A message from a disappointed fan

Just to warn you: if you are happily playing Veilguard, then maybe don’t read this. I am not writing this to take any enjoyment away from anyone, but I need to get this off my chest. Personally, I will not buy or play the game because I think financially supporting something I do not like will only lead to the studios getting away with it and then they will continue to produce such poor games. For any of you who might question how I can judge a game I haven’t played yet, well I have seen a lot of in-game-footage to know it isn’t for me.

To me, Solas is written so out of character in Veilguard I can hardly believe it was the very same author who wrote him for Inquisition. They missed his essence, his soul, and by consequence, they twisted the deep, complex love he had for Lavellan into something so shallow and unfeeling.

I think this is not only because of what they did to his relationship with Mythal (I‘ll come back to that later), but also because of the overaching problem this game has - it is just so poorly written. Not only is the dialogue abysmal, the plot points, the events that take place are as well. An example of this (sadly one of many):

Right at the beginning, Solas ritual is interrupted by mere pillars being thrown over? Seriously? This would never happen to intelligent, scheming, sad Solas who tricked the most powerful mages of his time and changed the whole world, trapping his people in what sounded like endless sleep in the Fade. I think an excellent insight into his tactical thinking is when he plays chess with the Iron bull. (Here is an amazing fan edit of their dialogue, the person who made this deserves more credit! Chess game How elegantly he plays the Bull, how he sacrifices every tower, risking defeat but by making these sacrifices, wins in the last moment. While playing he is charming and focused and hard to read. This is Solas, not the “oopsie you threw over my pillars”-Solas.

Which brings me to my next point and an even graver failure in terms of story decisions that negatively influenced the impact of his character: they should have made him succeed in bringing down the Veil at either the beginning or middle of the game. This could have made clear how incredibly powerful he is. (They could have made so much more of the game and story in general with this, ending the Dragon Age and ushering in the era of magic. They could even have turned him into an unlikely half ally still. Because the Fade is not the natural state of Thedas and because the Elvhen people are trapped. The Veil coming down has been teased since origins and it could have tied in so perfectly with Sandals prophecy. It could’ve been so epic. That is what was lost.)

Also, the two elvhen gods are so boring and one-dimensional, where they could have been epic and ethereal in a corrupted sort of way. This also takes away from Solas past.

And why did they change his motivations into something so cheap as a wrong sense of duty to Mythal and an implicated (which I already don’t like) romance. And this „they did it“ stuff, what an honestly stupid, senseless thing to let a character say. To portray intimacy as something so meaningless as this already indicates that the Solavellan romance, or any romance in the game, can’t be good, which they are not from what I have seen, sorry not sorry). This also does not do any justice to the relationship he could/should have with Mythal. Making it a romantic one (even if only by implication) is just lazy, bad writing and so sad, they missed the opportunity to show us how other kinds of connections and relationships can be meaningful and complex. Imagine beings as old as Mythal and Solas, being friends for millennia, watching the world they worked so hard for burn, reduced to this.

What I basically want to say is: this game has no soul, wisdom, poetry or creativity, so how could they ever hope to capture a person like Solas, to whom these traits are characteristic?

The Solas in Veilguard is not the Solas my Lavellan fell love with, but he continues to exist in our writings and paintings and YouTube edits. And I am hoping against hope some other studio buys the franchise and gives Dragon Age the epic end it deserves.

What do you think?