So a trailer dropped for Dragon Age: The Veilguard and it seems to have created a bit of a controversy. Personally, I'm not much invested in Dragon Age as a franchise. I've tried to get into all three of the games, and bounced off of all of them. But I find the controversy over the aesthetics of the new one kind of interesting.


I see a lot of people concerned that the tone is too jovial, too jokey or marvel-esque. One article pointed out that the character reveals looked like they belonged in an Overwatch-style hero shooter, which I thought was funny. My first thought was to compare the character designs to famous internet punching bag Raid: Shadow Legends, but honestly Raid has better designs.

What the trailer kind of crystallized to me is that there's a weirdly consistent aesthetic coming out of a large number of mainstream fantasy products --particularly games-- these days. It's relevant here, because I think it's very much the same thing you see in official Dungeons and Dragons art in recent years, and in the D&D movie. Of course you've got all the tropes: the racially and sexually ambiguous characters, the lantern-jawed females, the choice to make the Grey Warden (the faction of the first game's protagonist) black, and so on. But looking beyond the standard DEI tropes we all expect at this point, there's just a safe, plasticine, middle-of-the-road quality to everything. It's all very clean and bloodless. The characters sit in an awkward middle ground of not being beautiful or ugly, while also not looking realistic. The clothes and armor are sort of vaguely "exotic", without clearly referencing any real world culture, and the materials all just look fake. The character designs don't "pop". They don't immediately tell you what kind of person the character is or what their skills are. If you saw stills of the characters not doing anything, you wouldn't know what they were about. The messaging of the trailer is this happy-clappy "get your friends together for a fun adventure" affair.

There's been a lot of digital ink spilled around what kind of fantasy 5e is, and again, this new Dragon Age looks to me like being the exact same tone and aesthetics as 5e. It's obviously not dark fantasy, and I can't really call it high fantasy or epic fantasy either. High fantasy should be about going big, making things as extravagant and fantastical as possible, not bland characters and generic worlds. The words "epic" and "safe" cannot coexist; an epic needs real stakes, tragedy, serious themes and so on. This stuff just looks infantile.

I propose we should instead call this drivel "corporate fantasy".

Quote from: ForgottenF on June 10, 2024, 08:44:54 PMI see a lot of people concerned that the tone is too jovial, too jokey or marvel-esque. One article pointed out that the character reveals looked like they belonged in an Overwatch-style hero shooter, which I thought was funny. My first thought was to compare the character designs to famous internet punching bag Raid: Shadow Legends, but honestly Raid has better designs.

I played the original I think with a friend who was into it. Just never grabbed me. The trailer looks fairly good. A little humor but not the wall to wall jokes some of the reviews seem to make it out to be. The only humor seems to mostly be limited to early and the rest is just standard adventurer banter.

So whats all the uproar about?

Just for comparison...

https://youtu.be/GoEol-5Epfg?si=iPdBGnKXC5gbZUOy

Quote from: Omega on June 11, 2024, 09:04:01 AMI played the original I think with a friend who was into it. Just never grabbed me. The trailer looks fairly good. A little humor but not the wall to wall jokes some of the reviews seem to make it out to be. The only humor seems to mostly be limited to early and the rest is just standard adventurer banter.

So whats all the uproar about?

The common complaint coming from the Dragon Age fans is that it's out of keeping with the early 00s grimdark, and (at least attempted) realism of the earlier titles.

Personally I don't think Dragon Age as a series has ever had strong aesthetic chops. The arms and armor have always looked kinda doofy, and in general Origins might be one of the ugliest games I've ever played. But you can fairly blame a lot of that on the limitations of the engine when compared to what they were trying to do with it.

If you imagine what the aesthetic of the first two games would look like carried forward to 2024 AAA graphics, I imagine it'd look something like Vermintide or the Lords of the Fallen reboot. Definitely not like this.

So I get why fans would be mad if that's what they were expecting, though I don't think they should be surprised. 1) Dragon Age Inquisition was already moving in this direction, and 2) AAA publishing these days is not going to do gritty edgelord fantasy in a big tentpole game unless FromSoftware made it.