I'm not an activist, but I do care about good games. I write this for posterity as I saw this coming from the first game play trailer. Why didn't you? Why didn't you say something? Why didn't see these obvious faults and issues, Why was no one talking about them? Why did people only focus on the polarizing and divisive topics that make up less than 5% of the total gameplay experience?
What I've learned is that most people who consider themselves an activist are actually engagement and content addicts who spend more time on platforms like X and Discord, waging wars against a fictional bigot bogeyman, than they will ever do playing the games. It's all just a part of a feedback loop to satisfy their dopamine needs. They don't care about the issues or the games, they use them as a means to an end. Many online communities are polluted with these terminally online, parasitic individuals who spend more time online as fake personas around other fake personas than they do in the real world with real people. They live in a fake online world that is their reality. They represent the opposite of all the ideals they attack you with.
This creates an ivory tower echo chamber that is divisive, exclusive and intolerant, by design.
A pseudo social world of fake personas who spread themselves across all platforms and communities at the same time, curating behaviour to get the most rewarding feedback loop. People in the skinsuit of the issues they are weaponizing, who lack any depth or sense of real human connection. It's why these social platforms are somehow the most engaging yet lonely places to be.
The more critical, rational and meaningful you try to be the more these platforms resist you because that will dismantle the manufactured narrative and not promote it. Yet you can go in their waving a pitchfork, yelling about the trending issue and suddenly you're rewarded through likes and engagement. Yet it's all an illusion and meaningless.
Official Reddit's and Discord's often become anti-critical thinking spaces because of this, manufactured and curated to farm engagement for all forms of media. It's all fake. The people, the issues, and the drama are all manufactured to keep you engaged and coming back for more. This machinery of manufactured engagement is designed for revenue generation. They don't care about the issues. you or the games. You cannot have a sincere or genuine conversation in these spaces as they are designed to frustrate the pursuit of truth.
If you want to talk about DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and woke topics as primary talking points, the cause of all your problems, you likely have a superficial understanding of the issues and are probably part of the problem, not the solution. You are not a bigot, you are just uniformed and have no sense of how the world actually works, a confidently wrong opinion on matters you don't understand. You won't change the world by spamming on Twitter, Reddit, or Discord. These waves of outrage are manufactured to suit an agenda, and you just ride them for cheap thrills. You have fake opinions about fake issues and are being farmed for content so others can make money via YouTube, Twitch, and ad revenue.
Truly woke people are not addicts whose attention and thinking are directed and dictated by whatever TikTok, Reddit, or Facebook tells them. They are not on Twitter. They hate these platforms for what they represent. They are not raging about identity politics on social media or buying games from EA.
This is what woke really means: https://iea.org.uk/on-woke-anti-capitalism/
Identity politics has not “replaced” the traditional Marxist focus on social class. It complements it. In the woke view of the world, the capitalist ruling class deliberately creates divisions among the working class, along ethnic, religious, gender, and other lines, because a divided working class will not revolt. From this perspective, “wokery” is not a substitute for class struggle, but an indispensable element of it. Woke progressives do not see themselves as engaged in a dozen unrelated struggles against racism, transphobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, homophobia, etc. They believe that they are engaged in one single struggle against all of those, in which capitalism is the final enemy.
- V from V for Vendetta is woke.
- Quellcrist Falconer from Altered Carbon is woke.
A truly woke person is an empathetic and compassionate human being who has detached themselves from an oppressing system of consumerism and addiction and has learned to resist it's influence and to see the world for what it is. They are a rebel archetype who fights oppression and injustice for a better world for all.
"They" are not woke, these games are not "woke", and you certainly are no rebel or activist. You play games 60 hours a week and live on Discord and TikTok. Wake up.
You're the shock troopers in this story who think you're good guys.
You can go to Youtube, Reddit, Discord and all the rest and find everybody talking about the problems with no desire or intention to find solutions for the problems because they don't want a solution. Consumers are there for the drama and will buy and play any game anyway because they are addicts and have no impulse control, who pre-order Ultimate editions of games and then cry when it's bad. No sympathy for you, it was a personal choice and no one made you do it. Content creators and media will make click bait headlines and thumbnails to work the algorithms and stoke the flames to farm engagement. Even outright manufacture issues, like the fake issue of the Ghost of Yotei voice actor. This is makes more money than being moderate and responsible.
If we ignore all the curated drama that focuses on symptoms if a problem we can focus on the underlying problems.
- This game is a PS4 game that was supposed to released in 2019-2020 being sold as a AAA PS5 game in 2024 for £50 - £90 subject to platform.
- It was based on the Anthem base game code base in 2015 via the frostbite 3 engine. It has to have been updated to 3.5 or newer due to the PC features DA:The Veilguard has.
- It has a huge list of technical issues in the game-play, world design and environment. Bad physics, game play, AI, level and environment designs.
- A console first game. Based on Anthem so controller first game-play.
- EA made a decision to make Frostbite the main game engine used across all studios they controlled, after they acquired DICE and the Battlefield IP. The One Engine strategy that it has not abandoned
- It was claimed Anthem was forced to use frostbite when they started development of the game in 2012 even though Dragon Age: Inquisition used frostbite 3 already.
- They were forced as part of the one engine policy but they knew this was a thing before they started working ion the game.
- There was clearly a lack of engineering skill and technical understanding of the game engine. Bioware always demonstrated this weakness.
So Anthem was started using Frostbite 3 in 2012 and was released in 2019.
If this game was 7 years in the making for a live service game how was Dragon Age (TBA) going to be released on 2019/2020 on PS4 as well?
It's simple when you understand EA's one engine strategy: A shared code base from the Frostbite 3 game engine assets. So Dragon Age was started in 2015 when the team was freed up from Dragon Age Inquisition but they didn't start from scratch.They always planned to alongside the Anthem development with Frostbite 3.
Two games developed in tandem from one base game code and asset repository to speed up development of two AAA games. Are you starting to understand what happened now?
So in 2015 Bioware forked the base Anthem game, two years into Anthem's development and start working on what was later referred to as "Anthem with Dragons". Possibly not in the sense it was a full on live service game but that it was being developed in tandem with Anthem and sharing code, ideas, resources and the base game. The relation to the code base is hiding in plain sight, not even a secret: https://www.pcgamesn.com/dragon-age-4/dragon-age-4-anthem
For example, Dragon Age 4 is being built on top of Anthem’s code base.
So it when it was called "Anthem with Dragons" it was a snide internal reference to internal Bioware staff frustration and annoyance at the reality of the choices being made, by EA and Bioware leadership - https://kotaku.com/the-past-and-present-of-dragon-age-4-1833913351
Rumor among BioWare circles for the past year has been that Morrison is “Anthem with dragons”—a snarky label conveyed to me by several people—
The point people are missing here is you can google dragon age 4 based on anthem code and get loads of results from 2019 saying that Dragon Age 4 is reusing the Anthem code base. That was just a PR stunt. It already was, from 2015. That's the point. It was always the plan to share a code base with Anthem and develop the games in tandem.
In 2019 when Anthem was a phenomenal failure and cancelled in February 24, 2021 it threw Bioware into disarray and the idea to deliver the PS4 Dragon Age game was shelved. The pandemic probably didn't help at this point, as we going from early 2021 to now but lets take a minute to think about what just happened.
- Anthem was released in 22 February 2019, and was clearly an unfinished game. This means that the development strategy had failed. So it means that it failed for both games and both games were behind schedule.
- Anthem must have pulled on the Dragon Age resources to save the game, causing Dragon Age to stop being developed to the timeline. When Anthem is cancelled on February 24, 2021 you now have a major problem.
- All the resources that went into Anthem and away from Dragon Age have left you with one failed game and a second massively behind schedule, unfinished game.
- Now we are at February 24, 2021, behind schedule and unfinished and well into a pandemic that caused huge logistic issues. A major factor of further delay.
Note
Why was the pandemic a specific problem for game development? Game assets are huge. Fine when everyone is in the same building but when people were forced to work from home/remotely they had massive logistical and security issues with uploading and downloading game assets. They figured it out solutions quickly but it took time. A factor of the delay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_on_the_video_game_industry
So now they act like they have started a new game using Anthem code, which is lie. They were already doing this from 2015. They are redirecting personnel back to Dragon Age and having to re-brand away from the Anthem live service.
In June 2022 Dreadwolf is announced. Do some quick maths here.
- Anthem Released 22 February 2019
- Resources shifted to save Anthem, away from Dragon Age
- One year later Anthem is 2.0 is cancelled, February 24, 2021, a year into a pandemic. ( all future development was ceased in February 2021. )
- 2021 onwards, Resources are reallocated to Dragon Age
- In February 2022 Bioware Austin under new leadership, Corinne Busch took leadership control of the project.
- One and and four months later, June 2022, Dreadwolf is announced. They are back to where they should have been in 2021, accounting for the factor of delay the pandemic presented.
- Lot of core Bioware staff have left and no longer work at Bioware as well as other layoffs and An Update on the State of BioWare
So now we have a studio without the talent, numbers, experience and leadership to finish this game. The PS4 game that should have been released circa 2020/2021 is now unfinished in 2022 but the core base game is there.
Bioware Austin under new leadership takes the base Anthem rip of game that is probably somewhere between 60-80% finished and started working on it. They clearly have a weak talent pool to draw from and it appears to become a vanity project. The problem here is the underlying game is technically poor. Lots of engine issues, environment and effects issues.
All they seem to have done is re brand the game, give it a pink hue and just work with whatever was given to them. Like me taking a used 2010 car and spraying it pink. putting pink seat covers on and saying it's a great car. Pointless cosmetic things that don't improve the actual game. Put a pink seat cover of a Mclaren and it's still an amazing car with a stupid seat cover. This is a bad game with a bad re-brand.
A two year development process of entirely superficial and pointless changes to a bad underlying product because they don;t have the engineering talent to fix the engine issues.
This is why all the woke and identity politics stuff is irrelevant. It's not the reason the game will be bad. The reason it will be bad is that it is a unfinished 2020 PS4 game that has been badly re-branded as a modern themed progressive game.
A polished turd. A mediocre 5/10 PS5 game of 2020 that is being sold to you as a AAA PS5 game. This is not what the game is. It's a bad version of Anthem.
- The game play is atrocious. A bad version of Anthem
- Very poor game play and UI design that will frustrate the player.
- Very noisy visuals that are tiring and confusing.
- Poor writing and unlikable characters. Tropes and childish humour.
- Very strange design choices for races and enemies.
- Bad AI in combat. They are dumb.
- Bad companion system and combat wheel. Pause spam will get boring after 5 minutes.
- NO Quality assurance (QA) or play testing. Or a lack of change from reported issues.
- You can see a huge range of technical and game play issues from the game play trailers.
Just some video examples
dumb ai / roll spam - pointless combat interactions / pause spam
visual effect noise / no environmental interactions / overlay
You are getting a bad, unfinished Anthem rip off by a low talent developers.
A game made by people who don't play game for people who don't buy games.
Just watch any Anthem game play videos and you can clearly see how they share game play mechanics and why Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a hero action game instead or a party based RPG.
The environment, the combat, the health bars, the AI, the effects.
For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUlBvhoCvaE
Anthem telegraphing https://youtu.be/gzroGK7xXnY?feature=shared&t=26
Dragon Age: The Veilguard telegraphing https://youtu.be/xGMMK2I30-o?feature=shared&t=733
