Dragon Age™: The Veilguard is a Return To Form

[KOS-MOS]

I am not immune to female clerics

why is she brown ?

You, too, can become 'brown' by going outside.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wo ... ed-n794006

(I can't because I burn. The curse of being the last true white man.)

Oh but it's from lost eidolons, this game apparently has *******. I thought this was a medieval fantasy game....

[KOS-MOS]

OMG it looks like Planet Coaster 2 is the next smash hit in the industry! It is gaining on the Top 3 and may pass even the enormously successful Veilguard!!!!

Who knew that a Coaster game could be ground breaking GOTY material!!!!

No but how can a ****** korean mmo be top 2 ??

I get it, there is no games to play right now, but really ?

[PixiGreen]

More positive news:

[fkirenicus]

You have far more optimism then I will ever have. I expect it to get even worse in the coming years and I seen nothing to suggest otherwise.

I fear you are right, and what happens in the US today will probably tell us where the Western world is going.
And to you muricans who actually can vote: stop playing computer games and get out and vote! And NOT for Kamala Harris.

[Irenaeus]

All that code lost...like tears...in rain

[Acrux]

I bet it will be even fewer pretty soon!

[fkirenicus]

I bet it will be even fewer pretty soon!

Are they unable to download and install their own toolset?

[rusty_shackleford]

if they released the source code & assets there would be a fan remaster in 6 months btw

[SoLong]

I know you guys are busy discussing everything else but take a look at Veilguard's numbers. Only 65k peak playing yesterday and possibly even lower peak today, this seems like a quick drop!

https://steamdb.info/app/1845910/charts/

Games are unable to beat their launch weekend numbers unless they were overlooked and positive word of mouth causes the customer base to balloon.

This game has the opposite trend: journoshits shilling like crazy to inflate the launch but word of mouth is almost exclusively negative.

[jebacdrkac]

All that code lost...like tears...in rain

Heh, BioWare would honestly be making bigger profits in 2024 if, for the past decade, they’d kept only those 20 people on the payroll, churning out shameless 'remasters' with nothing but a new UI and updated textures.
Definitely more profitable than Gayguard, which will probably end up at a cool -$100 million.

[Rand]

A little like Aragorn and his army riding out to meet Sauron, and then when they arrive they think "hey, let's remove the one advantage we actually have!" and go to war with Sauron's armies on foot.

But that was ACTUAL strategy.
The point was to draw all of Sauron's attention to the gate and make it look like Aragorn had Sauron's ring. A ring that warps the mind of and betrays all wearers except Sauron.
It would have made Aragorn a powerful leader and fighter, but massively, delusionally overconfident. The ring wanting Aragorn to lose so Sauron can retrieve it would have urged him to attack stupidly with a weak force.
Gandalf knew this and no doubt convinced Aragorn that the sacrificial attack was needed because he knew the hobbits were miles south headed for Mount Doom and needed all the distraction they could provide.
And if the Gondor army was annihilated, it was the price of ultimate victory. The idiots of Middle Earth finally realized that they had to destroy Sauron after pissing about for literally many thousands of years while he continually caused death and destruction.

[Rand]

you'll never mistake it for Helm's Deep

Helm's Deep is both an atrociously bad design for a fortress (shockingly stupidly designed) and a terrible defense of that ****** fort.
If it hadn't been for a demigod leading a deus-ex-machina surprise attack, everyone would have died easily.

[Rand]

Making them archers is dumb because bows require a lot of upper body strength to operate.

Modern archeologists have identified English longbowmen remains by the bone structures of the arms and clavicles, due to lifelong training causing unusual development there.
The upper body strength of medieval longbowmen, already selected for being in the top 10% of male height, due to the size of the bows, was even considered remarkable at the time.
There was a historical tale I read a long time ago, allegedly from the late middle ages that was about some soldier guys starting a fight in a tavern in London, not realizing they were insulting the friend of a king's archer, and when the fistfight broke out, the archer waded in and killed two guys back to back with a single punch to the skull each. Those were often massive motherfuckers. Anyway the other lord complained about the death of his men to the king and asked for compensation, which is how the story was found in history.

[gerey]

The whole Ostagar fiasco is a just a gift that keeps on giving the more you look at the cutscene. Women everywhere, wafer thin lines, the archers in front of the palisades, the mabari charge into the horde, then Cailan's charge into the open where the lines thin out even more to cover the ground (whilst being pressed on all sides).

During the whole cutscene I was asking myself why they were all out in front of the ******* wall, instead of using the fortress they had specifically chosen as the most defensible position to its fullest advantage. Also why did the arches just fire a single volley of arrows (and why fire arrows of all things?), and where was the cavalry?

To say nothing of the battle scene depicting the leftist idea of what a medieval battle looked like - every cretin fighting an individual duel with no formations or lines. I'm sure their target audience, teenaged boys, gobbled it up.

Nowadys it just feels trite and cheap, making the battle look tiny and insignificant, featuring less than a thousand combatants.

Granted, it's not like I can signle BioWare out for this, they were obviously drawing heavy inspiration from the mouthbreathing, inbred ***** over at Hollywood, that have spent the past 100 years ******* up every single melee battle in cinematic history.

[gerey]

Helm's Deep is both an atrociously bad design for a fortress (shockingly stupidly designed) and a terrible defense of that ****** fort.

But at least they stayed in the ******* fortress, taking advantage of the walls, unlike Troy or Game of Thrones, where they squat in front of them so the savage enemy can't deface them with graffiti or whatever.

The upper body strength of medieval longbowmen, already selected for being in the top 10% of male height, due to the size of the bows, was even considered remarkable at the time.

Not just strength, but endurance too. It takes a monstrous amount of stamina to be able to fire volley after volley of arrows using a war bow.

If you wanted to get clever you could say that these women, who would most likely be nobility, are using enchanted bows that allow you to draw the string back using less strength or whatever.

[Rand]

After all, Éowyn was created in 1950. Sure, she was an absolute exception but she was a woman wielding a sword, wasn't she?

She wasn't supposed to be there, fought poorly when she did at all, almost died a couple of times, and was essentially bait for the Witch King so a hobbit with an ancient epic-tier enchanted dagger specially made to fight Morgoth's spirit warriors could backstab him and paralyze him while pinning his spirit to Middle Earth where a material weapon could actually affect him directly. She then walks up and stabs a paralyzed enemy in the face. And if Merry wasn't such a **** warrior and had gotten the Witch King in the vitals that he missed, she would haven't even been able to do that much. If not for Merry, she would have died in agony in seconds.
She was stupidly brave, I'll give her that.

[Norfleet]

During the whole cutscene I was asking myself why they were all out in front of the ******* wall, instead of using the fortress they had specifically chosen as the most defensible position to its fullest advantage. Also why did the arches just fire a single volley of arrows (and why fire arrows of all things?), and where was the cavalry?

Let's be real here. Have you ever played a game, which offered you a premade fort to defend? Where did you end up deciding the best place to defend it was? Probably out in the open, in front of the fort, so it wouldn't obstruct your line of fire, right? This is because game devs DON'T KNOW HOW TO MAKE FORTS. All of their forts are utterly useless disasters that end up being more of a hindrance to your defense than to the enemy. So yeah, they're out in front of the wall, because otherwise the wall would be ******* in the way.

[Rand]

But at least they stayed in the ******* fortress, taking advantage of the walls

That's the problem. They shouldn't have. At least not initially.
Helm's Deep is essentially a canyon with steep sides and an open plain, yet the riders of Rohan that were there holed up in a swiss-cheese fort where they couldn't maneuver and harass the advancing enemy from horseback.
Don't get me started about building the fort at the literal base of the mountain and not on the hillsides, where archers and siege engines could rain fire down on an advancing enemy with impunity.
Even 20 cavalry could have killed many times their number in skirmishes as the enemy assembled on the plain at the canyon mouth.

[fkirenicus]

But that was ACTUAL strategy.
The point was to draw all of Sauron's attention to the gate and make it look like Aragorn had Sauron's ring. A ring that warps the mind of and betrays all wearers except Sauron.

Yes, but sending the horses - the very essence of the riders of Rohan - away, probably wasn't Aragorn's idea, not sure it was PJ's idea either. I strongly suspect this "strike of genius" to come from one of his fair-sex co-writers. It is simply extremely bad writing and storyboarding from the filmmakers who want this to be "heroic and epic and stuff" but then it turns out to end up as pathetic and unrealistic as the Battle of the Bastards (please don't get me started on that...).

[Rand]

But that was ACTUAL strategy.
The point was to draw all of Sauron's attention to the gate and make it look like Aragorn had Sauron's ring. A ring that warps the mind of and betrays all wearers except Sauron.

Yes, but sending the horses - the very essence of the riders of Rohan - away, probably wasn't Aragorn's idea, not sure it was PJ's idea either. I strongly suspect this "strike of genius" to come from one of his fair-sex co-writers. It is simply extremely bad writing and storyboarding from the filmmakers who want this to be "heroic and epic and stuff" but then it turns out to end up as pathetic and unrealistic as the Battle of the Bastards (please don't get me started on that...).

Oh, the movies.
Yes, that was stupid and incorrect.
In the books, every man of Rohan, Gondor, and the West that could still fight joined Aragorn's army with the intent of attacking Sauron's troops at the gates, the same way the Spartans did in the real world.
They took cavalry and archers and such, and were a huge army, but Sauron was not a fool and had spent a millennium and everything he had not making the same mistake as last time and facing a foe with anything approaching fair numbers.
He had built the largest army Middle Earth had ever seen, outnumbering his enemies many, many times over.
When Aragorn's army saw the horde coming out the gate that they had no chance of even slowing down, they faltered and the enemy had time to corral them up and surround them on all sides.
Gandalf thought this was necessary still, because an army wiping them out kept Sauron too busy to notice three midgets sneaking into a volcano.

[Element]

The whole Ostagar fiasco is a just a gift that keeps on giving the more you look at the cutscene. Women everywhere, wafer thin lines, the archers in front of the palisades, the mabari charge into the horde, then Cailan's charge into the open where the lines thin out even more to cover the ground (whilst being pressed on all sides).

During the whole cutscene I was asking myself why they were all out in front of the ******* wall, instead of using the fortress they had specifically chosen as the most defensible position to its fullest advantage. Also why did the arches just fire a single volley of arrows (and why fire arrows of all things?), and where was the cavalry?

To say nothing of the battle scene depicting the leftist idea of what a medieval battle looked like - every cretin fighting an individual duel with no formations or lines. I'm sure their target audience, teenaged boys, gobbled it up.

Nowadys it just feels trite and cheap, making the battle look tiny and insignificant, featuring less than a thousand combatants.

Granted, it's not like I can signle BioWare out for this, they were obviously drawing heavy inspiration from the mouthbreathing, inbred ***** over at Hollywood, that have spent the past 100 years ******* up every single melee battle in cinematic history.

The archers are weird. I think they teleport out of their location between shots, since they're shown facing the horde head on in the first volley, but then get replaced with infantry after the dogs charge. They don't utilize the bridge much either. Having the army hold the darkspawn at the archway would give anyone atop it a chance to rain death down upon the horde. Five mages there would equivalent to thermobaric rocket artillery. The darkspawn do have trebuchets that are surprisingly accurate, but that's another reason to pull back to the archway rather than stand in front of it (if/when it collapses, it doesn't fall straight onto your own).

If I was Loghain I would have probably walked away after witnessing that shitshow as well tbh, even without planning on it.

[Acrux]

you'll never mistake it for Helm's Deep

Helm's Deep is both an atrociously bad design for a fortress (shockingly stupidly designed) and a terrible defense of that ****** fort.
If it hadn't been for a demigod leading a deus-ex-machina surprise attack, everyone would have died easily.

This guy is a military historian who analyzes battles in movies. He has an 8 part breakdown of both the book and movie versions of the Battle of the Hornburg.

https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collectio ... elms-gate/

Short conclusion: The book version does most things well - Tolkien has a good understanding of operations, probably from his time as a signals officer in WWI - but some of it is implied by the background of the story. Jackson's version, though, doesn't make any sense.

[Rand]

Helm's Deep from the book descriptions:


That's much better than the movie idiocy, but the open relatively straight ramp up to the main gate is still insane.

[rusty_shackleford]

Are you sure that's not meant to be water?

[Acrux]

Are you sure that's not meant to be water?

Yes, there is water. Here's another angle drawn by Tolkien.

[gerey]

All joking aside, why are fantasy writers/artists across all mediums so ******* **** at doing research?

Armor, weapons, fortifications, how people fought, logistics - they seem to (almost) never get any of it right, just decade upon decade of human-centipede-tier regurgitation of **** someone wrote previously, only more woke and obnoxious.

It can't be that hard for an artist/writers to look up what real armor looked like, or how big and thick a sword is supposed to be. There's plenty of images, even free 3D models, of castles, extensive literature on how they were built, what features they had and why, the specific locations chosen etc. Total War has been around for decades now, and while it's not 100% accurate in depicting how people fought in melee combat, it still makes far more sense than anything Hollywood, and most other game developers, have done.

Even paying a relative pittance to some YouTube medieval autist would go a long way towards grounding the setting of fantasy games - even if the grifter gets many things wrong, at least his knowledge is based on a lot of cobbled-together pop history stuff, which is still better than what the woke artist was going to **** out anyway.

[WhiteShark]

All joking aside, why are fantasy writers/artists across all mediums so ******* **** at doing research?

The research types rarely get past the research stage because there's an overwhelming amount of historical information. The non-researchers don't care, so they're free to immediately start writing whatever they think is cool in the moment.

[Faceless_Sentinel]

The whole Ostagar fiasco is a just a gift that keeps on giving the more you look at the cutscene. Women everywhere, wafer thin lines, the archers in front of the palisades, the mabari charge into the horde, then Cailan's charge into the open where the lines thin out even more to cover the ground (whilst being pressed on all sides).

During the whole cutscene I was asking myself why they were all out in front of the ******* wall, instead of using the fortress they had specifically chosen as the most defensible position to its fullest advantage. Also why did the arches just fire a single volley of arrows (and why fire arrows of all things?), and where was the cavalry?

To say nothing of the battle scene depicting the leftist idea of what a medieval battle looked like - every cretin fighting an individual duel with no formations or lines. I'm sure their target audience, teenaged boys, gobbled it up.

Nowadys it just feels trite and cheap, making the battle look tiny and insignificant, featuring less than a thousand combatants.

Granted, it's not like I can signle BioWare out for this, they were obviously drawing heavy inspiration from the mouthbreathing, inbred ***** over at Hollywood, that have spent the past 100 years ******* up every single melee battle in cinematic history.

@gerey, @Element, Did you ever see the game where thi aspect was done better? Whole game industry live on rule of cool, customers are stupid, they won't notice this things.

[Reichspepe]

[Xenich]

So does this game have the raunchy sex scenes of BG3? Those were all over the internet, but I haven't seen anyone losing their lunch over these, so I assumed the the game didn't have that crap?