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Dragon Age: Veilguard
We finished it yesterday. I am relatively satisfied overall -- some things I enjoyed, some complaints for sure. From what little I've seen of a consensus (since we played so slowly I haven't been following along with commentary at all), I agree that the story and characters had a lot of potential but were underwritten. Given where the story starts, I feel like we missed almost an entire game of backstory (the story DA: Dread Wolf was going to be?). I understand why, from a practical position, this game stands so separate from all the others -- there are so many potential world states by now that managing all the different versions would be a Herculean task (I suppose that's what fic is for) -- but divorcing the action and characters almost completely from what happened in southern Thedas over the past ten years made it harder for me to connect to the larger world. Also T got pretty bored with the sidequests about halfway through -- he felt like they weren't interesting enough on their own to justify spending the time. So we focused on main story and character quests, and toward the end on getting every faction up to a rank of at least two stars.
To the surprise of no one who knows me, we played a Grey Warden dwarf and romanced Harding (although we flirted with everybody until we were forced to make a choice, and it was hard to resist Neve (T's favorite companion by far) and Davrin (thereby breaking my streak of romancing the Grey Warden companion the first time through every game; I justified it because we were the Grey Warden this time)). Everything else is spoilers, so I'll put it behind a cut).
Here be spoilers, you are officially warned.
I did appreciate the big reveal that Varric died in the battle with Solas, and Rook's perceptions had been twisted to hide that fact from her. DA hasn't done a story like that before, and I think it holds up -- playing with that knowledge in mind is one of the ideas that makes a replay most compelling to me, along with getting to dig into more of the sidequests (especially clearing out the Crossroads) and, perhaps, playing a world state where the Inquisitor had romanced Solas. The set-up for that world state is in the works, but just barely -- I've only played DA:O and the first few scenes of Awakening -- so getting back to DA:V would take awhile. That said, I'm not so eager to replay right away, so probably it's fine if it takes me many months to get back to it.
Other choices of note -- Harding took the risk in the first battle and sacrificed herself in the fight with Ghilan'nain. (We picked her to lead the distraction despite being our love interest because Davrin and Neve were our standard party companions by that point.) We saved Minrathous from the dragon attack (T's partiality to Neve started very early on), the griffons went to the Grey Wardens, all of our companions became heroes of the Veilguard, Bellara was taken into the blight but survived at the end (as did all of the companions besides Harding). Since I'm unlikely to remain spoiler free for a bunch of replays, I'll satisfy my curiosity about what happens along other pathways soon (and feel free to talk about your decisions in comments).
For a game in a series that's been so important to my fannish life, I feel like I ought to have more to say, but maybe its inevitable, given that I've been disconnected from the fandom for so long. Maybe it's time to fix that.
Who else has played? What do you think? Feel free to leave spoilers in the comments (but mark them as such in case there are others here who don't want them).
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So, I think I agree with a lot of what you said; the bit about missing backstory/how did we get here is one of my major complaints with BioWare series, because allegedly most of that was in Trespasser, which is the DLC I didn't play, but had Important Things in it. Following on from Legacy having most of the plot of Inquisition seeded, and Mass Effect doing the same thing. I am extremely grouchy about it, because it makes me feel like I played Inquisition wrong (the only reason I knew what the haps were, was because of fandom spoilers.)
I managed the perfect ending through sheer doggedness of exploring everything, and I really liked it. You still lose a companion (either Harding or Davrin) but you can make everybody else's life better. (Also, Neve and Lucanis's romance if you don't kiss either of them? Ludicrously cute, as is Harding's with Taash.)
I think I was spoiled for the Varric thing so I played the whole game with suspicious squinty eyes at him, and it was an interesting experience. (I miss the days when people cared about not spoiling others.....though that one was probably my own fault.)
Overall this feels like an appropriate swan song for the series; it wraps up so very many things in such a tidy bow that I'm not sure what else they could do unless it was a prequel set in some other Blight.
I do want to replay lots, though.