Hello! Not a question just wanted to drop in and say I loved watching your playthrough of Veilguard. I’ve been a long time lurker reading and enjoying practically every fic of yours so it was really fun to hear your process of developing Kata’s personality and motivations.
Most days I’d have it on while I was at work but I finished it on Friday so now I don’t know what I’m gonna do to make the workday go faster haha. Anyway just wanted to say thank you for sharing it! The DA fandom can be cranky to say the least so seeing you genuinely enjoy the game was like a breath of fresh air (not to mention a lot of your reactions to characters and lore drops were very similar to mine)!
Hope you’re having a lovely weekend!
Ahh, I'm so glad! I had a blast with this game, start to finish, & I'm very close to starting a fresh Nightmare runthrough which I do intend to stream. I have such a better idea of who Kata is now, and I want to take her through the game again and get her narrative really right, especially as regards the timing & story structure. Plus, I want to figure out exactly where the Lucanis romance beats fall for her; I don't think that kiss at the end is their actual first kiss, but I don't know where it actually is!
Plus, I found that combat honestly so fun, and I want to enjoy the early levels again where it's no powers, all skill. I want to feel rewarded for my perfect parry timing & my headshots!! I want to go back to the fundamentals!!
Yeah, I've heard the game had its controversy, but I've done what I can to stay away from that, ahaha. I went into this game prepared to be pleased and with very low expectations, and keeping the mindset of "this game development was restarted twice & it's a miracle it exists at all" helped a lot. It also helped that my immediate circle of DA fans (who played well before I did) really loved the game as well, which I'm sure colored my opinion.
Plus, I think my total detachment from Veilguard's development period honestly was a huge boon. Because Inquisition didn't land for me the first time I played it, I didn't touch that sandbox at all! I didn't spend ten years thinking about Veilguard's possible storylines or Solas's outcomes or writing speculative meta about the Veil; I stayed firmly in my very Kirkwallian DA2 playground & was happy there. I think I wrote Solas's name in fic literally once. If I'd been invested at all in his story back then, if I'd had a decade to think about what I wanted from VG and for Solas and my Lavellan, I think I would have gotten super invested in certain ideas and concepts and possibilities and been inevitably disappointed.
(This segues into a half-thought I've been tossing around—I was quite shocked when a friend told me some people were sad there wasn't an option to side with Solas & complete the ritual, which had literally never once occurred to me as a desirable thing in all my DAI/VG playtime. I wonder if that's because I spent so many millions of words & thousands of hours in DA2's very Veiled-Off universe; to destroy or remake that world would feel like its own death to me, and a death of the future I wanted for Hawke & Fenris. Maybe that's why I felt so strongly against it the whole time. Food for thought!)
Anyway, not having an Inquisitor I loved until about five months ago I think really benefited my experience, as did not having to wait before playing the game. I'd never read a Solavellan fic in my life! I'd never had one iota of investment in his outcome! I'd spent ten years watching tragic fanart float over my dash and sadly shaking my head at those woeful Solas girlies! While the reversal of my own investment was an absolute slap in the face, it did mean I was able to go into VG with the emptiest head & the lowest romance expectations, which meant I was super easy to please from the start, hahahah.
It also helped that the stuff VG got right for me was way more important than the stuff I didn't like as much. The Solas material, Rook, the combat system, the Inquisitor they built, the companions, the back third of the Lucanis romance—those were great. I loved those. I left those events with a huge smile on my face. Those things were infinitely more important to me than the stuff I struggled with (some vocabulary/world tonal mismatches, the middle third of the Lucanis romance, some storylines/quest beats I thought were pretty heavyhanded). It's not a perfect game in any sense, but it did so many things I loved that to dwell on the misses doesn't seem productive.
I mean, I have a million words of DA2 on AO3. I lived in that world for like fourteen years, and boy does that world have holes. Plot, mechanics, combat, characters, even the non-brown-ness of the graphics—it was a complete break from so many of the Origins systems. I remember the huge outcry when that game was released. I remember seeing posts of people shredding their DA2 discs and burning the case inserts. I remember people absolutely railing against Anders' characterization and getting in huge arguments on the kink meme about the Arishok & Elthina & Isabela's pants. There've always been huge jumps in world implementation from game to game, and with the super long dev time, I figured VG would be the same. I guess I just tried to keep that in mind as I moved forward.
(I think it also helps that while I loved my Inquisitor and grew very fond of Solas over my replay, I still don't think DAI is a very good game. I do not like the map design, the combat system, or some choices they made with some of the companions; I think the inventory & UI systems are criminally clumsy. Those are really important aspects of modern gaming to me [I was much more tolerant the first time I played DA2, sue me], and for VG to polish those so well significantly improved my enjoyment of actually playing the thing.)
(Another side thought: I do wonder how some of VG would have been received had it released eight years ago instead of right before the election last year. The world was different then, and I wonder if some material would have seemed less graceless at that time, and if some voices would have been less virulent.)
Anyway, this reply has completely gotten away from me; if nothing else, thanks for giving me a place to finally get down some of these thoughts! Like I said, I'm really eager to get back into the game & Kata's story, & I'll post here when those streams start. Thank you so much! <3 <3
