So after playing Veilguard for 60 hours, I have some thoughts… and I have to say that the criticisms against it have been massively overblown to the point that I literally don’t know what anyone is talking about. The writing is not bad at all. The dialogue is really no more ‘modern’ sounding than in inquisition, and the characters talk appropriately depending on who they are. Everyone crapping all over the way Taash speaks is very stupid. They speak very similarly to other Qunari throughout the series. They’re very blunt and don’t mince words and since they were raised by a qunari mother who still believes in the qun despite leaving it behind it makes perfect sense. Sten’s dialogue was way more curt and to the point, and Bull in inquisition had that bluntness about him too (though he is considered very charismatic for a Qunari) But when you look at a character like Emmerich, an older character who works as a professor, his dialogue is written immaculately. He speaks in much more metaphorical and poetic language. The story and characters are great imo, but I do agree that SOME of the dialogue in VERY early game seems a bit strange and I do wish there was more friction between the companion members. As someone who’s been a huge fan of Dragon age for 15 years, I think Veilguard is a solid entry in the franchise. I don’t think it’s as good as Inquisition or origins but it’s better than 2. Not that I blame anyone for liking 2 more or having it as their favourite but from an objective standpoint 2 is the least coherent in the series, due to rushed development. As for its wokeness? What a stupid criticism. Literally everything we see happening in Veilguard has been set up from the very beginning. Like this video says “dragon age has always been woke”

I genuinely do not understand how people are able to grift with BioWare, the studio that was openly progressive from its inception. Have they had issues with said representation? Hell yes, I always cite the gay romance in Mass Effect 3 as a concrete example of the traumatized gay trope. I played that game around the time i figured out i was gay when i was a teen and it made me feel gross seeing how that romance went. When even Angry fucking Joe back in the day could look at that romance and go "eeeeehhhh" you know you done fucked up. Despite their issues, theyve always attempted and Zevran in Origins is a great example of a well written potentially gay romance, that game also has some bad shit in it too but hey it was 2009 so ill give some leeway there. I havent played Veilguard yet, cant afford a $60 charge when rents gone up, but ill prolly pick it up when it goes on sale and I finish a full playthrough of the series again. Im not gonna fall for cherry picked bs. Granted what i saw was pretty bad compared to Krems' representation in Inquisiton, so i know they can do better when it comes to exploring trans issues, and I hope im proven wrong when i finally play because its gonna be really sad if I find Taash to be badly written. Krem was a nice character, I always liked talking to him in inquisition but at the end of the day, he's a side character with very little screen time. I want a good example of a trans companion in an rpg. The closest example I got was in Baldurs Gate Siege of Dragonspear and i cannot for the life of me remember that characters name and im pretty sure they only had like 4 lines of dialogue.

Sending a wee little comment for the algo. I feel at some point we'll have to utterly un-engage with this grifters, part of their powers is algorithmic pushing and part of it gets fuel by hate watch. I feel we need an alternative while also utterly ignore them, do our best to drown out their hate and starve them for views so that the grift is so utterly powerless we may be able to defeat it.

Assmon didnt say anything when inquisition came out and a lot of the same freaks were mad that a series created by a gay had gay stuff in it. I hope they know liara topped shepard multiple times

00:54 GINGER PRIME NOOOOOOOO

A really funny thing about this whole Veilguard backlash is that I remember when DA:I was getting ready to be released and the same types of people were basically complaining about the exact same things. Krem, a trans man, being in the game. Female love interests that weren't 'hot' enough. Exclusively gay characters (especially the complaints about not being able to romance Sera as a man). Vivienne being a prominent black woman with power in Orlais. A lot of complaints about Sera in general. It's the same old song and dance, and these same people have the audacity to pretend that they supported the increase in LGBTQ representation and overall a more progressive message way back in the day. They did not support it. They complained about it almost as much as they are now. Unfortunately they feel louder now, somehow.

Okay, i didn't finished the game but my main grudges is that ALL discourse around DATV actually harm any valid criticism about it, which (as an old Bioware fan) i have. So here's some of my thoughts after playing 15+ hours. NO SPOILERS. The game on it's core is everything i wanted from new Dragon Age: good amount of story, interactions with companions aren't just two short quests, the game has right amount of filler which serves as an optional addition and does not harm the main story. Combat is fun and engaging i end up trying different companions and their abilities instead of ending up with one team of three characters as i did in previous games. The locations are beautiful and fun to explore. All these thing DO make Veilguard a big improvement after the Inquisition, the game that by most part felt like a chore to finish. So on core side Bioware did everything right. However, Veilguard kinda sucks at the details. Last time when i played DAI my main character of a choice was a human. Because of this he (the inquisitor) had to gain trust of dalish elves in the camp to proceed the questline. It was logical because we all know that humans and elves have a ROUGH history in Thedas. Yet in DATV the camp of mostly dalish elves was extremely friendly and on board with my TEVINTER HUMAN MAGE to the point they were open to an idea of him interacting with ancient elven artifact. You know the person elves historically should trust THE LEAST. It broke my immersion very quickly. And i also have a lot of grudges that nearly all elves felt the same despite city elves, dalish elves and ancient elves being presented wery differently through the series. Not to mention... Most of them feel too human. Even ancient ones and it's disappointing. To break immersion even more: every character is absolutely calm and okay to fight "ancient elven gods" despite most people in Thedas are Andrastian and do not know/believe in elven gods. It's the equivalent to go to random stranger and say "Odin is escaped the all god prison and now Ragnarok is coming" and everyone will be "ah sure how do we fight him" instead of "wtf are you talking about". Voice acting and accents are so over the place i end up skipping some dialogues simply because it was painful to listen to. And this is a big shame since DA2 was the FIRST game when i legit noted how good all characters speak and how real voice acting feels. The dialogue... Well i have a mixed feelings about this one. Dragon Age always been corny and I don't get the critique of "marvel dialogue" since almost every media has it at some point and you can clip any quote out of context to make it feel a bit cringy. But also the dialogue in DATV feels repetitive. 100000 talk about "ancient artifacts" gets boring really quickly. Companions always tell you what happened which is annoying. Trans stuff? Don't like the usage of modern terminology, it's just dont feels authentic like Krem dialogue did in DAI. But that's about it. In conclusion: i love to play this game, there wasn't a single moment when i get bored. But so many small things and decisions about it also disappoint me. Maybe my opinion will change more far in the game. We shall see.

Imagine being triggered by the word "melanin" lmfao

So tired of people mistaking DA:O's progressivism with Veilguard's wokeness; the two are very different. One presents minorities as they are: ordinary people. The other tells you how to think and castigates you for deviating from acceptable opinions, authoritarian, in short.

Woke or not, and it is. The game is hot buns 🤢

Taash saying “does anyone like being a fucking woman” was the line for me… like pls, them, let me giggle and cook in pink femme

The difference between previous DA games and games like BG3 (which no one had problems with) is that they presented it (wokeness) well, it wasn't condescending, preachy or pandering. It was written well and integrated into the characters as a part of them. It was never their entire identity, it was just another facet of a much more complex character overall. You could also disagree with what those characters believed, you could choose to support them or choose not to. DA:V does none of this, it force feeds you a narrative and tells you if you don't accept it, you're a bad person.

I have played so many hours of veilgaurd. None of the claims they make are ever true. “Forced” themes are barely present and only offensive to those trained to hate.

Origins and 2 were not woke. You could "choose" to engage in same gender romance. Not have it forced down your throat in the story like inquisition with Iron Bull and Dorian having a relationship if you don't choose a romance with any of those 2.

It’s strange the biggest infighting argument is “it’s too heavy handed”. It just gives me “slippery slope” vibes any time someone says it.

Yesterday an acquaintance of mine started some ~small talk~ with "Dragon Age: Veilguard is failing because of the trans-stuff". I told him that I don't believe that argument, he dropped it and we talked about something else. So I got curios and found some videos that compared DA:O dialog with veilguard, and yeah there's a qualitiy drop. And the algorithm offered more of the same guy and then obviosly videos around the woke argument. Eventually found this one, and I'm glad I did. Good stuff

The problem is the writing. It’s just force fed and tasteless

Lol, "major reputable news sources" like IGN, eh? You mean news outlets whose reviews have long lost any speck of credibility because they are constantly getting caught in blatant lies and overinflated ratings. But sure, go ahead and call them credible. Luckily for us gamers, nobody reads that slop anymore aside from the corpo shills who write them. I bet you'd claim that SBI is the best thing to have happened to gaming ever, right? I really like how people like you just attack the people who offer legitimate criticism ad hominem, because otherwise you got nothing, no real point to make...

If the game had better writting it wouldn't recieve this backlash..the dialogue is abysmal..even tho the dark fantasy is gone, the character designs are too cartoonish and there are almost no choices...the writting was all that mattered

I used to be one of those "The curtains are just blue" people and really didn't like a lot of my high school English classes and the seemingly nonsensical analysis we were sometimes doing. What finally made it all click for me was later writing classes and better media literacy, which filled in a crucial missing link that was never discussed in the context of literature. That being that sometimes the author doesn't intend there to be meaning in something they wrote, but it ends up carrying more meaning anyway because of how it fits in to other things. And then if you combine that with death of the author and similar ideas you end up at a point where you can pull any meaning you want from a work, you just gotta pull evidence from the text to support it.

I will watch this video later (after i finish DATV) but here's a comment for the algoritm since i always love your work

Gaming, for decades, has been the domain of children and geeks. Typically, geeks are outcasts. What I don't understand is how one group of outcasts can turn around and treat another group of outcasts poorly.

It's even worse than sharing conservative news sources. People like the people you're describing share news sources that are clearly marked as satire as if it's fact.

The "anti-identity" people are only mad because they only want to see their identity in games.

And rude!

Well skill up's opinion is largely negative!

Skill up is a jerk

Dragon age was always woke!

Well you're right it's not new

Dragon age hasn't always been woke... what a stupid comment.

Thank you for putting this together, it's been a oasis in deluge of YT critism videos by those that have clearly never played previous dragon age games, or even mass effect games. Edit: & Thank you for tackling the subject of how the gaming community has been infiltrated by far right wannabes, pushing weird propaganda and values, and the noticeable lack of push back from the game community.

I've got the first two Dragon Age games from a Steam sale for super cheap at some point but I'm not sure if I'll ever get around to them. There's too many games to play and not enough time. Maybe Veilguard is a decent entry point?

I watched a couple of your videos before this one and I have never disagreed with a person on so many topics before. I wish your channel the best tho. I ain't gonna hate on the grind. Respecc. It's all love, baby. ✌️ ❤️

This was an interesting video to watch as someone who hasn't been following the Veilguard discourse prior to launch. Your criticism of Skill Up's HR comment is valid that you think that it's a comment that Skill Up should have put more thought into if he was going to be vague on what he was critiquing (either because of his spoiler agreements as part of is review copy or of his own choice) but I don't understand why you bring up Ralph's identify into the argument. Ralph's identity is irrelevant to your criticism of the HR comment and that section is the lowest point of the video. As someone who has never seen any of your content prior to this and was recommended this video from F.D Signifier's community post, that gave me the impression that you wanted to be harsher on Ralph for that comment but because you couldn't because you weren't sure if he was cis het. Does that mean the HR comment wouldn't have been weaponized the way it was if Ralph is non-cis het? I don't recall anything about identity of the characters bring brought up around the comment or at all in the review. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see this connection you're trying to make with the HR comment and identity.

I genuinely hate that skillup’s review is being pointed to and parroted by chuds on the internet

This video series has been interesting to stumble upon, doing a deep dive into something I broadly understood to be true after some of my opinions shifted around a few years back. The segment around 18:00 about the Holdo Maneuver feels incorrect tho. I know my comment about it, and a lot of the ones I saw, were asking why it wasn't used everywhere. Which is a legitimate question that the film did not (as memory serves, been a minute) end up answering. Like yes, there's probably a reason (saw something that said the shields block this sort of attack but they had the shields down for specific plot reasons in this instance which is why it worked, dunno if that's canon tho) but it wasn't clear what the reason was. Some of those comments were likely rhetorical to boost the perceived legitimacy of the criticism, but I remember being genuinely curious why it wasn't more common. As to the series in general, several points you've covered are things I would consider valid criticisms/questions. However, this video is where it clicked that while you can question why certain things are being done within the movie, and that's a totally fair thing to do, the sheer amount of lambasting this movie received reminds me an awful lot of the "historical accuracy" crowd when a video game set at some point in history lets women do important things. Where yes, sometimes there's a valid point there, but everyone is suspiciously quiet when other instances of the same thing occur in something else. Like everyone questions the bombs from the bomber scene, but no one questions how the plasma torpedoes work.

No one will prob give a damn about what I say here since everyone is trapped in their own brainwashed Eco chamber but whatever. Yes, BioWare has had "woke" elements in its history, but it was not a part of woke culture. There is nothing wrong with having gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans elements in a game. The problem is the need that woke culture his to shove it down our throats. You can't make an established fantasy game set in what would be preindustrial times and add woke terminology and modern-day sayings to the franchise that never existed before. You shouldn't add things like top surgery scars to a world without modern medicine. No one is talking about NORMAL battle scars... Things like this are immersion breaking and come off as propaganda and nothing more. There are literal actual ways to change your gender in this world and it could have been handled with in the lore. Not all these elements are bad I admit. When you look in the mirror to decide you are trans, that is handled well. You could ignore that if you are not interested. The moment you are lectured about misgendering, however, not only has modern terminology but comes off completely preachy and unnatural. Being forced to also go along with Taash transition is also forced. You have no ability to disagree or distant yourself from the storyline. You literally can't disagree with anything in this game, I will get to that later. BG3 added all these elements but they did it in a way that could be ignored. When Asterion comes on to you, if you decline the matter is never brought up again. The man is extremely flamboyant, and he is everyone's favorite character, even us normies. The culture war is not about we are trans vs we hate trans. It is literally we are trans vs omg shut up already we know. The game is also extremely generic because of how safe it is. The HR is in the room and me saying you have no choices is because you literally don't. Every dialog decision in this game is nice and agreeable. You literally can't be a bad guy or disagree about anything. There is no darkness or drama. Even when Davras friend and companion dies it is never even talked about. He has absolutely no remorse over what just happened. Literally lifeless dialog. All of the companion dialog is just instructive and hand holding. You are given the illusion of choice in this game, but it is a lie. Every part of this games story is set in stone. All this safeness makes the game extremely boring and generic. They were so afraid to offend anyone they even removed Solas as the villain so not to upset the Solas stans. I miss PC culture. I miss when the culture war was about bringing people together. Today's woke culture war is either you are with us or against us. There is no in-between. You are either woke or a nazi. It forces everyone into groups. That is why adding wokeness to media today comes off as nothing more than propaganda. This leaves all of us normies exhausted and tired of it. You can call me a nazi or racist, I honestly don't care anymore. It is used so often now it is losing any meaning at all. Life sucks for everyone, even white people. People want to escape into media and when media uses modern terms that should never exist in previously established media where it never existed before, it brings you back to the real world and it ruins any escapism.

They're not tourists - as you said, tourists we should encourage. Tourists are there to see the sights, to join in the culture, even if they cannot get a very meaningful understanding of it in the short time they're there. Yes, they don't know anything about it and are visiting for the first time. But they're not interested in what is already there, they intend to scorch the land, use it for their own needs, and then leave nothing but wasteland behind. They're *colonisers*.

Skill Up does buy into the right wing rhetoric. I watched his Saints Row 2022 review and all his complaints were the same as the anti-woke crowd.

How can someone like Asmongold know so little yet talk to much for hours in a stream about a topic

Thanks you for this well structured and layed out video, while it might not be the biggest hit because it dos not fan the flames of rage like everything else on the Internet it helped me alot. I myself, as someone that used games as a save haven for years, while not beeing part of a minority struggelt with the things you describe here. At some point i was very well on the train of going fully to the extrem right because these appeals to emotions worked on me. Lucky for me i have few friends that helped pull me back, and while i had a understanding whats happing, your video rly helped me to put into words and put reason to a vague understanding that can be used. The last 5 min of the video where the most important for me and hepled me to ajust my perspektiv on whats happing and form a even clearer picture. i rarly comment on things, but since your video helped me so mutch i feld i wanted to leave one here.

So i say this as a fan of all of the DA games that i just think The dialogue options were week. Even if I disagree with a character, it seems like that disagreement is smaller than what it should be. Everyone is just to nice especially compared to something like Mass effect KOTOR or even Jade empire. With saying that i do understand that we have played as a different character in each game so they should feel different. Also a thing that I feel a LOT of people are missing that this in game around what 25 years later since DAO and a LOT has changed societally new things are more acceptable compared to before and so on and so on. But i will say the scene that everyone is talking about really did come across as a PBS Middle school PSA not ao much preachy, more roll my eyes. Again the dialogue writing is just not great. Will i finish the game? Yes will I play it again? Yes. But am I going to put as many hours into it like i did DAO or DAI no I most definitely won't. As a blavk man im all for More diversity including different perspectives in games. Just don't be lazy about it. I would have thought it would have been a lot more cool if Krem from DAI would have been in the game as a companion and we learned more about him.

I’m not even a big DA fan (only played inquisition and veilguard) and I’ve known this, I do think it was definitely done more tastefully in the previous entry though, in this one it feels more like they’re lecturing you on it; which does kinda suck.

It isn't anymore. Woke would have meant having the stones to tackle brutal subject matters, to take people out of their comfort zones by showing them something dark and terrifying hence why the LGBT loves horror so much. Veilguard is trying to be hugboxy, dispensing with the dark elements despite the premise being perfect for it.

The frustrating part of this conservative backlash is that as always, I feel like they're actually almost onto something with their complains, but just reach really bizarre and way-offbase conclusions. I do think there's something up with how a lot of games are writing their characters. I watched my housemate play the intro or Veilgard and the writing and dialoge felt super clunky. The intro has the same issue as the last Mass Effect where nothing feels emotionally real and grounded, and instead feels like a TTRPG session with friends. But maybe it recovers. SkillUp seemed to be onto something, everyone is too nice in these games. That, or it doesnt feel like the writing doesn't have the confidence to go for more emotionally complicated characters. I think that's a Bioware issue though, because games like BG3 and Disco Elysium DO NOT have this problem at sll imo. But all that's entirely separate from the increased inclusivity of these games. And it's also kinda revealing that these people correlate "being nice to people" with some kind of entropic cultural rot. The real issue here is just modern writing tropes being correlated with some kind of agenda. People are correctly identifying the tropes they dislike but then running in the wrong fucking direction. The problem is the same as always: people getting valid feelings on things that aren't working in their art and not quite figuring out why, but running with it anyway and continuously doubling down until Oops All Bigotry! Seriously, top surgery scars in a character select is so fucking cool. I'm so happy for my trans bros. <3

I really can’t get around the fact that Veilguard is badly written and that is a deadly flaw for a BioWare game. You could forgive a first entry for the amount of badly written exposition, but not the fourth entry. For example, a mage explaining to a dwarf that they cannot do magic is ridiculous in the setting, because every damn dwarf would know that. This exact principle comes up again and again, of one character explaining something to another that everybody in the setting knows. Anyway, the anti-woke stuff is laughable. Dragon Age always has been woke and has had a woke fanbase. I’m so far in agreement with Skill-Up in terms of the tone of the game, but I want to give it a fair shake until the end. The blighted village in the beginning of the game was dark, but it hasn’t raised itself to DAO levels of dark yet.

Dragon Age was not woke

if only we knew then the sort of pipeline giving money to the let gays marry crowd would lead to 💀