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Pre-ordered it 2 days ago.... i hope this game has a good story.... since i play video game mostly for the story... 😁

Is David Gaider ok? Is he sure that calling gamers incels for their criticism towards some aspects of the game is the right move? Usually these statements come and bite back and they can hurt sales of the game and bring more hate towards the developers that still work at bioware and the game.

is it an DEI adapter? does it gets VOLTS? no offence mark, did you know dragon age the veilguard went gold?¿ You seem like a nice guy, everybody needs a paycheck but i hope your on the right team, grtz from Belgium :)

Regarding Evolve or Die, how do you think the sequels to DAO were handled? DAO to me is almost everything i want in a game and DA2 was a shadow of it, it did not cater to the existing fans while trying to rake in new ones. DAI also simplified and changed a lot of things, and i think that core DAO audience has never really gotten the sequel they wanted following Awakening. The choices you can make to build your class and party tactics have never been as expansive, not to mention the loss of origins to start off the stories.

Another part of that 400 million could very well be marketing, hollywood normally avoids tacking marketing costs onto their budgets so sony could very well do the same

Love these videos Mark, thanks for your insight. It's honestly fascinating to hear about the development like this. I know it's been a couple of years, but just wondered if you still plan on making a video about Joplin as you mention at the end? Would love to hear you return to this reflective series, and myself and I'm sure many others are particularly interested in hearing more about Joplin's short development (fully understand that you may be unable to discuss Joplin/Morrison until Veilguard has been out for while, I've just been craving another of these videos!)

Like many of your other videos, I see wider implications. Change is the only constant; this is true in life and business. To stay relevant, there has to be change.

Hi Mark, i have eyes and ears too, i don't need someone on the internet to tell me The Veilguard is hot garbage, i can see it pretty plainly for myself.

Thanks, Mark! I was a little confused on went gone gold meant. :) 13 days till DAV! I can't wait to see what BW has cooked up for my favorite franchise! 🎉

Sonic rpg is back 😂

Assassin's Creed has been dealing with this exact thing for years now. "It's a good game, but not an Assassin's Creed game" is a common saying among fans who are clinging to the old style of the series that hasn't been done for years, and they continue to say it on every single release of a new AC game. If AC continues to release for the next 20 years, guaranteed they will still be saying that for each new release then too lol

Big fan of Dragon Age’s lore. Very excited to jump back into THE Dragon Age Setting!

Isn't doing triage basically a risk assessment and mitigation process(in game development context at least)? Btw thanks for the concept you provided: if you make different elements from two differently categorized lists become similar enough you can merge the two categories in one without damaging readability too much while improving flow of information.

What about fostering a company culture that teaches and emphasizes the importance of "completion urgency" and how each individual and role contributes to this? Start by testing when and where completion urgency is most needed and to what degree. You could also outline and train team members on specific processes designed to motivate individuals, allowing that motivation to spread to other team members, especially during critical times. This could create a domino effect, triggered and guided by a well-designed process that aims to cultivate and calibrate this sense of completion urgency across the team.

Feel like this whole video is just a big justification for why Andromeda/Inquisition didn't meet the high standards of Mass Effect 1-3 and Dragon Age 1.

It takes a special kind of hubris from creators to just assume that they know what elements constitute the "vibe" of an IP and therefore what is safe to change without losing the vibe. Even more egregious when they admit to not consuming or interacting with the source material. cough cough *the witcher* cough

Mark came out spitting facts about Orville. But moving this closer to home, I feel like removing the choice transfer from one game to the next does not hit the Bioware vibe. At least in Andromeda it's marketed as a separate story and it sort of was so it's cool to start over. However Veilguard (which is happily chilling in my pre-order queued up for downloading) is a sequel that still has relevant choices from previous games whether someone agrees it's relevant or not.

Aggressively changed IP that worked out for the best, an example: Interview with the Vampire show. I love and grew up with the Anne Rice source material, and the show changes quite a bit. But it somehow works because the changes actually strengthen the core characters and themes and drama of the source, and still understands and faithfully translates the ambience (the vibes) of the source.

Tbf I would totally buy a magical pony Star Wars game I always figured there was no hard and fast rules to this. Sometimes faithful works and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes creative license is a disaster or it actually makes the adaptation arguably the superior version. It's not a science. But I think what is most important is that you play to the strength of the medium you're adapting to. If you do that, the compromises to the source material are justified, at least.

I Imagine Mark, holding tight to a DVD of The Star Wars Holiday Special under the table through the entire video while he explains why change is important Hahaha. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us <3.

There is some responsibility. Pretty sure if you damage the positive image of an i.p that people have, the creator of said i.p is not going to be happy. The fans will not be happy. And your name will [rightfully] be dragged through the mud. My favourite game of all time is a sequel to a bioware game being kotor 2. That game is an incomplete buggy mess but even then the things it does it has improved upon from the first game and the quality of writing is out of this world. What it takes for a sequel to be an accurate representation of an i.p is to be the same but improve. Just look at pokemon. The entire battle mechanic from the first game was revelutionary for its time with the player having the ability to decide who in their party takes the hit. There was a layer of strategy. Follow that up with items, skills, ivs and evs, double battles, set mode vs switch mode. The game has almost always expanded in some way whilst keeping its core the same. And each iteration of pokemon is selling many many millions. So to say that a game that stays the same is killing itself is just wrong. If you dont want to make a sequel to a game, why not instead make a spin off, or just make a different game. This is because the games with positive names will have a number of guaranteed sales. It doesnt matter how terrible you make your game. People who are fanatics of the previous product will buy. (I used to be like this for bioware games up until and including inquisition. Now im sceptic about all games). The "vibes from a trailer or first 10 minuets of an experience" should be the thing that matters most. People say you should never judge a book by its cover. But the cover of a book can tell you alot about the writer and what is in the book and the quality of said book. If an advertisement sets off bad vibes that dont correlate with a final product then there is no point to having shown the advert. If it cant be recognised that said advertisment will work against a product then there is an internal issie that needs to be addressed about what a product is before going further. If the first 10 mins of a game does not have a representation of what the rest of the game will be then youve made a bad game. If you begin playing a shooter game and the adverts show a shooter game and the 2nd level of said game going foward is tetris, your audience is going to be upset regardless how good tetris is. You are setting yourself up for failure. The minuture matters to the people thay want to be most immersed. If tearing something down feeds the algorithm then it is clear that the thing being torn down is bad. You will not see a positive reaction to someone tearing down something percieved in a positive light. I remember a few year back jim sterling giving zelda botw a 7 (which is a good score) and people went insane that the number wasnt higher. There is no outrage culture. If something is good people will expectbit to be praised. If something is bad people will expect it to be critisized. Any deviation from this will create debate and therefore clicks. If there is alot of outrage that someone has praised something others consider to be bad, it means that alot of others have deemed it to be bad. There is likely a reason for people thinking that way. And to say that it is just a "rage bubble" intended for farming engagement is worrying. I think that alot of people end up going with the flow and use buzzwords being thrown around to describe a dislike of something because they dont know how to articulate the thing about something that they dont like in their own words. Influencers are popular because they validate others feelings, not invent feelings for them. They arent generating anger. Theyre feeding into the anger thats already there. The way that people feel about something is often informed from a sense of logic. And if something doesnt make sense in the world that has been created, the immersion will be broken and the feeling will be ruined. I would say that it is pretty common for feelings to be informed by objective fact. An i.p doesnt need to change into something completely different to evolve. Making something better and improving is not the same as just changing the i.p as a whole and essentially starting from scratch. I would argue that it is more important for larger i.ps to depend on a core. Keeping an already large playerbase is far safer than risking ticking off said playerbase, in the hopes that yoi get a new audience. As previously stated, if you want a new audience, make a new i.p or a spin off game. A smaller i.p has more room to take risks. If they upset their already small playerbase, it is likely easier to replace than a larger i.p as there is less to replace. Ips need to evolve. But evolution is a slow process of improving on what is already there. Not completely changing from 1 game to the next for a series of games that already has a large following.

Would you say that nvidia 4090 graphics card and 128 gigabytes of ram is overkill for dragon age the veilguard. True fact this computer is the first first computer i have ever built.

I think this is a bit loaded. Yes, toxic people shouldn't be added to teams. But what defines toxic? Being conservative leaning? Or being obtuse and abrasive about personal values onto other people?

Very informative, thanks. I still dream about that DAO remaster. Don't let my dreams be dreams?

This is a great video. Navigating the line between keeping and growing a fandom is devilishly difficult. I wonder if execs are waking up to the fact that adapting older IPs is not the risk-free pot of gold they thought it would be. The best recent example I can think of to illustrate this that line is the Witcher Netflix show. They navigated that line perfectly in Season 1. There were some complaints, yes, but overall it was a success that pleased existing fans and brought in new ones. Then, for whatever reason, in Season 2 they went way over that line and turned away a huge amount of fans. I think there are lessons from that any creator tasked with an adaptation should take a look at.

Something that comes quite close to adapting an IP is the adapting of history for a story. Within the discourse of historical adaptations there is the term “historically authentic”, instead of being “historically accurate”. Accuracy means that all events happen in the way that we know from the history books, there is no deviation. Authenticity, meanwhile, is close to what you describe. The aim is not to tell a story exactly as we now understand it, but to tell a story where people act the way you expect them to act to the time period, and everything looks, sounds and feels authentic to the period. Great example is the Shogun show that won all the Emmies recently. Its characters are fictional, based on historical people. Events in the show happen that were never there in history. But at the same time, it’s an incredibly engaging story that feels authentic to 17th century Japan. If you’re adapting, authenticity should be the sweet spot.

As a star wars fan I am a bit tired of this checklist mentality. It feels like they try to add Darth Vader to every piece of media nowadays. All I want is a great story and characters in the universe with respect to its canon. Andor is a great example

When it came to DA’s function as games, I always rolled with whatever hand the devs dealt me. Meaning that even if I really disliked a change, I tried to take the ride and see what they wanted to accomplish with it. It usually ended in me being of two minds about something but more often than not I came around to the change as a positive thing for the series. I hate to say that it’s really hard for me to do that with veilguard so far because I feel like the fundamental formula of a BioWare game, that which has given me my favorite experiences in gaming for 20 years, is being diluted in a way I don’t understand. I really don’t know why BioWare can’t make a succinct >10min video clearing up the situation with the keep and whether or not we can count on ourselves having a hand in shaping Thedas going forward. Are some past decisions canonized? Are our past choices out there somewhere to be returned to or are we all on some grey middle ground now? I know that some of these answers no one has but they had to have been aware of how many variables were being imported from DA:I and decided to say nothing about that until three weeks ago. (Who knows if IGN was even allowed to release that tidbit) I want to be able to do the same thing for DA’s story that I have done with the game-to-game changes in combat but I don’t understand why this “get less for more” kind of choice was made here and no amount of halfassed one-sentence X posts from the devs will make me get that. I think people that have supported this series in every iteration thus far deserve answers as to why they should support this if a staple of the series is being neglected. Change is good when it makes things better.

The last jedi is total mess and fallout 3 is crappy deviation of masterful crpg and remember cnc4? BG3 was sucessful continuation of old crpg and what bioware should've made. and they make massive fanbase. on the otherhand, DA4....

The orville got mentioned 👏👏its a great show

Not so subtle way to defend DA4, isnt it?

I would hate to be that guy, who has to make the design decisions around the Kotor remake (if that is still happening). Well, now that I think about it, I would hate to be any guy who has to make any design decisions about any new Star Wars media.

Omg these haters are ridiculous I bet they’re waiting for it to be released so they can report others online for no reason these people are cruel and I can see them going that level

9:06 Devil's advocate take: why is it a bad thing if IPs "slowly shrivel up and die"? Obviously, from the point of view of the IP owner, it'd be bad if that happens, but from a broader pop culture view, I'm not sure it would be. Would the overall media landscape be healthier if IPs were eventually allowed to gracefully end, remaining as time capsules for their specific time periods, while making space for something new? That seems preferable to the current situation, where the same IPs will continue to be milked until the heat death of the universe.

Great video. It’s frustrating that you feel the need to apologise for having a nuanced take! It’s hard to not bring up Star Wars considering Bioware’s history with that IP and the current online discourse surrounding it. Knights of the Old Republic feels unmistakably like “Star Wars”. The vibes are right, even though it divorced itself from the films by thousands of years.

Adaptations should be 100% faithful. If the writers want to do something different they should make a new IP.

So I saw the caption "what does the adapter owe the fans" and for about an hour I was trying to figure out the punch line to this dorky computer joke that doesn't exist lol. Wrong adapter.

I think it's important to know the rules and themes that define your universe, and to not violate those with sequels. when they're violated, the franchise is weakened and can be even be killed. all franchises have the fingerprint of the time in which they were launched, and that's a big contributor to their overall vibe. that original work becomes kind of sacred, and needs to be treated as such by subsequent works. in general i think it's a mistake to overwrite the fictional universe's founding ideology and rules with another one; doing so risks that universe losing its identity.

It's a risk/reward situation, right? If you make big changes and it works, you look like a genius and redefine the IP for the future (see: Fallout 3, World of Warcraft). If it doesn't work you "ruined" a classic. The trick is always to just make a great game. Fans are quick to forgive a lot and accept a lot of change when they love the new thing. But if they hate the new thing then you're the worst ever and you killed their childhood. No pressure!

Second video that mentions shadow run 🤔. Don't mind me.😅 And yeah, fandoms really get caught up in minutiae around adaptations. Doesn't help that their are content creators that make their living being lore experts (all the power to them!) and conditioning fans to expect certain things.

Anybody can say what they want but I thought the character was ugly so I didn't buy the game. I didn't require an influencer to "lie" to me. I just looked at the character's ugly face. Which game am I talking about? Indeed.