I've beaten all the Dragon Age games. I even came around on 2, and it had enemies that leapt out from a clear blue sky. Shit, man - we even did some work for hire, you can see some early Eyrewood ideas in there. It's not clear if Dragon Age: The Veilguard is for me, even though the other ones definitely were, and for some reason that is bad to say. It's not super clear how we came all the way around to compulsory capitalism, but man. We kinda did.
There have always been a couple factions inside the Bioware fanbase, and I have a foot in each of these worlds just because of how my brain is. You have something like we would call Grognards in the wargaming space, an adherent of the old ways. They've been playing them since you had to switch discs, potentially - and they've held it down since. They are drawn to technical combat and grim themes. But, because these games are so rich, it's entirely possible to be a fan primarily of the world and the characters - in some cases, even enduring the combat so you can progress, like turning the pages of a very heavy book.
We are having a hard time being honest about this. Now, of course, the whole thing is conflated with various stripes of culture war horseshit by a variety of actors, all of which I consider somewhat interchangeable. You have to understand that this is often just a personality type, not a set of deep-seated values, which is why they can change polarities with such ease. This is a very difficult age to have an IQ over a hundred.
It seems fairly clear that the Vibes faction - and I mean no disrespect in my deployment of this term - has the tiller of this iteration of the game. That might mean that I'm not particularly well served by its Mass Effect combat and its Whedonite patter, but from a practical perspective you can't fault Bioware for thumbing the scale. That world has been simmering in the shipper's pot for a decade now; the amount of art, fiction, and just energy that surrounds it is the kind of Earned Media companies dream of. But you can't be too mad at the other side of this fandom for feeling left behind. They've been left behind.
Art is getting away with it. Baldur's Gate 3 mollifies every corner with a full spectrum offering that is just so considered in its every detail you can't help but get pulled along for the ride. You can even fuck bears! Or, I guess bears can fuck you. But it's an incredibly difficult, incredibly impressive trick - one the traditional industry might simply not have the stomach for. Getting another Dragon Age game is a miracle; every miracle doesn't need to be for me.
(CW)TB out.
