Although I had been greatly involved with Origins & Inquisition, and even played through II multiple times despite its flaws, for some reason I had no interest in Veilguard. Didn’t even know it existed until fairly long after its release.
Finally got around to playing it earlier today and have just gotten past what appears to be the prologue/tutorial:
Gameplay feels like a middle-ground between Mass Effect II and Inquisition, which I consider a step backward. I suspect they moved away from the open-worldish nature of the latter because a corridor-shooter framework better supports the tighter narrative (assuming, that is, they simply didn’t lack the necessary funds/time). Plot developments and dialog meanwhile appear to be on par with Andromeda (i.e. bad) while the character design is atrocious.
The characters look like nothing found in any of the earlier ME or DA games. My best guess as to how this abomination came about is that someone looked at Inquisition and said to themselves: “Sera is clearly the best character here, and the only reason she had a divisive reception’s because the art style wasn’t goofy/cartoonish enough”.
Decided to play as a mage and was immediately confronted by the game’s assumption that I was a fighter; both the opening bar fight sequence and all your party members up to the point of reaching the Crossroads being rogues and mages seem to support this. Which is odd but, at least on normal difficulty, not a big issue. The strange structure of the leveling web is a larger one. Why would I have to learn Wall of Fire or Chain Lightning if I want to become a Spellblade? Why is the Spellblade-ish counterattack ability placed behind the former? Because both are offensive defensive abilities maybe? Bizarre.
A good chunk of the upgrade placement, on the lower half of the web anyway, is similarly head-scratching. Like why is the one that gives a bonus against enemies suffering from Necrosis on the complete opposite side of the web from the Death Caller specialty? It’s almost as if they wanted to make leveling-up a puzzle in and of itself… which doesn’t really work unless there’s a clear logic to how everything’s arrayed. Which there does not seem to be. Looking up the max level shows an apparent endgame pool of 65 points, so perhaps it’s structured like this solely to force you to use them up crisscrossing it.
Guess we’ll see how things develop.
