this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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No, it failed because making a good game was pushed aside in favor of making a game with a message—and not even a very good one.
I once played a D&D game where our party was hired to clear a camp of murderous orcs. When we arrived, the camp was nothing but women and children; the male orcs had already been slaughtered by someone else.
But because they were orcs, and because there was a stigma attached to their existence, we were still expected to kill them. Apparently, their heads were worth the same regardless of gender or age.
We were playing a game, but it still felt wrong, and everyone at the table was uncomfortable. That is how you deliver a meaningful message. Not by saying, "I'm nonbinary"—because, in the context of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, no one cares.
You don’t just ram a message down your players’ throats. You present it in a way that is playable and contextual to the game's world and lore.
The Veilguard is set in a magical world. There is no reason to have nonbinary or trans people with surgical scars when Dragon Age literally has polymorph magic—they can change their gender whenever they want.
It makes no sense to have nonbinary people in The Veilguard!
I see! So there was some kind of explicit order, or at least concerted effort with explicit goal, to make a game with "a message". And I assume we have all the evidence to look at to see the day-to-day chain of events that led to the market failure.
No?
Seriously though, there were many reasons why DAV failed, and "having a Message" was not even in the top 100. Every piece of media has a message.
...This is literally just the "historical accuracy" argument.