Dragon Age: The Veilguard arrived with pretty solid critic scores, racking up an 84 on Metacritic, translating into what appear to be pretty solid sales, at the very least, putting up the highest playercount EA or BioWare has seen on Steam, with seemingly good console performance as well.
But after the critic reviews come in, user scores go live, and it was exceptionally easy to predict how they were going to split between players who had played the game, and ones that likely hadn’t. See if you can spot the difference.
- Steam – 77% “Mostly Positive” scores
- PlayStation – 4.45/5 stars
- Xbox – 4/5 stars
- Metacritic – 3.4/10
You can guess which three platforms there require you to own the game to rate it, and which one does not.
The game has no DRM, it’s entirely possible that a significant portion of those players gave it a go and were disappointed and decided not to spend the money.
Personally, the game feels like a Josh Whedon film written by a team that prefers to proselytise instead of trying to capture the player in Thedas. It’s a constant barrage of immersion breaking dialogue from the get go. The combat has been dumbed down to such level that It should be advertised as an action adventure game and not an RPG. At the end of the day, the game ostensibly suffers from Bioware’s/EA choice to lay off talent like Mary Kirby and hire cheap, fresh out of college writers of dubious competence who were further mismanaged due to consistent lay offs. This was compounded by the reluctance of Connie to actually have a vision for the game.
It’s saddening because there was a small glimpse of brilliance in the final moments of the game but by that point it had already become a chore to finish it.
As a side note, my favourite game of the last few years is TLOU2. Sometimes the user reviews coalesce with one’s views, sometimes they don’t. Trying to paint tens of thousands of people with a broad stroke rather than at least listening to what they say is unfair. In this case it feels like the low user scores in DAV are warranted, since the game has significantly departed from the expectations of fans of the series. Conversely, in TLOU2, the users were mourning the loss of their favourite character and lashed out.