I Hope Dragon Age: The Veilguard Is Nothing Like Its Companion Podcast

By 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tessa Kaur

Published Sep 13, 2024

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My quest to finish all the games ahead of has been derailed by and other games I 🦄have to play for work, but I’ve still been trying to keep up in the ways I can. One of those ways is that, as a certified podcast fiend, I’ve been listening to the companion podcast, Dragon Age: Vows & Vengeance.

Vows & Vengeance, a collaboration between Dragon Age publisher and marketing agency Pod People, bills itself as an “immersive fantasy podcast series” that introduces us to two original heroes “brought together by fate” who “embark on a journey of revenge, redemption, and love”. Its deuteragonists, Nadia and Drayden, are on a mission to save Nadia’s partner (fiance, kinda) from the Fade, and in the process, meet every single o𓂃ne of the upcoming fourquel’s seven companions. There are eight episodes, seven of which will feature a different companion.

The actors from the game reprise their roles here. It’s cl🔯ear they’re trying very hard to make this script sound convincing, but unfortunately, they’re faili♔ng.

Do you all remember when the game’s first trailer was revealed in June and fans started freaking out on social media because 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:i꧅t seemed to be getting the tone a🥃ll wrong? People called it 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:“cheesy” and “goofy”, highlighting its constant quipping. The companions sounded less like the “complex” characters 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:BioWare insists they are and more like comic relief characters in a schlocky movie, constantly stating the obvious and dropping one-liners obviously meant for comedic effect but failing to transcend the 2010’s mille🔯nnial humour of the ‘He’s right behind me,✨ isn’t he?’ variety.

Morrigan in the new Dragon Age: The Veilguard trailer

Why Didn't BioWare Open With The Newest Dragon Age: The Veilguard Trailer?

The release date reveal trailer for the newest Dragon Age game is miles better than anything we’ve seen from BioWar🔜e so far.

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Now, I don’t want to alarm you. You can’t judge the quality of a game or its writing off its companion podcast. But this podcast sounds exactly like that trailer everybody hated.

The podcast, inherently, is an Avengers Assemble type deal, at least from what I can tell from the first two episodes. Characters come across each other by coincidence. In one case, they immediately act like besties – Nadia and Harding exposition dump on each other from their first meeting, compacting their getting to know each other into as small an amount of time as possible. In another, they form a childish rivalry that doesn’t seem conscious of its laziness at all – Nadia meets Drayden in the second episode and takes to rudely calling them Books, because they read a lot and bring it up in conversation. Books? Books? As a mean nickname?

Nadia also brings up her mother and her fiance in hamfisted, awkward ways, completely in contrast to her hardened, roguish nature, which doesn’t inspire a lot of faith in me when it comes to The Veilguard’s writi💧ng.

And then we get an enemies -to-friends scenario because Books proves their worth in battleꦇ, and they end up going off into the sunset together. Yes, it feels as inorganic as you can imagine. And yes, the quipping is still incessant, and incredibly unfunny. Not once has one of these characters’ꦡ sassy retorts managed to make me crack a smile, and I’m quite easily amused.

It’s just not very good writing, and quite frankly𝐆, quite a lot of each episode is also made up of grunting, shouting, and other similar sounds from battle scenes, which isn’t exactly suited to a podcast medium. Perhaps it would be more tolerable as an animated series, or a graphic novel, something that doesn’t reduce the combat to incoherent shouting and weak, unconvincing threats hollered at various enemies. But that would still keep in all the hackneyed, cliched writing that prompted my partner to say, sadly, “This is bad” when he walked in on me listening to it one night.

I’d managed to convince myself that maybe that first trailer just wasn’t very representative of what the game is like, but maybe it’ll turn out to be the most accurate of all of ♔them. Varric’s episode has just released,✅ and if he sounds as cookie cutter and tropey as what I’ve already heard so far, it’ll be a very bad sign.