i find it really frustrating when people dismiss the criticism of veilguard (from other fans, not grifters) by pointing out how people have always complained about each dragon age release for the same reasons while enjoying them in retrospect because. maybe its not just that people like to complain. maybe its because this game is a symptom of a greater issue across all media genres of late stage capitalism suffocating creativity and gradually reducing all types of media to shallow, shiny, easily-digestible shadows of their former iterations in favor of maximizing profit. and maybe you can see that decline especially clearly in a series like dragon age where you can track its creative manifestation over the last 15 years. and maybe you can see this across the entire gaming industry and film industry and book publishing and television and literally everywhere.
and maybe people have drawn comparisons between veilguard and disney, a comparison that would’ve been unthinkable 10 years ago, not because they are actually similar in content but in their similar loss of the passion, sincerity and humanity behind their creation in favor of meaningless cash grabs that people can FEEL when they experience them. and maybe we also have clear proof of this in the way that the fourth dragon age installment was scrapped, forced into being multiplayer, and ONLY allowed to revert back to single player following the massive monetary success of Jedi: Fallen Order that demonstrated the financial value of single player games to the millionaire executives at EA. but whatever i guess people just love to complain
I've been thinking, and I've come to the conclusion that one of the reasons why Veilguard feels so hollow is because it makes an attempt to reckon with Solas’s fatal flaw, but completely fails at actually doing so.
This may be a controversial opinion, but I don't think pride is Solas’s fatal flaw. It's a symptom, not the origin point. Solas’s fatal flaw is his inability to trust others. It's a threadline all the way through Inquisition, from the things he says to you (I know that mistake well enough to carve the angles of her face from memory) to the very structure of his personal quest (which does not trigger if you're on low approval with him). He's tragic (in the literary sense) because even in the case of a high approval Inquisitor, the person most likely to listen to him and capable of acting upon it, he doesn't ask them for help. Hell, we know he was planning to tell a romancing Inquisitor, but chickened out at literally the last possible second, that's how deep it runs. That's why it's Tragic.
And I think Veilguard tries to contrast this with the Team™. Which is fine, I guess, until you realise that Solas’s original Team was the Evanuris. None of Rook’s Team™ can betray them. If they don't do the companions personal quests they die, rather than become disloyal in some way. They're all 100% in accord about their politics and what is Right, without real argument. Which is nice, but if your advice to someone with severe trust issues is 'skill issue' that's...unhelpful.
And yeah, Solas did have his rebellion, but he had the rebellion in the sense that the Inquisitor had the Inquisition, not in the sense that Rook has the Team™. And as he says, any powerful organisation inevitably falls to betrayal and corruption.
And he had Felassan, but Felassan also betrayed him (with good reason, but he did actively undermine an operation he was on on behalf of Solas. That is a betrayal), which can only have cemented the inherent trust issues.
But, thinking about it, there is actually a paralell with some of the companions having experienced some kind of betrayal. Lucanis and Illario, Bellara and Cyrion, Davrin and Isseya/the Wardens, Taash and Shathann. And pretty much all of these experience a last minute change of heart, or otherwise come to the companion's POV if allowed to. Is this what they were going for with Mythal in the Atonement ending? I can kind of see the logic.
The problem is, I don't really see why this suddenly turns Solas around. He doesn't overcome his fatal flaw in order to avoid his tragedy. It always comes down to the fact that Solas’s actual reasons for bringing down the Veil are never truly addressed, and likely changed at some point in production between Trespasser and Veilguard. The political and systemic issues of the setting are pushed aside by Veilguard's narrative for individual and personal issues, even well established issues like systemic racism and slavery. It's incoherent to say 'Solas was destroying the Veil because he couldn't trust people, so fixing the trust means he doesn't want the veil to come down', when the issue was 'Solas can't trust anyone else to help solve the harm caused by the Veil because of the betrayal'. The harm doesn't go away because the betrayal did, you know what I mean? And Rook, and by extention the entire narrative, never displays willingness to even acknowledge those issues as existing in the first place, let alone needing addressing in some way. Rook interrupts Solas when he tries to talk about the suffering of the Spirits. So why does he suddenly hand over the dagger, symbolically handing the matter over to Rook?