Avowed. Dragon Age: Veilguard. Trash? No. Disappointing? Yes.

I love RPGs. My absolute favorite type of game – MMORPGs – are a sub-genre of RPGs. And it was single player RPGs that truly forged my love for video games: Ultima, Wizardry, Bard’s Tale, the SSI “Gold Box” Games  (Pools of Radiance, etc). Those are the CRPGs that made video games my biggest passion. So you can understand I have a very soft spot for these games and want them all to be good. I buy them and try them even when I have a very strong suspicion they aren’t going to be up to snuff.

I don’t write reviews so this isn’t going to be a review. Just some grave concerns and sadness about RPGs that should have been awesome.

Whether not these games are “woke” is irrelevant.

These games are not bad because they are woke. They are bad, and happen to be woke. Because let me blow your mind: most highly creative, imaginative forms of art and entertainment are woke. That’s just reality and facts.

Way too much time has been spent on character creation having pronoun choices (so what?), trans gender options (who cares?), and in the case of DA:V a very clunky, ham-fisted, scolding speech about how to interact with non-binary friends (ok, this was an abomination but also easily forgettable and ignorable if you just sigh and move on). The reality is, no matter how you feel about these elements, they didn’t take center stage. They were an easily forgotten sidebar.

Furthermore, the reality is nearly all sci-fi/fantasy is woke. Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Marvel, DC, Dune, Game of Thrones, Jurassic Park, Terminator, Alien, Predator, Stargate… the list goes on. The most creative and imaginatively brilliant franchises of all time are full of woke messages and themes.

Of course, the good ones are subtle about it. They don’t slap you in the face and over-explain it.

Do you recognize this? It is Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura in the first broadcast television interracial kiss. This was absolutely TECTONIC in impact and significance. But you know what they didn’t do? They didn’t talk about it for 30 minutes. It just happened. They put it on the screen and let the impact resonate.

Everyone who knows Star Trek (the Original Series) knows the Federation was the United States/Europe/”the West”, Klingons were the Russians, Romulans were the Chinese, and Vulcans were the Japanese. There were no “wink wink, nudge nudge” heavy references to beat you over the head with these connections. They just hint at them geopolitically (galactopolitically?) and let the themes and stories do the work.

They put Chekov on the bridge of the Enterprise to hint of a future when the US and USSR could be allies. But they never make a big deal out of it. They leave that to the viewer to pick up on at his/her own pace.

And Don’t Even Start With Blaming DEI

Educate yourself about DEI. DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion… and accessibility) does not exist to give unqualified people a job over qualified people. DEI exists for the opposite – to give people a CHANCE at jobs, schools, opportunities that they would otherwise be shut out of because they don’t “fit in” or “look like” the people historically in charge of making hiring decisions. DEI exists to give people a fair chance to compete when social structures, history, and tradition would otherwise lock them out completely.

Dragon Age: Veilguard – Boring. No risks. No new ideas. Shallow combat. Dull story.

Dragon Age: Veilguard. It lacked all the charm, intrigue, mystery, excitement, and panache of DA1 and DA2 (DA3 was also garbage and a terrible console port. Don’t get me started). Combat is dull. The world is dull. The story is dull. The absolutely unnecessary skill web is ridiculous and adds absolutely nothing. The gear system was weak. The armor skins look terrible (see: What is going on with art design in big games these days?). I used a mod to unlock every single armor skin. Not a single one was awesome. I wouldn’t pay 10 cents for a single one of them in a F2P shop. The weapons were also middling at best. I guarantee you the DAV team has brilliant artists. Who stopped them from actually using their imaginations and creativity? I really want to know.

But the real sin was the boring gameplay: absolutely nothing exciting or innovative. I played on max difficulty and every combat was a joke. Every RPG should have something incredibly exciting, fascinating, or interesting happen in the first 10 minutes that seeds your imagination for what’s going to happen. DA:V had absolutely nothing.

Avowed – Ugly. Dull. Shallow. Worse than its 10-20 year old ancestors.

Avowed. Have you seen the videos “Avowed vs. Skyrim” (Skyrim is 14 years older) and “Avowed vs. Oblivion” (Oblivion is 19 years older)? Sadly? They nail it.

The games feel very similar but the older games are MORE immersive, interactive, and interesting. Yikes. Avowed comes from Obsidian Entertainment, founded by Feargus Urquhart, which is the progeny of Urquhart’s Black Isle Studios who created Planescape: Torment (arguably the best CRPG of all time), Icewind Dale, Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate 2, Fallout 2. You can draw a lot of comparisons between Obsidian/Black Isle and Larian, and before BG3 call Obsidian/Black Isle the FAR MORE successful studio. Avowed should have been the Baldur’s Gate 3 of 2025. Instead, it’s also a bargain bin refund game.

How Do We Fix This?

Fortunately, so many games come out every year and there are so many studios, we still get great games on a regular basis. Baldur’s Gate 3 happened. God of War. Elden Ring. Marvel Rivals. Horizon Forbidden West. Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Balatro. Lethal Company. V: Rising.

But we also keep seeing huge, beloved franchises nuke themselves. Halo. Dragon Age. Mass Effect. Assassin’s Creed. Diablo.

What can be done?

1. Experiment with smaller budgets. Huge budgets result in less risks. This happens in other forms of entertainment also. Perhaps these huge franchises should let some hungrier, smaller studios take a shot with the IP and a less insane budget. Maybe $50m instead of $500m.

2. Keep your teams together. Studios lack team continuity. The corporate addiction with layoffs and giant bonuses to the executives means you cannot even keep the soul of a creative studio together for very long. Stop doing this. Value continuity. Spread the bonuses around to the entire team. I know I am dreaming here and this will require a complete societal change to corporate abuse of the workers, but simply because it is hard doesn’t mean I will ever stop saying it.

Pay your workers. Value your workers. Keep your teams together.

3. Reward creativity. Look to the indie dev community to find people doing amazingly creative stuff, and give them a shot with something bigger. In the old days, this happened all the time but it has fallen out of favor. So instead, you get people who end up in charge of a massive game like DA:V who were never the #1 person before. Their first time truly “in charge” the stakes are too high. Teaching an indie dev to scale is easier and less likely to ruin a game than teaching a corporate yes-man who got promoted by going with the flow to suddenly be creative.

What do you all think?