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I tend to take internet opinions with a pinch of salt. So much online now is just clickbait for views and clout. And nothing feeds the algorithm more than fear or anger. But yes, I'd say if they dropped the name Dragon Age and made it clear it was being pitched at a teen audience there probably wouldn't have been so much drama around it. Just call it Veilguard, that's a decent name for a game all by itself.

I played through GTA 4 again back in June and it's still excellent! I'd say it's aged better than Red Dead. Probably the best story in the entire GTA series with a level of seriousness and some tough decisions to make. Vehicle handling also felt pretty authentic and the missions are great fun! Gonna do the expansions sometime too - they add on another 30+ hours of content. GTA V was completely neglected and wasted in that respect.

What determines the 750,000 figure? Is that something you have decided upon as I can't see anything online that states this? As a comparison, Call of Duty, released in a similar timeframe on the same console / pc formats and probably a much larger budget. A game with multiple modes and generally multiplayer games achieve higher audiences in the first place had a peak of 300 thousand since release.... Is that also considered a failure for not achieving 750 thousand concurrent players at any one point? Is this a figure EA themselves have stated must be achieved? Just for something to compare it too, Skyrim has never achieved 750 thousand and is considered one of the most successful RPG's ever, Baldurs Gate 3 did exceed it but also didn't have quite the social media bashing that this game has received up to now. There are so many factors that can influence whether a game is considered a success or a 'catastrophic failure in the same realms as Concord', a big statement to make and I am trying to understand the metrics to it. We also have no idea what sales and numbers are like on console No need to go on the attack, I am not saying you can't have an opinion and have never done so. But what I am saying is whether you have first hand experience or whether you have watched video's / social media posts etc that someone where someone has pre-selected footage and such based on their opinion influences what you are saying. An opinion can be influenced, based on past experiences (for example have you played the last games at all? Were you hoping for something more akin to the original 2 games? Did you enjoy Inquisition and wanted more of that? Are you comparing it with Baldurs Gate, probably our most successful recent single player title), based on your personal outlook (and we all know what a happy bloke you are) or can be based on what you want from something. What I want from Dragon Age as a game would be very different from what you would want from it and depending on whose experience the game more closely achieves will influence our opinions of the game. You are entitled to have an opinion but what someone takes from that will be again different for each person depending on the background behind it and it is perfectly valid of me to ask if your opinion is based on social media or from first hand experience 🙂 I have played a number of games that were not received well initially (particularly by social media) and gone on to really enjoy them and in some instances have become popular games such as Days Gone, Hogwarts Legacy & Cyberpunk as recent examples, in fact I think Fallout New Vegas took a bit of a beating for all it's glitches and such early days and most of these weren't ever rectified and can still be found in the game today! 😄 As you have not not played it there are a number of positive things that I probably can't discuss with you because you may even not know they are part of the game and may not have been shown in the videos or posts you have seen - - Loading times seem minimal as you transition between places through the mirror transports which is really quite cool. The only thing I have seen that even closely resembles that was Ratchet & Clank. - Combat is really quite good. I generally prefer my turn based combat games, be it JRPG or Western RPG's, I like to take my time and pick my strategies. However the combat is quick, slick and looks fantastic. - The world building is up there with some of the best, they all look phenomenal, the way the blight has been crafted in certain areas and one of my favorite aspects is the use of mist in some areas. More often than not weather features tend to affect performance but it doesn't here. - The creation of your character actually impacts the game, most games where you create your protaginist it is typically a visual thing. This is much more like the original Dragon age game if you ever played it in that your decisions at the start impact upon how factions respond to you when you meet them. I have played 2 classes and factions through to Chapter 6 now and they have been somewhat different experiences. - It's also quite accessible, we live in a gaming world where your souls like games are something a lot of games try to recreate or capture. Tough games that require a fair amount of skill. My first run through of this I set the difficulty to one of the easy one's and it was exactly that. I find with single player games sometimes you just want to take in the world and story of it rather than taking on the challenges it offers. It is not a 10/10 experience by any means but it's also not the 'failure' you are both alluding to. It is probably more a 7/10 game, good ideas, good traits in there but it does have issues. I think James mentions one above which is probably my biggest bugbear, the lip syncing has not been done well at all. However that is something that could be patched. My other somewhat big gripe is the fact that the series started off much in the same vain as the Baldurs Gate games, I loved the original 2 games and for me that's where they should have taken the series and kept budgets smaller to suit, by appealing to a wider audience the game has had to change and evolve and it's just simply not the direction I would have preferred. A note on the writing, it does start off weak admittedly but once you get to the second half of the game it certainly improves, judging by both your comments above it would suggest the snippet of the game you have seen was likely in the first portion of the game which goes back to my point in that generally you would likely form a different opinion playing the game than watching something on social media. You have to also consider most of what is on social media is incomplete, a lot of the content release in the first few days of a games launch is all about getting your content out first which likely means the person has only experienced the first number of hours of the game.

Well thanks to you guys last night I took the launchers gold and today diamond.

Now I have had a bit more time with it. The game's not too bad but I think as with a few of the multiplayer games I am playing at the moment they have just been done to death. No matter what way you look at this it is just another COD, much in the same way as fifa is just another fifa each year and as I get older, my gameplay time is reducing at the moment and I want to spend it on better experiences rather than rehashes of yesteryear. I will play this on and off but I am going to limit my gameplay, rather than playing all evening it will be an hour or 2 and then done so I don't burn myself out with it. I have had some great games mind and do frequently come top 3 which is always good with these games, being competitive in what is an environment geared towards a younger, quicker audience! I do like the gameplay, the omni movement I am getting used to and kind of like it, guns are a bit meh. The maps are generally crap though for me, I think there are 2 or 3 I kind of like but on the whole they are crap. Mostly too small or too big which results in often being killed from spawn or running for minutes and finding no one only to get shot by someone sitting in a corner and having to do it again... The football stadium map could have been good but I think that's a prime example of how not to do a COD map for me. Babylon as mentioned above, I don't mind it but it is a clusterf*ck so you have to be in the mood for that.

Only 2 so far but I've been very late into starting Star Wars: Jedi Survivor. What a clean fucking game

Train Simulator 2019: I might play The Long Dark later on and I'll hopefully have some more to add.