Diana

55 hours means he went straight through it with little exploring and didn't do any side quest that wasn't necessary to get the various reputations up. I have over 100 hours in game, but I did pretty much everything. Unfortunately I had decided by hour 40 or so that while it's a decent game by itself, it falls short as a Dragon Age game - and that's where it counts.

If you are truly a long time fan and know the lore, then you are in the minority giving this game a 10/10. And yes, I played it - I have over 100 hours in it.

You seem to have chosen to ignore the very many well-established world & cultural / political lore that Veilguard chooses to simply ignore. It's too much for me to even list here. You either cannot be objective and should have left this review to someone who could, or you don't know the lore.

As just a game it's fun and the in-game world is beautiful. The combat is fun at first, but it gets very same-y, and every class seems to play very similarly to each other. Why does my warrior look a lot like my mage when fighting? The romances are under-written and juvenile; the villains have been reduced to caricatures of what they were in the lore, companions are rah-rah cheerleaders whose deepest thought is whether someone needs a hug, and Solas and every other past character that are the very reason we want to play the game has been marginalized to the point where it feels disrespectful. The only place it felt like old Dragon Age was the very end.

I comprehend that this new team at Bioware probably wanted to write their own story and characters that they could feel passionate about, and they wrote an "okay" game here, albeit one that seems aimed at young adults raised on text interactions and therapy sessions. But they didn't respect the source material, nor did they stop to think about the fact that the reason they have jobs at all is because of those older games, done in that different, deeper tone, that they seem to turn their noses up at.