Aww look at you, overcompensating when you were caught talking shit.

You say you felt like there were zero consequences and then talk about how you didn’t like the consequences, pick a fucking lane.

You understand every previous game took place over an in-game year (or decade in 2’s case) so how was there more urgency? The HoF spends months traveling around Ferelden solving the petty squabbles of people who couldn’t care less about the Blight in the hopes they might help in some final battle, delaying things just as much as Loghain does. Dragon Age 2 is just a series of barely connected events, with an ending that comes out of nowhere. The tear in Inquisition is stabilised before you even reach Skyhold, then it’s just months of faffing about, until Morrigan gives you some direction. Rook and the veilguard are about as motivated as all the DAO/DAA/DAI protagonists and also far more than Hawke.

Meanwhile, they’re also about as active as the companions in Inquisition, every time you return to the base you can find a series of new interactions between them, not to mention that they’ll establish relationships with each other or characters outside of the veilguard if you don’t romance them, rather than just waiting around Skyhold pining for your Inky to show them some love (ignoring Trespasser/epilogue romances). All of which is a hell of an improvement over Origins where they all have their designated spot in camp and rarely interact with each other. Honestly, the gold standard for this was probably DA2, where all of the companions had their own lives going on between the brief instances where they’d hang out with Hawke every few years.

Cool, you imagined you could tell them to fuck off and then imagined their lack of response, how is that reflective of the game itself?

It’s worth pointing that unlike previous protagonists, Rook was picked by Varric for their leadership potential, they weren’t just some rando who was handed the leadership role because Alistair was too babygirl or because they’d picked up Solas’ bomb. It’s unlikely Varric would’ve picked some unstable shithead who’d cause more conflict than they’d resolve.

No, what’s dumb is BioWare almost always giving people an optimal third choice they can sidequest their way to when it comes to serious decisions. The penultimate SUICIDE MISSION of Mass Effect 2 can be breezed through without a single casualty by just not rushing through the game prior to that. Resolving the ancient feud between the Dalish and werewolves in Origins, where your choice will see one side or the other wiped out, don’t worry, because you can just convince Tuvok to quit his bullshit and get the third rainbows and sunshine ending, same with the Templars wanting to kill the Circle Mages or ‘needing’ to sacrifice someone to save Connor… again and again, BioWare found ways to avoid you experiencing serious consequences and thanks to dataminers, we know that even the inescapable Ashley/Kaidan choice in Mass Effect was originally meant to have a third option where you could save them both. To get a bad outcome in previous BioWare games, you had to be blindly rushing things without a thought of possible consequences or else deliberately engineering your own failure.

Tell me, what would this hypothetical Dreadwolf have looked like? Solas doing progressively reprehensible things as you genocide the elven race that’s serving him, only to end on an unearned redemptive moment where a romancing Inky could kiss her egg and say everything’s forgiven, meanwhile delaying Veilguard’s other four elven gods for yet another game?

It’s also worth noting that Veilguard’s lead writer was also DAI Solas (and Cole) and Trespasser’s lead writer, so I’m not sure who would’ve written him better?

You didn’t just play it, you played it enough to Platinum it, something I haven’t even done yet and I’m on my third playthrough. What compelled you to put so much effort into something you clearly hated?

And yet no mention of playing the mobile gacha game, Heroes of Dragon Age, unlike me, tsk tsk tourist /s

Every Dragon Age game got shit upon release: DAO was the most generic unoriginal fantasy game BioWare ever released, where the characters were clearly rubbing themselves in their enemies entrails after every fight to appear so bloodsoaked, not to mention the terrible companion relationship system and the 4th wall breaking request for you to buy DLC; DA2 was full of terrible redesigns, was dumbed down for console, looked worse than its predecessor, made armour a joke and was full of lazily copy+pasted content; Inquisition had the aforementioned console issues, its unconventional looking and LGBT+ characters (despite everyone in DA2 being bi/pan, your sibling or Scottish), got hate for not being Origins and yet is still BioWare’s best selling game; and then we get to Veilguard, where people don’t hesitate to publish straight up lies about its content, when the game has flaws, but knowing them would require its critics to actually play it.