i haven’t felt so INVESTED in something fandom-wise for over 5 years. and now i can’t fuckin stop thinking about this canadian bottom and his russian soft dom top

unreal / unity make it possible for small teams to make incredible games. and that is nothing to shit on.

this idea that indie means $50,000 and someone’s basement for 10 years is ridiculous. a video game need funding if someone wants to quit their job in order to do it. and $10m over 6 years is a cheap ass game.

is it a perfect game? no, bc that’s entirely subjective and there is no such thing. but it shows what happens when people are allowed to be creative & create a game that is for them & their players, not a greedy CEO addicted to micro transactions. and that in and of itself makes it a masterpiece

e33 deserved to sweep bc it showed the world what is possible for an indie game - a game that frankly looks close to a AAA game. you can even feel in the game how much more they wanted to add to it - additional quests, stories, maps etc based on how the pacing/map exploration is between act 2 and 3

idk these comments (cuz it mostly is just salty commenters) just show how little people actually understand what goes into making a game, which is fine at baseline, you don’t need to know everything. but then they act like they are the authority on what constitutes an indie game or whatever.

similarly dumb is the “it’s not an rpg” lens because it is literally a french jrpg. and jrpgs are rpgs.

indie: independent studio. doesn’t mean they don’t have a publisher lol. also doesn’t mean that a $10m budget over 6ish years isn’t incredibly small. AND doesn’t mean they can’t use unreal to make a good 3D game utilizing all of the incredible in-engine things that unreal provides

the character writing in da:i is also SO INCREDIBLY GOOD and well done that sometimes i forget how truly horrendous most video game writing is

i have played this game for over 1,200 hours according to my playstation which is simultaneously concerning and impressive. 1,000 of those hours are likely doing the same dorian romance over and over again

nevermind the fact that the game textures literally look like kh1 remastered 😭✋

battle system: better than persona. aesthetics: significantly worse (imo - it doesn’t feel as memorable)

i think overall i love the game mechanics but dislike the game. which is a really weird are to live in

i’m ragging on veilguard not because i hate it, also. it had SO much potential, and imo with a few small(ish) adjustments and additional companion dialogue and scenes it could really shine. but they tried to hard to appeal to everyone, and in the process alienated their fanbase

solas also went from a fairly interesting antihero to being trapped for the majority of the game? like what? i was nervous when the game was retitled veilguard instead of dread wolf - and it turns out i was right lol.

like why are all my companions so willing to die for me?? the approval system feels like a broken afterthought bc no one ever disagrees with you or hates you. from origins to inquisition, your team had some autonomy with whether they stayed with you. rook says the team is family but i don’t see it.

there are so many plot holes that could have been really easily fixed if there was more of a relationship between rook and the inquisition and the inquisitor - on top of having really, really milktoast and bland companion dialogue in comparison to every other da game so far.