This is why Veilguard is receiving so much hate

[ThespianMask]

(It's a half-rant, half-opinion piece)

Think about it. Dragon Age has ALWAYS had gay romance options. Zevran and Leliana in Origins. Everyone except Sebastian in DA2 are bi. Inquisition had Dorian for men, Sera for Women, and Iron Bull for both.

The "wokeness" of the DAV is not its main issue. The game is just an unfortunate victim of the times. If you REALLY think about it, DAV is not any more or less strong about its "wokeness" than it was before.

The first instance of hate I saw thrown against DA was about Krem in Inquisition. People were talking about how the game proselytizes about how Krem is a man, and that the Qun is accepting of it according to Iron Bull (which is odd, because the Qun don't have the concept of personal identity IIRC. Yes, I'm aware is not an adherent of the Qun.). Many anti-"woke" people felt that the game was talking down to them, as if treating the player as ignorant, and were forcing the issue.

I believe DAV is just the unfortunate victim of the following:

1. Bad Reputation - EA has a track record for being greedy, and BioWare has shown subpar output with Andromeda and Anthem. After those two blunders, who's going to pre-order a BioWare game?

2. The Culture War - We see it in general media news all the time. One side says "representation is good for everyone" while the other side says "Yeah, but you're actively warping the things we like to shoehorn it in." I can think of Star Wars, and The Witcher as very mainstream examples of the two sides clashing.

3. The Times - There's been a large pushback against "wokeness" in video games, particularly because one side is seemingly insistent on pushing it hard, whereas the other side wants to be left alone.

How do those three factors come together? Because of the rise of news regarding the dreaded ESG/DEI/SBI influence on games seemingly pushing for diversity first, quality second, many people are angry that DAV seemingly is leaning on the "woke" side (which I mentioned already. DA's always been that way).

Then, they point to the game director. One look at them and people are like "Oh no. This game is gonna bomb because it's diversity first, quality second." Unfortunately, it's a "judging a book by its cover" moment. It happens.

Let's bring it back to point 2: The Culture War.

Did general gaming populace care this about the romances I mentioned earlier in the earlier DA games? What about Mass Effect? Did people care that in ME3, you could get with Cortez or Kaidan as MShep, or Traynor or Kelly as FShep? What about FShep and Liara in ME1? There was no outrage. People didn't really care all that hard.

Now suddenly, the well-known "wokeness" of BioWare is a problem? Why? Because of trans top surgery scars and pronouns? No no no. That's a very surface level understanding of the hate it's getting.

Next, point 3: The Times.

Look at what the anti-"woke" people's number 1 enemy is right now. It's not the concept "wokeness". It's the fact that it's being pushed hard by people they believe have warped franchises they like in the name of DEI (and if you're really wanting to tinfoil it up, you could attribute it to being an ESG Score pump for that investor cash-money).

Let's set the record straight. Do the anti-"woke" crowd want DAV to fail directly because of the trans rep and top surgery scars? No, that's not why they're clamoring for it to fail or bomb. They want it to fail because they want to punish the people they think is responsible for destroying franchises they like.

"Maybe if DAV fails, more studios will stop working with SBI, and therefore, the franchises I like can stay the way I like them."

Ok, so how does point 1 play into all this? That's the simplest one. "Look! Game is woke garbage and pre-orders are low because of it!" Buddy, that's not why pre-orders are low. It's low because of what BioWare did with Andromeda and Anthem. They don't currently have a good track record, and potential customers are well within their right to wait and see before buying in.

[ThespianMask]

Originally posted by Razzalan:

The Character Creation in Veilguard actually looks pretty good. If there wasn't Top Surgery Scars, and the Pronoun stuff, I think people would actually see that it's a pretty versatile system. It's unfortunate that the people they showed off to make characters tried making them as weird as possible. They would probably be better off just giving people a Character Creation Demo and have people show off their Rooks.

I second this. It's getting the wrong type of marketing. They should know the general gaming populace is very divided right now, so to lean on one side or the other is basically them shooting themselves in the foot. A free character creator demo would have sidestepped this easily.

[Malamasala]

Culture war mainly happens when there is social engineering happening.

Offer a game to be played normally, and you get no complaints from the gamers. Normal Male/Female gender, normal attractive models, normal crude jokes and so on.

Then to appeal to "the modern audience", just make it a DLC. A DLC that replaces Male/Female with body type A and body type B. Removes most customization around women so they can't be made attractive. All sexy armor alternatives are blocked. All jokes are properly filtered to be non-funny jokes about the patriarchy and incels.

And behold. A game that caters to everyone, and has no controversy at all. (Except people mocking that there was only 8 people, all journalists, who downloaded the DLC. And the journalists dunking on the game because it doesn't properly remove content popular with men).

[Ffabbia]

I said it in an earlier post, I'll repeat myself.

If Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect 1 were to be released right now, in the current climate their respective forums would be a solid wall of vitriol, hatred, and furious abuse aimed toward all the things currently aimed at Veilguard.

Note how 98% of the hatred and abuse has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual gameplay, narrative, or game mechanics. It's entirely focussed upon 1% of the game - the character creation tool which contains a few optional features which can be entirely ignored if you don't want them - and (most depressingly) probably wouldn't even have been noticed by most people until it was taken up as a 'Grand Cause' by Youtubers.

The times we live in are absolutely the main culprit here. People were generally just more easygoing back in the early noughties, but the phenomenon of Gamergate the alt right, MAGA and the rapid rise of the far right across the spectrum of world politics is now directly impacting our culture as well as geopolitics. It's a huge pushback against the permissiveness of the 90s and early noughties, and like all movements of this kind it stems largely from fear. In this case it's fear of a fast-changing world, thus the anti-woke movement is entirely reactionary in nature. An attempt to stop the clock.

The other important factor is the rise of social media. A thing that was still in it's infancy when Origins and Mass Effect were released.

Pretty much every single anti-woke poster on these boards has been exposed to a relentless barrage of information piped directly into their brains by Youtubers and social media posters, to the extent that their posts actively replicate the same buzz words and phrases over and over again. The evidence is all around us - how often do you see the term 'modern audiences' parroted in these posts? All digested and regurgitated from a single Youtuber who coined the notion that content made for 'modern audiences' are a dangerous thing to be scorned and shunned, and then quickly adopted by other Youtubers.

What we're basically dealing with here is an angry mob, fired up and radicalised by inflammatory content on the internet - the Youtubers responsible are basically hate preachers, and they've found themselves a captive audience. Angry mobs lack individuality, or the capacity for critical thinking - they're simply 'crowd' - subsumed into groupthink that bypasses their higher brain functions until emotion overrides all logic.

[[Heretic]Rivga]

Originally posted by Malamasala:

Culture war mainly happens when there is social engineering happening.

Name a time that social engineering has not been happening?
The Church has for the past 2000 years been the primary force imposing its social engineering on western society. "Not allowed to be gay, only men and women exist, a womans place is in the home"

All that is happening now is people are furious that these "rules" are being challenged. We are not being social engineered or no more than usual.

[Valkyria]

This is why I just play video games and have fun. It is a wild concept to some people now.
When I first loaded Origins, I didn't think or consider any type of drama about it online.

[Ffabbia]

Originally posted by Valkyria:

This is why I just play video games and have fun. It is a wild concept to some people now.
When I first loaded Origins, I didn't think or consider any type of drama about it online.

Nobody did - but as I wrote in my long-winded post above it was back in the days before social media really gained a foothold. Origins was released when Myspace was the main social media platform and Youtube was barely two years old,

Thus there were relatively few voices capable of influencing gamers - or as we're seeing here - grooming them.

[[Heretic]Rivga]

Originally posted by Bruttus:

Originally posted by HereticRivga:

Name a time that social engineering has not been happening?
The Church has for the past 2000 years been imposing its social engineering on western society. "Not allowed to be gay, only men and women exist, a womans place is in the home"

All that is happening now is people are furious that these "rules" are being challenged. We are not being social engineered or no more than usual.

Isn't that not in all religions? Go the the Middle East, and proclaim you are LGTB+ Alphabet, and you will be thrown from the highest building, or worse.

You know the 3 major religions are just branches of each other - Judaism starts, then Christianity comes from that, Jesus if he was in fact a real person was Jewish, Christianity did not exist until after his death, so he could not have been a Christian. and Islam is an off shoot of both Christianity and Judaism.

Islam recognises Jesus as the second most important, after Mohammad, man in the universe - they do not think he is the son of God but a messenger of God like Mohammad.

There views on marriage, men and women place in the world and sexuality is very much the same. For the majority of the moral structure the 3 religions are basically the same.

Looking at a religion that is not basically a branch of Judaism, Hinduism per colonialism homosexuality is not banned in India. The cultural influence of Colonialism left homophobia over that way.

Tribes in Africa were OK with Homosexual before colonialism (not all of them). Viking, Romans and Greeks had various rules over it but it was not altogether banned. Viking society for instance you are fine so long as you are the person "giving", it was still seem as MANLY. Vikings did not just rape the women - for all you viking fans out there!!!

Thailand famously has the 3rd gender - more than just Thailand is very accepting of people born one sex but identify as the other.

We forget that the western colonisation has a major influence on the world - and because it came with the religion a branch of Judaism its influence on "Morality" is huge.

*Note everything above is a very simplified take on a deeply complex subject - I an not here to write a 200 epic (and even then I would not be able to cover everything).

[johnwick]

This the activism for dummies take.

These points have nothing to do with true nature of the underlying issues. They are all symptoms of a problem and not even good representations of these symptoms.

It's all mental gymnastics, goal post shifting, buzzword parroting and talking points hammered together into this hot take which basically means nothing to normal people, only those who spend their entire social life in discord/reddit/x/facebook.

Woke people won't support a company like EA or buy their products.

Woke people don't use x/facebook/reddit because they know they are platforms controlled by the thing they are opposed to.

You are not woke or progressive for holding these views. Woke people will think you are parroting the views of the indoctrinated.

Woke people think people who hold these narrow minded and recycled views are part of the problem.

[Ryu Hayabusa]

Originally posted by Valkyria:

This is why I just play video games and have fun. It is a wild concept to some people now.
When I first loaded Origins, I didn't think or consider any type of drama about it online.

And yet you are here spreading propaganda and false narratives on behalf of western game publishers and devs.

[ThespianMask]

Originally posted by Ffabbia:

I said it in an earlier post, I'll repeat myself.

If Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect 1 were to be released right now, in the current climate their respective forums would be a solid wall of vitriol, hatred, and furious abuse aimed toward all the things currently aimed at Veilguard.

Note how 98% of the hatred and abuse has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual gameplay, narrative, or game mechanics. It's entirely focussed upon 1% of the game - the character creation tool which contains a few optional features which can be entirely ignored if you don't want them - and (most depressingly) probably wouldn't even have been noticed by most people until it was taken up as a 'Grand Cause' by Youtubers.

The times we live in are absolutely the main culprit here. People were generally just more easygoing back in the early noughties, but the phenomenon of Gamergate the alt right, MAGA and the rapid rise of the far right across the spectrum of world politics is now directly impacting our culture as well as geopolitics. It's a huge pushback against the permissiveness of the 90s and early noughties, and like all movements of this kind it stems largely from fear. In this case it's fear of a fast-changing world, thus the anti-woke movement is entirely reactionary in nature. An attempt to stop the clock.

The other important factor is the rise of social media. A thing that was still in it's infancy when Origins and Mass Effect were released.

Pretty much every single anti-woke poster on these boards has been exposed to a relentless barrage of information piped directly into their brains by Youtubers and social media posters, to the extent that their posts actively replicate the same buzz words and phrases over and over again. The evidence is all around us - how often do you see the term 'modern audiences' parroted in these posts? All digested and regurgitated from a single Youtuber who coined the notion that content made for 'modern audiences' are a dangerous thing to be scorned and shunned, and then quickly adopted by other Youtubers.

What we're basically dealing with here is an angry mob, fired up and radicalised by inflammatory content on the internet - the Youtubers responsible are basically hate preachers, and they've found themselves a captive audience. Angry mobs lack individuality, or the capacity for critical thinking - they're simply 'crowd' - subsumed into groupthink that bypasses their higher brain functions until emotion overrides all logic.

I mean, angry mob or no, if they're the majority, they'll dictate the market. "The Wizard Game" had a boycott attempted on it, but it failed, despite the large outcry by "the woke" to not play a "game birthed from a toxic TERF". Only time will tell if this will be a real boycott, or just another Hogwarts Legacy failed boycott. In both instances, DA will be cooked. If the boycott fails, then it confirms that the "modern audience" for DA is large enough that they can shaft the old anti-"woke" fans over. If the boycott succeeds, we might not see a new DA game ever again.

[LuckyOwl]

Originally posted by ThespianMask:

(It's a half-rant, half-opinion piece)

Think about it. Dragon Age has ALWAYS had gay romance options. Zevran and Leliana in Origins. Everyone except Sebastian in DA2 are bi. Inquisition had Dorian for men, Sera for Women, and Iron Bull for both.

The "wokeness" of the DAV is not its main issue. The game is just an unfortunate victim of the times. If you REALLY think about it, DAV is not any more or less strong about its "wokeness" than it was before.

The first instance of hate I saw thrown against DA was about Krem in Inquisition. People were talking about how the game proselytizes about how Krem is a man, and that the Qun is accepting of it according to Iron Bull (which is odd, because the Qun don't have the concept of personal identity IIRC. Yes, I'm aware is not an adherent of the Qun.). Many anti-"woke" people felt that the game was talking down to them, as if treating the player as ignorant, and were forcing the issue.

I believe DAV is just the unfortunate victim of the following:

1. Bad Reputation - EA has a track record for being greedy, and BioWare has shown subpar output with Andromeda and Anthem. After those two blunders, who's going to pre-order a BioWare game?

2. The Culture War - We see it in general media news all the time. One side says "representation is good for everyone" while the other side says "Yeah, but you're actively warping the things we like to shoehorn it in." I can think of Star Wars, and The Witcher as very mainstream examples of the two sides clashing.

3. The Times - There's been a large pushback against "wokeness" in video games, particularly because one side is seemingly insistent on pushing it hard, whereas the other side wants to be left alone.

How do those three factors come together? Because of the rise of news regarding the dreaded ESG/DEI/SBI influence on games seemingly pushing for diversity first, quality second, many people are angry that DAV seemingly is leaning on the "woke" side (which I mentioned already. DA's always been that way).

Then, they point to the game director. One look at them and people are like "Oh no. This game is gonna bomb because it's diversity first, quality second." Unfortunately, it's a "judging a book by its cover" moment. It happens.

Let's bring it back to point 2: The Culture War.

Did general gaming populace care this about the romances I mentioned earlier in the earlier DA games? What about Mass Effect? Did people care that in ME3, you could get with Cortez or Kaidan as MShep, or Traynor or Kelly as FShep? What about FShep and Liara in ME1? There was no outrage. People didn't really care all that hard.

Now suddenly, the well-known "wokeness" of BioWare is a problem? Why? Because of trans top surgery scars and pronouns? No no no. That's a very surface level understanding of the hate it's getting.

Next, point 3: The Times.

Look at what the anti-"woke" people's number 1 enemy is right now. It's not the concept "wokeness". It's the fact that it's being pushed hard by people they believe have warped franchises they like in the name of DEI (and if you're really wanting to tinfoil it up, you could attribute it to being an ESG Score pump for that investor cash-money).

Let's set the record straight. Do the anti-"woke" crowd want DAV to fail directly because of the trans rep and top surgery scars? No, that's not why they're clamoring for it to fail or bomb. They want it to fail because they want to punish the people they think is responsible for destroying franchises they like.

"Maybe if DAV fails, more studios will stop working with SBI, and therefore, the franchises I like can stay the way I like them."

Ok, so how does point 1 play into all this? That's the simplest one. "Look! Game is woke garbage and pre-orders are low because of it!" Buddy, that's not why pre-orders are low. It's low because of what BioWare did with Andromeda and Anthem. They don't currently have a good track record, and potential customers are well within their right to wait and see before buying in.

tldr

The reason it's getting so much hate from actual fans is because it is nothing like previous Dragon age games specifically when people had been wanting more of what origins offered in terms of player choice and combat.

another point is that Bioware games have always been about your choices being imported, it was nice to hear about the HoF and other things, now all of that is gone and we only get 3 choices from Inquisition.

This is a Dragon age game in name only.

[BornToFragAlpha]

Inquisition was bad as well and we didn't like it.

Dragon age 1-2:

"Why would our women wish to be men?"

Relating to women wanting to fight martially.

It makes sense, biologically. Women are weaker than males in every race introduced in Dragon Age. The Qun is about maximizing the yield of the individual for the society, where each has a role.

Comes Dragon Age 3, Ackchyually, it's OK for women to try to be men, fight inefficiently, risk their lives and those of others for... what?

Iron Bull and everything about him is a contradiction of something interesting and alien set by Dragon Age 1-2.

[LuckyOwl]

Originally posted by Ffabbia:

I said it in an earlier post, I'll repeat myself.

If Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect 1 were to be released right now, in the current climate their respective forums would be a solid wall of vitriol, hatred, and furious abuse aimed toward all the things currently aimed at Veilguard.

The problem with what you are saying is that I recently played Origins for the first time and found it to be an exceptional game, the amount of player freedom to doom or save lives was incredibly refreshing, I bet we will not see DAV allow us to choose if a child gets possessed by a demon so that we can gain more power.

Everything has to be nice and inclusive or funny/goofy now, this was a dark fantasy were women were kidnapped to become brood mothers (a part of the story I personally didn't think was good).

[DESTARD]

Game just doesn't meet fan expectations so everyone is let down. Might be the nail in the coffin for this series.

[LuckyOwl]

Originally posted by Valkyria:

Originally posted by LuckyOwl:

No he has a point, it doesn't make sense at all for the Qun to incorporate the ideology of 2024 California, well I guess it does make them feel alien to the rest of human civilisation.

But by replying like this you come off as irrational. This is a dark fantasy world, not Disney land.

Sexism has no place in the community, period. I don't expect logical discussions from people who think giving someone a Jester award, somehow nullifies that persons opinion/argument.

it's not about sexism, it's about 21st century political ideology being put into a well established franchise, fans are just tired of seeing their beloved stories get corrupted by ideologues.

The Qun are not a friendly bunch, this has been well established. They are barbaric, but we are supposed to believe that they care if you identify as the opposite gender?