I played 6 hours of Dragon Age: Veilguard earlier this month.

I'll fully admit I went into the preview a bit nervous about what I would find. After I finished, I sat with my thoughts and ruminated for a long time. I've played every BioWare game since Neverwinter Nights, and as someone who has been with the DA series since Origins and based on my time with the game, I couldn't shake that feeling in the back of my head - "this feels like BioWare is back".

Strap yourselves in. I've broken down my thoughts into separate sections to hopefully make things simpler and more easily digestible. Let's dig in.

🧵 My History with Dragon Age

First, I thought it would be helpful to quickly give an idea of where I come from and my experience with the series. I've played every Dragon Age game. Origins was my GOTY in 2009, as was Inquisition in 2014. I'm someone who was okay with the combat in Origins but don't cite it as the reason the game is great. I fell in love with the game because of its deeply immersive world and lore, interesting characters and quests and great writing. I enjoyed Dragon Age 2 a lot as well, from the scrappiness of Hawke as a character, to the fun companions and intimate and politically charged plot. It was sadly deeply held back by its repeating level and enemy designs.

Lastly comes Dragon Age: Inquisition. While a flawed gem, I have a fond place in my heart for the game. I felt the overall main plot was a bit weak and yes, most of the huge open zones were filled with repetitive fetch style quests and I wasn't a big fan of the power dynamic. However, I still had a great time exploring the world, chatting up companions in Skyhold (Dorian and Iron Bull were great), engaging in political intrigue in Orlais and thought Solas was a great villain. Overall, I've always played Dragon Age as an action RPG, using abilities on the fly and pausing only on occasion on tougher fights. I rarely went into tactical camera or felt the desire to take control of other companions.

This is the lens in which I approached Veilguard. Now that you have better context, let's go into more detail of what I thought.

With #TheGameAwards coming up soon, I took some time and put together a prediction list of sorts:

Games/reveals that are likely or *could* show up.

It's not to say ALL of these will, but there's lots of games and studios you might be unaware of. Strap in, this'll be long! 🧵 Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree

Announced way back in February of this year and likely in development long before then, this expansion is definitely far along. Couple that with FROM's coziness with Mr. Hype himself Geoff Keighley, and I'd say this make sense.

There's been a lot of...interesting conversations and misinterpretations since yesterday. About Phil Spencer, Xbox, the games industry in general. I think a lot of people still haven't come to terms that the 'console market' shifted dramatically 10 years ago.

A thread 🧵 The Xbox One generation was a massive setback for the Xbox brand. There's just no other way to put it. Phil literally said as much. And he's 100% right in that it was the worst gen to lose, because digital library continuity became a thing, and Sony cemented itself in that space.

Over the last few weeks, I've been interested in all the new game studios that have formed and popped up in the games industry during the past several years.

I put together a summary profile list of over TWO DOZEN mostly independent studios creating new AAA games.

A thread: That’s No Moon

Founded: 2021

New independent AAA studio comprised of talent from PlayStation, Infinity Ward, Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Monica & others, developing a new action-adventure title.

$100M investment from Smilegate.

Website: thatsnomoon.com