Dragon Age™: The Veilguard

95% vom LGBTQ mist kann man skippen. Ansonsten hatte es alles was ich von einem Fantasy Rollenspiel erwarte. Für 18 Euro, 100 Stunden spaß ohne frust, klare empfehlung.

It's fine. Seriously. There's been a lot of ink spilled about whether this is a "good" game, but it's tough to disentangle the following issues that I think are often conflated when they should be clearly distinguished: - Is it a good or adequate followup to previous Dragon Age games? - Is the dialogue well-written/are the characters compelling? - Is it fun to play? If you're concerned with whether this deserves the title Dragon Age, then I don't know what to tell you. I would prefer to take a game on its own terms; I'm not overly concerned with how well this meshes with or lives up to the standards set by the prior three games in the series. It's not as if they were all very similar games anyway, and they've clearly grown less CRPG-like over time. Only you can answer the question as to whether this game's pivot to RPG-lite action gameplay and its shifts to some of the lore are important factors to consider. They're not to me, and they won't be to those who haven't played -- or weren't superfans of -- those prior titles. Is the dialogue well-written and are the characters compelling? It's tough to talk about this without acknowledging that some of the pushback to Veilguard's writing concerns how "woke" it is. Frankly if something being woke offends you then from my perspective you can eat a bag of d*cks. But I will admit that one subplot in particular can feel a bit awkwardly-written, as if the writers were trying to make a socially positive point without being careful about embedding it into the setting or the overarching plot's sense of urgency. For the most part, though, the writing is fine and the characters are fun, if a little one-note. The generally lighthearted tone may turn some people off. But it's nothing out of the ordinary for a big goofy AAA action game. Most important to me: is it fun to play? Yeah, I'd say that it is. It's a third-person RPG-lite action game, with some allowances for tailoring your build to a specific playstyle. I'd say 75% of the game is combat; 15% of the game involves solving environmental puzzles to find loot; and 10% is upgrading equipment and chatting with companions. Each of these systems function reasonably well. If the combat gels with you you'll have a good time, and I think it's adequate for the most part. It's not perfect, though. Enemy variety is fairly low. This is especially true for bosses; there are just a couple different boss movesets and they'll be repeated over and over again. There are several dragon fights in the game, the biggest set-piece fights by a good margin, but disappointingly they're all basically the same. Your build will also come online fairly early, with bonuses from later levels being minimal. This all means that the game overstays its welcome. If you do most of the side content you could easily spend over sixty hours in the game -- the low enemy variety and combat tactics will have become stale hours before you get to the end. It doesn't help that the game is quite easy, so after your initial rampup there won't be much of a challenge to keep you on your toes. I'd recommend upping the difficulty, especially once you've hit level 20 or so. That said, the last few hours were great. Definitely an exciting climax to the game which ties everything together really nicely. If it had come after thirty hours rather than sixty I'd probably rate this game as a 9/10 rather than maybe a 6.5 or 7/10. I do think it's kind of a bummer that [spoiler]there are some cool endgame consequences you'll miss if you did all of the side content[/spoiler], but that's a minor quibble. All in all, I stand by my assessment: this game is fine. It's not game-of-the-decade it-changed-my-life-and-made-me-cry put-it-in-the-hall-of-fame good. But if goofy, turn-your-brain-off action fun is your thing, and you're not too uptight about this being a [i]Dragon Age[/i] game, then I recommend it. Oh, I should note performance. On my rig it was OK, but if I wanted high frame rates at 4K with ray tracing, I had to turn down a couple settings slightly and turn DLSS to balanced. If you turn off ray tracing, which wasn't that transformative anyway, you could probably do max settings and DLSS quality at 4K without much issue on something equivalent to my rig. Kind of a mixed bag performance-wise but we live in an era of Unreal Engine 5 and lego games that want you to use frame gen at 15fps -- Veilguard is top-tier just by comparison. I did run into an issue where my fans were ramping up to max constantly while playing the game, irritating both me and anyone else in the room with me. This appears to be an issue where the game boosts the CPU way more aggressively than it needs to. I turned off boosting while playing at minimal performance loss, though depending on how CPU limited you are the performance loss might be more substantial. If this is an issue you run into just google how to change the setting, as Windows doesn't make it visible by default.