>>1038989 ok when do you have the poopsex? you forgot to have the poopsex thats like everything dragon age is about.

>>1038991 Ah yes of course. That is what my archer was missing. Homosexuality. Thank you anon. I will now go do the poopsex and winz. I am winrar.

>>1038991 I have poopsex on saturdays when I'm not in school and mom's working, but I want to talk about dragon age not my anal appetite for cock.

>>1038991 https://archive.fo/MowzS Dragon Age Has Always Been Gay As Hell The Veilguard is getting hate for its same-sex relationships and trans storylines, but this is the natural evolution of a series that’s always been queer >It’s nearly impossible to talk about Dragon Age: The Veilguard on certain sectors of social media without being overrun by people who have a vested interest in seeing the game fail. There are plenty of criticisms to levy at the fourth entry to BioWare’s fantasy RPG series, such as its lack of choice continuity from previous games and Whedon-esque quips sprinkled through its dialogue. And if you’re a CRPG diehard, you’re probably not too thrilled by it pivoting hard into an action RPG. But most of the time, these criticisms are buried under (or wielded by) people who are being pretty blatant that their real issue is that The Veilguard features queer characters who are actively presenting as such. To which, I have to ask, have you played a Dragon Age game? If you think this is a sudden pivot, I’m doubtful we played the same games. >If you open up the user reviews on critic aggregate site Metacritic, you’ll find dozens of reviews from people calling The Veilguard every variation of “forced woke propaganda” a thesaurus would provide. Google user reviews are pretty much the same. There’s not even an attempt to intellectualize the bigotry. Some other platforms like Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation’s storefronts fare much better and notably require you to own a game before you can rate it, so it’s not quite so easy to drop a hateful comment drive-by. I imagine the average bigot isn’t willing to pay $60 to $70 just to post something hateful that will get taken down or caught in moderation. But some of the most readily available user review platforms on the internet are being bombarded with reviews from people who don’t even mention any other problems they might have with a game. The mere existence of queer characters is enough to merit one-star reviews. Metacritic even released a statement to Eurogamer about the clear review bombing going on >I won’t entertain the notion that queer characters existing in a game is a negative as a good faith critique. Even the attempts to intellectualize such criticism via claims that its “ahistorical” to include modern-day terminology like “non-binary” in a fantasy setting falls apart: Dragon Age is an entirely fictional universe with flying lizards and people with horns. Is there perhaps a discussion to be had about how the story of Taash, the non-binary Qunari party member who is figuring out their identity, was handled? Sure, but I think it’s probably queer people that are trying to have that conversation, rather than the ones who are calling it “woke” and dogpiling on queer people who so much as mention The Veilguard on social media. >But what I do want to address is the revisionist history that Dragon Age wasn’t always writing stories that not only included queer characters but actively engaged with their storylines in a way that built out the world of Thedas. The first game, Dragon Age: Origins, included two same-sex romance options in Leliana and Zevran, with both acting as conduits through which we learned about the intersections of sex, religion, and gender as early as 2009. Dragon Age II is one of the most prolific examples of the “playersexual” romance that makes all its romance options bisexual. Dragon Age: Inquisition has an entire questline about a gay man nearly being subjected to a magical form of conversion therapy, while also including the series’ first exclusively gay companions and a prominent trans side character. Each of these games has progressively included queer characters and, perhaps even more notably, queer struggle within its world. Having a trans party member and the ability to confirm your protagonist is trans is the natural progression of a series that has only gotten more queer as the real world has. >That progression of visibly queer characters and storylines has been in the face of years of pushback from prejudiced criticism. A lot of this came from people who claimed to be fans often believing that queer people getting roleplaying options were somehow taking away from straight people. This perspective ignores the fact that BioWare’s franchise has aspired to create an equal playing field for its queer players for years. BioWare even responded to that line of thinking, saying Dragon Age II’s free-for-all romances “are not for ‘the straight male gamer’. They’re for everyone.” Dragon Age is no stranger to queerness, but it’s no stranger to controversy surrounding it, either. Many of us who have been around BioWare’s orbit for decades have seen the way bigots have expressed faux concern as a thinly-veiled effort to strip Dragon Age of its queer legacy. >It’s funny to watch scenes like the above, in which Iron Bull has a frank discussion with Krem, a trans man, about how trans people are viewed in Qunari culture in the world of Dragon Age, knowing that The Veilguard would be having a trans Qunari wrestling with those questions themself. It doesn’t attempt to muddy the reality of what it’s talking about and even gives you a good slap on the wrist if you try to misgender Krem through your dialogue choices. It’s no less overt than what The Veilguard does. So what’s different now, 10 years later? The answer is not Dragon Age. In a way, it’s not angry bigots online, either. It’s the way the internet has allowed entire businesses to thrive on faux outrage by painting a video game as a boogeyman worth mobilizing against. >Dragon Age: The Veilguard hasn’t even been out a week and it’s become such a minefield to talk about. As people who weren’t even going to play the game in the first place make it a battleground, it’s got fans of the series so resistant to criticism for fear that it will become ammunition for hateful people to use against it. >The internet is broken, and when it feels like we have no power to fight about anything else, people resort to fighting about a video game like it’s activism. Those problems extend far beyond BioWare’s latest, but let’s not pretend the criticisms that Dragon Age “wasn’t like this before” are anything other than what they are. If you think The Veilguard’s portrayal of a non-binary character finding who they are, a protagonist capable of being explicitly trans, and a party of queer characters who are smooching between missions is in any way “new” for the franchise, you haven’t been paying attention.

>>1039002 I didn't like the fag characters in origins either, but at least (with the help of modding) I was able to have some nice eye candy to stare at and fuck for the women, plus the game itself was fun. Veilguard has literally nothing.

>>1039002 You know it is almost funny how much the journos are batting for this game. Like they are just so fucking mad about the game flopping. To answer the question the article proposes. I didn't care about inquisition because I didn't play it. Had already given up on bioware by then.

>>1038989 Kinda odd that this game flops and Baldur's gate did kinda well when they are both woke faggot games. What did they do different.

>>1039009 BG3 had a lot going for it. >D&D 5th edition is by far the most popular TTRPG. Has only gotten more popular in recent years. >Larian studios has been a respected studio for years and already had a hit with Divinity original sin. >Baldurs gate is just super popular. 2 in particular people wouldn't shut the fuck up about. Back in the 2000s people would constantly talk about how great the games were. Any RPG forum would inevitably be filled with people recommending the game. On the contrary Veilguard: >Is based on dragon age which was never as popular as baldurs gate. Which is funny since Dragon age was supposed to be Baldurs gate 3. >Isn't even a proper CRPG so the old fans aren't interested. >Markets itself with trannies who nobody fucking likes. Kinda easy to see why the game isn't doing nearly as well. Forgotten realms as a setting already had magical trannies so adding them in doesn't really matter.

>>1039009 Larian is actually known for making fun games, people probably enjoyed it in spite of the woke faggot shit.

>>1039002 What's /v/'s favourite LGBT character in Dragon Age before The Veilguard? Anders, Branka, Briala, Celene, Dorian, Eldredda, Fenris, Hepsith, Herren, Iron Bull, Isabela, Jethann, Josephine, Krem, Leliana, Marjolaine, Merrill, Ritts, Sera, Wade, Zevran?

>>1039087 I distinctly recall >us criticising inquisition for its greasy ugly and gay characters.

Farm Simulator 25 released today and it already has better numbers (according to SteamDB) than Veilguard. How will game journos try to spin this one?

>>1039093 I remember 2014 when people were making fun of Cisquisition for being an sjw game with shit character design and gay dialogue like "Ride the bull" and everything about the Chav "lolsorandumb" knife ear who looked like she was carved from a greasy potato.

>>1038989 Generally warriors/rogues that aren't backstabbing are played optimally by stacking bonuses/buffs and auto-attacking, and using maybe 1-2 talents, and you should select party members that synergize with you (shale, leliana bard archer, zevran bard archer). If you're going into Awakening, warrior spirit archers are far superior to rogues.

>>1038989 Shale is a good tank if you spec her correctly.

>>1039087 >LGBT characters in Dragon Age before The Veilguard >Anders, Branka, Briala, Celene, Dorian, Eldredda, Fenris, Hepsith, Herren, Iron Bull, Isabela, Jethann, Josephine, Krem, Leliana, Marjolaine, Merrill, Ritts, Sera, Wade, Zevran WTF? Is Dragon Age THAT gay?

>>1039087 Most of them weren't super in the fact about it until the 3rd game.

>>1039134 face about it.

>>1039009 Two big differences, one, the characters are playersexual, not homosexual/bisexual, so that gay vampire is only "gay" if you are a male, otherwise he is straight, and second you can tell almost all the characters to fuck off, can permanently kill them, or make decisions that will make them permanently leave the party, something you can't really do in Veilguard. You can also use generic mercenaries, instead of the party members, if you think they are that insufferable. On the first point, I personally think it's worse, as it takes away from the character's agency and personality, if their sexuality simply revolves around what gender the player is. I prefer it when Bioware would simply say that X character is straight, Y character is gay, and Z character is bisexual.

>>1039002 >that pic. Then why are they suprised that dragon age is shitted on for being a faggot game. When the games were always shitted on for being faggot games? Are they just stupid? don't answer that question

>>1039122 >(shale, leliana bard archer, zevran bard archer) Damn, I was really looking forward to killing Zevran again. Honestly I didn't even think of making a warrior archer going into the game.

>>1039205 I like when you genuinely gain his loyalty he is 100% ride and die.

>>1039011 >BG3

>>1039412 Yeah that does single handedly undermine him tbh.

>>1039113 I loved the previous Farm Simulator, and this one apparently allows the player to cultivate rice paddies and has deformable terrain. It appears to be for sale on Amazon, so that probably means that it comes on a DVD. Now, normally I refrain from buying any games ever, but if this is on disk I may shell out the cash.

>>1039500 >I loved the previous Farm Simulator <Germany has entered the chat

Dragon Age: The Veilguard cost $200-300m to develop over 9 years >$200-300m figure is before marketing >would need to sell something like 6-8 million to break even after retail and Steam take their cut >615k sold to date, not including the estimated 30,000 refunds >franchise is dead for the foreseeable future https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=3IBix3oHlW4

>>1039696 I wish we had a reliable way to verify those numbers. I mean don't get me wrong it would be really funny if that is true. I am just very doubtful of this guy.

>>1039696 >>1039697 I can honestly believe this being true and now of course it should be confirmed.

>>1039696 >source: some bullshit outrage channel

>>1039696 >>1039697 >>1039798 >>1039807 I decided to look up the numbers, and found this Steam post https://steamcommunity.com/app/1845910/discussions/0/4635985982183763189/ which inspired me to make my own calculations. First let's determine the size of Bioware, according to this article https://archive.ph/wip/Qj1LJ last year they laid off 50 people which was roughly 20% of their workforce, so they had roughly 250 employees for the first few years of development and 200 in it's last year. That was also when the game was still called Dragon Age Dreadwolf. Next we need to estimate how long they worked on the game, which is a bit tricky, according to the kikepedia article, it started in 2015, but kept getting on hold to work on other projects like Andromeda(2017) and Anthem(2019). Anthem got released in February 2019, so if they started working on Dragon Age in November 2019 that would be 5 years of development. They had 250 employees, so let's say that 200 worked on Dragon Age, the rest maintained Andromeda and worked on the Mass Effect trilogy HD edition. This is pure speculation, but not implausible. There are also claims that in 2019 Bioware had 320 employees, so the 200 estimate isn't all that far-fetched. So if we have 200 people working on the game for 5 years, how much did these people cost? Well the Steam post, I linked, assumed that they were all getting a programmer's salary, but not everyone is a programmer, as you have artists, writers, musicians, managers, among other roles. Here I was a bit stumped, but thankfully the kikepedia article for Inquisition had this to say in regards to Inquisition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Age:_Inquisition >The game cost "tens of millions" of dollars to develop. More than 200 people worked on it, including eight writers, 70 artists, 75 game-testers, and more than 30 actors. This should be similar in composition to how Veilguard was made, so how long did it take them to make Inquisition? Roughly 2 years, so if Veilguard took double that amount of time and had the same amount of workers, then I could see it above 100 million dollars as there is inflation, COVID probably hit them hard as well, and all other stuff. Now, if the kikepedia article that said Inquisition cost tens of millions does not include advertisement, and if you want to go with the rule of advertisement cost as much as the game itself, then Dragon Age Veilguard could have costed EA 200 million dollars.

>>1039913 I don't buy the "Tens of millions" shit. Not only do they need to pay those 200 developers, but what about the dozen or so DEI managers, those don't work for peanuts. And the Sweet Baby Inc consultancy fees ain't cheap either. And who knows how many other consultants they needed? Gotta make those surgery scars and vitiligo skin patches look right, so that's probably another consultancy fee of 100k to some doctor. And lets not forget bonuses for the CEO's and other suits. That's tens of millions at least, for each. Shit like this adds up. It's like the rings of power, most expensive TV show ever made, yet somehow still looks cheap and half assed, or Concord. The problem with the budget, is that all the race and diversity grifters are going to drain it away on fuck all, making any game's budget balloon like crazy. TL:DR I don't think 200 million sounds high, if anything, it sounds like a low estimate.

>>1039927 >those 200 developers Again, not all of them are devs, some of them were voice actors, which might have been paid by the hour, and others like writers or artists might not have been paid as much as programmers, or maybe it's just because, for me developer means programmer. >I don't buy the "Tens of millions" shit. It was most likely true for Inquisition, since Sweet Baby Inc didn't even exist yet, and Bioware isn't the type of company that needs that kind of agencies to make woke products, they are way ahead of the curve, but maybe there were still a few consultants to siphon money. I also find it weird how people can casually throw around figures like "200 million" or "300 million" when I remember GTA V was, at the time, the most expensive game ever produced with the exception of Star Citizen and that was around 250 million dollars, but it also made it's money back, tenfold. They even scaled production costs a bit for Red Dead 2, as that only had a 200 million dollar budget, since Rockstar knew it was an absurd amount of money. Then you read articles about how a Monopoly IOS game costed 500 million dollars, or that GTA VI will have a buget of 2 billion dollars, and I am like WHAT THE FUCK? that can't be right. https://archive.ph/wip/t059M >the company has spent an eye-watering $500 million on marketing and user acquisition. >To put the $500 million marketing budget in perspective, a poorly redacted document last year leaked a set of budgets for some of PlayStation's biggest AAA titles, which revealed that The Last of Us Part 2 cost $220 million to develop, and Horizon Forbidden West cost $212 million to develop. <Developer Scopely has revealed in an interview that the game has now brought in over $2 billion in its first 10 months How the fuck do you spend that much money on a Monopoly game? I guess the 2 billion figure for GTA looks belieaveble, but this isn't even AAAA territory, this is AAAAA territory, that's five As. I don't know, I think somewhere down the line, both consumers and producers over-estimate how much money you need to invest in the development of a game. Still, this whole Monopoly Go thing, looks really weird, might have to look into it.

>>1039011 You forgot the game was in early acess for 5 years so there was already a lot of people aware and hyping it

>>1039938 Ah, mea culpa, I was thinking Veilguard's budget, not Inquisitions.

>>1038989 When your game starts becoming a hassle Cheat >>1039132 half of em are schrodinger's sexuality At any time they can be gay or straight >>1039113 >>1039696 >>1039913 You want to see something that makes it even more pathetic A fucking russian roulette poker game with animals had more all time players and I 100% know it didn't take 200-300 or even a 100 million to develop that game

>>1040111 Wew, that looks like a copyright lawsuit just waiting to happen. The water buffalo and fox look ripped straight from Zootopia, there's P'eyj from BG&E, and I'm not sure about the Doberman - but I swear I've seen that model before.

Tangential, but there are way too many RPG games based on cheap DnD homebrews. That is to say, they are all basically the same world with a few parameters shifted around and some name changes.

>>1040136 This is fucking embarrassing.

>>1040131 >but there are way too many RPG games based on cheap DnD homebrews Anon, the ENTIRE RPG genre was as a result of DnD. Everything from Dragon Age, to Final Fantasy, to even Mario & Luigi: Brotherhood. Everything that we know about the "Role playing game" comes from DnD.

>>1040162 Not technically true? DnD itself comes from games like Chainmail and more generally, tabletop wargames like Little Wars which are well over 100 years old

>>1040136 Is this chart an Xbox?

>>1040162 >Anon, the ENTIRE RPG genre was as a result of DnD That's the problem. Not talking about the mechanics but the worldbuilding

>>1040136 >modern age ended 235 years ago

>>1040288 Learn about history

>>1040290 But it's just "modern" there, not "early modern".

>>1040288 >Contemporary >Napoleonic Wars >Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade >Fall of the Qing Dynasty >Reunification of Germany >History within living memory.... What kind of living memory, a vampires?

>>1040292 It's just a simplification, there are a lot of eras

>>1040136 Why did they made the dragon look so ugly and malformed?

>>1039002 >natural evolution Not 'deliberately piling weight on the fag scale till it tips over into an abyss', the difference is ever to subtle.

>>1039002 >It’s funny to watch scenes like the above, in which Iron Bull has a frank discussion with Krem, a trans man, about how trans people are viewed in Qunari culture in the world of Dragon Age, knowing that The Veilguard would be having a trans Qunari wrestling with those questions themself. Just kill everyone who can think like this, it's the only way, they're too far gone to bother try saving. >>1039064 >Grey Wardens Mystery Meat Midgets They're about as imposing as a blob of cake frosting, bet they know how to master their taints though.

>>1040732 What do you wanna fuck the dragons or somethin'?

>>1041036 If they're going to make everything poly-gay transbinary, the least they can do is toss dracosexuals a bone.

>>1041089 The games did have a gilf that turned into a dragon.