Writing this out in somewhat long form for the sake of capturing the details, not sure if we'll even cover this by the time we return to the show in January, but it is the story of the now.
So what even is this?
Dragon Age is having its first new game in the franchise in 10 years, made by EA BioWare. Whose last two games were total flops like Anthem, and Mass Effect Andromeda. If you ask me, none of the Dragon Age games were that special in the first place, but like Mass Effect - Dragon Age has a pretty big fanbase.
The target audience of Dragon Age is very similar to Baldur's Gate. It's mostly ""safe-horny"" gooners that like fantasy, and want to feel superior about it.
Pre-release drama
There was some kind of beta/demo for Veilguard that people got to play, but as far as we know right now, all content creators that were critical of what they had played were denied early review codes. It's worth noting some creators that were positive were also denied codes, but there wasn't a single critical voice that got a code. However this did not stop some reviewers, such as SkillUp, from giving a negative review. This has led to people (myself included) to speculate that EA is being selective on purpose such that they have the strongest possible opening weekend for sales, as the only bad reviews they intended to receive would be after the game is launched.
One such creator in question:
Source
But what is in the game would make EA worry about bad reviews?
The Writing
The writing is really bad. We're seeing reviews and posts online from fans of the franchise that this is the weakest the writing has been, and that Inquisition, Origins, 2, the other dragon age games all had it better. To complicate matters further there is some very forced gender & leftist talking points in the dialogue that is immersion breaking. Defenders of the game (either paid or somehow genuine) will point this out and deflect criticism of the writing as people being mad at the inclusion of these ideas.
It gets worse however, as one creator - MrMattyPlays had footage of the game leak that was covered by the review embargo. We know it's his footage because we know what his character looks like. This would normally be a nothingburger but the person posting the leaks had 'aGoyThatRemains' as their twitter handle so hordes of people came after Matty for an explanation. He posted a wall of text apology where he alleges one of his editors was the leak and he has no idea who owns that account. You can read his wall of text here:
The Character Editor
To put it bluntly, the character creator is lacking. Seems extra care and detail was put in for things like vertiligo, and mastectomy scars, however the body proportion sliders don't allow you to have large chests, hips, or even fat. Everybody is basically the same shape. Bloggers giving high praise to the game have been celebrating this editor for the surgery scars, but seem to have forgotten that women with large chests exist? It's a net loss of representation.
Example:
Source
Pre-Launch Conclusion
This is super suspicious. EA seems to be aware that the writing is bad, and that it was controversial to include so much pandering but decided to do whatever they could to manipulate the launch perception of the game, which all came undone with a couple of leaks showing the parts of the game the reviewers weren't allowed to show.
What is happening now?
Grummz is straight up telling lies
This Grummz dude has been posting about Veilguard nonstop but the first big viral post he made was sharing a very obviously fake NDA contract, you can even see the edit cursor in the top left!
Source
He was called out for this by a ton of people, even including people that are either neutral to him or ignore him. Huge embarrassment
Asmongold is back on twitch, and is streaming this
He doesn't like it. Are you surprised? His haters are posting short clips out of context to make him look bad again, one such example is when he clicked on the gender identity options and didn't click the back button. He was surprised that there were three options in that menu that all result in becoming trans, but when they cut the clip off where they did it made it sound like he thinks he was forced. He did click one of the options anyway but honestly he's not that stupid, he could have clicked the back button. Don't fall for this.
Additionally, it seems the reddit mods for /r/dragonage have used some kind of tool to proactively ban from their subreddit anybody who has ever posted on /r/asmongold. I want to be outraged by this but I just can't sympathize with redditors. They reap what they sow.
Opening Weekend Numbers
At the time of writing, it's Friday night of opening weekend for Dragon Age: Veilguard. To put this in perspective, most Americans are off work, out of school, and got paid. So while the game did come out on a Thursday, there should be the most people playing TONIGHT. Tomorrow and Sunday may have similar numbers but we don't expect to see some kind of huge spike in numbers. The people who were committed to buying the game have likely done so by now. So we should look at those numbers.
Annoyingly, Grummz has already compared this launch to the current ongoing beta for the new Monster Hunter, which has way more people. However that beta is free. I don't even want to post that. Instead it's only fair to compare Veilguard to Baldur's Gate 3. I have my reasons:
- Same target audience: "safe-horny" gooners
- Same genre: high fantasy (with sex)
- Both were big, established franchises who haven't seen a new entry in a long time
- BG3 only came out in August of 2023, not that long ago.
Got some bad news for Veilguard, these numbers don't even come close to BG3. In fact, there's almost as many people playing BG3 RIGHT NOW than there are playing Veilguard on this opening weekend.
Veilguard
BG3
BG3 had almost 900K players when it launched in August. Let's take a closer look at BG3's opening weekend:
On opening weekend, the big peak was actually that Sunday, with the previous days at half the number in the 400thousands range. So there's a couple more days for Veilguard to go find 700K more gamers to add to its audience.
I'm not much of a betting man, but I would not bet on this.
Consider also the money EA was likely to spend on this production compared to what Larian did with BG3. It most likely cost more money to pay for Veilguard. So one can only speculate that their ROI is in the dump. Time will tell. These numbers look pretty dire.
While we're looking at numbers let's pull up some other hits from this year just to make sure we're not biased for BG3 considering it was 2023's game of the year according to many.
Wukong:
Final Fantasy:
COD (this is some kind of launcher that covers multiple games, and black ops 6 JUST came out) (does not include battle.net players (the majority)
Metaphor:
Sparking Zero:
COD and Sparking Zero have multiplayer so their concurrent player numbers should skew in their favor, but FF16 is a year-late PC port of a console game, and Metaphor is effectively a AA budget game. I question if EA made much money on this so far.
Let's use this thread to expand upon any new happenings that are dragon age veilguard related
