Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Clumsy, Preachy Political Messaging Does More Harm Than Good
Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Clumsy, Preachy Political Messaging Does More Harm Than Good
Dragon Age: The Veilguard foolishly inserts modern politics into a game that could have addressed these issues within the framework of the game's lore.
I know this might start war in the comments so please chill people, I don't want to get 20 reports from this single post.
Having not played it, I'll stick to using a review I read in the past few days.
To sum it up, the game felt too positive to the reviewer. To them it felt more like a Disney adventure than a grim fantasy world that's invaded by malevolent, torture-happy evil gods. They felt no bite from their choices, from the story or from their companions. Everything felt like it needed to be happy in some way, like the idea of conflict was a far more terrible outcome than being skullfucked by an angry tentacle god lady.
To sum it up even further, the game felt too safe. And so became a bland meal that's easily forgettable.
Additionally, everyone speaks in this insufferable Marvel-tone full of cheeriness and quippiness. The characters speak and act as if they’re aware they’re in a video game and never drop the infuriating singsong HR tone.
Ever work with someone whose parent(s) were in HR? You’ll know what I mean.
Maybe this is a gen z thing and I’m just falling behind the times. I don’t know. But the ME3-tier ending really seals the deal. I’ll pay $10 max for this and probably refund in 2 hours, or just get a crack later down the line.
I'm playing the "demo" and just met an elf companion who said something like "whoopsie! My gods are real and they're going to destroy the world! 🤷" And it just undercuts the whole story.
Marvelization is the perfect way to describe it. There are zero stakes.
Origins had humor and snark, but it was mostly used in service of the story and themes.
Quite early on you have a difficult choice
spoiler
You need to choose between saving 2 cities with each their respective companion, that will result in one of those cities being overrun by the blight and that companion becoming distant. Turning it into a hellscape with even more consequences than I type here.
So I don't share your opinion.
I feel like I have a outside the norm third-take opinion on this topic, tbh.
I think including the hot social topic of the day often time is pandering.
But I also don't think pandering is a problem. The muscles on the main character is also pandering. When McDonald's does market research and then releases a new product, that is pandering.
Games are a sales industry; they are going to pander to potential buyers, period.
So yes, a potentially trans-centric storyline in a game is unnecessary. But so is including a longsword, or a tavern, or a comic relief character. Unnecessary doesn't mean bad; all of those things are likely only adding to the depth and value of the game.
So all this to say that when crazy right-wingers talk about SJWs and pandering and all that nonsense don't waste your time trying to fight them on the irrelevant bits - go ahead and acknowledge the pandering aspect and fight the real fight by telling them it's not negative pandering and minorities deserve to be pandered to and represented just as much as anyone else. They just don't recognize the market targeting the white male demographic as pandering because it is the sphere of normal under which they operate.
I guess I should add that I'm not speaking to this game specifically since I've never played it. I really enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins but frankly felt like I got everything I needed of the world from it and haven't been interested in any of the sequels. So I won't be playing DA: The Veilguard, but that reason has absolutely fuck all to do with the inclusion of any social politics.
I just want to voice my opinion that not every article about video games needs to be shared/promoted, particularly gamergate-lite shit like this. "Only" whinging about how non-cis white male characters are included in games is hardly any better than the chuds bombing the game on metacritic.
I'd also argue this violates your own sub's rule (rule 9), not because it's about "political" genders, but for explicitly calling peoples' existence "political messaging".
You didn't read the article did you? Its not about the inclusion of a character, but about how a specific scene with that character is handled. The author claims it is completely jarring, doesn't fit into the games setting and doesn't even use the games existing lore for transgender people but instead uses modern terminology.
I found the article to very informative and not at all "gamergatey".
Its points are:
- this is the scene
- it is bad
- here is exelent trans representation in a fantasy setting
- "its a BioWare self insert"
- this is how they could have handled it better
- the game is great, but now everybody will just talk about woke, so again the game is good
Its not about the inclusion of a character, but about how a specific scene with that character is handled.
You didn't read my comment, did you? Like the part where I specifically mention that? I don't care if the scene was shot on a camcorder for a student created after-school special on a PTA budget. Acting like that's the problem instead of any of the reactionary bullshit to it is not the viewpoint of someone who truly cares about these populations. Where's the "helpful" article about shitty hetero romance scenes in countless movies/shows/games and how we should do better there? Those don't cause a blip. But this? This is a "problem". Fuck that.
and doesn’t even use the games existing lore for transgender people but instead uses modern terminology.
This reads like those losers that rage about black people in The Witcher because it's "noT hIStoRIcaLlY AccuRAtE". Bemoaning "modern terminology" is so pointless. They're also speaking modern languages through the majority of the game. Gonna write a Forbes "article" about that, too?
I'm sorry but (all other issues with the scene aside) pretending that performative "apologies" are a good thing actually is genuinely problematic. Performative apologies are inherently manipulative by drawing attention away from the thing you're apologising for and by being designed to be an effort that feels bad to reject.
I remember very well bioware games and others in past decades got the same kind of reaction because « omg gay romance, that kind of agenda shouldn't be pushed in a video game, think of the children ».
So now the new social "battle" is trans right and the game has a gender questioning character (From a review, I haven't played) that seems to take at most a whole 5 minutes over the course of the whole game. Why not.
Now the game has been designed to cater to 10 year old and not the older crowd who played the original so it doesn't have the depth you'd want and the dialog is on the nose. Well, too bad. Just play something else.
I haven't played it yet, still unsure if I will, but everything I've seen of it is nudging me towards not playing it. The dialogues I've watched were poorly written, cutscenes were okay at best, and the new companions seemed all to be obnoxious teenagers.
To me, Dragon Age Origins is the only game in the franchise that's worth playing. The Warden is your character as the player, and that, to me, is the hallmark of a good rpg. None of the other Dragon Age games put as much effort into allowing you to choose and make your own character. The fact that DA:O had entirely different intros, that were both long, well written, and nuanced, based on your combination of class + race was the thing that sold me into that game. Hawke is not your character, but a character they wanted you to play for a reason, but I'll give it a pass since the idea of Hawke's story was fairly good, just not as well implemented (DA2 should have been a spin off and not part of the main series). The Inquisitor is even worse, it could have been your character, but it's some weird generic character that's there just to perform a function in the world. I've played most of DA2, but only a couple of hours of Inquisition, and it was enough to know that both those games fell short of Origins, and this one is looking even worse.
An RPG needs excellent writing above all else. Good gameplay comes as a close second, but it should be mostly about allowing players to forge their own path and have their own interpretations of the world. RPGs need nuance and subtlety, you can't just constantly regurgitate something to someone's face and expect them not to be annoyed by it.
I will give you my review as someone who is a trans ally. The writing is bad. Like really bad.
I played DA:O when it first came out, bought the Golem bonus release package. It was a fun, dark fantasy game. Same with the expansion and the other DA games. This game has none of that in the story. It’s just a really awful written story.
The chuds, and I despise even typing this, are right. The trans/non-binary stuff comes out of no where. They go full vegan road biker CrossFit attitude with it and just inject it in the most random places. “Let me tell you about all the sets I did!” And then there are some kind of odd non-consenting scenes which make it even weirder.
It lacks ALL the magic and creative writing of BG3 with almost none of the character development. It’s Mary Sue shit from start to finish.
The combat is good, but it’s likely a separate team made it.
Regardless of content. I learned a long time ago that only unhappyness can come from paying for games by EA.
Though all AAA should come with a "may cause irritation" label.
Indie games are king and that is where my money goes.
I am nonbinary, I haven't played a Dragon Age game before Veilguard, I haven't yet gotten to this one scene that's apparently damned the entire franchise, nor have I even met Taash(?) yet. Here's my off the cuff rambling thoughts:
I've just now watched the scene devoid of context, and if that's where the misgendering conversation started and stopped, I think everyone is wildly overreacting. The first minute is fine, a weird older lady apologizes for screwing up in her own way, I've had people react in much stranger ways than that, and in it's own way "Whoops I fucked up, lemme do some push ups to show I feel bad" is kinda sweet. I'll concede that the explanation after was heavy handed, but you could definitely include the gist of it somewhere else easily. "Don't be weird, just say sorry and move on" is the correct advice to give to someone who doesn't know how to interact with trans people but wants to be supportive. If that last minute of the conversation happened somewhere else in the game, it'd have been fine.
The game overall has been mediocre so far, a solid 6 out of 10, nothing to write home about, but certainly not deserving of the flak it's been getting. This is one of the first games I've played where I feel like I'm represented, I think it might be the first major game where you can make a custom character who's explicitly transgender, and that counts for something in my book.
From where I'm standing, it really feels like a lot of the outrage DA:V is drawing comes from some discomfort(conscious or no) with having the queer experience very out in the open for everyone to see, which is what I would expect from a series that (as far as I can tell) has always had tons of explicitly queer characters. I'm sure that's not universally the case, but I simply don't buy this narrative of "I'm fine with trans people, but the way it's written is so clunky." because I've had almost the polar opposite experience. I can think of few other games that talk about transness in the way that actual trans people talk about it.
I wouldn’t say it’s always had a ton of queer characters. The first game had a few bi characters and some transmisogynistic depictions of sex workers, the second had a bunch of bi characters and some transmisogynistic depictions of sex workers, and the third game had a few bi characters, a gay man, a well written trans man, and some lesbian characters written by someone who clearly hates lesbians.
But yeah you’re describing what I expected.
Ah, my only context was what little I've picked up about Krem and Dorian(as well as an explanation about how the Qun is sexist to the point of wrapping around to be progressive), and assurances from people that the games have always been like that.
Even still, from a 15 year old series, that still manages to be a lot gayer than most.
I don't care about wokeness, the game looks like plastic garbage and they genericized the combat
I would like to find a game free of political message, can someone please show me one?
I'm really curious about what this mythical beast might look like.....
Doom? Tetris? Need for Speed? Wii Tennis? WTF are you talking about?
- Doom promotes strong virilism = political.
- Tetris = promote the control of chaos (view as destructive, because too much and you lose) through psycho-rigid order.
- Need For Speed = yeah nothing political about promoting cars, except the incitation to get one.
- Wii Tennis = tries to make you forget tennis is for rich people only, by making it cute = political.
My point is everything is political, you don't have to see political standpoint in things, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.
Need for Speed promotes scofflaw activities.
And I'm all for it.
Super mario bros was clearly about promoting poligamy.
Super Mario make a twist on the trope of the knight saving the princess. The knight is just a plumber and it is said to him that the 'princess is an another castle'. But at the end the right order of the world is restaured when Mario finally frees the princess from the evil Bowser.
So from a political standpoint Super Mario is a product believing strongly in individualism and in the self made man ideology. The twist shows only that even a plumber can save the princess if he works enough = liberal capitalism making us believed that we'll be all rock stars and billionaires when we're definitively not (and yes I'm quoting fight club here). All this is the consequence of the game focussing more on gameplay than it's narration, therefore it leans towards what was the common thinking of the time.
Polygamy (relationship between Peach, Mario and Luigi, if that's what you are referring to) is much to me a side effect of the 2 players gameplay possibility, but it is still indeed pretty interesting in itself yeah.
You probably meant it as a joke, but too bad you get a real answer :)
The game's writing is not up to par with past games in the franchise, and it does suffer from "Marvel speak," but it's a pretty good game overall and I'm enjoying it. Being part of the Dragon Age franchise hurts it more than anything else because it doesn't measure up story-wise.
Being preached by a game company owned by EA is like being preached by actors at the oscars. Gotta love the bourgeoisie proselytising. (edit -at)
So, you simply mean "being preached at"? What's the over/under on religious "leaders" feeling they're above the law, etc., but knowing that they have to keep the sheep from spooking?
I quite liked Stephanie's video about Veilguard's forced "guyversity" and "himclusion".
Guyversity and himclusion, ugh word vomit.
I hate this so much. But knowing myself, Ill end up using it in ironically after a few years.
Given the context of the video, I think they're pretty funny.
This sounds like exactly my response to a ”Christian” movie. They are so ridiculously bad because to earn the label "Christian" they have to be preachy.
chuds won