I don't know what's happening, but it's definitely happening.
With just one week to go before the release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Electronic Arts has dropped the official Dragon Age: The Veilguard launch trailer, an action-packed extravaganza of sound and fury signifying that a videogame will definitely be arriving soon.
Also arriving soon, as seen in the trailer, is a pair of elven gods, and that’s bad news all around. They were “horrific tyrants,” so the story goes, and “the worst is still coming. Unless we stop them.”
I’m not fully up to speed on my Dragon Age lore, but last time I looked, elves had pretty much got the short end of the stick in Thedas, reduced to poverty, enslavement, and abuse at the hands of humans following the loss of their homeland in a war with the Tevinter Imperium. In that light, I can’t shake the feeling that maybe payback in the form of a little elven tyranny is only fair. To paraphrase the great Michael Madsen, they deserve their revenge, and we deserve to die.
(Yes, I chose Iorveth’s path in The Witcher 3, and no, it wasn’t a hard decision.)
But the obvious implication here is that this pair of pointy-eared overlords will be bad for everyone, and so it is that we’re putting together a team to pump the brakes on the whole thing. It’s all very dramatic and grim, with a “summer blockbuster” cinematic approach that’s 100% focused on generating hype rather than saying anything of substance. I suppose that’s to be expected given that by now, everyone’s already made up their minds on whether The Veilguard is something they care about, but even so I was tempted to give it a bit of a hard time for that high-volume superficiality. But then I wondered: Is it really all that unusual?
Flashing back to the 1998 E3 trailer for the original Baldur’s Gate rather strongly suggests that no, it is not. (Forgive the video quality—it was a long time ago.)
They’re really not all that different, are they? Cinematics, dramatic music, bits of gameplay here and there, and a flash to the title card.
Comments on the Dragon Age: The Veilguard launch trailer on YouTube seem largely positive. Several people say Electronic Arts should’ve led with this in the first place, rather than the widely disliked reveal trailer we got, which is a sentiment we’ve shared previously too.
Even so, there may be some ground to make up. The launch trailer currently holds 12,000 likes on YouTube, but also 5,000 dislikes, and while that doesn’t mean a whole lot on its own—it’s easy to click the “dislike” button just for the hell of it—it’s not an especially encouraging ratio. The Baldur’s Gate 3 launch trailer, by way of comparison, has 50,000 likes and just 517 dislikes, and that’s arguably as much a commentary on the benefits of early access as anything else, but the bottom line is that as expressions of goodwill go, racking up 4,400 dislikes immediately after the release of your launch trailer is a pretty sure sign you still have some convincing to do.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard comes out on October 31. A preload period on PC will not be available because of our unfortunate tendency to pirate videogames: You can start downloading when the game goes live on launch day at 9 am PT/12 pm ET.
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