressing.

[00:18:13] It's not as impactful as I typically would want, with few exceptions out there.

[00:18:18] And it's like interesting, too, because this really fascinating race that one of the core companions have, the Qunari, are an interesting thing.

[00:18:25] And I had to go, I, of course, could I have gone through the codex?

[00:18:28] Yes.

[00:18:29] Do I like to read in my video games?

[00:18:31] Only in certain video games and not this one.

[00:18:34] So the answer typically is no, I don't want to read, but I went to you.

[00:18:37] And I was like, what's the deal with the Qunari?

[00:18:39] Like, who are these people?

[00:18:41] And I made the comparison to Klingons.

[00:18:43] And you said, yeah, that's actually kind of apt because they are very warlike.

[00:18:47] Sure.

[00:18:48] You know, pseudo-barbarian, militaristic, hierarchical race of peoples.

[00:18:53] Yeah.

[00:18:53] But they're also quite learned.

[00:18:55] And, I mean, one of the characters has, you know, a parent who's a scholar, philosopher, researcher, academic.

[00:19:02] Yeah, that's her job in the Qun.

[00:19:04] Yeah.

[00:19:04] Yeah.

[00:19:05] And what is the Qun?

[00:19:06] Could you?

[00:19:07] The Qun is like a code of honor.

[00:19:09] Okay.

[00:19:09] So like the Bushido code for samurai.

[00:19:11] Sure.

[00:19:11] Okay.

[00:19:12] That's a good comparison.

[00:19:14] But I think the game was made for new players.

[00:19:17] I think you got lucky because a lot of the decisions that you made in all the previous games were just thrown out.

[00:19:24] Yeah.

[00:19:25] Yeah.

[00:19:25] And that's another thing.

[00:19:26] But you're right about the soft reboot.

[00:19:27] That's exactly what it was.

[00:19:28] Yeah.

[00:19:29] It's a soft reboot in a lot of different ways that kind of, it's really upsetting because like for all of the, all the people exactly like you, all of the wonderful folks out there, the Dragon Age fans out there who have been waiting and waiting and waiting for the Dread Wolf to make his awaited reappearance.

[00:19:46] It's, it's, I get it because I mean, the first time, and we, again, we, the first time we, it happened in Mass Effect from Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2.

[00:19:56] And they were like, oh, we're importing your save from one because you had these core decisions to make.

[00:20:01] Like, you know, what did you do on these various worlds?

[00:20:03] And this is going to impact who you get to talk to in Mass Effect 2.

[00:20:06] Like my, my little mind was blown.

[00:20:08] I was like, oh my God, this is amazing.

[00:20:10] It was amazing.

[00:20:10] And I feel like, I say this, but, and I know that it's much easier said than done, but like, I feel like we could have done that in Veil Guard and it was a very specific point for them not to.

[00:20:23] We could have.

[00:20:25] And Inquisition had something incredible called the Keep, where you got to go online and make your decisions and preload your world state.

[00:20:34] Yeah.

[00:20:35] Um, you could choose any of the decisions that you made from one or two, um, and your game would change based off of those decisions.

[00:20:43] So I think that what they, they might, they might think that their hardcore fans have aged out of video games.

[00:20:52] See, that's so funny though, because this is like, this is so indicative of what I imagine maybe isn't Bioware's fault.

[00:20:59] It could potentially be a problem that I could leverage and throw at EA because they're fucking shitty money, grubby corporate overlords that are, you know, in the margins and in the spreadsheets for the budget for this game is like, yeah, why spend an extra $200,000 on one person to manage the keep for this game?

[00:21:17] And we could just do a soft reboot.

[00:21:19] Right.

[00:21:19] And then that doesn't cost anything.

[00:21:20] And I'm paying you people already make it happen.

[00:21:22] Right.

[00:21:22] I imagine those meetings and conversations take place and there is a push and pull and it does take really strong and experienced directors at the helm to be, to grab executive producers on the publishing team by the short hairs and be like, this needs to happen.

[00:21:37] And when you don't have those people in place, unfortunately, the budget gets pushed elsewhere.

[00:21:42] Um, for a long time, Dragon Age fans, we can tell that David Gator is no longer on the writing staff.

[00:21:48] Yeah.

[00:21:49] Yeah.

[00:21:49] Yeah.

[00:21:50] And that's, that's just in, that's, that's been manifested in so many different ways, but let's go ahead and jump into, uh, some of the core elements of the gameplay and the visuals for Dragon Age, the Veil Guard.

[00:22:00] We're going to get into the mechanics.

[00:22:02] Yes, sir.

[00:22:02] We're going to jump down.

[00:22:03] If we want to come back to the lore at any points for the, feel free, we'll, we'll, we'll jump back to the lore.

[00:22:07] I'll pepper it in.

[00:22:08] Okay.

[00:22:08] Yeah.

[00:22:08] Pepper it in.

[00:22:09] Sprinkle it in there.

[00:22:10] Sprinkle it in like Salt Bay.

[00:22:11] Um, but I like to talk to you about the character creator.

[00:22:15] Um, I, for me, you know, me, we've, we've, we've, we've, we've, we've,

[00:22:18] we've had multiple conversations offline about CCs.

[00:22:21] I do not care.

[00:22:22] Um, I think that character creators, especially for inexperienced writing teams are a not so great thing.

[00:22:31] If you have a story to tell, um, especially if you have a story to tell with a voiced protagonist.

[00:22:36] And when you have a voice protagonist, I think that it makes more sense to actually tell a story about that protagonist and about the people, the surrounding them.

[00:22:45] Um, and that from having like a malleable character creator, like it takes a lot of experience and work to build a narrative around somebody, especially if they're going to get voiced.

[00:22:56] So that's all fine and well.

[00:22:58] Um, but yeah, for me, give me a cool looking preset.

[00:23:01] And that's exactly what I did.

[00:23:02] I just selected a preset, added a mustache.

[00:23:06] Cause I wanted to be a mustache boy and, uh, I'm locked in, but what did you think?

[00:23:10] What do you think of your CC?

[00:23:11] You had the cool little braid and everything.

[00:23:13] Well, it was a Jedi braid.

[00:23:15] It was a rat tail.

[00:23:17] It was the side rat tail.

[00:23:18] It was so good.

[00:23:19] His character was incredible.

[00:23:22] You say you don't like CCs, but he was awesome.

[00:23:25] He's gorgeous.

[00:23:26] Um, well, I grew up playing with pixel dolls on dial up internet.

[00:23:32] Yeah, you did.

[00:23:33] So I love a CC.

[00:23:35] I think that it's, it, it, it's incredible when you can look at this preexisting, uh, climate from other points of view.

[00:23:45] So I really enjoyed it.

[00:23:47] Um, it's incredibly, um, inclusive.

[00:23:52] There's lots of different body types.

[00:23:54] There's a bunch of different scars.

[00:23:56] There's vitiligo.

[00:23:57] Um, and while this isn't part of the CC, one gripe that I did have is that Rook's hair physics.

[00:24:06] Yeah.

[00:24:07] Nobody's hair looks that good.

[00:24:09] Let's talk about it.

[00:24:10] Yeah.

[00:24:10] We get the Pantene commercial in every video.

[00:24:13] And it's funny too, because before I even, I watched you play this game before I even got it and started playing it myself.

[00:24:20] And it was funny running around as your character because the physics, the particle physics.

[00:24:26] And it's so funny because people have said this for a long time about dragon ages.

[00:24:30] Like they can't get hair, right?

[00:24:32] Apparently the hair or eyebrows.

[00:24:34] And apparently the hair in inquisition was awful.

[00:24:37] It was something else.

[00:24:39] It was something else.

[00:24:39] It was plastic.

[00:24:40] And, and then they came into this game and I feel like the developers even talked about, we made a point.

[00:24:47] We got the hair right in this game.

[00:24:48] And it's just like, they, they swung the pendulum so hard to the other side of making the hair kind of like, try to be realistic or try to be like, you know, work with the rigging model of your actual character.

[00:25:03] I'm just like, that's nice.

[00:25:05] But, but now we have the technology and I want to see floaty hair in Mass Effect.

[00:25:10] Yeah.

[00:25:10] No, give me the floaty hair.

[00:25:12] Seriously.

[00:25:12] Seriously.

[00:25:12] Walking around the spaceship with it, you know, you could do interesting hairstyles with that.

[00:25:17] Absolutely.

[00:25:18] Interesting hairstyles.

[00:25:18] But yeah.

[00:25:20] Again, you know, we talk about the CC for any listeners who maybe are new to the show who, I mean, I'm just going to draw a line in the sand here right now.

[00:25:30] If you're one of the people that like listen to YouTubers or listen to podcasts and be like, woke, this is not going to be a show for you.

[00:25:38] This isn't a podcast for you, frankly.

[00:25:40] Like that's not something, that's not what we do here.

[00:25:43] We, we love inclusion.

[00:25:44] We love different communities be represented.

[00:25:47] You know, a lot of conversations about the top scars in this game.

[00:25:51] Will, if I can steal some of his thoughts very shortly for the show, had a really, you know, pointed comment to make about, you know, the top scars.

[00:25:58] Like you're literally going to make it in the character creator.

[00:26:01] And then you're going to put armor sets on.

[00:26:02] You're never going to see it throughout the entire game.

[00:26:04] So for someone to feel slighted or someone to feel any kind of way other than cool, I'm glad that's in there.

[00:26:11] It's that's something maybe some internal work that you might need to do because it's not for you.

[00:26:15] It's for the people who want to be seen in the art that they make.

[00:26:20] And that's something that's very important, I think.

[00:26:21] Absolutely.

[00:26:22] Absolutely.

[00:26:22] And if you don't like it, you don't have to use it.

[00:26:25] Nobody's forcing you to.

[00:26:26] Nobody's forcing you to play the game either.

[00:26:28] Just, just as, just as a call out there.

[00:26:30] Also, it's like, it's so, so endlessly funny to me because this is another thing that Will says.

[00:26:35] It's like, oh, it's 2024.

[00:26:36] All of a sudden all games are woke, but literally Dragon Age Origins back in, what was it?

[00:26:42] 2007, 2009 came out and had like some of the most progressive representation in RPGs like ever.

[00:26:51] And multiracial, you know, queer characters, incredible stuff there.

[00:26:57] And it's like, now we want to sit here in 2024 and act like things have changed so much with the Dragon Age franchise.

[00:27:04] It's so goofy.

[00:27:04] No, in 2009, Dragon Age was making waves and creating headlines on Fox News.

[00:27:10] So, you know, they were doing something right.

[00:27:12] Yeah, exactly.

[00:27:14] Exactly.

[00:27:14] So there's that.

[00:27:16] We're going to go ahead and take these ideas about like the character creator and jump into the overall visual design.

[00:27:22] I wanted to get your thoughts on this because I myself was initially taken aback by the cartoonish look.

[00:27:29] And this was something that happened at the very first reveal trailer.

[00:27:32] I don't remember if this was a Summer Games Fest or if it was the Game Awards.

[00:27:36] I feel like it was a Keeley event or it might have potentially just been a YouTube video that Bioware dropped.

[00:27:42] Um, they might not have been.

[00:27:44] It might have been during Summer Games Fest, but not at the main premiere event for that show.

[00:27:49] But yeah, the marketing campaign for this dropped.

[00:27:51] And it was kind of because I know what the Dragon Age games have looked like before.

[00:27:57] I've seen screenshots.

[00:27:58] I've seen like cover art stuff.

[00:28:00] And it seemed like a very, very intense pivot away from that in terms of the visual style.

[00:28:06] Things looked a little bit softer around the edges, a little bit more cartoonish, more closer to Pixar instead of what we know and love from the Dragon Age or just from Bioware and EA as a whole.

[00:28:19] Um, and I feel like that the visual design was fine as I got deeper into the game, especially when they let themselves get darker.

[00:28:27] Yes.

[00:28:28] With the themes and the context, you know, everything with the dark spawn, the Green Wardens, you know, Weishaupt, everything that we have there, uh, was great.

[00:28:35] I thought, and I felt like the visual design really complemented that stuff.

[00:28:39] But when we got out of that, um, into some of the more roles that just, it only serviced to make this game kind of more comedic than it should have been, I feel like.

[00:28:49] Sure.

[00:28:50] Um, I remember the marketing trailer that you're talking about and I remember texting you about it and you said they had Marvel splash screens or something.

[00:28:59] They did.

[00:29:00] They did.

[00:29:01] It's like, it was very, can he says something quippy?

[00:29:03] And I'm like, what the fuck are we doing?

[00:29:04] What is this?

[00:29:05] It's a very interesting choice for sure.

[00:29:08] Yeah.

[00:29:09] Um, but the visual design itself, I, I liked it because of the scope and variance of the world we've been dropped into.

[00:29:16] Yeah.

[00:29:17] Um, we have just as a couple examples of vaulting cathedral like architecture in Treviso.

[00:29:24] We have neon signposts in Docktown.

[00:29:27] Yeah.

[00:29:27] Um.

[00:29:28] I thought that was a really cool touch.

[00:29:30] Right.

[00:29:30] And prismatic, like vaguely unsettling plays of light through Arlethon.

[00:29:35] Um, it's just a very larger than life game.

[00:29:39] So I feel like the exaggerated sort of cartoony, um, character design wasn't too far off base.

[00:29:46] And also it's reflected in the art book, the visual design.

[00:29:52] Yeah.

[00:29:52] You can see it being developed.

[00:29:54] So I, I find it, um, you know, very on brand because, uh, they use the same concept artists for every game.

[00:30:02] Matt Rhodes.

[00:30:03] Yeah.

[00:30:04] I'm a big fan.

[00:30:04] Yeah.

[00:30:05] Um, it just to see it evolve is, is really cool.

[00:30:09] Yeah.

[00:30:09] I, purple was a big theme of this game.

[00:30:12] The color, a color palette theme that you see played across, um, a lot of different environments, a lot of different areas.

[00:30:18] Um, you see it all over the lighthouse, which is like the home base.

[00:30:22] We'll get into that a little bit later, but purple seemed to be any, it's on literally the cover art of the game.

[00:30:27] So it's like, there's a lot of stuff that you could do that.

[00:30:29] It's one of my favorite colors too.

[00:30:30] So there's some stuff there that I really, really like.

[00:30:34] And, um, it's interesting because I feel like they definitely stuck to their guns in terms of the aesthetic that they wanted.

[00:30:41] Um, whether or not that met the writing in a way that we wanted remains to be seen, but we can get into that a little bit later.

[00:30:48] Um, jumping in here, looking at, you know, going from the overall visual design, I think it was serviceable.

[00:30:55] It was fine.

[00:30:56] Um, we want to go into the, the actual world.

[00:31:00] The world setting itself in the systems of the traversal, uh, in this game.

[00:31:05] So for the uninitiated veil guard, I messed that up again, but I'm just going to keep going.

[00:31:10] Veil guard utilizes something that's commonly known as a hub and spoke world design, where you have one central point where that's going to be your home base.

[00:31:19] And that's where you talk to your companions.

[00:31:21] You mess around with your armor, your gear, maybe do some stat corrections, some buffs, that sort of thing.

[00:31:26] You can, you have the upgrader.

[00:31:28] I can't remember what was the name of the character in the lighthouse that upgrades your gear.

[00:31:32] What is that?

[00:31:32] The caretaker.

[00:31:33] The caretaker.

[00:31:34] Yeah.

[00:31:34] You can go to the caretaker and, uh, upgrade your gear there.

[00:31:37] But what it does is it allows you because of the alluvians that you had mentioned earlier, they're scattered throughout the lighthouse.

[00:31:45] A little bit of lore context.

[00:31:47] This isn't really a spoiler, but what happens after the main events of the game, after Rook stops the ritual from happening, which releases it, something bad happens.

[00:31:57] We're not really sure.

[00:31:58] It's a little bit vague, but you're brought to the lighthouse, which is actually Fen'Harel, aka Solas's, uh, hideout in the Fade.

[00:32:06] It's how he eluded the Ebonurus during the Great War, if I'm not mistaken.

[00:32:11] Is that right?

[00:32:11] Is that point right?

[00:32:12] I believe so.

[00:32:13] Okay.

[00:32:13] But it also allows him, you know, as this very old, very powerful being to travel all out about Thedas and go to many different parts of Thedas.

[00:32:24] And the lighthouse is kind of damaged.

[00:32:27] Uh, when you're first there, something's wrong with it.

[00:32:29] And I think that's indicative of like what's going on with Solas in this game.

[00:32:33] Like not all of the areas are open and accessible.

[00:32:35] Um, but as you travel, the lighthouse has a direct connection to what is known as the crossroads, which is a point in the Fade.

[00:32:44] We're getting really technical here, but it's a point in the Fade that allows the character to go to anywhere that they want.

[00:32:49] Whether it's Minrathus, Treviso, the Rivian Coast.

[00:32:53] Am I saying that right?

[00:32:54] The Rivian?

[00:32:55] Rivain?

[00:32:55] Rivian?

[00:32:56] I think it is Rivian.

[00:32:57] Okay.

[00:32:58] I'm going to call it Rivian because it sounds great.

[00:32:59] Um, but yeah, so you, you're able to travel throughout the game and that's kind of what we mean by the hub and spokes world.

[00:33:04] I have a note here.

[00:33:05] This makes the map really fucking dumb and confusing.

[00:33:09] I don't know.

[00:33:10] Did you do agree?

[00:33:11] Is that like, I liked it, but I liked it because Morrigan said something really interesting because she has access to Alluvians.

[00:33:20] Okay.

[00:33:21] Um, she says she crawls through the walls of this world to get different places.

[00:33:26] And I found that really cool.

[00:33:28] That is cool.

[00:33:29] Yeah.

[00:33:30] That is cool.

[00:33:30] I love Morgan as a character, by the way.

[00:33:32] She's incredible.

[00:33:33] And she's a long time, she's a long time Dragon Age fan.

[00:33:35] What is she from?

[00:33:36] She is from Origins.

[00:33:37] She's not a fan.

[00:33:38] She's a character.

[00:33:39] Sorry, I had to correct myself.

[00:33:42] Um, she, she, you meet her in Origins and you have a much, um, deeper, more interesting relationship with Morgan in Origins because she is your companion.

[00:33:51] Interesting.

[00:33:52] Okay.

[00:33:52] Um, and you can make a lot of choices that don't mean shit in Veilguard.

[00:33:58] But see, and that's such a shame because she's so important.

[00:34:01] She's so important to this, this story.

[00:34:04] So important.

[00:34:05] Yeah.

[00:34:05] Yeah.

[00:34:06] Um, but she's a little aloof and, um, I don't know, removed from your influence in Inquisition, which is the next game you see her in.

[00:34:18] You don't see her in Dragon Age 2.

[00:34:20] Gotcha.

[00:34:20] Gotcha.

[00:34:20] So I was, yeah, just thinking about the map and you were talking about how, uh, what Morgan said about like, you know, crawling through the walls of Thedas and to get to different places of the house that is Thedas, which I think is, it's an apt description.

[00:34:33] It's an apt comparison.

[00:34:34] And I'm thinking more along the lines of like the UI, the user interface, the experience of pulling up the map, pressing the touchpad on the PS5, and then using that stupid fucking cursor to scroll around at like, you know, snail space to go to wherever you need to go.

[00:34:50] It's something that really gets me.

[00:34:52] And also, I think what gets me about it is that you, again, I'm seeking an external source, AKA Courtney, to show me the actual Thedas map.

[00:35:02] I could have looked this up on my end.

[00:35:03] I chose not to, but she showed me the Thedas map and it's a beautiful map.

[00:35:08] It's really cool.

[00:35:09] I'm a nerd.

[00:35:09] I'm a nerd for maps and it would have been perfect if they had just had the map in all the different locations.

[00:35:15] I love it.

[00:35:16] I grew up on Lord of the Rings.

[00:35:18] I grew up on Aragon, heaven forbid, and they have like really cool maps and books.

[00:35:22] And I was like, if we can just get back to that.

[00:35:23] And there are plenty of games that have done that.

[00:35:26] We can just get back to that.

[00:35:28] If you squint, you can kind of see it behind the overlay.

[00:35:31] But that's dumb and I hate it.

[00:35:33] And that's, it makes me so frustrated because it's like, I get it.

[00:35:36] The Illuvians are taking us from point A to point B.

[00:35:39] But at the end of the day, just give me a sidebar list and let me click down that sidebar list and click on Minrathis.

[00:35:44] Click on Triviso.

[00:35:45] Whatever the city may be that I need to go to.

[00:35:47] I hear you.

[00:35:48] I think they tried.

[00:35:49] Yeah.

[00:35:50] I think they really tried to make it seem otherworldly.

[00:35:54] That's fair.

[00:35:54] Yeah.

[00:35:55] That's fair.

[00:35:55] I get that.

[00:35:56] Yeah.

[00:35:56] A little ethereal.

[00:35:58] Yeah.

[00:35:59] But I'm so fucking serious, gameplay designers.

[00:36:01] If you don't leave the goddamn cursor and the menu bars and the 2024 trash can, I'm coming for you.

[00:36:07] I am not.

[00:36:08] I will be fueled by hatred.

[00:36:10] I will find you at PAX East and we're going to have conversations.

[00:36:13] I could feel him vibrating as he was watching me bring up the map when he first started.

[00:36:18] When I first started playing.

[00:36:20] Yeah.

[00:36:20] Yeah.

[00:36:21] I was shaking.

[00:36:21] He really doesn't like it.

[00:36:22] I was shaking.

[00:36:23] Um, but yeah, uh, moving on here, the lighthouse hub world can be customized and it slowly

[00:36:28] unlocks secrets over time.

[00:36:30] Uh, personally, the lighthouse didn't particularly feel like home.

[00:36:36] In my opinion, I felt like, um, it just was like a place.

[00:36:40] It was like a hideout.

[00:36:41] I felt like I was on, I was subleasing an apartment from Solace and like, I guess technically

[00:36:46] that's what you were doing.

[00:36:47] That's exactly what's correct.

[00:36:48] But it's just like, it didn't feel cozy in the same way the Normandy felt home.

[00:36:54] I feel like you're right.

[00:36:55] I don't know if that's fair.

[00:36:56] I don't know if that's a fair comparison to make because it's like, did any of the other

[00:37:00] Dragon Age have like an identity or a feeling of home in like other bases for the, for the

[00:37:06] other games?

[00:37:07] Yes.

[00:37:08] And no origins had a camp like Baldur's gate.

[00:37:12] Um, Dragon Age 2 had like a progressive sort of location.

[00:37:16] You begin in your uncle, uncle Gamlin's house, uh, in Lowtown, which is basically a shack.

[00:37:24] And after you, um, play through some of the events of the game, you get your own mansion,

[00:37:30] but your companions don't have a spot there.

[00:37:33] They live other places and you have to go other places to see them.

[00:37:36] But in Inquisition, you finally get Skyhold, which all of your companions have their own

[00:37:43] place, but it doesn't progress or grow around them the way that the lighthouse does, which

[00:37:49] I thought was a really interesting touch.

[00:37:52] Yeah.

[00:37:52] Um, it's, it's the first, uh, real home base that is customized and customizable.

[00:38:00] You can bring your own decorations in.

[00:38:02] And I just feel like it felt kind of like an afterthought.

[00:38:06] It was really cool being able to grab these decor items from across the world and decorate

[00:38:11] your own space, but different merchants.

[00:38:14] There wasn't enough room.

[00:38:16] I guess I wanted to max.

[00:38:18] For sure.

[00:38:18] For sure.

[00:38:19] I wanted to fill it with all the shit that I have sitting in my inventory.

[00:38:22] And it's like, you have two wall spaces, two, two wall spaces.

[00:38:25] And you have like 16 murals to choose from.

[00:38:28] Like, what are we doing?

[00:38:28] What are we doing here, folks?

[00:38:29] That's, and you can customize the whole thing with themes, but I don't know.

[00:38:35] I like the gray warden, the one though, because there's a nugs.

[00:38:38] Oh, there are nugs in it.

[00:38:40] There's nugs statues.

[00:38:40] Oh, that's so cute.

[00:38:41] That's so cute.

[00:38:42] Yeah.

[00:38:42] I, um, I will say that like, I feel like the Normandy comparison is fair and unfair at the

[00:38:47] same time.

[00:38:48] But the reason why I immediately jumped to that is because they put a fucking, they, they

[00:38:51] put a aquarium in Rook's room the same way that Shepard had set up in theirs.

[00:38:55] But you don't have to feed the fish.

[00:38:57] You don't have to feed the fish.

[00:38:59] You don't have to.

[00:39:00] They're magic fish.

[00:39:00] Yeah.

[00:39:01] Um, but yeah, so we talked about the lighthouse and it branches off into every different part

[00:39:06] of Thedas, um, as we go throughout the game, I wanted to ask you, uh, what were some of

[00:39:12] your favorite areas and levels in this game?

[00:39:15] I liked every single gray warden area and event.

[00:39:19] Same.

[00:39:20] Um, the wetlands were beautiful.

[00:39:23] I really liked the morning dove call off screen.

[00:39:28] Um, it's part of the ambient noise.

[00:39:31] And I think the spooky, um, happenings going on in the wetlands were really cool.

[00:39:39] Like the echo in the well, the haunted manor, the scarecrow that was possessed.

[00:39:45] Yeah.

[00:39:47] Um, and going towards the end of the quest line, there's like a glade bursting with a certain

[00:39:53] flower that, um, it ends on just a really poignant, beautiful note, uh, with our favorite,

[00:39:59] uh, gray warden couple, Antoine and Evka.

[00:40:02] No, they're the besties.

[00:40:04] Do they need a third?

[00:40:06] Honestly, honestly, you know, I'll sign, sign me up, sign me up y'all.

[00:40:10] No, I completely agree with you in terms of the different areas that you found really

[00:40:15] engaging.

[00:40:16] Uh, the Hossberg wetlands, I think was the best designed level.

[00:40:20] And the reason why I think it was the best design level for this game is because it felt

[00:40:24] organic and it felt native to what it was like.

[00:40:27] I also would imagine and think in my mind that Hossberg wetlands was probably the last

[00:40:33] level that they designed in this game.

[00:40:35] You think so?

[00:40:35] I do.

[00:40:36] What makes you think that?

[00:40:37] Because it doesn't have the same structural layout that Minrathus and Treviso, um, and

[00:40:42] even the Rivian coast do.

[00:40:43] What about Arlethan?

[00:40:44] So Arlethan, I think is natural.

[00:40:48] I just think there's too much bullshit in Arlethan.

[00:40:50] And I also think that Arlethan suffers from the exact same thing that Treviso and Minrathus

[00:40:55] do is that literally they're all, it's all structural rectangles.

[00:40:59] When you look at the map themselves, they are literally all structural rectangles and

[00:41:03] they look like maps in home bases for live service experiences.

[00:41:08] That's literally what they are.

[00:41:10] And I am.

[00:41:10] They never caught onto that.

[00:41:11] It's, it's very, very apparent.

[00:41:13] I think Treviso and Minrathus are the worst case scenarios.

[00:41:16] And I think what the developers and the designers kind of said to themselves, they were like,

[00:41:20] okay, these are cities.

[00:41:23] They're going to be more, uh, structural.

[00:41:25] They're going to be more brutalist.

[00:41:26] They're going to be more integrative than what you would get in the wetlands or the Rivian

[00:41:30] coast because it's society.

[00:41:34] But I know for a fact that those were designed years before we decided where we were going

[00:41:38] to go.

[00:41:39] And I know for a fact that they had a limited budget to work within this game.

[00:41:42] And they just said, let's just do what we can with this, especially with Minrathus.

[00:41:45] And I think some of your complaints about, uh, Doctown not living up to your expectations

[00:41:50] after years and years and years of not being able to live and experience.

[00:41:54] There was so much hype.

[00:41:55] Dorian made it sound like it was this, uh, beautiful, uh, varied, exotic.

[00:42:03] Yeah.

[00:42:03] Uh, locale.

[00:42:04] And we, we got stinky Doctown.

[00:42:06] Yeah.

[00:42:07] We got stinky Doctown.

[00:42:08] And it's one of those things where the Doctown, like Minrathus itself, the skyboxes are gorgeous.

[00:42:16] They're beautiful.

[00:42:17] The idea of it, the floating structures.

[00:42:20] The Arkans Palace.

[00:42:21] This cool city.

[00:42:21] Yeah.

[00:42:22] The Arkans Palace.

[00:42:23] You see it immediately at the beginning of the game.

[00:42:24] It's so cool.

[00:42:25] It is so, so cool.

[00:42:26] But you're so scoped in and limited.

[00:42:29] And this is another thing that we're, you know, cause we're here in this section now

[00:42:33] and a critique that I actually first listened to, um, on friends per second, Lucy, uh, I think,

[00:42:39] I think it's Lucy Valentine was talking to, um, the boys on that podcast.

[00:42:43] And she was saying that one of the failures of this game's visual design is that they draw

[00:42:50] the player's eye to the ground everywhere you go, because this game is a collectathon.

[00:42:54] Let's just say I got the fucking platinum.

[00:42:56] This game is a collectathon.

[00:42:58] I fell into the trap of wanting to unlock every chest.

[00:43:01] I love the fact that you were like, I don't give a fuck about the chest.

[00:43:04] Don't care.

[00:43:04] Do not care.

[00:43:05] Do not care.

[00:43:06] And that's amazing.

[00:43:07] And you had it right, I think.

[00:43:09] But every time I knew, I, I knew at some point I was going to need to get stuff, buy stuff,

[00:43:14] do something.

[00:43:14] And I was right.

[00:43:15] Holy shit.

[00:43:16] I was right because I came this close, very close.

[00:43:19] I'm holding my fingers close together, uh, dear listener.

[00:43:21] But like, uh, I came super, super close to not getting the platinum because I did not

[00:43:26] level Minrathus in the way that I should have.

[00:43:28] I overspent money and resources on other merchants when I should have put it into the Minrathus

[00:43:36] merchant.

[00:43:36] Um, were you trying to get?

[00:43:39] Well, the platinum requires you to have, uh, level three, excellent, um, reputation scores

[00:43:46] for all factions.

[00:43:47] Got it.

[00:43:48] And you saved Treviso.

[00:43:49] Yes.

[00:43:50] Okay.

[00:43:50] And so, so yeah, what happens is they're mechanically, that's kind of something we get into a little

[00:43:54] bit later, but there's a decision basically early on in the game that Rook has to make,

[00:43:58] um, because the, um, Evanuris send out two blighted dragons to both Minrathus and Treviso.

[00:44:04] Why both of those places, even though neither of them are super strategic in my personal

[00:44:10] opinion for this game?

[00:44:11] I mean, I could be wrong.

[00:44:11] I could be wrong, but like, I'm just, it's very curious that they sent them to those places

[00:44:16] as opposed to other more important parts of the world that you explore later on.

[00:44:21] But like, why don't, why wouldn't you send it to Arlethun?

[00:44:23] I don't understand, but.

[00:44:24] Huh.

[00:44:24] I mean, I guess they did later.

[00:44:26] Correct.

[00:44:27] Maybe that was just a strategic thing.

[00:44:30] But regardless, Rook has to make a choice.

[00:44:31] Am I going to invest my resources and take the team to go save Treviso or Minrathus?

[00:44:36] And, um, whichever person on your team is tied to those locations who, wherever you go,

[00:44:44] you save one city and it gets kind of decimated, but not super bad.

[00:44:48] But the other city gets fucking decimated.

[00:44:50] And whoever are like the bad elements that are already occupying those cities, because

[00:44:55] you have the Venatori evil mages occupying Minrathus.

[00:44:58] And then you have the.

[00:45:00] Antom.

[00:45:01] The Antom.

[00:45:02] Thank you so much.

[00:45:02] These evil Qunari warlords called the Antom who have invaded Treviso and they're kind

[00:45:07] of like ruling over it, which is, it's tough, but there's a lot of stuff that's baked into

[00:45:12] that there.

[00:45:13] Whoever you decide not to save the Venatori or the Antom take over and wipe out the factions

[00:45:18] that are there.

[00:45:19] Um, and the merchant that should normally be in the normal hideout, uh, dies, but their

[00:45:25] spirit goes to the crossroads and you can go to the crossroads, access their spirit, sell

[00:45:30] gold to them, level up your faction strength with that spirit.

[00:45:33] I can't believe that I didn't catch on that.

[00:45:35] That was their spirit.

[00:45:36] Yeah.

[00:45:36] Well, it wouldn't make sense if they actually like manifested a little ghosty form because

[00:45:40] they literally have a ghost like woman sitting next to that spirit.

[00:45:45] But no, it's a wisp.

[00:45:46] It's just a wisp.

[00:45:47] And the only indication that you would have is just the Minrathus rank that's next to

[00:45:51] it on the side there and that you can sell stuff too.

[00:45:53] So there's that anyway, that's a long way to say that like this game struggles because

[00:45:59] they always draw the character's eye down.

[00:46:01] Like in games that are like visual masterpieces and there are parts of this game that are

[00:46:06] truly visual masterpiece.

[00:46:07] You want the character's eye up and looking at the skyboxes, looking at the architecture

[00:46:11] and it's just, they just didn't, it just didn't do that.

[00:46:14] Yeah.

[00:46:15] And leaving that tavern at the beginning with Varric, they do draw your eye up.

[00:46:19] They, you hear somebody shouting from the Archon's palace that they're under arrest and

[00:46:27] you see somebody get put in a spotlight right in front of you.

[00:46:31] Right.

[00:46:32] So they, they tried.

[00:46:34] Yeah.

[00:46:34] But it didn't get there all the way for the rest of the game.

[00:46:38] Right.

[00:46:38] I just, and that's something that, you know, we're, we're in the mechanics section.

[00:46:42] We're talking about the gameplay of Dragon Age, the Veil Guard, and I'm getting ready to

[00:46:47] jump into, you know, some of the combat sections.

[00:46:50] But my thing is, is that when you're making a game like the Veil Guard, yeah, it's a narrative

[00:46:55] RPG.

[00:46:56] You're going to want to collect some collectibles in that game, especially if you want a full,

[00:47:00] like something that I think that gameplay designers, a trap that they fall into so often

[00:47:05] is they want to give the players value for their dollar with gameplay time.

[00:47:11] But instead of giving them content, like substantive, like a good meaty tuna sandwich to bite into,

[00:47:17] they give them, I don't know, like a, like a shitty pepperoni sandwich with like one layer

[00:47:23] of pepperonis in there and it's really bad for you and you don't like it.

[00:47:26] And that's kind of like what this turned into because you're collecting hundreds of swords

[00:47:32] in armor sets and armor pieces.

[00:47:34] And I did not like any of them.

[00:47:37] That's why I just didn't do it.

[00:47:39] And you were right not to.

[00:47:41] You were right not to.

[00:47:42] But like at the end of the game, I imagined that I wanted to have the legendary items.

[00:47:45] The funny thing is, is that the, the platinum doesn't require you to have any legendary items.

[00:47:51] And you kind of pick them up by defeating things and completing quests.

[00:47:55] Yeah, I did want to.

[00:47:56] You don't always need them.

[00:47:56] And that's actually a perfect way to segue into the combat and the stuff that kind of

[00:48:02] gets into, you know, the more, the more gameplay fighty, fighty, bang, bang, shoot, shoot method

[00:48:07] of this game.

[00:48:08] It's really interesting because throughout this game, there are lots of optional boss fights

[00:48:14] or secret boss fights or other like optional side content that results in a boss fight because

[00:48:19] kind of the end of every quest results in you having to kill something.

[00:48:22] Hmm.

[00:48:23] It's another flaw if I could continue to be in my critical bag, but a lot of the time,

[00:48:28] so you have like legendary items that you upgrade through collecting chests, right?

[00:48:33] And you open a chest and it literally, you have a sword and it goes from plus 20 burning

[00:48:37] to plus 45 burning when you open a chest.

[00:48:40] But there are other times where you open up a chest and it has a special rare variant

[00:48:44] of an item.

[00:48:44] And I started noticing that it was from other Bioware properties or other like properties

[00:48:50] that some of the developers were a fan of.

[00:48:52] Um, and I'm struggling to think of an example.

[00:48:55] Yeah.

[00:48:55] Like there is, uh, there is like a, a sword that I picked up that was a direct reference

[00:49:03] to, um, to Mass Effect.

[00:49:06] What?

[00:49:06] No way.

[00:49:07] Are you talking about the armor that's delivered in the chest to the lighthouse?

[00:49:13] No, no, I'll have to find it.

[00:49:16] I'll have to find it for you and talk to you about it.

[00:49:17] And I could be wrong, but it's, it is a sword that was like a direct reference to like Star

[00:49:21] Trek or like this happens a few different times.

[00:49:25] Um, and there's one that I'm like, there's a few in there that, and the coding on it, when

[00:49:30] you're looking at it in the UI and you're in your inventory, it's like, it's a red, it's

[00:49:34] got red around it as opposed to the orange where the legendary has.

[00:49:38] And there's some of them that like, there's like an, Oh, Jenny sword or something like

[00:49:43] that.

[00:49:44] And it's, they do interesting things with these swords where, um, when you're on the

[00:49:49] ground, it does 0% physical damage.

[00:49:51] But as long as you're fighting, you hit the enemy in the air, it does plus 150% physical

[00:49:55] damage.

[00:49:56] How did I miss this?

[00:49:57] And there are a few, there are like multiple items cause you didn't do the collectathon

[00:50:00] like I did.

[00:50:01] That's, that's probably why.

[00:50:02] Yeah.

[00:50:03] But, but that's okay.

[00:50:04] That's okay.

[00:50:05] At the end of the day, you did what you wanted to do.

[00:50:07] I'll do it again.

[00:50:09] You're in the middle of your third run.

[00:50:11] You don't have to, you can just give up.

[00:50:13] You can just give up.

[00:50:15] Um, but yeah, so, you know, as we're talking about swords and armor, um, let's go ahead

[00:50:20] and segue into, um, just more deeper conversation about the combat.

[00:50:25] I played a duelist necro blade rogue, which was pretty good and melted enemies real nice.

[00:50:30] What did you play?

[00:50:31] I was a spell blade mage using the orb and dagger combination, not the stack.

[00:50:38] Um, and it was, it was, it was fine.

[00:50:41] It was just fine.

[00:50:42] Um, it was still my favorite mage specialization, but I had a little bit of envy watching you

[00:50:49] play your rogue.

[00:50:50] Really?

[00:50:50] Yeah.

[00:50:50] Because it was so crunchy and flippy and very acrobatic.

[00:50:54] And I was just, um, casting spells with my little dagger.

[00:50:59] Now, my question is, did you have, um, you must have had a parry though with a, with a

[00:51:04] dagger and orb, right?

[00:51:06] Must I have?

[00:51:06] If I had one, I did not use it because I was rolling and trying to keep at least a little

[00:51:12] bit ranged and moving around the back of enemies.

[00:51:14] Yeah.

[00:51:15] Um, but I'm not really a combat girly.

[00:51:17] That's fair.

[00:51:18] That's fair.

[00:51:18] They do have a perfect dodge.

[00:51:20] My question for you though, is with the, uh, with the blade, with the orbit dagger build

[00:51:25] that you did something about this game that I felt was significant when we talk about

[00:51:31] the combat is that all of the, like 90% of the enemies get up in your face.

[00:51:36] When you have a general encounter, you have like maybe 10 enemies on the map, eight of

[00:51:41] those enemies rush you.

[00:51:42] And then you might have two mages standing on their back line shooting spirit.

[00:51:46] And those very annoying, those backline opponents are very annoying.

[00:51:49] Um, how did that feel to you being a mage and working at range and distance with the

[00:51:54] orb and dagger?

[00:51:54] Like, were you melting people really quick or what, what was that like?

[00:51:58] Okay.

[00:51:58] So in inquisition, you had a night enchanter specialization where you had, um, buffed

[00:52:07] armor, but in this game, you did not have such a class or specialization.

[00:52:12] So I brought Davern along and I used his taunt.

[00:52:17] Okay.

[00:52:17] So that's really cool.

[00:52:18] So when you had people, so all of the, everybody on the map would rush Davern instead of you and

[00:52:24] you would stand back and shoot them from, from distance.

[00:52:27] But if I'm not mistaken, it's actually, um, it's one of the, the wheel choices.

[00:52:31] You have to bring it down.

[00:52:33] He doesn't naturally taunt.

[00:52:34] Yeah.

[00:52:35] It's, it's definitely, uh, it is a power and it has to reload, right?

[00:52:39] It has that cool down rate.

[00:52:40] Okay.

[00:52:41] Interesting.

[00:52:41] So if you hit somebody that he, I guess was outside of the AOE of that taunt, you're going

[00:52:48] to get attacked, but you're going to get melted.

[00:52:50] Yeah.

[00:52:50] I mean, they don't hit super hard.

[00:52:52] Um, and you can also, you level up really quickly in this game too.

[00:52:56] Yeah.

[00:52:56] And you can spec your skill tree into, um, taking less damage or having more armor, but

[00:53:03] being tanky.

[00:53:04] Yeah.

[00:53:04] Um, it was just, I missed the night enchanter because you were tanky.

[00:53:08] Your sword was just, um, it materialized.

[00:53:12] It was magic.

[00:53:13] Yeah.

[00:53:13] Yeah.

[00:53:14] That's interesting.

[00:53:14] I'm, I'm not fascinated enough to reroll another character and try again.

[00:53:20] Uh, how I know, I know.

[00:53:22] Are you fascinated enough to play inquisition?

[00:53:25] Uh, eventually someday we'll start with origins.

[00:53:29] Write that down.

[00:53:29] We'll see where that goes.

[00:53:30] Don't sign it.

[00:53:31] Don't quote me on this dear listener.

[00:53:33] Um, but yeah, no, it's, it's funny because you talk about the different options that you

[00:53:37] have as a mage in the different specializations.

[00:53:40] You can go into the skill tree.

[00:53:43] As soon as I opened the skill tree in this game, I got a fucking headache because you

[00:53:47] open up and you see like literally a thousand nodes in the skill tree.

[00:53:52] And I'm just like, come on, come on.

[00:53:54] We've, we've come so far, but, and here's the thing.

[00:53:58] And here's where the real crux, dear listener, it's an hour into this episode, 54 minutes

[00:54:02] into this episode.

[00:54:03] If you've made it this far, uh, here's the crux of what dragon age, the veil guard is.

[00:54:07] This is not a narrative RPG.

[00:54:09] This isn't a, uh, game where you're going and you're making choices at every NPC you

[00:54:15] talk to that's going to affect the game later on.

[00:54:18] This is not what the veil guard is.

[00:54:19] The veil guard is an ARPG because you are going throughout the world.

[00:54:23] Like I said before, you're collecting a million armor pieces.

[00:54:26] They have a million different stats in buffs and you have a skill tree in whatever class

[00:54:33] you select that has quite literally a thousand nodes that you can choose to spec and arrange

[00:54:39] your character into people that are really into ARPGs like Diablo, like path of exile.

[00:54:45] This is for you.

[00:54:45] You are going to love this because you're going to go in there and you're going to be like,

[00:54:48] Oh wow, I can apply.

[00:54:50] I can apply 30% to my necro blade.

[00:54:52] And then if I also pick this skill tree, I can pick a cool down on my control abilities

[00:54:57] that makes people that are affected by like the necrosis have like 16% more damage.

[00:55:03] If I use a bow at range, literally this is the type of energy that you're going into and

[00:55:08] you're figuring out how to arrange your character.

[00:55:10] Me?

[00:55:10] I just like to kill shit.

[00:55:12] I just, I just want to kill shit, right?

[00:55:15] Like I, so I go in and I just went, I see all these necrosis abilities.

[00:55:19] I saw that the dualist, uh, skill set specialization had a really cool ultimate at the end of that

[00:55:25] tree.

[00:55:25] So I was like, cool, I'll just plug all of my, my level of points, my resources into this

[00:55:29] one.

[00:55:29] We'll go ahead and work with that.

[00:55:31] And I just, and I just operated based off of that.

[00:55:33] I did not care about where I was going.

[00:55:35] I barely paid attention to the control abilities, the tool abilities.

[00:55:40] Like, I don't know what you're talking about.

[00:55:41] And they did a terrible job of teaching me what they're talking about.

[00:55:44] I still don't know what a primer is.

[00:55:46] Right?

[00:55:46] I, what the fuck is a primer y'all?

[00:55:48] What's a, it's talk to me, Bioware.

[00:55:51] Talk to me, John Epler.

[00:55:52] Where are you?

[00:55:53] Cause explain to me what the thought process is in going into this because I was lost in

[00:55:58] trying to design my character.

[00:56:00] And again, yes.

[00:56:01] Could I have sat down and read every single thing and gone through the codex or gone through

[00:56:06] the tutorial page and like figured out what a primer was?

[00:56:10] Yes, I absolutely could have.

[00:56:11] Was I at all incentivized in any way to do that?

[00:56:16] No, no.

[00:56:17] I wasn't.

[00:56:17] The enemies were cardboard.

[00:56:18] They were, they were.

[00:56:19] And it was like, I, I could have put nothing into my skill tree and I would have made it

[00:56:23] 30% through the game.

[00:56:24] I killed an optional boss at level 29 when they recommended you be a level 40 or higher.

[00:56:29] And I am not the pro gamer of this podcast.

[00:56:33] Well, that's William.

[00:56:33] He's, he holds that chair very confidently.

[00:56:36] So it's, it's, it's just tough when you have these situations and you want to go in and

[00:56:42] you want to say, oh, well, we're an RPG.

[00:56:43] You're, you're not an RPG.

[00:56:45] You're an ARPG.

[00:56:46] This is very close to a dragon's dogma, much closer.

[00:56:49] Like I said, to a Diablo, to a path of exile, as opposed to dragon age.

[00:56:53] You're.

[00:56:54] Dragon's dogma.

[00:56:55] How dare you, sir?

[00:56:56] What?

[00:56:57] It is.

[00:56:58] It is.

[00:56:59] The story is there.

[00:57:01] Yeah.

[00:57:02] Yeah.

[00:57:02] Yeah.

[00:57:02] There's much more story.

[00:57:04] The characterization.

[00:57:05] It's a Bioware game.

[00:57:07] No, that's, that's fair.

[00:57:08] But there's, it's just the, the idea that went into it is just like the frustrating thing

[00:57:13] for me is that like, yes, the combat can be crunchy.

[00:57:17] It can be cool.

[00:57:18] You can arrange your character to be super OP if you really wanted to.

[00:57:22] You can pick all of the weapons in the armor to make yourself godlike as the rook as you

[00:57:28] go throughout this world.

[00:57:29] Um, but is that what dragon age is meant to feel like?

[00:57:35] Hmm.

[00:57:36] Great question.

[00:57:37] I feel like, um, in previous games, combat wasn't so heavily leaned on.

[00:57:44] It was more a story and veil guard did have a story, but.

[00:57:50] Like they were telling you a story through the different fights that you had.

[00:57:54] Right.

[00:57:55] Is that what you mean?

[00:57:55] Okay.

[00:57:56] Mm-hmm.

[00:57:57] I don't know.

[00:57:58] You called it the chicken soup of combat here in the notes.

[00:58:01] And I really like that.

[00:58:02] Yeah.

[00:58:02] It's like not bad.

[00:58:03] And that's what I, that's what I'm saying is that like, I, I have to balance myself because

[00:58:07] I feel like my frustration.

[00:58:09] If you listen or you're hearing frustration through me is because I see so much promise

[00:58:13] in this game.

[00:58:14] I see so much promise on a narrative standpoint.

[00:58:16] I see so much promise on a combat standpoint.

[00:58:19] They figured out a lot of really cool stuff to make the gameplay engaging.

[00:58:23] Like the enemy AI isn't bad.

[00:58:25] Like I have a note here on some of the enemy design as we go later down on, there are a

[00:58:30] couple of mini bosses in this game that are really freaking cool.

[00:58:33] The, the, the Venatori have these like brutalist.

[00:58:36] Um, so the Venatori have like these crystals that are very annoying.

[00:58:40] You go throughout the game, you'll see a million of them.

[00:58:42] They block off different areas of the map and you have to find a crystal, shoot the crystal

[00:58:46] to shoot another crystal.

[00:58:47] Then open up the door.

[00:58:48] Oh my God.

[00:58:49] The puzzles gave me fucking headaches.

[00:58:51] So they're so bad.

[00:58:52] They're so bad and easy.

[00:58:53] And, but the actual Venatori, as you go in, you're fighting them.

[00:58:58] They call in reinforcements at one point.

[00:59:01] And the reinforcement is this massive like mech that's shaped like a metallic crystal,

[00:59:06] just like the ones that you've been shooting.

[00:59:07] And it has these really cool move sets.

[00:59:09] It's spinning around.

[00:59:10] It's slamming the ground.

[00:59:11] It has a mechanized golem, right?

[00:59:13] It's really cool.

[00:59:14] And then, and then they do the same thing.

[00:59:15] They use the same rigging, uh, but for like a deep roads and they give a couple of new

[00:59:19] animations for the deep roads mini boss.

[00:59:22] Yeah.

[00:59:22] Yeah.

[00:59:22] It's like a little, yeah.

[00:59:23] Golem that comes out or just like a avatar or something like that.

[00:59:27] I just played that quest last night.

[00:59:28] So yeah, I'm remembering.

[00:59:29] Yeah, no, it's, it's really cool.

[00:59:31] Really cool stuff that they have there.

[00:59:33] Um, so it's not without promise.

[00:59:36] Like there's cool stuff there, but it's just, we talk about enemy variety.

[00:59:39] It's the same thing with a different skin over and over again.

[00:59:42] And I do sound so negative, but one of the parts of the combat that I really liked was

[00:59:47] your companions cheer you on.

[00:59:50] They're like great hit Rook.

[00:59:52] Do that again, Rook.

[00:59:53] I lined that up for you, Rook.

[00:59:55] Take them out.

[00:59:56] Yeah.

[00:59:56] Love it.

[00:59:57] It's, I love that too.

[00:59:59] But oh my God, Courtney, I was so frustrated because we had talked about this.

[01:00:03] I had listened to you play and I listened to your, your companions were so much more supportive

[01:00:07] than my companions.

[01:00:08] Maybe you should talk to your companions more.

[01:00:10] I literally maxed out all of my companion ranks.

[01:00:13] So I don't know what the fuck their deal was.

[01:00:15] Who did you choose?

[01:00:16] Who was always with you?

[01:00:17] So I always had Nave with me because I needed, because she was hardened and it took her longer

[01:00:24] to increase her companion rank.

[01:00:25] So I basically just cycled a bunch of different people with Nave most of the time.

[01:00:30] But the funny thing was, is that like, for whatever reason, I might just be bad.

[01:00:35] I might just be bad at playing the game the way that they wanted me to play because I was

[01:00:39] using my companion abilities, the companion, you know, on the wheelbar whenever they popped

[01:00:44] up.

[01:00:45] And I was like, okay, cool.

[01:00:46] We'll do that.

[01:00:46] Sometimes there were combos.

[01:00:48] Sometimes there weren't.

[01:00:49] Combos are a new feature in Dragon Age, the Veil Guard.

[01:00:52] It's actually something that creates a big, heavy damage moment where you have, for example,

[01:01:00] Emryx, his necrosis abilities are reacting to Nave's ice abilities really well.

[01:01:07] And they come together and they actually freeze the enemy to allow you to get like three or

[01:01:10] four or five more hits in and also do a big explosion damage in the moment.

[01:01:14] Those are what combos are in this game.

[01:01:16] Yeah.

[01:01:17] It's really cool.

[01:01:18] I like those.

[01:01:19] You got all kinds of love and support from your companions.

[01:01:21] And I was looking for that through this game.

[01:01:23] I was like, cheer me on, guys.

[01:01:24] We're rooting and tooting.

[01:01:26] We're running through Thedas and we're killing everybody.

[01:01:28] I feel like Nev might have been a poor choice if you wanted support.

[01:01:33] God bless America.

[01:01:34] She keeps her cards to her chest.

[01:01:35] She's like, I really like Rook, but I don't want them to know it.

[01:01:39] Oh my God.

[01:01:39] I can't.

[01:01:40] I can't with her.

[01:01:41] I can't with her.

[01:01:42] I will say though, I think that Balara was probably the most verbose companion when I

[01:01:47] was out and about.

[01:01:48] Boy, was she.

[01:01:50] I'm sorry.

[01:01:50] I really like Balara, but oh my gosh.

[01:01:53] Yeah.

[01:01:53] My goodness.

[01:01:54] She's definitely the ADHD-er of the group.

[01:01:57] Who did you find the most useful in combat?

[01:02:00] Davrin because he kept people off of me.

[01:02:02] Because of your build, your play style.

[01:02:04] Yeah.

[01:02:04] I felt like Davrin was the most useful.

[01:02:06] And the thing is, is that like I didn't need to keep people off of me because I had pretty

[01:02:11] good stats overall.

[01:02:11] It was very rare.

[01:02:13] I think I died like once in this game and it was totally my fault.

[01:02:16] You died?

[01:02:18] Yeah.

[01:02:18] See, see, I'm going to get shit from everybody because I literally said that.

[01:02:22] But no, and I went through this game and I would say that the most involved the characters

[01:02:28] got were Tosh and Lucanus.

[01:02:34] They were the most involved.

[01:02:35] And I loved actually putting those two together because they would go off and for whatever

[01:02:39] reason, they're AI.

[01:02:40] Because you can direct them.

[01:02:42] You can tell them to attack or defend.

[01:02:43] There's a little buttons at the top of the wheelbar to kind of assign them enemies if you

[01:02:47] want.

[01:02:48] I didn't fucking care about that.

[01:02:49] But just I wanted them to engage on their own and do their own thing.

[01:02:54] And very rarely did they actually do it in a way that was like front and center in my

[01:02:57] face because I was front and center melting through everything.

[01:03:02] Okay.

[01:03:03] If you re-roll, maybe try a warrior.

[01:03:05] That would be sick, right?

[01:03:06] Yeah.

[01:03:07] But I mean, how different is a warrior going to be from the rogue, right?

[01:03:10] Because they're going to be, you're going to be getting in people's grills, right?

[01:03:13] As you go through.

[01:03:15] Yeah.

[01:03:15] Yeah.

[01:03:15] I feel like rogues hit from the side and behind or they're supposed to, right?

[01:03:20] Unless you're an archer, but.

[01:03:22] Yeah.

[01:03:23] Yeah.

[01:03:24] I was, I was literally because I did the twin blade, I would just rush enemies.

[01:03:27] I would go in there and I would flurry blade, hold down triangle and just do the little

[01:03:32] spinny attack.

[01:03:32] And it was, it was really fun.

[01:03:34] And then I would dodge.

[01:03:35] The, the dodge as the, as the rogue was really cool.

[01:03:38] It is really cool.

[01:03:39] Especially because of, I think my background, it you're, you become like smoke and like a

[01:03:44] crow and then you go back and then you jump back in.

[01:03:47] If you do the, that's the perfect dodge animation, which is pretty neat.

[01:03:50] It is a really cool animation.

[01:03:51] Is it the same thing for mage?

[01:03:52] Um, mage has like a, like they disappear and they reappear.

[01:03:59] Okay.

[01:03:59] Um, but some of the animations are different and I don't know how I got some of those

[01:04:04] animations because I'm not really paying attention.

[01:04:06] I'm just kind of slicing and dicing, casting spells.

[01:04:11] That's fair.

[01:04:12] That's fair.

[01:04:13] But yeah, so that is the combat.

[01:04:15] Was there anything else that you kind of like felt super strongly about getting into this?

[01:04:21] Minor gripe.

[01:04:22] Um, I was a gray warden and all of the specializations were somebody else.

[01:04:28] The, um, spell blade was, I believe it was crow.

[01:04:33] And the necrosis one was for mourn watch and the elemental one was veil jumper.

[01:04:40] I believe.

[01:04:41] Okay.

[01:04:41] I didn't have a gray warden specialization as a mage and I did not like that.

[01:04:46] Cause it's so important.

[01:04:47] Like the wardens are just an important aspect to the lore and the history overall.

[01:04:51] So like, why not?

[01:04:52] Why not do it?

[01:04:53] But let's go ahead and take a quick music break.

[01:04:56] And when we come back, we're going to talk about our companions and the different party

[01:05:00] dynamics as if we didn't do that in.

[01:05:02] Yay.

[01:06:20] Okay.

[01:06:20] And we're back and we're going to be talking about companion and party dynamics here.

[01:06:25] Um, we're not going to get super deep into the weeds with the spoilers for the different

[01:06:29] companions and the party members, but we're going to talk about who is here, what they're

[01:06:33] doing, who some of our favorites are.

[01:06:35] Uh, I wanted to start with you, Courtney, who was your bestie?

[01:06:38] Who was your fave?

[01:06:39] Who did you carry with you most of the time through the game?

[01:06:41] Emmerich.

[01:06:42] Emmerich.

[01:06:43] Same.

[01:06:43] Emmerich was my Garrus.

[01:06:45] Yeah.

[01:06:46] He was so good.

[01:06:47] The, I, I should have looked up the voice actor before the show.

[01:06:49] I did not.

[01:06:50] The voice actor did excellent.

[01:06:52] Um, something that I think is really important for the overall experience and something that

[01:06:57] like he actually carried me through the game in terms of like interest and kind of intrigue

[01:07:03] as of this world.

[01:07:05] I don't know how much of Navara has been explored in the previous Dragon Age titles, but I was,

[01:07:11] endlessly obsessed when I realized as I went on.

[01:07:15] Uh, so we have Nick Borain as Emmerich who, and he seems to be about the same age as Emmerich

[01:07:21] potentially, uh, maybe a little younger actually.

[01:07:23] Who's to say?

[01:07:23] But, um, yeah, it's, it's funny because Navara, like the context and the setting of that world

[01:07:30] is really fascinating to me because I'm thinking about this necropolis society, right?

[01:07:35] Once I, I thought it was just a necropolis and they had a couple of people like the Mourn

[01:07:40] Watch were basically just the guard guardians of the gate, but the Mourn Watch is basically

[01:07:44] just a military for this society that lives in Navara.

[01:07:48] Is that right?

[01:07:49] Am I, am I on the right track there?

[01:07:50] I mean, I guess you could call it paramilitary.

[01:07:53] Um, I'm reading Teventer Knights.

[01:07:55] Okay.

[01:07:56] Um, and it has guards, it has, um, all kinds of jobs.

[01:08:02] Like there's a society that lives in the necropolis.

[01:08:05] Now that's not all of Navara.

[01:08:07] Oh, okay.

[01:08:08] So it takes place outside of, all right.

[01:08:10] Well, it's in Navara.

[01:08:11] It's a, it's very important, um, aspect of Navaran society is they respect and revere

[01:08:17] their dead and they like to preserve it.

[01:08:19] They're very, uh, uh, keeper oriented.

[01:08:24] Um, but it.

[01:08:26] Cause he doesn't, he doesn't believe in the incineration customs.

[01:08:30] No.

[01:08:30] That's really bad.

[01:08:31] He thinks it's barbaric.

[01:08:33] Yeah.

[01:08:34] You're dead.

[01:08:35] Yeah.

[01:08:36] Yeah.

[01:08:36] I have note here.

[01:08:37] Uh, obviously Emmerich Volcarin.

[01:08:39] Cool name.

[01:08:40] Cool ass name.

[01:08:41] So cool.

[01:08:41] But yeah, he's the best boy for me.

[01:08:43] He's, he's an older, uh, sassy queen, um, and senior professor of the necromancy arts

[01:08:48] of Navara, which is really cool.

[01:08:50] What did you think about him?

[01:08:51] He was just so realistic, uh, deeply human, flawed, had his own fears.

[01:08:58] Um, gosh, that was the most compelling thing.

[01:09:02] Right.

[01:09:02] It was the most, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off there.

[01:09:04] Fine.

[01:09:05] But yeah, his, his idea, his subplot, right.

[01:09:09] Which we're not getting into now, but it was the most compelling out of all of these other

[01:09:12] characters.

[01:09:12] And that's what made him such an interesting character.

[01:09:17] Also because of another thing that I, again, to bring this back up is that one of the writing

[01:09:24] this game suffers is that like, there's a lot of amateurish writing in this game.

[01:09:28] And a lot of that is manifested in a lot of these amateurish characters, these young

[01:09:32] characters.

[01:09:32] So it's like, it's all kind of coming together in this singing like thing.

[01:09:36] It's just showing the game is showing its face through its companions as being not

[01:09:42] very well.

[01:09:44] Like thought through in from, from end to end in terms of how do we want to display these

[01:09:49] characters?

[01:09:50] How do we want these characters to be presented?

[01:09:52] Because it's interesting as you go later on into this game, these characters start telling

[01:09:57] you things about themselves that the game assumes that you have learned about them early on.

[01:10:02] And it's like, no, you didn't show this to me.

[01:10:05] You didn't tell this to me.

[01:10:06] Um, if it weren't like said maybe 25 hours in the game, would you have known that Nev was

[01:10:15] a detective?

[01:10:17] Hmm.

[01:10:17] I really don't think you would have.

[01:10:19] I would think that she was, um, an interloper.

[01:10:24] Yeah.

[01:10:24] I just thought she would have been a powerful magister.

[01:10:27] Sure.

[01:10:27] At the, at the very most, like something like that.

[01:10:29] Cause magisters are like the high powered sorcerers of Teventer.

[01:10:32] Is that right?

[01:10:33] Right.

[01:10:33] Yes.

[01:10:34] Okay.

[01:10:34] I think she kind of strikes me as a bit of a gumshoe, but there's just some, I guess

[01:10:41] they try to throw in some noir elements and there, if you don't, if you're not paying

[01:10:47] attention, you'll miss it.

[01:10:48] Yeah.

[01:10:48] Right.

[01:10:48] But Emmerich, there was nothing about him that you would miss.

[01:10:52] No.

[01:10:52] He was extremely forward focused.

[01:10:55] Um, he's bestie material.

[01:10:58] He is bestie material.

[01:10:59] And speaking of other bestie material, um.

[01:11:01] Um, who was your favorite Emmerich by far, by far and away.

[01:11:05] Yeah.

[01:11:05] So, so we're on the same page here in terms of like who, who that, that being my favorite,

[01:11:09] I think like second and third, uh, lineup is Davrin and Tosh.

[01:11:14] Yeah.

[01:11:14] Um, I think that Davrin was really good.

[01:11:16] I said this to you and I was half joking, but also like low key, a hundred percent serious

[01:11:20] is that like when I was playing through the game, I went up to Davrin and I said something

[01:11:25] to him and he has like a line and he, you basically just ask him about something.

[01:11:30] He has like a single sentence response and it ends the conversation.

[01:11:34] I was like, Oh my God, thank you so much Davrin.

[01:11:37] I've had to click through so much dialogue with these other motherfuckers.

[01:11:41] I, I loved it.

[01:11:43] I was like, you said what you needed to say Pookie and you did it so well.

[01:11:47] You left it there.

[01:11:48] Thank you so much.

[01:11:49] Succinct.

[01:11:50] Yeah.

[01:11:51] I, um, I think he's just the, he's this hard ass gray warden, tough guy, sword and board

[01:11:55] main.

[01:11:56] There's nothing subtle about him.

[01:11:58] And I kind of love that, especially for him being an elf.

[01:12:00] He, he and Ballara are the two elves of the team.

[01:12:03] And I think that he's got an interesting personality, um, especially with his like,

[01:12:08] I love your note here.

[01:12:09] You talked about, you know, I don't know anything about raising cats, uh, when it comes

[01:12:12] to him and raising a son, uh, which is a spoiler, but you know, we'll get into that a

[01:12:17] little bit later.

[01:12:17] He's the reluctant cat dad.

[01:12:18] He is a reluctant cat dad.

[01:12:20] I love, I loved it so much.

[01:12:22] Um, but yeah.

[01:12:23] And I think that, you know, Nave was pretty good.

[01:12:28] Lucanus, I have a note here.

[01:12:29] Hey Alexa, play animal.

[01:12:30] I have become by three days grace.

[01:12:33] He's an edgy boy, but it's like, what were we trying to do?

[01:12:37] First of all, what were we trying to do with like him saying mierda the entire game?

[01:12:42] Like is Treviso is supposed to be a, uh, uh, one-to-one analog of Spain.

[01:12:47] Is that just Treviso?

[01:12:49] It's an amalgamation of Mediterranean societies.

[01:12:52] So what?

[01:12:52] Yeah.

[01:12:53] It's just, I, I, I cringe when I think about how they wrote him.

[01:12:57] That's totally fair.

[01:12:58] And it's the, he's supposed to be, I feel like he's supposed to be like a schizophrenic

[01:13:02] or he's supposed to be like bipolar maybe BPD potentially.

[01:13:06] He is possessed.

[01:13:07] He is.

[01:13:08] Yeah.

[01:13:08] I mean, spoiler alert for the game.

[01:13:10] Like he's possessed.

[01:13:11] I don't think it's really a spoiler because it's a, yeah, he's, he's running around with

[01:13:15] wings and stuff.

[01:13:16] He's got a demon inside of him.

[01:13:17] For our Dragon Age 2 fans, he is an abomination.

[01:13:20] Abomination!

[01:13:22] He would have been slain for it in Kirkwall.

[01:13:25] Yeah.

[01:13:26] Yeah.

[01:13:26] It's, um, he, he definitely is not, uh, he, he's struggling.

[01:13:30] He's struggling, but I'm just like, it's, this is, I just, I just don't know where they

[01:13:35] were going with him.

[01:13:36] I liked the idea of Lucanus and I really wanted to like Lucanus.

[01:13:39] I just didn't, I just didn't like him.

[01:13:42] He's, he's like, um, a more straight laced Zevran.

[01:13:45] I feel like from Dragon Age Origins.

[01:13:47] Okay.

[01:13:48] And you're going to keep playing that, right?

[01:13:49] So you'll figure out who he is.

[01:13:51] I'll figure it.

[01:13:51] Yeah.

[01:13:51] I'll figure that eventually.

[01:13:53] Eventually.

[01:13:54] Um, I wanted to ask you here.

[01:13:56] Okay.

[01:13:56] So Lace Harding.

[01:13:57] Yes.

[01:13:57] She is an Inquisition, Dragon Age Inquisition alum.

[01:14:01] She graduated the Inquisition.

[01:14:03] Uh, she's best Dwarven lady.

[01:14:05] Shout out to existing fans, question mark.

[01:14:07] I really wanted to ask you, why do you think they chose Harding to carry over into this game

[01:14:13] first?

[01:14:14] And secondly, do you think they honored or like pulled off displaying who Harding was in

[01:14:21] Veilguard the same way they did in Inquisition?

[01:14:23] So in Inquisition, Harding was a scout.

[01:14:26] And when you went to new areas, she would explain the terrain and what was going on.

[01:14:31] So she wasn't a companion.

[01:14:32] She was not a companion.

[01:14:33] Oh, okay.

[01:14:34] But she was treasured staff.

[01:14:37] You could copy that.

[01:14:39] She wasn't faculty.

[01:14:39] She was staff.

[01:14:40] Correct.

[01:14:41] Yes.

[01:14:41] Well said.

[01:14:42] Um, but she, I believe you could flirt with her and have like a mini relationship as the

[01:14:49] Inquisitor.

[01:14:49] Oh, neat.

[01:14:50] Okay.

[01:14:50] Um, I never did.

[01:14:51] I just heard tell of it, but she, um, she's always been at my notes here say the homeschooled

[01:14:59] horse girl, but in the best way, she is a cupcake and she hurt her cupcakery persists

[01:15:07] in Veilguard.

[01:15:08] And I really enjoy that about her.

[01:15:10] She's just your marshmallow friend, your sweetie pie.

[01:15:13] Yeah.

[01:15:13] And I feel like having her as the, the, I guess vector would be the right word as explaining

[01:15:21] the Dwarven lore and what's going on with the dwarves, I think is a really cool choice.

[01:15:26] I really liked that.

[01:15:27] That's interesting because me, I'm so glad that I asked you this question because coming

[01:15:31] into this game, I assumed she was just an Inquisitor.

[01:15:34] And I assumed that she was like one of the core companion cast members and the heavy hitters

[01:15:39] of the Inquisition companion lineup.

[01:15:41] Um, especially because she was so close with Varric in the very beginning and that he was

[01:15:47] the one that brought her along, um, with Rook and eventually Knave to go deal with Solas.

[01:15:53] Yeah.

[01:15:53] Uh, so it's, it's interesting that she was kind of just like an ancillary aspect, you

[01:15:57] know, supporting cast for, for Inquisition.

[01:16:00] That's, that's interesting.

[01:16:01] But so you didn't get enough of, I guess the answer to my question is that you didn't quite

[01:16:06] get enough of her to get a good understanding of her personality until the Veilguard.

[01:16:12] Um, I mean, yeah, she's, she's kind of like low key and I say this affectionately dorky

[01:16:17] in Inquisition.

[01:16:19] Um, she's just, she's sweet little Harding that Harding is Harding.

[01:16:24] There's no other definition.

[01:16:26] Harding is Harding outside of Varric because, because unfortunately Varric sidelined in this

[01:16:32] game.

[01:16:32] Um, were there any other dwarves from the Dragon Age mythos or the compendium list of different

[01:16:40] characters throughout the series that you would have preferred to see as opposed to Harding?

[01:16:45] Oh my gosh.

[01:16:46] Good question.

[01:16:46] Um, I mean, we had a few cool dwarven characters thrown at us in the DLC where you went to the,

[01:16:55] the tag, uh, I forget the name of it.

[01:16:58] Descent maybe.

[01:17:00] I don't know.

[01:17:00] That's a horror movie.

[01:17:01] Yeah, that is.

[01:17:02] I love that movie actually.

[01:17:04] Um, no, I think Harding was like the standout choice.

[01:17:08] And I remember that there was a lot of fan noise around Inquisition and people really liked

[01:17:13] Harding for some reason.

[01:17:14] They just resonated.

[01:17:15] Interesting.

[01:17:16] Um, so she was pulled in because of fans.

[01:17:18] I think so.

[01:17:19] Okay.

[01:17:19] That's fair.

[01:17:20] That's fair.

[01:17:20] That makes sense.

[01:17:22] Um, I would like to, I, Bulara, do you have any big thoughts about Bulara?

[01:17:29] I don't want to be a hater, but she is not my favorite.

[01:17:32] I mean, her, her, her line deliveries.

[01:17:36] I'll admit a lot of the other companions didn't bring a tear to my eye, but she did her delivery

[01:17:42] of, um, really.

[01:17:49] She blames herself for a lot of the things that she's struggling through.

[01:17:52] And I find that intensely relatable and her delivery of the lines is just so sad.

[01:17:58] So heartbreaking.

[01:17:59] Yeah.

[01:18:00] I, there are a couple of scenes with her that are really, really well done and really well,

[01:18:06] uh, directed in terms of how they wanted her to kind of emote and convey some of those

[01:18:12] moments.

[01:18:12] And I felt like exactly, you said it was tragic.

[01:18:14] It was heartbreaking.

[01:18:15] Um, what she was talking about outside of those scenes, I found her very annoying.

[01:18:20] Yes.

[01:18:20] I did not like the voice actors affect.

[01:18:23] Um, and this is no disrespect to the voice actor.

[01:18:25] I'm sure they're a lovely person.

[01:18:27] Um, but I just, I did, I didn't care for it.

[01:18:29] Uh, especially, you know, playing 80 hours of this game.

[01:18:32] You listen to a lot of these different characters, um, throughout the experience.

[01:18:36] And it's, it's, it's a little bit tough to get through it.

[01:18:39] I have her as the, the character itself, you know, Bulara Lutare, she's the other elf

[01:18:44] of the team.

[01:18:45] She's a fun, uh, whimsical Elvin Tinkerer that has an academic streak.

[01:18:49] She's very plucky.

[01:18:50] She's generally very happy go lucky.

[01:18:52] Uh, very inquisitive.

[01:18:53] She's got an academic streak to the effect of, I had fun listening to her in Emmerich Banter.

[01:18:59] They talked about writing a paper together, um, about the archive about the, uh, or something

[01:19:05] or something to the effect that we were in, we were in the necropolis and they talked about

[01:19:09] writing paper together.

[01:19:10] I was like, that's actually, I like that.

[01:19:12] That's, I find that very interesting.

[01:19:13] Um, no spoilers, but they do something canonical that it's very interesting with Bulara at the

[01:19:20] very end of this game.

[01:19:22] You know what I'm talking about, but we can get into it, but they do something interesting

[01:19:25] with Bulara depending on choices that are made.

[01:19:28] Oh, got it.

[01:19:29] And, and it's, I found that to be fascinating in terms of what she does at the very, how important

[01:19:37] she becomes at the very end.

[01:19:38] And it hits you out of nowhere.

[01:19:39] Like all these characters are supposed to be important.

[01:19:41] They just all felt like footnotes behind Rook.

[01:19:45] And if Rook is like this casual observer that goes through the story and just cracks fucking

[01:19:50] jokes.

[01:19:51] And again, this is my critique of the writing.

[01:19:53] And then like, they kind of follow suit, but they're, they're, they literally, like we

[01:19:59] talk about supporting cast.

[01:20:00] We talk about, you know, uh, staff, not faculty.

[01:20:03] They should be the faculty.

[01:20:04] And only a couple of them managed to land that spot in my personal mind.

[01:20:09] And a lot of them end up being staff and just left behind at the lighthouse.

[01:20:13] Can we talk about Rook at one point?

[01:20:14] Because I have thoughts on Rook.

[01:20:16] Let's talk about Rook right now.

[01:20:17] Let's do it.

[01:20:18] Um, I feel like Rook was meant to be a Hawk-esque character.

[01:20:24] And what was Hawk like?

[01:20:25] Hawk was...

[01:20:26] In Dragon Age 2 specifically.

[01:20:28] Hawk is the person who accidentally becomes important at work.

[01:20:32] Okay.

[01:20:33] Okay.

[01:20:34] Their writing is incredible.

[01:20:36] I was so stoked to learn that we were going to get the jokey middle option of dialogue

[01:20:41] on the dialogue wheel.

[01:20:43] Hawk did it impeccably.

[01:20:45] Rook fell short of the mark.

[01:20:47] I didn't laugh out loud once.

[01:20:50] But Rook is a character I think is meant to be kind of a bumbling, accidentally in charge.

[01:20:57] Um, but Varric passed the baton to them for a reason?

[01:21:02] Question mark?

[01:21:03] Right.

[01:21:04] Yeah.

[01:21:05] And I feel like for someone who became accidentally important at work, they sure have a lot of therapeutic

[01:21:13] answers to their companions' concerns.

[01:21:15] There's so much to say.

[01:21:17] And it's like they have a lot of safe answers.

[01:21:22] Everything we...

[01:21:23] Again, because we're talking about characters, it's kind of inextricable to not talk about the writing in this game.

[01:21:30] You've heard it a million times.

[01:21:31] The infamous skill up quote sounds like HR is in the room.

[01:21:36] Mm-hmm.

[01:21:37] That's true to some extent.

[01:21:38] Not all of it.

[01:21:39] That's not a representation of this entire game.

[01:21:42] But I hate that it was right on its face.

[01:21:43] It's correct.

[01:21:44] It really is.

[01:21:45] And it's like, um...

[01:21:47] The issue is that you can't really get any companions mad at you.

[01:21:52] Right.

[01:21:52] You can't really make them mad.

[01:21:54] Like, I don't even know if there's a consequence for seducing more than one character.

[01:21:58] Or romancing more than one character.

[01:22:00] I'm sure you have to choose.

[01:22:01] They just take away the romance options on the other person's dialogue wheel.

[01:22:04] Right.

[01:22:04] Your forced monogamy.

[01:22:05] Not that I was looking for it or anything.

[01:22:08] I just wanted to see if somebody would get mad at me.

[01:22:11] Well, you choose...

[01:22:12] Well, I would imagine that you'd have to...

[01:22:14] What I would hope there to be a case is they do The Witcher 3.

[01:22:18] And instead of maybe tying Rook up the way they tied Geralt up, which is very funny.

[01:22:22] And The Witcher 3 did it perfectly.

[01:22:24] Exactly.

[01:22:24] But like, you know, sit you down in the lighthouse and say,

[01:22:28] Honey, we care about your feelings, but you have to choose between the two of us.

[01:22:31] Right?

[01:22:32] And I just don't...

[01:22:32] I don't know.

[01:22:33] I mean, I can look that up at a certain point.

[01:22:35] I just don't know if that happened.

[01:22:36] But even if it did happen, I would be relatively sure that that conversation isn't going to be funny.

[01:22:42] It's not going to make me squeamish or uncomfortable the same way that Triss and...

[01:22:50] Dark-haired lady from The Witcher.

[01:22:51] Which Yennefer made me feel when that whole situation happened with Geralt and the three of them together.

[01:22:58] And it's just...

[01:22:58] And it's because of the fact that, like, there's no teeth in this game.

[01:23:03] There's no dire consequences.

[01:23:04] The worst consequence of this game is what happens to the first warden.

[01:23:09] And again, we can't spoil too much.

[01:23:12] But like, I didn't even care about it.

[01:23:15] I liked it.

[01:23:16] I didn't even care about it.

[01:23:17] Like, I don't know if he necessarily deserved what he got.

[01:23:20] But, you know, at the end of the day, it's like, I did not...

[01:23:23] It left me with no emotional resonance or impact.

[01:23:26] And that's something that is repeated over and over throughout this game.

[01:23:29] By where I know you can make me feel something.

[01:23:33] They used to be able to.

[01:23:34] But it's a completely different company now.

[01:23:37] It's because David Gator left.

[01:23:39] And then they fired...

[01:23:40] I think he's the executive producer now.

[01:23:41] They fired Mary Kirby.

[01:23:43] Yeah, I don't...

[01:23:44] Did they let her go or did they fire her?

[01:23:46] I mean, I guess it was technically a layoff.

[01:23:49] But how disrespectful.

[01:23:51] She's been with Bioware for such a long time.

[01:23:53] And I mean, it shows.

[01:23:54] It shows in the writing.

[01:23:55] They probably...

[01:23:56] I guarantee you what they did is they fired these writers that probably had good salaries.

[01:24:01] That probably had six...

[01:24:03] Maybe six-digit salaries for being on the staff.

[01:24:06] And they hired kids out of college.

[01:24:09] And I say that with all due respect to the dev team.

[01:24:11] Because it's so hard to do this kind of work.

[01:24:13] But it's just...

[01:24:14] It's apparent that most of the people that are on the team were very inexperienced.

[01:24:19] And that the people who were at the top, who were responsible for QAing how everything is supposed to fit together seamlessly,

[01:24:26] looked at it and said, good enough.

[01:24:27] And unfortunately, for people like you and other long-time Dragon Age fans, good enough doesn't cut the mustard.

[01:24:35] When you have games like Baldur's Gate 3.

[01:24:38] Yeah.

[01:24:38] When you have games like...

[01:24:40] I mean, I could list off a dozen.

[01:24:42] When you have games like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which again, not a perfect game.

[01:24:46] We reviewed it on the show.

[01:24:47] Go back and listen to that episode.

[01:24:49] But the writing for the characters in that game made me cry at multiple moments.

[01:24:55] I did not think I would care about a huge, beefy man with a gun arm.

[01:24:59] But goddammit, Square Enix made me care about Barret in a way I never thought possible.

[01:25:04] It is beautiful.

[01:25:04] It is beautiful.

[01:25:06] And it's not...

[01:25:06] I think it's hard to do, and writing is hard.

[01:25:09] But it's not when you're operating at a high level, which is the way that Bioware should be operating.

[01:25:14] It's not the hardest thing in the world to make people care.

[01:25:17] Those elder writers were worth every penny.

[01:25:20] Yeah.

[01:25:20] And I think EA is going to witness that their content is degrading because they've let them go.

[01:25:29] Yeah.

[01:25:29] We talk about the degradation of the content.

[01:25:31] I do want to touch on one last character before we move on.

[01:25:36] I want to talk about Tosh.

[01:25:38] Tosh is the non-binary character of the Dragon Age, the Veilguard, companion lineup.

[01:25:47] I am a little bit flippant, and I'm going to avoid being flippant on this recording.

[01:25:52] Because I actually really...

[01:25:55] I didn't think I would, especially when you first meet Tosh.

[01:25:59] You go out through the game, and I was going to be like, I don't care about this game.

[01:26:02] Tosh actually performs really well in the field.

[01:26:04] Yeah.

[01:26:05] Really, really strong character.

[01:26:07] Wonderful to fight against Darkspawn.

[01:26:09] Tosh's powers...

[01:26:10] Tosh is a dragon breather, and they are really, really talented at using fire.

[01:26:16] They have heavy damage hitting options if you spec into that in their skill tree.

[01:26:22] They're a really good character.

[01:26:23] The writing really needed so much fucking work in order to make Tosh a multi-dimensional real character.

[01:26:33] And I think for somebody who is very...

[01:26:36] Like, the Veilguard is a very mainstream game.

[01:26:38] For a non-binary character to make the core cast lineup in a mainstream game, there should have been a lot more work and a lot more thought put into how they were written.

[01:26:48] It felt a little ham-fisted.

[01:26:50] I will admit that.

[01:26:51] Super ham-fisted.

[01:26:52] What were your thoughts overall?

[01:26:55] I came into the game thinking that Tosh was going to be my favorite companion.

[01:26:59] And they did end up being my favorite companion.

[01:27:03] Not in a way that I would have thought, though.

[01:27:05] Because, you know, I'm in my 30s.

[01:27:10] And as soon as I met Tosh, I identified them as, oh, this is a kid.

[01:27:16] Yeah.

[01:27:16] This is just a baby.

[01:27:18] And they're trying to cut the apron strings of their mother and get out from under her judgmental observations.

[01:27:26] And, you know, they end up doing so.

[01:27:30] So, but I felt affection for Tosh in the way that a mother would feel affection for their child.

[01:27:38] Yeah.

[01:27:39] And I think, again, as soon as you realize Tosh is the equivalent of an 18-year-old, it's so apparent.

[01:27:47] Right.

[01:27:47] Their behavior and the way they're reacting.

[01:27:49] And it's when you walk into it at first, you're like, why aren't you saying anything to me?

[01:27:53] Like, why am I not getting more from you?

[01:27:55] And I think that that's important on a couple fronts because I think that, and I'm going to really give Bioware the benefit of the doubt here.

[01:28:02] But I think what was being targeted or what was aimed for with Tosh's character is that non-binary people are allowed to be young and willful and a little bit stubborn and a little bit ignorant.

[01:28:15] And they're allowed to make wrong choices.

[01:28:17] And that makes them real people.

[01:28:18] And that makes them just as valid as everyone else.

[01:28:20] And I furthermore think that that was kind of purposeful in their writing to a certain extent in terms of the way that they comported themselves, the way that they reacted to the other characters.

[01:28:34] But I think that when you put a non-binary character on the forefront and you want to be like, this is going to be one of our spearheader characters and we're going to really put this out here and this is going to be a moment for the community.

[01:28:46] I think you have to write them way better.

[01:28:49] You have to give your audience some credit.

[01:28:52] Yeah.

[01:28:53] Because a lot of Bioware fans, I mean, the fandom itself is quite queer.

[01:28:59] Yeah.

[01:29:00] And it's very social justice minded.

[01:29:04] Yeah.

[01:29:05] So the people who are playing this game who meet Tosh.

[01:29:08] They understand identity politics.

[01:29:09] They get it.

[01:29:10] They don't need to be spoken down to.

[01:29:11] Right.

[01:29:12] Yeah, they don't.

[01:29:13] And I think that people who do, well, I would argue that nobody really needs to.

[01:29:20] I think that even teenagers could have played this game and you could have been more nuanced with what you're trying to convey with some of the themes you're trying to convey about found family, about discovering your own identity.

[01:29:33] It just, it seemed like, and this is again, Tosh is a perfect representation that Dragon Age of the Veil Guard is 2024's baby's first RPG.

[01:29:41] And if this is your first RPG, that's actually okay.

[01:29:48] I liked that one.

[01:29:50] Yeah.

[01:29:51] Also, how fortunate for kids growing up these days that they get to experience these RPGs as their first RPG.

[01:30:00] Come on.

[01:30:01] If they can put down Roblox or Minecraft or Marvel Rivals.

[01:30:06] Skippity Fortnite.

[01:30:06] Skippity Fortnite, Marvel Rivals, China Games, you know, whatever the case may be.

[01:30:11] If they can put those down.

[01:30:12] Yeah, they are super fortunate.

[01:30:13] It's just so funny because I would love to see the demographic information.

[01:30:19] I say this a lot on the show.

[01:30:20] I feel like listeners yell at me online if I'm repeating myself too much, but I would love to see the demographic information for the sales of the user audience for Dragon Age of the Veil Guard.

[01:30:32] And I would be willing to bet that the peak of the player scale are people in our age bracket.

[01:30:40] I think so too.

[01:30:41] And I think that when you have to write a game like this, you have to understand your audience deeply.

[01:30:47] And if you write a game for us, younger people will like it.

[01:30:51] Younger people will want to play and engage with that game.

[01:30:54] But I think that if this is not, especially if you're writing this game for 15 to 16 or 18 year old demographics, this is not the one.

[01:31:04] Nope.

[01:31:04] This is not the way to do that.

[01:31:05] Oh, one more thing about Tosh.

[01:31:07] I don't want to get my like psychology hat on or anything.

[01:31:09] Sure.

[01:31:10] But I feel like they have just a little bit of a PDA profile.

[01:31:14] That's pathological demand avoidance because they're very autonomy minded.

[01:31:21] Pathological demand avoidance.

[01:31:23] They want to be on their own.

[01:31:25] They want their will to be known and respected, their autonomy, their personal choice.

[01:31:32] Okay.

[01:31:32] And I think Tosh really, I mean, just watching it, I was like, oh, this is a PDA profile.

[01:31:38] Like.

[01:31:38] You don't know anything about me, mom.

[01:31:41] Right.

[01:31:41] And you don't get to tell me who I am.

[01:31:43] I get to tell, I get to say who I am.

[01:31:46] Yeah.

[01:31:47] I think it's a very powerful moment coming out.

[01:31:52] I think that it's a little tough though.

[01:31:56] First of all, because people don't finish games.

[01:31:59] Yes.

[01:31:59] People don't.

[01:32:00] People start games and people don't finish games.

[01:32:02] And if you have to wait until 30 hours, 40, 50, 60 hours into the game for Tosh to be like,

[01:32:10] I don't go by she, her, I go by they, them.

[01:32:13] Um, that's a little bit of a problem.

[01:32:16] If you want this person to be a non-binary representation character, that needs to be

[01:32:21] something that happens earlier.

[01:32:23] And I understand it's, you know, you got, you got to earn that moment.

[01:32:27] You got to get to that moment.

[01:32:28] Eventually.

[01:32:29] Tosh has to trust you.

[01:32:30] Tosh has to trust Rook and Tosh has to trust the audience, um, to understand that they're

[01:32:36] a non-binary and go through the game that way.

[01:32:38] Uh, especially because I'm texting you 25, 30 hours in and I'm like,

[01:32:42] why aren't they using their right pronouns?

[01:32:44] Right.

[01:32:45] And you're like, well, they haven't come out yet.

[01:32:48] Not everybody knows.

[01:32:49] Yeah.

[01:32:49] And so, and again, you know, coming out is a journey.

[01:32:52] It's tough.

[01:32:55] Moving on.

[01:32:56] Yeah.

[01:32:56] Is there anything else you wanted to add to any of these characters?

[01:33:00] Oh, shoot.

[01:33:01] Um, did we go over everybody?

[01:33:03] Yeah.

[01:33:04] I feel like we did cover everybody.

[01:33:05] You know, we covered Bellara.

[01:33:06] I just, I glazed over Nev because it's Nev and we talked about her not being a gumshoe.

[01:33:12] We do love Nev though.

[01:33:13] We love Nev.

[01:33:13] She's God's favorite princess.

[01:33:15] I romanced Nev.

[01:33:16] How was that for you?

[01:33:18] It's interesting.

[01:33:19] I, I feel like this is a spoiler.

[01:33:22] So dear listener, if you don't want to listen to this, go ahead and skip ahead.

[01:33:27] Uh, romancing Nev was interesting because she just, I, we, we talked about this before.

[01:33:31] She plays her cards so close to the chest is that even when you have moments and you select

[01:33:37] the dial to go with the heart option, uh, Rook plays it kind of like very straight and

[01:33:44] they're like, Oh, I'd love to have you along with me.

[01:33:47] Usually those types of voice lines where he's like, he says something, he sounds just like

[01:33:50] that too.

[01:33:51] He does.

[01:33:51] You did a great impression.

[01:33:53] Um, and she, her response again, this is something that's indicative of the art style and of the

[01:34:00] mocap work that's done in this game.

[01:34:02] I do not feel any emotion from her response, even if they're writing her to be like nuanced

[01:34:07] and you're supposed to pick up on some of her energy for Rook, um, some of her body language

[01:34:13] or her attraction to Rook later on.

[01:34:15] I did not get that from Nev.

[01:34:17] Nev, I'd be very curious to go and see if Bilara, Emmerich, Lace, whoever, uh, you know,

[01:34:23] Harding, whoever, um, responds in a different manner or maybe is a little bit more evocative.

[01:34:30] What were your different romances like?

[01:34:32] Uh, I also romanced Nev.

[01:34:34] Okay.

[01:34:35] And I really liked her just because I, I like, uh, I like a woman who won't give me the time

[01:34:41] of day for a little bit.

[01:34:42] Um, but in my second playthrough, I romanced Emmerich.

[01:34:47] Okay.

[01:34:47] And he is much more receptive to your flirting.

[01:34:51] He makes a couple of shocked faces when you flirt with him.

[01:34:54] Really?

[01:34:54] I love that.

[01:34:55] Which is like so precious.

[01:34:56] I love that.

[01:34:57] He's like, are you really hitting on me?

[01:34:59] But, uh, it's, he's very genteel.

[01:35:03] Okay.

[01:35:03] He's very romantic.

[01:35:04] Um, and, and the juxtaposition between those two is just chef's kiss.

[01:35:09] I love it.

[01:35:10] It is.

[01:35:10] It is.

[01:35:10] And I love when they, you put the two of them together in a party and they have a lot

[01:35:13] of banter too.

[01:35:14] Um, it's interesting because I would imagine it, one of the issues with me romancing Ned

[01:35:21] is that I didn't choose Minrathis.

[01:35:23] And I would have imagined that I would have gotten so much more out of the romance because

[01:35:27] I could have romanced her for far longer before making that monogamy choice, um, in the

[01:35:33] game.

[01:35:34] Maybe.

[01:35:34] I don't know.

[01:35:35] I don't know if there's like a set amount of romance dialogue or if they have more depending

[01:35:39] in and they just streamline it based on where you are in the game.

[01:35:42] I think there is, but I chose to save Treviso in the first playthrough and Minrathis in the

[01:35:49] second.

[01:35:49] I feel like I got more of the game throwing Ned at me in my playthrough where I saved Minrathis.

[01:35:56] When you save it, see that?

[01:35:57] And that makes sense.

[01:35:57] It could be that I just didn't go back to the lighthouse enough in my first playthrough.

[01:36:01] True.

[01:36:02] That, that definitely could be the case.

[01:36:03] Cause I, as soon as I learned that different conversations happen literally every time

[01:36:08] you finish a primary mission, whether it's a companion mission or a main mission, the

[01:36:13] lighthouse refreshes.

[01:36:14] I dig that shit.

[01:36:16] Yeah.

[01:36:16] Give me more of it.

[01:36:17] Yeah.

[01:36:17] No, give me all of the dialogue.

[01:36:18] Cause that's what this game is supposed to be.

[01:36:20] Right.

[01:36:20] This game is supposed to be a lot about choices.

[01:36:22] It's about interpersonal dynamics, about talking your way out of situations, even though

[01:36:26] in the main story, you never, well, you only get one time where you kind of can

[01:36:30] talk your way out of a fight.

[01:36:32] Um, it's a very important fight.

[01:36:34] I want more of that Hawk-esque bumbling out of situations and trying to grease palms, you

[01:36:40] know?

[01:36:40] You know, what's the interesting comparison too?

[01:36:42] Uh, you know, I wanted more of the way that they wrote K this in Star Wars Outlaws.

[01:36:48] You know, if Rook is supposed to be the scattershot, became important at work, thrust into the

[01:36:53] position that they're not ready for.

[01:36:55] Uh, I want Rook to do that a lot more in the same way that K did and they just didn't.

[01:37:01] I agree.

[01:37:01] Yeah.

[01:37:02] I agree.

[01:37:02] They did get some really cool.

[01:37:04] Okay.

[01:37:04] One comes to mind.

[01:37:06] I'm not going to share it because it's a spoiler, but I love a loose cannon MC.

[01:37:12] Right.

[01:37:12] Yeah.

[01:37:13] Yeah.

[01:37:13] Just going off the cuff, doing whatever the hell they want.

[01:37:15] That's right.

[01:37:16] Um, like beating, beating the shit out of somebody in a bar in the very beginning.

[01:37:20] Like, where was that the rest of this game?

[01:37:23] Yeah.

[01:37:23] I mean, it came back one time, one time.

[01:37:25] Did it?

[01:37:28] Okay.

[01:37:29] Yeah.

[01:37:30] I hope you didn't hear that.

[01:37:31] Yeah.

[01:37:32] Yeah.

[01:37:32] Don't go away.

[01:37:33] Listeners go away.

[01:37:34] Stop listening.

[01:37:35] Um, okay.

[01:37:37] So the last thing that I wanted to talk about before we go into our final break of the show

[01:37:42] and in jumping into spoiler conversations and narrative spoiler territory, I want to talk about

[01:37:48] the music, the score for this game.

[01:37:51] Uh, this game manifests itself in mediocre ways and a lot of different facets in the music

[01:37:57] and the score is no exception to the mediocrity that you kind of find throughout this game.

[01:38:03] And that's so frustrating for me on multiple fronts.

[01:38:06] First of all, uh, you have 2024, which is like the year of like some of the most incredible

[01:38:12] and insane original soundtracks and video games I've ever heard.

[01:38:16] Again, Final Fantasy seven rebirth, Star Wars outlaws, hell divers, the main theme for veil

[01:38:22] guard, like isn't even that great.

[01:38:24] And the saddest thing about that is that they paid big bucks to Hans Zimmer and Lauren Balfi

[01:38:31] to compose, to be co-composers for dragon age, the veil guard.

[01:38:35] And I'm just really pissed off about that because there's not a single track.

[01:38:39] I listened to this OST extensively and there's not a single track that stands out in my mind

[01:38:45] as being like, wow, this is great.

[01:38:47] Zimmer did this.

[01:38:48] Yeah.

[01:38:49] It's like, yeah, exactly.

[01:38:49] Like this is a Hans Zimmer moment.

[01:38:51] You know what I mean?

[01:38:52] And I'm just like, what, what happened there?

[01:38:54] I know exactly what you mean.

[01:38:55] And Inquisition, I know you didn't play it.

[01:38:58] You gotta play it.

[01:38:59] Has some of the most beautiful soaring scores.

[01:39:05] And Trevor Morris did that, if I'm not mistaken.

[01:39:09] And the thing that ticks me off about this is that they did not invite Trevor Morris back

[01:39:15] to do veil guard.

[01:39:17] Yeah.

[01:39:18] He posted somewhere on social media that they didn't even communicate.

[01:39:22] I bet they didn't.

[01:39:23] I bet they didn't in, in a large piece of that is twos because like the Bioware that

[01:39:28] made like Inquisition is probably gone for the most part.

[01:39:32] I mean, they, you have a whole new directorial team, maybe like one or two of the staff members

[01:39:38] that's on the, on the, you know, production side are still sitting there and remember the

[01:39:43] work that Trevor did for Inquisition.

[01:39:45] Um, and I will tell you this right now.

[01:39:48] I, the first thing that I was ever, the first touch moment.

[01:39:52] Um, touch base that I ever had for Dragon Age Inquisition was seeing someone on Twitter

[01:39:57] before the Elon Musk takeover was somebody posting.

[01:40:01] Oh my God.

[01:40:03] I just woke up this morning and drove to work listening to the Inquisition main theme.

[01:40:07] And I'm so hyped to have an awesome day.

[01:40:09] And they posted like a two minute clip of like the theme.

[01:40:12] And I was like, this is really fucking good.

[01:40:14] And I went and listened to the rest of the song.

[01:40:16] It was really good.

[01:40:17] And this morning while I was getting ready for the show today, I listened to like the

[01:40:20] beginning of the Inquisition OST album.

[01:40:22] I love that.

[01:40:23] And it's amazing.

[01:40:25] It is so good.

[01:40:26] And it's so indicative of like Trevor Morris at his core level understood implicitly the

[01:40:33] feeling of what a Dragon Age game was.

[01:40:35] The scope, the breadth.

[01:40:36] Yes.

[01:40:37] And it was so well communicated in the different tracks.

[01:40:41] And that's something that is really, really frustrating is because I know that EA spent

[01:40:46] crazy money to get Hans Zimmer to his name on this soundtrack.

[01:40:51] They're both Hollywood, you know, Hollywood composers.

[01:40:54] But Lauren Baffley did a bunch of like Mission Impossible.

[01:40:57] Lauren Baffley did the original soundtrack for Dungeons and Dragons.

[01:41:01] No way.

[01:41:01] The Chris Pine movie.

[01:41:02] Yeah.

[01:41:02] He did a lot of really good stuff.

[01:41:04] But there is a very, very big difference in between composing a soundtrack for a video

[01:41:10] game that you're going to spend 80 hours on versus the score for a two hour movie.

[01:41:14] Very big difference.

[01:41:15] It's a lot more work to do it for a video game.

[01:41:17] And there are so many incredible other creators and composers out there that could have easily

[01:41:23] done.

[01:41:24] That could have easily.

[01:41:25] Sorry, there's a cat that's trying to get into our composing space right now or our recording

[01:41:29] space.

[01:41:30] But yeah, I just it's it's tough because like hire literally anybody.

[01:41:37] You know, what's his name?

[01:41:39] Boris Savlov.

[01:41:40] I'm sure he's in between projects right now because Baldur's Gate 3 is done.

[01:41:44] You have you have what's his face that did God of War, God of War Ragnarok and the Lord

[01:41:49] of the Rings show.

[01:41:50] That was a really good OSU too.

[01:41:52] You know, we have so many Yasunori Mitsuda.

[01:41:54] He doesn't do a lot of work these days.

[01:41:56] Like we have incredible composers that could have literally done so much for this game.

[01:42:02] And then we got Hans Zimmer that just like probably phoned it in.

[01:42:06] Yeah.

[01:42:06] With like one or two tracks.

[01:42:07] And then Lauren Balfe like picked up the slack and they had like I looked at the production

[01:42:11] list and they had like 12 different arrangers do it.

[01:42:14] And it's just like, I get it.

[01:42:16] But at the same time, like they're like no one's going to play Dragon Age because they

[01:42:20] see Hans Zimmer on the on the OST.

[01:42:22] They're going to play Dragon Age for Dragon Age.

[01:42:24] You were pretty hyped to see Hans Zimmer on the project.

[01:42:27] I was and I'm so disappointed now.

[01:42:29] You know, I guess I'm right.

[01:42:31] There's a lot of.

[01:42:33] They're in the business of selling units and getting Hans in there probably sells some extra

[01:42:38] units because people like, yeah, I want to listen to more Hans Zimmer.

[01:42:41] This is not the way to do it.

[01:42:42] No.

[01:42:42] Not the way to do it.

[01:42:44] That being said, it's like the score is serviceable.

[01:42:46] It's just forgettable.

[01:42:47] It's fine.

[01:42:48] It's forgettable.

[01:42:48] I couldn't hum it if you asked me to.

[01:42:50] Again.

[01:42:57] These games, these these pieces, we need a return to form.

[01:43:01] Anthem was like the start of a downhill slide.

[01:43:03] Some people will say Inquisition was the start of a downhill slide for Bioware.

[01:43:07] Unfortunately, like it or love it.

[01:43:10] That's what people say.

[01:43:11] And when you need when you need a Dragon Age of the Vaguard to be a banger in every aspect,

[01:43:17] it just wasn't.

[01:43:18] And that's just so disappointing for me.

[01:43:20] It felt like they just didn't have many Dragon Age fans on staff.

[01:43:25] True.

[01:43:25] True.

[01:43:26] They showed up for a check.

[01:43:27] And that's what happened at the end of the day.

[01:43:29] I heard some people conversing about the Vaguard devs not knowing who Zevran was.

[01:43:36] And that hurt me deeply.

[01:43:39] Yeah.

[01:43:40] That like, you know what that feels like to me?

[01:43:43] That feels like the production team over at Paramount making the Halo show.

[01:43:50] And they asked, oh, did you play any of the games?

[01:43:53] Oh, we're not doing anything from the games.

[01:43:55] So we didn't play it.

[01:43:56] And they made it.

[01:43:57] They made a Halo show.

[01:43:58] And what did we get?

[01:43:59] We got a show where Master Cheeks had his cheeks out more than he was in the fucking armor.

[01:44:06] You saw his face.

[01:44:07] He was acting with his face out more than he was in the fucking armor.

[01:44:10] And the whole thing about Master Chief is he's in the armor.

[01:44:12] He's the guy in the armor.

[01:44:13] He's Sierra 117.

[01:44:15] I thought you meant his butt.

[01:44:16] I have no idea.

[01:44:17] No, also his cheeks.

[01:44:18] No way.

[01:44:19] Yes.

[01:44:19] Yes.

[01:44:20] No, there was a moment.

[01:44:21] He fucks an alien.

[01:44:22] We have a sex scene with an alien.

[01:44:23] Master Chief never fucks an alien.

[01:44:24] He murders aliens.

[01:44:25] He doesn't fuck them.

[01:44:26] There are hot aliens in Halo?

[01:44:28] It's like a human woman who was taken by the Covenant.

[01:44:31] It's the stupidest thing ever.

[01:44:33] It's the stupidest thing ever.

[01:44:34] Don't listen to anything I'm saying about the Paramount Plus Halo show because it's like the worst.

[01:44:38] I'm not going to watch it.

[01:44:39] Don't worry about it.

[01:44:39] It's fine.

[01:44:40] Of course.

[01:44:40] I'll play the games and you can watch me play the games.

[01:44:42] Great.

[01:44:43] That's how we'll do that.

[01:44:44] Awesome.

[01:44:44] But dear listeners, we're talking about The Veil Guard.

[01:44:47] The Veil Guard.

[01:44:47] Let's go ahead and take another music break.

[01:44:49] I'm going to try and pick a song that seems memorable, sounds memorable, and it's good.

[01:44:54] And after that, we're going to jump back into the primary plot thread in the character arc discussion for this game.

[01:45:31] We're talking about spoilers now, Courtney.

[01:45:33] Are you ready?

[01:45:34] Spoilers.

[01:45:35] I'm so ready.

[01:45:35] I'm excited.

[01:45:36] Because we've been dropping a lot here and there.

[01:45:38] There's nuggets.

[01:45:39] I hope you've stopped me.

[01:45:40] I have.

[01:45:41] You haven't.

[01:45:42] You've done a great job.

[01:45:43] You haven't given anything crazy away so far.

[01:45:45] So it's we're fine.

[01:45:46] We're in a good place.

[01:45:47] All right.

[01:45:48] Let's go ahead and get into it.

[01:45:49] So the story of Dragon Age of the Veil Guard, you know, as the listeners already know,

[01:45:55] Rook interrupts the ritual that Solas is starting out with and that inadvertently releases two elven gods, Elganon and Gilanane.

[01:46:04] From imprisonment that Solas used, it's so confusing and archaic and like nonsensical.

[01:46:13] Like he used the fade to trap the Evanuris, which included Elganon and Gilanane.

[01:46:18] And he wants to remove the fade, which will release a bunch of demons into Thedas and kill untold amount of people that are living in Thedas.

[01:46:28] But by doing so, he will allow the power to flow back into the hands of the elves.

[01:46:38] See, that's such a problem.

[01:46:40] It is a problem.

[01:46:41] I don't know the effect that it would have.

[01:46:45] I wonder if the dwarves would get their dreams back.

[01:46:49] I wonder if.

[01:46:49] It might have been a piece to it.

[01:46:51] So there's a thing about with Harding.

[01:46:53] Harding, her character arc, she starts getting magic powers and dwarves are known to like not have magic.

[01:46:59] They are not magic users.

[01:47:01] And they don't have dreams.

[01:47:02] They do not dream.

[01:47:02] And the reason why is that we learn, I guess I'm assuming this is a revelation from the Veilguard,

[01:47:09] is the lore piece that they drop is that the dwarves are descended from actual titans.

[01:47:13] Right.

[01:47:14] Who were the other power source.

[01:47:16] And the titans were basically chewed up and spit out by the Evanuris.

[01:47:22] Or is it?

[01:47:24] Their dreams, their magic was stolen from them.

[01:47:27] With stolen in order to give the elves their physical form.

[01:47:32] Or at least the original elves their physical form.

[01:47:35] Is that right?

[01:47:35] I'm a terrible Dragon Age fan.

[01:47:37] I didn't quite follow.

[01:47:38] Yeah.

[01:47:39] There's a lot of lore moments here.

[01:47:41] But the bottom line is that Solas basically is tearing the fate open.

[01:47:45] And he's trying to do it in a way that what he says, quote unquote, is going to minimize the damage to the other.

[01:47:52] He's bullshitting.

[01:47:53] He doesn't know what he's doing.

[01:47:55] He's just trying to fix a past wrong.

[01:47:57] And he's so hung up on what he's done wrong in the past that he's trying to make right by his people.

[01:48:04] He's trying to do right by his people.

[01:48:06] And that's what makes Solas such an interesting character to me.

[01:48:09] I know you hated him.

[01:48:10] You hated him going into this game.

[01:48:12] Listen.

[01:48:13] I really enjoyed Solas in this game.

[01:48:17] I don't hate him.

[01:48:18] Personally.

[01:48:18] I think his characterization is tragic because he can't see past his own nose.

[01:48:22] No, he can't.

[01:48:23] I don't think that he is doing it for his people.

[01:48:25] I think he's doing it because he knows he did something wrong and he regrets it.

[01:48:29] He's deeply self-obsessed.

[01:48:30] And regret is a huge theme in this game.

[01:48:33] Yeah.

[01:48:33] You're absolutely right.

[01:48:34] It's a huge theme.

[01:48:36] But during the ritual, while you're interrupting Solas, what happens?

[01:48:42] Is that it's this moment that Rook and Varric and Harding and Nave show up to the site.

[01:48:50] Rook's like, we need to stop him.

[01:48:52] And Varric is like, no, let me talk to him first.

[01:48:54] I need to talk him down.

[01:48:55] I can talk to him.

[01:48:56] I'm his oldest friend.

[01:48:57] I'm going to talk him down.

[01:48:58] And you're like, okay.

[01:48:59] And so you take, you get to choose between Harding and Nave and whoever you choose ends up getting really banged up.

[01:49:05] Yeah.

[01:49:06] And that kind of affects your relationship going into it.

[01:49:10] And of course I chose Nave.

[01:49:11] She got banged up.

[01:49:12] So I chose her to get banged up and I chose her city to fail.

[01:49:15] So of course I had issues having a good character connection with her throughout the game.

[01:49:19] But regardless, Varric goes up to talk to Solas and he tried to say, hey man, you're doing some dumb shit right now.

[01:49:27] You need to cut it out.

[01:49:28] And Solas does not want to hear anything from him.

[01:49:30] Good Varric.

[01:49:31] Good old Varric.

[01:49:32] He basically does the elven like backhand, magical backhand, smashes Beatrix.

[01:49:40] Bianca.

[01:49:41] Bianca.

[01:49:41] His customized crossbow.

[01:49:43] His favorite crossbow in the world.

[01:49:46] And Varric falls down and he essentially gets in a fist fight with Solas, which results in the very intro cutscene is that you see something real bad.

[01:49:56] You're not really sure what happened.

[01:49:57] But he gets stabbed in like the shoulder with this lyrium dagger and he falls down the stairs and he's still like alive.

[01:50:05] And like you show up as Rook and you pull it out of him and then like the statue falls down.

[01:50:11] And at this moment, Solas gets caught up with Rook and forms a blood connection while Varric is badly hurt.

[01:50:19] In this whole mix up, Elginon and Gilinane bust out.

[01:50:22] That's the last thing you see from the intro sequence is they are stepping out of the fade and they're like, we're weird.

[01:50:27] We're old elven gods and we're fucking pissed off.

[01:50:30] That's right.

[01:50:31] We're so mad.

[01:50:32] And so their whole thing, and this is another critique of the story, is that they are the biggest Looney Tune fucking villains I've ever seen in a long time.

[01:50:42] The most two-dimensional bad guys for the sake of being bad guys that don't want to hear anything that anybody else says.

[01:50:49] And I get it.

[01:50:50] Like they're old ancient elven gods.

[01:50:52] Yeah, maybe they're set in their ways.

[01:50:53] They've been twisted by the blight or something or whatever.

[01:50:56] See, that's another issue.

[01:50:58] I don't even understand after 80 hours what the blight is.

[01:51:02] Like what is the blight?

[01:51:04] Is it dark spawn?

[01:51:05] Is the blight an infection?

[01:51:06] Is it a magical source?

[01:51:08] I know it fucks with the Grey Warden's heads and that's eventually why they get sent into the deep roads.

[01:51:14] But like what is, they're utilizing the blight to try and take over Thedas.

[01:51:19] Yes.

[01:51:19] But what is the blight really?

[01:51:23] I know Gilinade uses it as a tool.

[01:51:26] I think there's like some questions about its origin.

[01:51:29] I know that there's some interesting lore about Andruil, who is another of the Evanuris who discovered the Void and wore it as armor.

[01:51:40] And there's some like questions about whether or not the Void is the blight.

[01:51:45] It's interesting because I surmised, I'm just now remembering this as we're having this conversation, but there's the big revelation about the Titans in this game.

[01:51:56] The Titans existed and the Titans and the Evanuris are kind of inextricably linked in a way.

[01:52:01] And the downfall of the Titans apparently stripping, I think if I'm remembering correctly, stripping the dreams away from the Titans was the source of the blight itself in the very beginning.

[01:52:14] I think you're right because Davern also has a line where he says the blight isn't evil.

[01:52:21] It's like an animal.

[01:52:22] It's frightened.

[01:52:23] It's scared.

[01:52:24] Yeah.

[01:52:25] But the way that it manifests itself in this game is through Darkspawn.

[01:52:29] The Darkspawn are blighted?

[01:52:31] Blighted creatures.

[01:52:32] They're basically blighted creatures that are mutated and disgusting.

[01:52:36] And it's just evil, gross tentacles that wrap around everything.

[01:52:40] And Gilanane has been blighted for a very long time and is very skilled at using the blight to manipulate creatures and form new creatures with the blight.

[01:52:53] And so kind of the idea between both Gilanane and Elganane is that they are going to utilize it to wipe out all life and then rebuild it in its own image.

[01:53:04] And it's very interesting because Elganane has a conversation at the very end of this game when you're going to fight him at the very end.

[01:53:12] And he's really mad about the fact that you killed Gilanane.

[01:53:16] And he's like, my beautiful, wonderful sister would have used the blight to do wonderful things.

[01:53:22] And he basically implies that she would have eventually used the blight to turn it into something beautiful.

[01:53:31] But from whose perspective, right?

[01:53:33] I think it's from his perspective.

[01:53:34] Yeah, from his perspective.

[01:53:35] It would have been beautiful because it would have been control.

[01:53:38] Because it's under his hand.

[01:53:39] Yeah.

[01:53:39] Yeah.

[01:53:40] So that's interesting.

[01:53:41] But yeah, so basically you are tasked to essentially stop them and they turn an old god into an archdemon.

[01:53:51] I didn't pick that up until I fought the archdemon at Weishaupt.

[01:53:55] That was really interesting.

[01:53:56] Like they didn't even talk about it.

[01:53:58] They just showed up and they were like, oh, by the way, Gilanane has an archdemon and you got to kill the archdemon.

[01:54:03] What's the deal with that?

[01:54:04] Do you know?

[01:54:05] Archdemons are old gods.

[01:54:06] Okay.

[01:54:07] I believe.

[01:54:07] So what did they just have another Evanuris just hanging out and they were like, you're going to be my demon now.

[01:54:12] Is that what it was?

[01:54:14] I think the old gods might have always been archdemons.

[01:54:17] Interesting.

[01:54:18] Okay.

[01:54:20] Don't quote me on that.

[01:54:21] Some of these lore blind spots.

[01:54:24] There's a lot of, yeah.

[01:54:25] Because there's so many ways to interpret this lore, right?

[01:54:28] Because like the example I gave earlier of Duncan saying that the Illuvian was of Tevinter make.

[01:54:35] I mean, technically because the Tevinter mages stole elven magic.

[01:54:42] Yeah.

[01:54:43] So he's not wrong, but he's not right either.

[01:54:46] Right, right.

[01:54:47] And with the Blight.

[01:54:48] Is it the Void?

[01:54:50] Is it the Titan's Dreams?

[01:54:52] Could it be both?

[01:54:54] There's just lots of ways to interpret a lot of different parts of this lore.

[01:54:59] There's a little bit of nuance, but the fact that like so much of this game is kind of slapped together in a very much of a patchwork.

[01:55:07] Is that like the questions that I'm having aren't out of like, this is not me being excited like, oh my gosh, there are so many interesting questions.

[01:55:15] Because I know that there's a person at the helm that's puppeteering this.

[01:55:19] It's literally me being like, I have so many questions because they're not answering my questions in a way that like I feel like is convincing or conveying a story.

[01:55:28] It could be somewhat intentional though, because...

[01:55:31] They leave out a lot on purpose.

[01:55:33] Right.

[01:55:33] And it's kind of fun that way because in Inquisition, for example, Cole, one of your companions who is a spirit of compassion...

[01:55:43] Yeah.

[01:55:45] ...he says some really odd shit.

[01:55:47] And your Inquisitor is listening and going, what does that mean?

[01:55:51] Interesting.

[01:55:51] In this game, you figure out what some of that stuff is, what he's trying to say, because he has a different viewpoint and knows some shit that you don't.

[01:55:59] What did he say?

[01:55:59] Okay.

[01:56:00] I can't give you an example off the top of my head.

[01:56:04] Was he talking about the elves and the spirits?

[01:56:05] He was talking about...

[01:56:08] Shoot, it slipped my mind.

[01:56:10] It...

[01:56:10] You know what?

[01:56:11] Go play the game.

[01:56:12] Go play the game.

[01:56:13] Go play the game.

[01:56:14] Ladies and gentlemen, go play the game and go figure it out and we'll report back to you on the FNG review of Dragon Age Inquisition.

[01:56:21] But for now, you know, we're kind of just like running down the list.

[01:56:24] Um, I'm going to give cliff notes because, dear listener, if you really like what we said so far, and we've been pretty critical of this game overall...

[01:56:33] Oh, we have.

[01:56:33] We have, and that's okay, because it's just honest, right?

[01:56:37] But at the end of the day, like, but definitely, I feel like if you're a Dragon Age fan, play the game.

[01:56:43] There's something for you here.

[01:56:45] If you're not a Dragon Age fan, that's okay.

[01:56:47] For sure.

[01:56:47] But as we move along, Rook enlists the help of multiple different factions in order to combat the two Elven gods, the Evanderis.

[01:56:57] Essentially, every single member is a representative or a member of the race or faction that is allied with Rook and the team in order to combat or fight against Elganon and Gilinane's forces.

[01:57:12] Their forces essentially do attract, like, their powers itself.

[01:57:17] This was something that I found relatively interesting is that there are people in Thedas that are very deeply attracted to...

[01:57:25] They want power, and they will do anything to claim it.

[01:57:28] And the two people that are most susceptible to that are the Antom as well as the Venatori.

[01:57:34] And they're literally just power-hungry people.

[01:57:36] It's a little two-dimensional on that front, but at the same time, like, it makes me not surprised that they would be drawn to Elganon and Gilinane because they're like, oh, they got some stuff that we can go get in order to take over what we want to take over.

[01:57:48] Their mistake is thinking that they're going to use that power for their own instead of being manipulated to do what these two gods want them to do.

[01:57:55] Yeah.

[01:57:56] Mechanically, it's a pretty clean way to do it.

[01:57:59] Yeah, it is.

[01:58:00] It is.

[01:58:00] It's relatively clean, and it makes sense.

[01:58:03] But essentially, alongside Harding, Rook, Nave, Rook also recruits Ballara, who's a member of the Veiljumpers.

[01:58:12] Lucanus, who is another crow.

[01:58:14] I rolled a crow, so I say fellow crow.

[01:58:16] He's also a crow.

[01:58:17] And that pissed me off a lot.

[01:58:18] I talked to Lucanus a lot, and there was very rare moments where he was like, oh, as a fellow crow, you know that we always fulfill our contracts.

[01:58:25] He said that, like, twice.

[01:58:26] Oh, that sucks, because as a warden, Dattman brings it up all the time.

[01:58:30] Yeah.

[01:58:30] It's barely brought up.

[01:58:31] Like, the person who brings up me being a crow more often than not is Varric when you go into the lighthouse and you talk to him while he's sitting on the bed with his leg in a splint.

[01:58:39] King.

[01:58:39] Yeah, he's a true king.

[01:58:41] But yeah, and then so Lucanus is part of the crows.

[01:58:44] Davrin, as you mentioned, is a gray warden.

[01:58:47] Nave is a very important socialite in Minrathus.

[01:58:52] She works with the Shadow Dragons.

[01:58:53] She works with the Shadow Dragons, who are the faction.

[01:58:56] Big shout out to Matt Mercer, who plays the Viper.

[01:59:00] Oh my god, he's incredible.

[01:59:01] He's really, really good in the game.

[01:59:02] He also plays one of the Forgotten Ones.

[01:59:05] Yeah, I think so.

[01:59:06] Anaris.

[01:59:07] I don't know.

[01:59:09] But yeah.

[01:59:10] No, shout out to Matt Mercer.

[01:59:11] That was really fun.

[01:59:12] And then, of course, Harding, who is...

[01:59:15] I mean, what is her faction?

[01:59:18] What is she...

[01:59:19] Who is she allied with?

[01:59:20] Is she...

[01:59:20] I mean, she's technically from the Inquisition.

[01:59:23] But you don't level the Inquisition up in this game.

[01:59:26] Because I'm trying to think about that sidebar that's in the map.

[01:59:29] And I'm pretty sure that maybe it's like the Deep Roads that you get.

[01:59:35] I'm just trying to think about who the merchant is that's tied to Harding.

[01:59:40] It doesn't matter.

[01:59:40] I'm not sure that she has one.

[01:59:41] She might not.

[01:59:42] She might be one of the few that don't have it.

[01:59:44] But then, of course, you have Tosh that you recruit later on.

[01:59:49] Who's the Lords of Fortune.

[01:59:50] Which also includes fan favorite Isabel.

[01:59:53] Isabella!

[01:59:54] Isabella, who comes back.

[01:59:56] Yeah.

[01:59:57] Our girl.

[01:59:59] Although, I will say this.

[02:00:00] Isabella is looking fantastic.

[02:00:02] She does not seem to be mourning the loss of Hawk.

[02:00:07] At all.

[02:00:08] At all.

[02:00:08] Didn't even bring it up.

[02:00:09] Fireware.

[02:00:11] Again, soft reboot territory.

[02:00:13] You know, she's hot.

[02:00:14] She's in a bikini.

[02:00:16] You know.

[02:00:16] And this is a woman in her 40s now.

[02:00:18] Yeah.

[02:00:19] This is a mature woman.

[02:00:20] Taking very good care of herself.

[02:00:21] She's stunning.

[02:00:22] Stunning.

[02:00:23] No notes.

[02:00:23] Absolutely stunning.

[02:00:25] You're doing a great job.

[02:00:26] But essentially, as you progress through the game, we had mentioned this earlier, Rook is forced to make a decision in between saving either Treviso or Minrathis.

[02:00:37] I chose Treviso.

[02:00:39] I guess, you know, you chose both in your separate playthroughs.

[02:00:42] And so that's a really big choice.

[02:00:44] And the reason for that choice is because the Avenuras send blighted dragons to each city to wreak havoc.

[02:00:51] And basically, it's your job to go beat them up and drive them out of the city.

[02:00:55] And you kind of do.

[02:00:56] You, they get called away.

[02:00:59] Really.

[02:00:59] You get lucky.

[02:01:00] You get lucky.

[02:01:01] A lot.

[02:01:01] It's, you know, having plot armor is kind of crazy in Dragon Age.

[02:01:05] You love to see it, but you kind of go through there.

[02:01:08] And then you essentially have a choice to make because you're dealing with a blight.

[02:01:13] You're like, okay, I need to get with the first wardens.

[02:01:17] And that is a really important moment where you have to talk to the first warden who is like the current one who's actively controlled the gray wardens at this point.

[02:01:27] He's a massive dick.

[02:01:28] He does not like you one bit.

[02:01:29] He's terrible.

[02:01:30] I hated talking to him.

[02:01:31] It was one of the things that I was actually like glad talking to him because it was like, finally, somebody who fucking doesn't like me in this game.

[02:01:38] Oh my God.

[02:01:39] Great point.

[02:01:39] You know, it was refreshing to be like, okay, now we're getting somewhere.

[02:01:42] We have somebody who's being a little bit of a dick.

[02:01:45] But it's just like, he's one note.

[02:01:47] There's not really any convincing the first warden of going one way or another.

[02:01:51] It's not like, he's not like some of the admirals or the politician on the Citadel where you can talk them into doing what Shepard wants them to do.

[02:02:01] Just like his own force of nature.

[02:02:03] And instead, you pivot to working with Anton and Evka, who are these two talented gray wardens working together.

[02:02:10] They're a couple.

[02:02:11] We love them.

[02:02:12] We mentioned them earlier.

[02:02:13] No, we're a throuple.

[02:02:14] If you weren't, we could be a throuple.

[02:02:16] Who's to say?

[02:02:16] Who's to say?

[02:02:17] Okay.

[02:02:18] But essentially, you enlist them to help you trying to manage the blighthead, trying to deal with it.

[02:02:24] You go on.

[02:02:25] You realize you recruit the whole team.

[02:02:27] You go through this game.

[02:02:28] You realize that Elganon and Gillanane, you kind of focus.

[02:02:32] You're bouncing back and forth in between fighting Gillanane and then maybe dealing with other of the bullshit that the gods throw at you.

[02:02:40] But Gillanane is kind of like the easiest target because you learn very quickly from Solas that Gillanane is far, far weaker when compared to Elganon.

[02:02:49] Elganon has like crazy powerful strength.

[02:02:53] He's like an ultimate mage.

[02:02:54] He is the first god, if I'm remembering correctly.

[02:02:59] I think they refer to him as like the firstborn or something like that.

[02:03:02] So, yeah, he's incredibly powerful.

[02:03:06] He was kind of a pushover in the boss fight at the end of the game.

[02:03:09] I don't know how you felt about that fight, but I was like, this ain't no big deal.

[02:03:14] Yeah.

[02:03:15] I mean, I guess I was more anticipating the confrontation with Solas that I knew was waiting after.

[02:03:25] It was coming.

[02:03:26] And speaking of Solas, this is something that obviously that I mentioned earlier, you form a blood connection throughout this game.

[02:03:33] Again, one of the reasons why I really wish they stuck to their guns in the original title for this game and called it the Dreadwolf because this game is really more about Solas than anybody else.

[02:03:43] It is about Solas.

[02:03:44] And I feel like the decision to call it the Veil Guard was because they wanted to get away from the lore of the older Dragon Age games.

[02:03:52] But like, it's so important.

[02:03:53] He's so important to this game that like calling it Dragon Age of the Dreadwolf would have been perfect because it's really about your relationship with Solas.

[02:04:01] He's in your mind palace.

[02:04:03] You go and meditate in the lighthouse and he talks to you.

[02:04:07] And throughout the game, he first starts trying to manipulate you as Solas is wont to do.

[02:04:12] And he's basically just kind of playing with you like cat and mouse.

[02:04:15] Like, I'll just mess with you because I don't have anything better to do.

[02:04:18] He is trapped in the Fade because of the failed, his failed attempt at bringing it down.

[02:04:24] That's a great characterization.

[02:04:25] I kind of felt like he was just sparring for funsies too.

[02:04:29] Yeah, he's not.

[02:04:30] He doesn't take Rook seriously.

[02:04:31] And it isn't until I believe there is a massive confrontation at White Stopped, which is the original Grey.

[02:04:39] It was just like the Grey Warden Fortress against the Blight.

[02:04:42] It is the place that we have been hearing about for three games.

[02:04:45] And God, it was so cool.

[02:04:47] It was really cool.

[02:04:48] That was really, really fun.

[02:04:49] And that was a moment that I wanted from a lot of these other moments in the game.

[02:04:52] And I feel like this game doesn't do a bad job at getting us into the action hype moments.

[02:04:58] I have a problem with pacing.

[02:04:59] Sometimes it goes on a little bit too long.

[02:05:01] There are a little too many enemy waves.

[02:05:03] I'm like, all right, we can see this all along.

[02:05:04] I killed like a million of these guys before.

[02:05:06] We don't have to do this.

[02:05:07] That might be a me problem because I did plot in the game.

[02:05:10] So that's that.

[02:05:11] But as it goes on and as Rook starts making different accomplishments,

[02:05:18] your relationship with Solas starts getting a little bit more friendlier.

[02:05:22] He starts actually kind of like talking to you and not down at you, which is interesting.

[02:05:28] And the more you learn about Solas, you take into your conversations with him in the Fade,

[02:05:35] which is super fascinating because one of the mechanics of this game is that there are

[02:05:39] these different Fen'Harel altars that are scattered throughout every map.

[02:05:43] Collecting these altars services two things.

[02:05:46] It allows you to get one skill point to add to your skill tree.

[02:05:49] And goddamn, do you need those skill points?

[02:05:50] Because it's a massive tree that you have to fill in.

[02:05:53] But then also at the same time, collecting these altars unlocks different murals.

[02:05:58] And so you and the team learn about what happened to Solas and why he is the way he is.

[02:06:05] Yeah, you have really cool conversations around the library table talking about what you learned from the flashback.

[02:06:15] Yeah.

[02:06:15] Which I thought was really such a cool touch that everybody around the table had something to say about it.

[02:06:22] Yeah.

[02:06:22] Yeah, it was cool.

[02:06:24] I enjoyed those conversations were the best conversations from the team, in my opinion, throughout the game.

[02:06:29] And it was probably the most well-written, I think, in terms of trying to utilize lore of Thedas and trying to leverage what was previously existing and then progressing the story along.

[02:06:40] The thing that kind of brought me out of it was that I had collected so many of these Fen'Harel altars already throughout my playthrough because it's part of the platinum.

[02:06:49] You did them all at once?

[02:06:49] I did all of them at once.

[02:06:50] Why did you do that?

[02:06:52] Because I already had them all.

[02:06:53] You gotta sprinkle it in.

[02:06:54] It's not my fault.

[02:06:55] They were there on the map.

[02:06:56] I was like, ooh, skill point.

[02:06:58] Okay, that's true.

[02:06:59] They should have made it so that you could only collect like one statue per, I don't know, certain amount of quest.

[02:07:05] And then you would be excited to unlock it and have that conversation.

[02:07:08] And they do that in so many other games.

[02:07:10] I mean, I literally just played Indiana Jones and they make it to where they sprinkle in only a certain amount of items that you can collect in the open world until you have hit certain markers in the game.

[02:07:24] And then the map like kind of opens up and gives you other collectibles and items you can get throughout the game.

[02:07:28] Great game.

[02:07:29] Go play Indiana Jones.

[02:07:30] But in this game, they kind of just scatter everything throughout the screen.

[02:07:33] You can collect-a-thon.

[02:07:35] Yeah.

[02:07:35] And that's what I did because that's the language that this game is teaching me to speak.

[02:07:39] And so I spoke it.

[02:07:41] But I bet it was really useful for you as a new player because so many of the characters you could use as a new player insert.

[02:07:49] Exactly.

[02:07:50] And explain the lore to you.

[02:07:51] And I will say that I am glad that I did it all at once because having those conversations back to back made some of the reveals more impactful.

[02:08:00] I wish that they were ordered in a way.

[02:08:04] Like I wish that because you can unlock any of those conversations, but some of the conversations seem to be more important than other revelations.

[02:08:12] Really?

[02:08:13] Because I think you can only plug them in in a certain order.

[02:08:17] Or...

[02:08:17] Mm-mm.

[02:08:17] You can...

[02:08:18] From my...

[02:08:19] I mean...

[02:08:20] I went in all of the different altars where the different murals and tapestries were available as I was running through.

[02:08:28] And I was like, um, which one do I pick?

[02:08:30] And I just picked whichever was closest.

[02:08:31] I don't think it followed a timeline either.

[02:08:33] Yeah, I don't think so.

[02:08:34] Yeah.

[02:08:34] Yeah.

[02:08:35] So...

[02:08:35] But one of the big reveals that you learn is that Solas and the elves, and this is a big revelation for the overall Dragon Age lore,

[02:08:43] is that the ancient elves, which Solas is a part of, they're not actually elves.

[02:08:49] They're spirits in physically manifested bodies.

[02:08:52] Yes.

[02:08:53] And they are shapeshifters, and so they can change form.

[02:08:55] That's why Solas turns into a wolf at the end, which is really sick.

[02:08:59] Had he done that before?

[02:09:00] Have we ever seen that happen?

[02:09:01] You see hints of it.

[02:09:05] Like, there's a fresco in the rotunda of Skyhold.

[02:09:10] Okay.

[02:09:11] And there's a painting of a wolf with many eyes.

[02:09:14] Oh.

[02:09:14] And also, there's murals all throughout the ruins and countryside in, I think, the hinterlands?

[02:09:24] Emerald Dale...

[02:09:25] The Dales, the Emerald Glades.

[02:09:28] Yeah.

[02:09:28] And there's murals everywhere with Fen'Hara.

[02:09:31] Yeah.

[02:09:31] But yeah, so...

[02:09:32] And you learn that his relationship to the rest of the Evanuris is very close.

[02:09:38] He disagreed.

[02:09:39] You actually get flashbacks.

[02:09:41] There are, like, there's a sidecast called The Regrets of the Dreadwolf.

[02:09:43] And you realize early on is that Solas did not fuck with the Evanuris, like, at all.

[02:09:48] Off-rip.

[02:09:49] Like, he disagreed with the entire concept of ruling over people.

[02:09:53] And that's what the Evanuris were all about.

[02:09:54] They were conquerors.

[02:09:55] They were rulers.

[02:09:56] They physically manifested their bodies and they decided that they wanted to control.

[02:10:00] And he didn't believe in that?

[02:10:02] He had integrity.

[02:10:03] His name in Elvin means pride.

[02:10:05] Yeah.

[02:10:06] And I think pride and integrity are pretty good neighbors with Solas.

[02:10:09] I think that's true.

[02:10:11] Even though he's kind of like a liar.

[02:10:13] Deceiver.

[02:10:13] Yeah.

[02:10:14] He rug pulls when he doesn't see you as an equal.

[02:10:17] Yeah.

[02:10:17] He doesn't respect people as equals.

[02:10:19] And that's something that's very easily manifested in his conversations with Rook as it goes on until you do stuff that actually impresses him.

[02:10:27] I don't know.

[02:10:27] He tries to fuck you over until the very end.

[02:10:30] Until the very end.

[02:10:31] Until the very end.

[02:10:31] He tries.

[02:10:32] He plays.

[02:10:33] And even during that final sequence.

[02:10:35] To kind of move folks along, obviously, the Evanuris, you know, Elginon and Gilranain, they're at the Tearstone Island and they're trying to do a ritual.

[02:10:44] They make their own red lyrium dagger because they can't get a hold of your lyrium dagger, which was Solas made, in order to bring down the Fade.

[02:10:51] And so they want to bring down the Fade to let everything else in and let the...

[02:10:53] They just want to do bad shit.

[02:10:55] Who cares what they're doing?

[02:10:56] They're just doing bad shit.

[02:10:57] They're just twirling their cartoon mustaches off screen.

[02:11:00] They're cackling as they, you know, cartwheel off the cliff.

[02:11:04] Tying women to railroad trails.

[02:11:05] Exactly.

[02:11:06] That are tracks.

[02:11:06] Exactly.

[02:11:07] No, that's what they're doing.

[02:11:08] And you basically go there and you fight them and stop them.

[02:11:13] And that's the sequence where Solas kind of like, he gets out of the Fade trap that he kind of locked himself into and puts you in there.

[02:11:21] And you basically get out of that trap by like the power of friendship.

[02:11:25] You're like, oh, I believe in myself.

[02:11:28] Well, you're not trapped by your regrets the way that Solas is.

[02:11:31] Because you see regrets as mistakes to learn from and Solas does not.

[02:11:35] He doesn't.

[02:11:36] Yeah.

[02:11:36] And he wants to change it.

[02:11:38] I think that's the way, that's the difference between you and Solas is that the only way that he feels like he can let go of the past is by changing the past or changing his decisions.

[02:11:49] Well said.

[02:11:50] And I think that that's a really important character moment.

[02:11:52] And he's just, he's so compelling because he walks that line into, and this is something that Varric, another very important character in this game, drives home for you over and over again is that he's not a bad guy.

[02:12:05] He just falls into that role because he desperately wants to be a good guy.

[02:12:09] Yeah.

[02:12:10] And he like tries so hard, but like he feels more comfortable in the clothes of a villain than he does a hero.

[02:12:17] And that's why.

[02:12:18] He gets in his own way.

[02:12:18] Yeah.

[02:12:18] He definitely constantly, he self-sabotages if we're going to put our psychology hats on.

[02:12:23] Yeah.

[02:12:23] Yeah.

[02:12:23] I agree with that.

[02:12:25] And coming into this game, I was so excited to fry that egg.

[02:12:29] I was, I was wanting to get my revenge.

[02:12:33] And I think the game itself did a wonderful job of illustrating through his regrets that he is not that bad guy.

[02:12:43] He is not a cartoon villain like Elgarnon and Gellinane.

[02:12:48] Yeah.

[02:12:48] He is a tragic figure.

[02:12:50] And the thing is, is that they could have made Elgarnon and Gellinane multidimensional.

[02:12:55] They chose not to.

[02:12:57] I kind of rock with it.

[02:12:58] I like that decision.

[02:12:59] I've said that a lot about different games is that like, it's okay for villains to be baddies.

[02:13:04] Yeah.

[02:13:04] It's just, it was so cartoonishly like a bad, like their motivations for like, because that's the thing is that I always ask the question whenever you have the villains that are going to, you know, take over the world.

[02:13:17] And I'm always like, okay, but like what next?

[02:13:19] What are you going to do with that?

[02:13:20] Yeah.

[02:13:20] What are you going to do?

[02:13:21] Like, or like they're going to, it's, I think Will has said this before.

[02:13:24] Are you going to blow up the world?

[02:13:25] But you live here.

[02:13:27] This is like, you're here too, dog.

[02:13:29] Like, don't you get that?

[02:13:31] And it's in, in my whole thing is, is like, all right, so you're going to turn everything blighted.

[02:13:35] But are you sure you can do something with that?

[02:13:39] Do you want to live there?

[02:13:39] Like, yeah.

[02:13:40] Like who is there?

[02:13:41] Cause that's the whole thing is that Elginon is he's, I'm a ruler, right?

[02:13:44] I'm going to control everything.

[02:13:45] But if everything's blighted, it's just blight.

[02:13:47] Like there's nothing to control.

[02:13:49] You're just chilling, dog.

[02:13:50] You're just, you're just like chilling by yourself alone in your room.

[02:13:54] Anyway.

[02:13:55] Okay.

[02:13:56] So moving on, basically you start, you kill Gilanine.

[02:14:00] You are in the section where, uh, the very end, there's this really cool moment.

[02:14:05] I'm skipping over a lot.

[02:14:06] This cool moment where basically once he realizes that Elginon's archdemon dies, he makes his

[02:14:12] own or summons his own archdemon in the form of this massive elder dragon, a high dragon.

[02:14:18] I think that might be before Gilanine dies, but yes, he has a dragon.

[02:14:22] It's right before he has a, he has a dragon.

[02:14:24] And, um, in the final chase to get to the end of this game and the final buildup, uh,

[02:14:30] to stop him Elginon is he uses the dragon to kind of like fuck with the team.

[02:14:37] But then Solas turns into the dread wolf, which I thought was really cool.

[02:14:41] It was so sick.

[02:14:41] Love that visualization.

[02:14:42] And he's fighting.

[02:14:43] He's like biting at the dragon and everything.

[02:14:45] And it's, it's really fun.

[02:14:47] And throughout this whole process, you know, that Solas has like backstabbed you already.

[02:14:51] You don't trust him.

[02:14:52] He trapped you in the fade.

[02:14:53] There's all this stuff going on and you basically go with the team and they're like, yeah, he's

[02:14:57] doing all this stuff.

[02:14:58] And you have, you even have a conversation with, uh, Morgan.

[02:15:01] And we almost forgot one of the most important ideas of like how you're going to combat Solas

[02:15:07] is that he fell in love with this other Evanuris called Mythal who believed that she just like,

[02:15:14] she's kind of an enabler.

[02:15:16] She kind of just allowed the Evanuris to do what they were going to do.

[02:15:19] She felt she was a Democrat.

[02:15:21] She was a hardline institutional Democrat.

[02:15:23] She wanted to change them from within.

[02:15:25] That's such a good analogy.

[02:15:27] Yeah.

[02:15:27] Yeah.

[02:15:28] She, she, but.

[02:15:29] She's a fence sitter.

[02:15:29] Yeah.

[02:15:29] She's a fence sitter.

[02:15:30] Like she, but she like, she was like, no, we can, she was like, we can deal with it.

[02:15:34] I can manage the Evanuris.

[02:15:35] Don't worry about it.

[02:15:36] And he's like, no, they're fucking broken.

[02:15:37] We need to fight them.

[02:15:38] And he loved her.

[02:15:40] That was the, one of the things that reveals is that he fell deeply in love with her.

[02:15:45] He also, he also like took her soul.

[02:15:49] And that's what he used to create the lyrium dagger.

[02:15:51] Is that right?

[02:15:52] I think so.

[02:15:54] Okay.

[02:15:54] The cool thing about Mythal is you've seen her in every single Dragon Age game.

[02:15:59] Yeah.

[02:16:01] She inhabited Flemeth who was the witch of the wilds in origins.

[02:16:05] Okay.

[02:16:05] Um, you see Flemeth at the beginning of Dragon Age too.

[02:16:08] Yeah.

[02:16:09] You see Flemeth in Inquisition and you make some choices that don't matter in Veilguard,

[02:16:17] but, um, you wrote Morgan in, uh, because Morgan is a, a new avatar.

[02:16:27] Yeah.

[02:16:28] For Mythal's soul.

[02:16:29] Yeah.

[02:16:29] So she, so she has all of her memories.

[02:16:32] She has all of Mythal's memories and you basically have to use that in, or you have to ally with her in order to go get like this.

[02:16:41] You have to go capture like a vessel, the other half of Mythal in order to use it in your final fight.

[02:16:49] Um.

[02:16:50] And you can do it by talking and being nice or you can take it by force.

[02:16:54] I talked to her.

[02:16:55] There's a very narrow window, uh, to, to talk to her, talk her out of fighting.

[02:16:59] I just couldn't get my thumb on her.

[02:17:01] I couldn't read her well enough to get the, the good choice.

[02:17:04] Yeah.

[02:17:04] I had to, I had to take it.

[02:17:06] Yeah.

[02:17:06] And that's fair.

[02:17:07] And that's fair.

[02:17:07] And there's a lot of stuff that kind of goes in there.

[02:17:09] And that's where I actually picked up one of the special swords in the chest that is in that arena.

[02:17:14] Um, when you're crawling out of it.

[02:17:16] Oh, so you got the chest and you didn't even have to fight the dragon.

[02:17:19] Yeah.

[02:17:20] I actually had to go back for that chest.

[02:17:22] Um, cause I was, I was looking for it.

[02:17:23] I didn't even, yeah.

[02:17:24] All right.

[02:17:25] I didn't even do it, but no.

[02:17:26] So yeah, you, uh, you basically talk to, talk to them.

[02:17:31] You go and you go up to the very end and this is another big piece to it.

[02:17:37] Varric has been narrating this whole game.

[02:17:39] And if you were an adult and you've consumed any type of fantasy or high fantasy content,

[02:17:45] you would have known at this point that Varric was fucking cooked at the intro scene.

[02:17:49] He gets stabbed by the lyrium dagger, which basically just rips his soul out of his body

[02:17:54] and kills him.

[02:17:55] Um, all of, and, and Rook has been throughout this game having conversations with Varric.

[02:18:00] Um, all those conversations have been manifestations of Varric in Rook's head.

[02:18:06] It's very sixth sense.

[02:18:07] It is very sixth sense.

[02:18:08] You know, he was dead all along.

[02:18:09] Um, and he's been giving advice and Rook has this revelation the entire time I've been

[02:18:14] talking to you.

[02:18:15] I was just talking to myself and I was just imagining what you would say to me.

[02:18:19] It was a trick that Solas pulled on her.

[02:18:21] Yeah.

[02:18:22] Yeah.

[02:18:23] And it was a, it was a very mean trick.

[02:18:25] Honestly, it wasn't, it wasn't very kind, but regardless, you get to the end, you fight,

[02:18:33] uh, Elgernon without much difficulty.

[02:18:36] You get to him.

[02:18:37] Uh, there's a little bit of hoops that you got to jump through to get there.

[02:18:40] You, uh, Solas is occupying his arch demon, um, to give you the chance to strike the final

[02:18:45] blow.

[02:18:46] Uh, with the help of the rest of the team, you get there, you kill Elgernon.

[02:18:50] And then at the very end, the real demon rears his ugly head and Solas is like, actually,

[02:18:56] gotcha.

[02:18:57] Um, I'm going to do what I set out to do at the beginning of this game and that you stopped

[02:19:00] me because it's important that it needs to be done.

[02:19:02] He's very convicted.

[02:19:03] He's very convinced that tearing down the fade needs to happen.

[02:19:07] Yeah.

[02:19:07] But he tricked you into helping him.

[02:19:09] And he did.

[02:19:10] He did trick you into helping him and removing the objects in his way with Elgernon and Gilinane.

[02:19:15] And, um, you have a couple of options at the end.

[02:19:19] There are multiple different endings in Dragon Age, the veil guard.

[02:19:21] The ending that I got was I used.

[02:19:25] So in this lead up to this fight, they created like the team while I was trapped in the fade

[02:19:31] created a duplicate lyrium dagger that did not have the power, but it was like magical

[02:19:37] enough to be a fake, um, lyrium dagger.

[02:19:41] And you basically use that and you do a whole one hand, two hand switcheroo and you give

[02:19:47] Solas the lyrium dagger.

[02:19:49] He forces you with magic to give it to him, but you have enough willpower to kind of swap

[02:19:54] the real one out for the fake one.

[02:19:56] And I think if I'm not mistaken by using the fake one, you have this dialogue option.

[02:20:01] And this is what's really interesting is that he like the dialogue option can manifest itself

[02:20:06] in multiple ways with Solas.

[02:20:07] Once he realizes that he fucked up or you fucked him over, whatever the case may be, is that

[02:20:12] I basically chose the dialogue or I tried to talk to him in a way, but he didn't really

[02:20:19] he, he like basically stuck to his guns.

[02:20:22] He was like, no, you betrayed me.

[02:20:24] Blah, blah, blah, blah.

[02:20:25] And then he gets stuck.

[02:20:26] He, he laughs at himself because he's like, I finally met my match.

[02:20:30] Yeah.

[02:20:31] That was honestly a really cool moment.

[02:20:32] He was like, I'm just a, I've, I've never met my match before.

[02:20:36] And finally I've met someone that's as smart as I am.

[02:20:39] And he gets himself sucked into the fade.

[02:20:42] Um, there apparently are conversations where at the very end, when he decides to double

[02:20:48] cross you again, where you can convince him that what he's doing is wrong and he willingly

[02:20:54] takes the dagger and locks himself into the fade.

[02:20:57] So I'm hearing this correctly.

[02:20:58] You tricked him.

[02:21:00] That was your choice.

[02:21:01] Yeah.

[02:21:01] I talked him down.

[02:21:03] Really?

[02:21:03] I did.

[02:21:04] Okay.

[02:21:04] But also.

[02:21:05] How did you talk him down though?

[02:21:06] What was the, was it like, did you just choose not to use the dagger?

[02:21:10] Was that the choice?

[02:21:11] Uh huh.

[02:21:12] I appealed to his sensibilities, but also I find it interesting because I know that your

[02:21:15] default world state, your inquisitor had romanced Solas.

[02:21:20] That is.

[02:21:21] Yeah.

[02:21:21] But still you had to trick him.

[02:21:23] Yeah.

[02:21:23] Oh, that's so sad.

[02:21:25] Yeah.

[02:21:25] Um, but if you don't trick him, you have to call Mathal in for backup.

[02:21:30] Yeah.

[02:21:31] And she talks him down question mark.

[02:21:34] Am I remembering this correctly?

[02:21:35] Probably.

[02:21:36] But, um, I've seen that there's your ending, my ending, and then there's the ending where

[02:21:44] you talk him down and the inquisitor had romanced Solas and she and him just fuck off into

[02:21:50] the fade somewhere for, um, self-flagellation.

[02:21:55] I suppose that's very on brand.

[02:21:57] I kind of like that ending.

[02:21:59] Like I, with everything that Solas had been through, everything he had done, learning more

[02:22:04] about him.

[02:22:04] Obviously he keeps making bad choices and Rook like knows that he's going to double cross

[02:22:09] him.

[02:22:09] Like, he's like, yeah, I expect him to do that because he can't help himself.

[02:22:12] Right.

[02:22:13] He, or my Rook understands this about Solas's nature, but I kind of wanted a happy ending

[02:22:20] for him anyway.

[02:22:21] Like I kind of wanted him to come to terms with himself, come to terms with the choices

[02:22:25] that he made.

[02:22:26] And I really liked the idea that at the very end he can go off into the sunset with Mathal

[02:22:31] because he never got that chance.

[02:22:33] Well, it's not Mathal, it's the inquisitor.

[02:22:34] Oh, really?

[02:22:38] Really?

[02:22:38] Really.

[02:22:39] It's not Morgan?

[02:22:40] Morgan?

[02:22:40] No.

[02:22:41] Why is, oh, interesting.

[02:22:43] Okay.

[02:22:43] Because evidently they're, they're soulmates and they make it all better.

[02:22:47] I don't know.

[02:22:48] It's very tropey, but.

[02:22:50] Yeah, that is kind of tropey.

[02:22:51] Kind of sweet, I guess.

[02:22:53] We're at the very end here.

[02:22:54] We're wrapping up our final thoughts.

[02:22:56] That was the story of Dragon Age the Veilguard.

[02:22:58] Yay.

[02:22:59] Oh, oh, oh, hold on.

[02:23:01] Hold on.

[02:23:02] We didn't get to like one of the big, the first main choice is that you choose to like

[02:23:08] which city to save.

[02:23:10] The second main choice in the game is choose who to fucking die because they do the collector.

[02:23:15] The Vermeier.

[02:23:16] Yeah, they do the Vermeier mission.

[02:23:18] They do the collector mission at the end of this game.

[02:23:20] You basically have a choice.

[02:23:22] There's only two options, two companions that you can choose to take the L at the end of

[02:23:26] this game.

[02:23:27] And that's Davrin and Ahsan or Harding.

[02:23:30] Who did you choose?

[02:23:33] I'm sorry.

[02:23:34] Harding.

[02:23:34] I chose Harding because.

[02:23:36] I should have chosen Harding.

[02:23:37] I mean, I knew.

[02:23:38] I did not care enough.

[02:23:39] I liked, I was so, I had a lot of affection in my heart for Harding.

[02:23:43] And I thought in my mind, my reasoning.

[02:23:46] See, I cut you off again.

[02:23:47] I'm sorry.

[02:23:47] That's fine.

[02:23:47] But my reasoning for choosing Harding to live was like, she's super important.

[02:23:52] And she's like a former, she was an inquisition.

[02:23:55] She was in the inquisition.

[02:23:56] There's no way she could live through that and not live through this.

[02:23:58] You thought that she had plot armor.

[02:23:59] I thought that she was important.

[02:24:01] I thought that she was important.

[02:24:02] She's not important.

[02:24:03] And then instead, I chose Davrin to be the big man, to take the L.

[02:24:09] And if it was just Davrin, that would be one thing.

[02:24:12] Right.

[02:24:12] But at the very end, in the final sacrifice moment, which is basically the moment where

[02:24:17] they open up a window for Lucanus to stab Gielinon, he falls into this pit of blight.

[02:24:26] Yeah.

[02:24:26] And dies.

[02:24:27] And he's gone, gone.

[02:24:29] There's no body.

[02:24:30] There's no body.

[02:24:30] But they're fucking cooked.

[02:24:32] And Ahsan flies in after him because he sees Davrin fall into it.

[02:24:39] And also, Davrin was stabbed multiple times by Gielinane.

[02:24:43] And so I'm like, he's probably cooked.

[02:24:47] Yeah.

[02:24:47] But again, I was like, how dare?

[02:24:49] How dare they give me the option to kill one of the last remaining griffins of the game

[02:24:56] who's also like the best boy?

[02:24:58] He's the best boy ever.

[02:24:59] And instead, you know, I could have done without Harding.

[02:25:04] Yeah.

[02:25:05] I chose Harding because she said at the beginning of the game, whatever it takes.

[02:25:11] And you get to echo that sentiment.

[02:25:14] Yeah.

[02:25:14] With Harding at the end.

[02:25:15] But also, it feels so profound choosing Harding.

[02:25:21] Really?

[02:25:22] Yes.

[02:25:23] And-

[02:25:23] How?

[02:25:23] I feel justified in picking Harding.

[02:25:26] I'm not sure if you get the same scene if you pick Davrin.

[02:25:31] After that confrontation, after Gielinane is dead, before the assault on Elgernon, you can

[02:25:39] go to her room, which is now flourishing.

[02:25:43] It's gorgeous.

[02:25:44] It starts off as this dank, empty crypt.

[02:25:47] And then she turns it into a garden.

[02:25:49] Yeah.

[02:25:49] And you can talk to Harding, even though she's not there, and you tell her, you know, there

[02:25:54] was no body, and if you're out there, I'll find you, while there's like butterflies fluttering

[02:25:59] on and off screen.

[02:26:00] It's just, it's such a poignant, beautiful moment.

[02:26:03] See, I rolled credits on this game, and I didn't pick it back up.

[02:26:08] You weren't sad enough about losing Davrin.

[02:26:10] I was really sad.

[02:26:11] I was just ready for the game to be done, honestly, at that point.

[02:26:14] The end is a bit of an uphill climb.

[02:26:16] It is, it's a little bit of a push to get over the end, but I'm glad that we went there.

[02:26:22] But that's the end of the game, and that was the other big decision.

[02:26:25] I wanted to make sure that we made that clear, that there is a huge death.

[02:26:29] There is a Vermeer.

[02:26:30] Be careful who you pick.

[02:26:31] Be careful who you pick in this game.

[02:26:35] I wanted to really quickly, before we wrap up here, talk about the character arcs and where

[02:26:40] they went.

[02:26:42] And I'm just going to go first.

[02:26:44] I felt like Emmerich's character arc, again, he was the best written.

[02:26:48] He was the best performed.

[02:26:50] And his character arc seemed to be like the most impactful for who Emmerich was as a human,

[02:26:57] as like, as a person in this world.

[02:26:59] Like, he basically has this choice of, as a Mourn Watcher, there is this super big honor

[02:27:05] that you get to have of, I forget what the name of it is.

[02:27:09] It's a proper noun.

[02:27:10] Lichdom.

[02:27:11] Yeah, you get to become a lich, which means that it's not like an evil, spooky, you kind

[02:27:16] of look like evil, spooky man that you have to fight in a dungeon.

[02:27:19] But they're literally just beings that were Navarran Mourn Watchers who want to continue

[02:27:25] their work within the Mourn Watch after death.

[02:27:28] And then they also kind of serve a political purpose, if I'm not mistaken.

[02:27:31] They have some power, yeah.

[02:27:33] Yeah, they have a little bit of power in that society, but they're deeply revered.

[02:27:36] And it's like the ultimate honor.

[02:27:38] And that's his big goal.

[02:27:39] He wants to get to the point where he can get to lichdom.

[02:27:43] Because he's afraid of mortality.

[02:27:45] Yeah.

[02:27:45] And throughout this game, he has this character named Manfred, who's like his little companion.

[02:27:51] He's this little spirit that he got to inhabit a skeleton.

[02:27:54] And over the course of Emmerich's arc, his character arc, you realize that Manfred gains

[02:28:02] sentience and starts talking and saying really funny stuff.

[02:28:06] And we love Manfred in this household.

[02:28:08] Our boy Manfred.

[02:28:08] Our boy Manfred is the best.

[02:28:10] But yeah, so it's really interesting.

[02:28:13] But at the end, one of the core key character components of Emmerich is that he was brought

[02:28:19] into the Mourn Watch as a child and he was deathly afraid of death.

[02:28:23] And he was raised around literal death itself all the time.

[02:28:28] But he also still has this foreboding, overwhelming sense of dread around passing away, which is why

[02:28:35] he wants to become a lich.

[02:28:36] It's because he can never die.

[02:28:37] He becomes immortal by becoming a lich.

[02:28:41] And that's kind of what the idea of like where he wants to go.

[02:28:44] But throughout the story, you get to convince him.

[02:28:47] He basically has to choose because he fights his old nemesis.

[02:28:50] You fight a bone mech, which is really cool.

[02:28:52] It was really cool.

[02:28:53] That was a really cool thing that she made.

[02:28:55] Balara had an interesting comment to make because I brought Balara along for that mission.

[02:28:59] She was like, out of all manifestations, that's the way that she chose to make the mech.

[02:29:04] She didn't give it like more arms or like, you know, it's so her.

[02:29:09] She was like, I would have done it way differently.

[02:29:11] I'd have critiques.

[02:29:11] But she was like, this is all in theory, of course, in theory.

[02:29:14] He's like, of course, surely.

[02:29:16] It was honestly really funny.

[02:29:18] One of the few moments where I appreciated her being along for the ride.

[02:29:21] But yeah.

[02:29:22] And Emmerich basically has a moment where Manfred gets crushed.

[02:29:28] He gets got.

[02:29:29] He gets got.

[02:29:30] Manfred gets killed in order to help us out at the very end.

[02:29:33] And so he really wants to bring back Manfred because he was making so much progress.

[02:29:38] He was literally gaining sentience in speaking towards the end.

[02:29:42] And Emmerich got so excited by it.

[02:29:44] But at the end, it basically becomes a decision comes down to Emmerich on.

[02:29:49] Do you want to become a lich?

[02:29:51] Meaning that you let go of these earthly desires like Manfred.

[02:29:56] Or do you want to bring him back and then face death when the time comes?

[02:30:00] And I got the chance to talk him down or convince him that, hey, you loved Manfred.

[02:30:08] Why not?

[02:30:08] Why not just pursue that?

[02:30:10] Yeah.

[02:30:10] Instead of becoming a lich.

[02:30:11] And I am.

[02:30:12] That's like one of the coolest decisions that I got to make in this game.

[02:30:16] And I'm so glad I got to make that with him.

[02:30:17] I loved it too.

[02:30:18] Yeah.

[02:30:19] Because all of the other ones are sort of like emotional or theoretical.

[02:30:25] It's, but Emmerich is.

[02:30:28] It's very human.

[02:30:29] It's so human.

[02:30:30] It's like your note here.

[02:30:31] He's deeply human.

[02:30:33] Being scared of death is something that we all share.

[02:30:35] And that's something that a lot of these characters are lacking.

[02:30:37] Like I can't relate to almost any of these characters.

[02:30:40] And I get it.

[02:30:40] I'm a middle slider boy in real life.

[02:30:42] I'm a cishet white male.

[02:30:46] Middle slider in all capacities.

[02:30:48] But like Ballara with her brother being recruited, you know, that's fine.

[02:30:54] Lace discovering, Lace Harding discovering her powers, discovering that she was from the

[02:31:00] Titans.

[02:31:00] That's great.

[02:31:01] Tasha's identity journey.

[02:31:03] Awesome.

[02:31:04] Nave like saving Minrathus, I guess.

[02:31:08] Like I don't even remember Nave's like character arc overall.

[02:31:12] It's not very memorable.

[02:31:13] Some of these choices are.

[02:31:14] She's fighting her nemesis.

[02:31:15] She's a blood mage.

[02:31:16] She's tracking down a blood mage.

[02:31:18] And Lucanus's is if you kill Ellario or not.

[02:31:21] Yeah.

[02:31:22] But some of these choices are just the right thing to do.

[02:31:25] I felt like Emmerich's choice was a little more complex than that.

[02:31:30] It was nuanced.

[02:31:30] Yeah.

[02:31:31] It was nuanced.

[02:31:31] It's like, yeah, do you want Ellario to live or die?

[02:31:34] And I chose to spare him.

[02:31:36] And he actually shows up at the end.

[02:31:37] He makes this quippy comment at the very end.

[02:31:39] He's like, ha ha, you would expect that from me, wouldn't you?

[02:31:42] Like he said something snarky.

[02:31:43] And I'm just like, oh, Ellario, I should have fucking killed you.

[02:31:46] Just Ellario being Ellario.

[02:31:47] I should have killed you when I had the chance.

[02:31:49] Anyway.

[02:31:50] But yeah.

[02:31:51] So, I mean, were there any other ones?

[02:31:53] Did you like Davrin's mission, learning more about the Grey Wardens' history with the

[02:32:00] Griffins?

[02:32:00] So, I feel like Davrin's choice of making the Griffins serve the Grey Wardens still or

[02:32:08] become...

[02:32:10] Guardians of the Forest.

[02:32:11] Guardians of the Forest.

[02:32:12] I felt like that was a really profound choice too.

[02:32:15] Because the whole questline with Asan was learning about how the Grey Wardens mistreated

[02:32:21] Griffins to make them impervious.

[02:32:24] And I chose to make them Guardians of the Forest.

[02:32:28] I did too.

[02:32:28] It was the right thing to do.

[02:32:30] Like there are these whimsical, lovely creatures who...

[02:32:33] They're just wild.

[02:32:35] They're wild animals, but they deserve to be free.

[02:32:37] Right.

[02:32:38] And I knew for a fact that Davrin's relationship with his father figure in the forest there,

[02:32:44] that was a really important relationship.

[02:32:45] And I could tell that like his whole thing was like you have to treat animals and nature

[02:32:52] with the respect that you treat people with.

[02:32:55] And you can change your nature.

[02:32:57] And yeah, and they can teach you to believe again.

[02:32:59] And that was like...

[02:33:00] That was kind of like Davrin's emotional journey.

[02:33:02] Like he was learning to like believe in himself and Asan at the end there.

[02:33:06] Because he wasn't...

[02:33:07] Again, he wasn't...

[02:33:08] You know, cat dad.

[02:33:09] He wasn't built to raise this animal.

[02:33:12] He wasn't trained to do it.

[02:33:13] He kind of is just figuring it out as he was going.

[02:33:16] Right.

[02:33:16] And that was really cool.

[02:33:18] We can be a little bit more multidimensional than we think we can.

[02:33:21] Harding, I don't want to brush Harding off because the dwarf stuff, you said this before,

[02:33:27] but the whole section where you go into the dwarfs...

[02:33:30] And apparently there's multiple factions of dwarfs out there.

[02:33:33] Yes.

[02:33:34] And in order to do the whole thing with a Titan quest line, you got to go through this special

[02:33:39] faction.

[02:33:39] In the Deep Roads...

[02:33:41] The Kalshirak.

[02:33:42] Are they in the...

[02:33:43] The Kalshirak.

[02:33:43] Yes.

[02:33:44] It's a tag that only surfaced, I think, 20 years ago in game.

[02:33:49] Whereas Orzumar has never been lost to the surface.

[02:33:53] They've always had relations with the surface.

[02:33:55] Yeah.

[02:33:56] Yeah.

[02:33:56] So again, you know, not to sell Harding short, I think that was really cool.

[02:34:00] And again, like it was really powerful.

[02:34:02] And you at the very end kind of tell her like, you got to learn to trust yourself, that sort

[02:34:07] of thing, because she was scared she would lose herself in the power, that kind of stuff.

[02:34:11] Everyone else, I kind of shrug.

[02:34:15] Besides Tosh, Tosh's relationship with their mother at the very end was really powerful

[02:34:21] and tragic.

[02:34:22] Tear jerking.

[02:34:23] Really tragic.

[02:34:24] Yeah, I cried.

[02:34:24] Honestly.

[02:34:25] You know, spoilers, but word spoiler territory.

[02:34:29] They fucking kill her.

[02:34:30] They killed Tosh's mom.

[02:34:32] Yeah.

[02:34:32] Right when...

[02:34:34] And it's interesting because Tosh's mom has this whole comment and there's this dialogue,

[02:34:39] this commentary about the Kuhn.

[02:34:41] And Tosh is having a conversation with...

[02:34:45] Tosh's mother is having a conversation with both Tosh and the dragon, the dragon king.

[02:34:51] And I love this every time.

[02:34:53] She's like, dragons don't have kings, they have queens.

[02:34:55] I love it.

[02:34:57] Which is great.

[02:34:58] But yeah.

[02:35:00] And I think...

[02:35:02] What's the line?

[02:35:04] What's the line that Tosh repeats over and over again?

[02:35:07] Fighting against your nature.

[02:35:09] Shaka to Ebra.

[02:35:09] Shaka to Ebra.

[02:35:11] Wow.

[02:35:11] A gold star for me.

[02:35:12] I can't believe I pulled that one out.

[02:35:13] Gold star for Courtney.

[02:35:14] You fucking did it.

[02:35:15] Wow.

[02:35:15] You did it for the show.

[02:35:17] That was really powerful because their mother's point was that it's not the struggle.

[02:35:25] It's not about the struggle.

[02:35:27] It's about how you define yourself because of that struggle.

[02:35:30] Yeah.

[02:35:31] It's like...

[02:35:31] The point is not that you have to fight against yourself.

[02:35:34] The point is that you choose to fight against yourself in order to find yourself.

[02:35:38] And they like honor their pronouns at the very end.

[02:35:42] And like it's a beautiful moment.

[02:35:44] That should have been the entire arc.

[02:35:46] I agree.

[02:35:47] And it wasn't unfortunately.

[02:35:49] But that moment was really strong.

[02:35:51] It just wasn't earned.

[02:35:52] I think that the arc maybe was so slow because you're supposed to feel Tasha's uncertainty in coming out to their mother.

[02:36:00] Because they love and respect their mother.

[02:36:02] Their mother is their whole world.

[02:36:04] Their whole world.

[02:36:05] It seems like.

[02:36:05] Yeah.

[02:36:05] So the way that their mother was always very opinionated maybe scared Tasha off from...

[02:36:12] Tasha's mom is very much a helicopter parent.

[02:36:14] Oh, for sure.

[02:36:15] In this world.

[02:36:16] Everything they say is that my mom says this.

[02:36:19] My mom says that.

[02:36:21] And it's very funny because when it comes down to interfacing with their mom, you have dinner with their mother a couple of times.

[02:36:26] And they do nothing but argue.

[02:36:28] Right.

[02:36:28] Back and forth the entire time.

[02:36:29] And it's really interesting.

[02:36:31] Very real.

[02:36:32] There was a point in the game where I was like, Tasha, please stop talking about your mom.

[02:36:37] But I get it now.

[02:36:40] So we're kind of here at the tail end.

[02:36:42] Were there any final character moments that you wanted to call out as highlights for yourself before we go into final thoughts?

[02:36:47] Oh, gosh.

[02:36:50] Or have we covered mostly everything?

[02:36:52] I think we covered mostly everything.

[02:36:54] If we did miss something, well, great.

[02:36:57] People get to experience it themselves.

[02:36:58] They get to experience it firsthand.

[02:37:00] Yeah.

[02:37:00] So, yeah, this has been great.

[02:37:02] And again, thank you because you have really enlightened me.

[02:37:05] And it's been fun to kind of dig into the story of this game and dig into what makes Dragon Age the Veil Guard special and a worthwhile time for Dragon Age fans.

[02:37:14] Yeah.

[02:37:14] I'm just a filthy Dragon Age sinner.

[02:37:16] I'm here.

[02:37:16] Anytime you need something Dragon Age, I'm here.

[02:37:19] I'm going to let you have the final word.

[02:37:21] So I'll jump into the final thoughts first.

[02:37:24] Again, as something that you've kind of surmised or gathered from what I've said overall, this is going to be mostly repetitive.

[02:37:31] But I think there's a decent game in Dragon Age the Veil Guard hiding underneath some poorly scoped and thought out gameplay and narrative design.

[02:37:42] This is something that's very similar to Star Wars Outlaws is that unfortunately there's a lot of disparate parts and disparate teams that were working together, but not harmoniously.

[02:37:52] Yeah.

[02:37:52] There is no melody.

[02:37:53] They really lacked an identity in bringing everything together.

[02:37:58] There's definitely standout moments in this game.

[02:38:00] There's great moments.

[02:38:01] And that's where I go back to what I was saying earlier about seeing so much promise in the Veil Guard is that there's so much good stuff there.

[02:38:09] They didn't have the time or the budget to really put it together in a product that Dragon Age fans deserved.

[02:38:14] Or in a way that really would bring in even more new fans and sell units the way that a Final Fantasy or a Baldur's Gate could sell units today.

[02:38:24] And I think it's something to learn from that if you want good content, you've got to pay for good writers and good developers who have a lot of senior leadership under their belt at that point.

[02:38:36] I think what could have easily landed with most people as a 7 to a 7.5 out of 10 was brought down significantly by the amateurish writing, by oversimplifying RPG mechanics throughout the game.

[02:38:49] Two choices.

[02:38:50] Again, two major choices.

[02:38:52] Plenty of little choices that don't really mean anything in between there.

[02:38:56] Sure.

[02:38:56] And then a heavy emphasis on meaningless side content and collect-a-thon quest progression, going back to the armor and leveling up, paying merchants to level up faction ranks, that sort of thing.

[02:39:10] And unfortunately, there's a lot of talking down that exists in the narrative of this game.

[02:39:20] I want to call it virtue signaling, for lack of a better word, but I think that if you tell a good story that is aligned with your values, which is something that Baldur's Gate does, without actually having to use 2024 social justice language the way that The Veil Guard does,

[02:39:40] I think that you will find that fans can resonate and connect with it more directly than the way that it manifests itself here.

[02:39:49] And that's what brings the score down a little bit for me.

[02:39:52] I'm not going to put a score on this.

[02:39:53] I'm just going to say-

[02:39:54] You're not?

[02:39:54] No, no.

[02:39:55] I mean, if you want me to, I can, but I don't really think that there's a lot of value in putting this on a 1 to 10 scale because it's just not a great game.

[02:40:05] I respect that.

[02:40:05] It's just not a great game, and I think that it not achieving greatness means that, for me, similar to- there's a lot of similarities with Outlaws, is that if you are a Dragon Age fan, there's plenty of stuff in this game that you're really, really going to love.

[02:40:20] And I strongly recommend you play it and connect with it because if you fall in love with Emmerich or Tosh or Harding in the way that I did while I was playing this game, more power to you.

[02:40:30] I think you're really going to enjoy your time with it.

[02:40:31] If you're not a Dragon Age fan, this is very tentative on whether or not you want to jump into this.

[02:40:36] If you're an ARPG fan, you like stuff like Dragon's Dogma, and you intend on skipping cutscenes, this might be a game for you.

[02:40:43] But if not, this could be a skip as well.

[02:40:46] So I'm going to go ahead and just leave it at that.

[02:40:49] Courtney, what were your final thoughts for The Veil Guard?

[02:40:52] So I've been waiting for this game for a decade, and I had extremely high expectations.

[02:40:58] Feeling a little disappointed was probably always in the cards, coming down from the writing of Origins, the interpersonal dynamics of Dragon Age 2, and a behemoth-like Inquisition.

[02:41:09] So I give it a solid 7 with affection.

[02:41:13] But I am very concerned that we're not going to get another one because of how many marks they missed.

[02:41:22] Yeah, I guess I'm going to hold out hope, though.

[02:41:25] I really want a Dragon Age 5.

[02:41:27] The takeaway of The Veil Guard, also it has literally been a decade, November 18th, 2014, since this game was released, since Inquisition was released.

[02:41:40] But yeah, the takeaway from this game is that Mass Effect 4 has to be really good.

[02:41:48] It has to be.

[02:41:49] I don't think that they can afford another mediocre game.

[02:41:53] I don't think that Bioware can afford to put out bad movies the way that Sony Pictures puts out the venom in Kraven movies.

[02:42:04] Not to say that Dragon Age Veil Guard isn't anywhere the territory of those movies.

[02:42:09] Thanks for clearing that up.

[02:42:10] Yeah, not saying that.

[02:42:11] I'm just saying that they need to make a lot of money.

[02:42:14] In order to make a lot of money, they've got to put out a product that's going to be super compelling and really spark the fandom to go out there and buy the game.

[02:42:22] Sure.

[02:42:23] And I think that Mass Effect 4 needs to be an absolute banger.

[02:42:29] Yeah.

[02:42:30] But in the meantime, we did get what we got.

[02:42:32] And I think that there's some cool stuff here that Dragon Age fans can check out and appreciate.

[02:42:36] Sure.

[02:42:37] And I know I sounded really negative, but honestly, this game is stunning.

[02:42:41] Yeah.

[02:42:42] It's a pretty game.

[02:42:43] It's a beautiful game.

[02:42:44] It has really fascinating lore.

[02:42:47] The characterization is wonderful.

[02:42:48] If you look hard enough, you're going to find some gems.

[02:42:51] And there's even more secrets that we didn't have time to touch on in this review.

[02:42:56] And we're coming up on three hours now.

[02:42:57] So there's a lot to take away in this game.

[02:43:02] Well, thank you so much for joining me.

[02:43:04] That is going to be it for tonight, folks.

[02:43:06] I want to give a big thank you to all of our listeners.

[02:43:09] If you've enjoyed our content and want to support us further, please feel free to leave us a rating review on your podcasting platform of choice.

[02:43:15] Whether that's Apple, iTunes, Spotify, or GoodPods.

[02:43:19] We love to hear any feedback from the listeners.

[02:43:21] We're also over on Blue Sky.

[02:43:23] We're at FNGCPod at Blue Sky.

[02:43:26] So go ahead and add us on there.

[02:43:28] This is a moment where I give another plug for our guests.

[02:43:31] But because Courtney doesn't really have anything to plug, we're just going to say don't find her online.

[02:43:36] Don't come looking for me.

[02:43:37] Because we'll fight.

[02:43:38] And that's fine.

[02:43:39] That's totally okay.

[02:43:40] But Courtney, again, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

[02:43:43] Absolutely.

[02:43:43] It was a blast.

[02:43:44] Yeah.

[02:43:44] We'll do this again sometime soon.

[02:43:46] But with that, everyone, please keep gaming.

[02:43:49] Take it easy.

[02:43:50] We're going to see you next Friday night.