Gabe has been pushing this new Frankenstein shit pretty hard, but I don't have to be nudged with any intensity into seeing a Guillermo Del Toro movie. I can close my eyes and see one, I love his shit. Apparently this new one balls out of control, and a wisp of a scene at the very end of the runtime hints at the kind of structures in play.
I just got through one of the most bizarre articles I've ever read. It's over at Eurogamer, which - along with a few of its satellites - I think is about the best we got in that space. The article, entitled longly, is called "Revisiting Dragon Age: The Veilguard - one year on, how have our thoughts changed on BioWare's opinion-splitting RPG." Having read it, I'm not a hundred percent sure the answer exists in the piece.
Eventually it becomes an interview between someone who gave the game five stars and someone who scored it correctly talking about God knows what. After an interminable period, during which several empires rose and fell in history's rich pageant, the author says he might have given it a four instead, if he had to do it all again - but that's not true. This is a mea culpa with no culpa in it, a vampire looking into a full-length mirror. The next opportunity he has to falsify reality, he will take it up in both hands.
An uncharitable goblin man would say, "Didn't they give Baldur's Gate 3 Four Stars?" but I hail not from those deep and darkened realms. There was some rough stuff the further you got into launch BG3. Plus, different people score things differently - and they weren't scored by the same person. But they might as well be, in this case: at that time, it was not possible to tell the truth. Bad people didn't like it, and good people did. There's no room to meaningfully discuss a product under these conditions, but there are plenty of opportunities to offer exaggerated pieties for… what, exactly? A piece of retail software from Electronic Arts? An epitaph for a storied development house?
Later, after the launch, even the most steadfast adherent might be heard voicing a concern, in the dark, lips barely moving, only a single candle to light the secret vault such heretic confessions must be birthed in. Then Jason Schreier would waddle out of his bog, with tales of a game that was functionally an Extended Club Remix of whatever market segment management was jacking off to at the time, and evidence of working conditions deployed - in the signature Schreier style - long after they might have served a living soul.
(CW)TB out.
