Oh yes, he is. Caleb isn't shy about expressing his intense feelings for MC. Especially not in this scene! It's well-written for sure.

The few times it works (Star wars TOR, WOW, FF11/14, PSO) are a minority, and work as they don't act as replacements for other games/entries that remain Single player, or allow someone to play Solo through them if they just want to experience the story. Most others rip out story for Multiplayer.

Me too, honestly. Trying to fit the square peg into the round hole and then blaming the people unable to fit the square peg into the round hole because you gave them an impossible task is just crazy stuff. Par for the course with EA, unfortunately.

The "OMG!" I let out when my Inquisitor stabbed the map right on Tevinter...with Cassandra, Leliana and Cullen plotting their next move. Only for that to be pushed aside after 10 years EA-induced development hell.

My God, Mike, just imagining what we could have had in DA immediately after "Trespasser" if the studio weren't required to chase live service/multi-player fad. And to go through everything since and deduce "should have made Veilguard live service"...fuck

Agree 100% - Nobody looks at a horror film and thinks, "Hey, that Frozen movie was successful so let's make the sequel more like that."

When you screw with what works in a franchise, you lose the fanbase - that's it. A tree doesn't thrive by chopping it off at its roots and expecting it to grow.

More players, maximum profits! - Generic (Modern) CEO

At least that’s their very wrong takeaway. EA only cares about how much of a return for making this game. A game that’s changed direction and rebooted at least three times because of EA’s poor leadership. EA does not understand their customers.

Does that make Veilguard a failure? Depends on your metric. We have many cases of games that sold well but came under whatever the internal projections/forecasts for that game were. Whether those were out to lunch or not, to them they’re the only numbers that matter.

The analogy about a carpenter seeing all problems as "nails" and the solution being a "hammer" comes to mind. EA needs to seriously reassess why they even bought Bioware and what they expected out of this studio

My advice to EA (not that they care): you have an IP that a lot of people love. Deeply. At its height, it sold well enough to make you happy, right? Look at what it did best at the point where it sold the most. Follow Larian's lead and double down on that. The audience is still there. And waiting. ❤️

Maybe I'm being unkind. There are certainly all sorts of lessons a company could learn from a game like Veilguard (I still haven't played it, so I'm going off what other people have said), but "maybe it should have been live service" being the takeaway seems a bit short-sighted and self-serving.

Eventually, you're going to ask yourself why we (the company) even bother with those other games. Like single player games. It's a question you've asked aloud before. The fans bristle, but you're not here to supply every audience what they want. You're here to make money and increase share value.

You go look at their sales. Good, sure, but not as spectacular as live service and action games! Profit's great, but what's the point if you're not #1 in the charts? If you're not making headlines? If the devs can't make it work, this is THEIR failure. This, after all, is the future of gaming!

Your natural response? "We should make more action games, and all our games should have live service!" Cha-ching, right? Then some uppity devs spoil your buzz by saying "that doesn't apply equally to all games" or "we have an established IP with an audience that has certain expectations". You frown.