i had been crying about this on discord for a little while bc it's so wild, but. here is a Veilguard Development Lore :')
"maybe being the lead writer of a fairly dark fantasy game is not the ideal role for someone who gets stressed out by conflict in fiction"
yeah I can't stop thinking about this either, ever since I first read it. There's so much going on. I read the first chapter of this book, and the tension that was so unbearable in it was "main character's uncle dies and main character's father talks about maybe keeping the inheritance from her" - that's the stressful plot point that couldn't be handled.
I had some people upset with me years ago about suggesting (and grimly sticking to my gut) that maybe the writers of the video game had something to do with the deeply different writing tone and scope and depth of the video game (experienced subjectively by many people). none of the many interviews since then with the head writer talking about comfort in fiction have proven me wrong at all. I cannot imagine the situation where they would willingly add a distressing conflict where it wasn't already there, or fight to include a darker tone. They said "we're going to proudly do this our way and it's not going to be the same as if Gaider was there to lead" and called it a day. And I think they genuinely still don't understand what happened because the tone genuinely pleased them.
