In the opinion of franchise creator David Gaider, those players who are concerned that the upcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard may lean heavily into identity politics and political pandering are nothing more than “f–king toursts”.
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As can be gathered by even the quickest glance at any of the game’s thus-far-released promotional materials, The Veilguard is set to present players with a Dragon Age entry whose overall identity deviates drastically from those that came before it.
From introducing its cast with a Suicide Squad-style montage, to various clips highlight its Marvel-esque style of ‘quippy’ writing, to the fact that its character creator includes such optional aesthetics as transgender ‘top scars), many players have come to fear that the long-awaited sequel will be weighed down – and possibly even outright drowned – by ‘modern audience’ trappings.
And while a good chunk of Dragon Age‘s player base has raised these issues, the aforementioned Gaider believes both critics and their fears are nothing more than loud annoyances.
Taking to his personal BlueSky account on September 21st, the former BioWare dev asserted, “Apparently the usual suspects are upset at how ‘woke’ the new Dragon Age is, an apparently sudden and unexpected development in the series. F–king tourists.”
Unsurprisingly, this flippancy from the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Anthem writer quickly drew push back from players, a number of whom created their own BlueSky accounts in order to voice their concerns directly to Gaider.
In one particular exchange, when met with a complaint from a woman regarding the lack of ‘chesty’ options in The Veilguard‘s character creator, Gaider asserted, “Did you follow me over here just to tell me all this? How sweet. 1) I suggest not taking character creation options you don’t like. Poof! Problem solved. 2) What an obsessively weird lens to look at everything through. Have you tried being less weird?”
Following a handful of interactions with his critics, the video game industry veteran put a period on his end of the discussion, writing on September 25th, “I have to apologize to Bluesky users for evidently attracting new users here with the sole intention of telling me how very fixated they are on transgender people.” It’s weird, but so are they… and apparently they have a lot of time on their hands.”
From there pressed by another user as to “why” he believed he was drawing such a large crowd of new users, Gaider added, “Probably because they wander around, looking to fixate on problems that don’t exist.”
Ultimately, whether or not The Veilguard team should have listened to player feedback will be determined when the fantasy RPG officially hits shelves on October 31st – just a little over one month from the time of this article’s writing.