One of the major faults of Veilguard's dialogue is how often it's shaped by generic platitudes and sound bites instead of actual specific things happening or being talked about in the narrative. "Sometimes people let you down", "Family makes things complicated", "Bullies are always drawn to power", "It's just people trying to live their lives", "You have to take care of yourself every once in a while", "When your heart and your gut are both telling you, 'Do what you can'--"
My biggest issue with this is not a quibble over whether or not these things are true (like all platitudes they are trivially true, whether or not they're appropriate or correct things to say in the context the characters say them), but that they are a style of placeholder dialogue that exists to avoid having to give specific details or actual development. They could only be interesting if they were argued against, demonstrated, or interrogated for meaning in some way. Instead, the characters often take these things as read, and so nothing comes of it.
Like the line "How many exceptions 'til tyranny?"--a one-off sentiment expressed by a Lich at the end of Emmrich's questline. It doesn't exist to provide meaning or create a conversation. It exists to provide a cheap explanation as to why Emmrich is not allowed to both become a lich and to revive Manfred. There is no impassioned argument on behalf of a grieving Emmrich, torn between the protege that he loved and the life's work that he is about to give up, spurred on by the phobia that defines his motives. Nobody thinks to argue that as a wisp Manfred wasn't a "mortal" who is "supposed" to die to begin with (but then, it's either canon-breaking that they can resurrect Manfred at all, or it's no big deal and they don't need lich approval to do it, and there is no in-between on this one I'm afraid). There is no exploration of what it looks like when a Lich has "exceptions", whether in the past or during the course of the story (since Johanna was obviously not trying to resurrect people in terms of what made her a bad lich). And are there circumstances where "no exceptions" can also be a form of tyranny? How would that work? Could Rook argue that on Emmrich's behalf?
Of course not, this is cheap glue holding the scene together, we can't interrogate it or it'll fall apart.
All of Veilguard's platitudes are like that. Neve says "The gods were people, and people can let you down"--no one wants to challenge her on this? No one wants to argue that "let you down" is a MILD phrase to use for "the people you selected to protect you decided to enslave and torture you instead"? No one wants to argue that they SHOULD have been better, they were practically gods! No one wants to push their basic faith that sometimes people DON'T let you down? If someone were to push back on this line, then it might have told us something about Neve or the character arguing with her. It might have given us actual specifics in terms of what is going on--in what way were the gods "people" and what made them tyrants? Could someone else have done better? Is there no other way this could have gone? But this is filler dialogue. You're not supposed to think about it. It is supposed to paper over the scene in your head so the writers don't have to tell you any more than that. You are expected to nod your head at this aphorism and keep going.
This is, incidentally, why so much of the dialogue comes across as blandly lecturing the player.
And it's not a SURPRISE that the game with the amateur writer as narrative head where they spent the majority of the development time with no idea what the hell they were doing with the story is chock full of filler dialogue, but it is, you know, irritating when it's the sequel that was supposed to explain shit to us. What is Tevinter like? Oh, you know. Like any place with people living in it. What were the ancient elves like? They were people trying to live their lives, of course.
I don't need the game to be having arguments with itself all the time to be clear, but platitudes are something you write when you don't have anything to actually say. When you know that Bellara's problem is that her brother has become suckered in by a charismatic cult leader and is about to do a ritual that will kill/torture people, then your advice to her should be about that and not that she needs to “do what [she] can but take time for [her]self too”. "Family is hard" CAN describe this situation, but it can also describe a million other situations and so if I was Bellara I think I'd get kind of pissed that it feels like no one's actually paying attention to my specific problem.
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