I played the demo & I don't see what everyone is raving about. The writing is way too on-the-nose & nothing about the story setup really gripped me. The combat was OK, but I felt like they were introducing a bit too much complexity too quickly. I like some depth to combat, but the pacing of how different elements are introduced is important.

I finished the demo doing a dungeon sidequest. The difficulty of the dungeon was fine but when I got to the boss, I found I was hopelessly underleveled. I looked it up & read that it's recommended to do the story quest first... which would have meant I wouldn't get to see a dungeon in the demo because it ends when you do the story quest. The signposting to the player around difficulty & appropriate levels wasn't as clear as it could have been.

I don't know if some of these issues I had get better as the game goes on, or maybe there's just something so great that it's worth dealing with some flaws, but from what I experienced, it's hard to see it as a GOTY... Maybe it just shows what a poor year it's been for game releases.

Sounds like Bioware has really dropped the ball here. I guess that's what you get when the star players quit & leave it to the B team. Bioware is nothing but a name above the door now.

This art style reminds me of Civ 6 - which everyone hated. The writing sounds like its severely lacking in quality and range of choice. The combat is OK... if you're a rogue.

This is really disappointing. I was trying to remain optimistic about this game but it looks like it's just another OKish RPG that is a bit of fun but does nothing special.

It sounds like people are enjoying the career mode this year, which is good. I mostly play Football Manager for my football fix now, so it's going to be difficult to match that level of detail, but at least they've made some improvements. It's still not worth full price for what is essentially a roster update & taking away as many features as they add, but I'll check out the game at some point.

DA: Origins was such a strong first entry in the series that subsequent games have always failed to live up to the expectations.

This does look fun & while I would prefer some more tactical influence on my companions, at least the radial menu offers some options. The story & characters are going to be really important for the overall enjoyment of this game though.

I think the art style looks OK from a distance. The environments & skyboxes look great, but the characters look like plastic figurines. That's going to annoy me every time there's a cutscene & I think it will impact those all-important character interactions.

There seems to be a lot of people ready to hate on this game, I've noticed a lot of that recently. Star Wars: Outlaws was a fun game even though it had plenty of failings but the comments sections seemed to be full of people hating on Ubisoft & hoping the game would fail - as if we haven't had enough mass layoffs recently. I'm certainly not going to pre-order anything, but I'm going to remain cautiously optimistic about Veilguard.

Since EA lost the FIFA license, everyone's been hoping that 2K will enter the football space & bring some competition. While they might actually innovate & add some features, this is a sign that they are just as keen to monetise the pants off of everybody, just the same as EA.

@Vaildez: That's in a lot of stealth-lite games these days. I just finished playing AC: Mirage, which is a lot more stealth focused than other recent AC entries & that has a very forgiving whistle mechanic too.

Older stealth games are actually much harder. Vision cones & hearing radiuses have been around a long time but if you go back to Thief or early Hitman, you won't find a whistle mechanic where they just walk towards you.

@OrionMD: You should check out more Japanese games. Look at the quality of the food assets in Monster Hunter World or recent Yakuza games. Some people really dig looking at food being prepared & presented well. It's not my thing but I understand that a lot of gamers are into it.

A reviewer can list their positives & negatives & you can use that to see how it fits with your own preferences. It's a lot better than just looking at the score without context.

I decided to sub to Ubi+ for a month to play through AC: Mirage & give this a go.

I've put in a few hours & so far, it's a fun stealth-lite action game. I'm not really a SW fan, so I don't care how it ties into the lore but it's disappointing to read that its story doesn't really go anywhere & your choices don't have much impact.

One thing I will applaud is the number of options to tweak your experience. First of all, thank you for being allowed to turn 21:9 & film grain off... except no, why were those ever on by default? The Kurosawa mode in Ghost of Tsushima was a cool nod to the films that inspired it, but nobody should play the whole game that way the first time through. Digital film grain is bad & wrong - always. Some movies shoot in digital & add fake film grain & it's the dumbest thing - adding fake grain shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what actually makes film good. You're making a video game, not a film, so lean into the strengths of games rather than aping the imperfections of another medium.

...I'm actually feeling pretty positive overall about what I've played so far. Silly design decisions just need to be called out. Judging by the opening few hours, I'd recommend this game to anyone who's into third person action-adventure games. It's probably not worth US$70 but it might be worth a month-long sub if you can finish it in that time.

Looks interesting, but I have some worries about the player not even finishing one quest in his 3 hours of play. Far Cry games had a great system where you would be walking by some lake & a crocodile would just jump out at you, or you'd be infiltrating an outpost & a leopard would randomly run out of the jungle & start causing chaos. That was fun... until they leant into it too hard. In later games, you could just throw a piece of meat to spawn a leopard out of nowhere & Far Cry 5 was probably the worst example of not trusting the world to actually provide fun for the player without spawning 6 dozen cultists every time you faced even a moment of downtime. You couldn't hand in a mission, or just go fishing without the game forcing some kind of chaos upon you.

I'm not saying Dragon's Dogma 2 is going to be that bad, but I just hope they don't turn the random encounter dial up too high.

@treechopper88: The gameplay is engaging, the story has all sorts of twists & turns, the battles are all hand-crafted & the characters are well-written. I don't know where you've been looking but likely people are avoiding spoilers & letting you play the game to find out what characters are like for yourself.

If you're not into CRPGs & only want to play action-packed shooters, that's fine. This game is popular for a reason though.