And then the content creator said a single phrase that changed my mind: Avowed will be on Game Pass on day one. Suddenly I was thinking, "Oh, I am going to play this!". While Game Pass isn't free, and has increased in price this year, I still consider it very good value for money in general, and have an ongoing subscription to it; so it kind of feels like playing Avowed for free, "no added cost", as opposed to buying the game for $70 on Steam.

I am not poor, and can afford buying $70 games. But this event still shows that I am somewhat price sensitive. Paying $70 for a game and then not liking it just feels bad, even if that $70 is not missing for rent money. On Game Pass, I can try out a game for free, and if I don't like it, it doesn't feel as bad as if I had bought it. It just feels a lot safer. That makes games that I am only borderline interested in a lot more attractive. I felt the same thing about Ara: History Untold, nice enough to play for free, but would have hated to have paid $60 for it.

Of course there is something like circular logic operating here. It feels as if I am playing the Game Pass games for free, while simultaneously me playing a lot of games that would cost $60-$70 on Game Pass justifies me paying €144 per year for the subscription. In the end, I am still paying $10 to $20 per game, depending on how many I try in a year. But the one thing it does for certain is removing that "should I buy this game?" decision process, and the possible regret connected to it.

Since the industrial revolution started in the early 19th century, most countries have a large population of people who make their living mostly from working for an employer. Whether you call them proletariat, working class, or middle class varies with time, country, and the person speaking. But there are some observations we can make about this class of people that mostly hold true both globally and over two centuries: There are a lot of them, they are leaning to the left in economic issues, but they are mostly conservative in social issues.

The US left strongly believes in identity politics, which pretty much completely replaced the older ideas of class politics. Thus Democrats believed that for example Latinos, or as they like to call them LatinX, would vote for them, based on their identity. That turned out to be not the case. In reality, working class hispanics acted more like any other working class population, rather than basing their vote on their hispanic identity. Especially Latino men flocked to Trump in large numbers. They didn't particularly like being called LatinX, and they didn't like illegal immigration, even if many of those new arrivals are also from Latin America. But even more importantly, they were more upset about the price of groceries than they were moved by the social arguments of the Democratic Party. Economic policies of the Biden administration, like student loan forgiveness, weren't very popular to people who didn't have a college degree in the first place, many of them from minorities.

While Democrats strongly appealed to women in their defence of abortion rights, they haven't been particularly nice or welcoming to men. Commenters from the left frequently use "cis hetero male" as a term of insult, and imply that all men are rapists and violent against women. It turns out that men generally don't like being insulted, and that a large majority of men is cis hetero. And that this holds true even for men who are Black, Latino, or from any other minority. The left-wing anti-men bias thus resulted in an estimated 10% gender gap, and 54% of men voting for Trump. I consider it possible that the Democrats got close to 100% of the transgender vote, but of course that doesn't amount to much, and several politicians of the Democratic Party are now back pedalling on transgender rights, realizing that it might have lost them more votes than won them.

All this to say that the US political left, and the Democrats, are increasingly a highly educated elite, detached from the working class population. They believed that because of their identity politics, minorities were somehow forced to vote for them. And now they frequently perceive the fact that the working class voted for Trump as a sort of betrayal. The disdain that many of these left-leaning media types feel towards the common man as a result of that "betrayal" is rather visible in the news commentaries. And I find that rather hard to watch. Some of the comments that left-leaning media made about minority groups that voted for Trump are actually racist, which is strange from the political side that says it wants to fight racism. And even more comments are anti-democratic, which is even stranger for the party that wanted to save democracy with this election. Note that the Republicans mostly fell for the same wrong assumptions of who would vote Democrat, and ended up making it harder for working class people to vote, which then ended up voting for them.

2024 was an election year in many countries, and it turns out that it was a terrible year for incumbents. Many working class people in rich countries were feeling that their government was handling immigration badly, with too many immigrants exerting economic pressure on the cost of affordable housing. It also turned out that regular people perceive the economy differently than economic indicators would suggest: Official core inflation numbers exclude volatile food and energy prices, as well as the cost of investment assets like housing; real people feel volatile food and energy prices more strongly, and also feel their increasing inability to buy a house very strongly. On the other hand, people have a tendency to believe that if they get a raise, it is due to having worked well, rather than just inflation. An economist would say that if you have 20% core inflation accumulated over the last few years, but your salary went up by 25%, you are better off than you were. Only, it doesn't feel like that to most people, which is why they often voted against the incumbents in elections this year.

There is of course a valid argument to be made that people who voted for Trump due to the inflation made a mistake. It is hard to predict how the coming years will play out, but at the very least it is obvious that an economic policy based on higher tariffs is more likely to push inflation up, rather than down. It remains to be seen in how far such a policy might increase working class jobs in America, rather than just shifting them away from China to other countries. But even this "error" of the electorate doesn't justify a left-leaning elite to treat working class voters like idiots. The Democrats could have explained the likely consequences of Trump's announced economic policies better.

Besides the disdain for voters who didn't vote as they "should have", I also find the general panic and doom mongering from the left difficult to watch. Weren't the crazies supposed to be on the right-wing channels? Now they are everywhere. Realistically speaking, people overestimate the power of government and the president, and they underestimate the power of the system, or what the right calls "the deep state". The deep state isn't a nefarious organization, directed by shadowy figures from the background. Rather it is a huge machine of administration that touches a large number of issues in people's lives. While in Scandinavian countries around 30% of the total workforce are public sector employees, in the USA the number is estimated to be around 15%, which is lower, but still around 24 million people. Running an organization of 25 million people is very difficult. Installing a layer of upper management for that organization which mostly consists of ideologically pure and loyal, but incompetent, clowns isn't going to help. The most likely prediction for the next 4 years is that the Trump administration will be shouting very loudly and not achieve very much at all. Bureaucrats everywhere have a fantastic super power to resist change, by simply not working or not prioritizing the change their superiors told them to implement.

Part of that is of course that Trump and other right-wing figures promised some stuff which is simply impossible. I had to laugh very hard when I saw that the one of the government agencies they propose to close down is the IRS. That could never happen. Since Reagan's "government is the problem" speech, many Republican administrations have claimed to want to diminish the state, while often engaging in policies that can only be described as "tax and spend". The US government has grown pretty much steadily over the last 4 decades, regardless of which party was in power, and even Reagan couldn't manage more than slow down that growth without reversing it. While it is possible that Trump manages to shut down the Department of Education, that would only result in the influence of the various states on education growing, resulting in more visibly "blue state schools" and "red state schools". The USA has 3.8 million teachers at elementary and secondary school level; most of them are progressive by nature, as you need to believe in community in order to accept a stressful and badly paid job like that. Firing every progressive teacher, replacing them by MAGA loyalists, and turning the whole US education system into a right-wing indoctrination machine is simply impossible. At most they can slightly diminish the left-wing indoctrination machine. Not that this machine was working all that well, 56% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for Trump, as well as 40% of women of that age. Which then resulted in Millennial Democrats insulting Gen Z on social media: “Gen Z gotta be the worst generation of all time. Can’t read, can’t write, can’t add, can’t fuck, can’t joke, can’t dance, can’t dress, can’t drink, can’t smoke, can’t not elect a fascist conman.”. The left never realized how the viciousness resulting from their virtue signalling wasn't any better than the hate speech they accused the right of.

I don't want to give the impression that everything is fine. The incompetent flunkies of Trump will result in some damage to various institutions, and possibly trigger a global recession via a trade war. But both the hopes of the right wing and the fears of the left wing of change in America are mostly overblown. I wouldn't be surprised if even key policies, like Trump's "largest mass deportation plan" end up being fairly inefficient and small compared to the size of the illegal immigrant population. Just look at his previous term, where the "Trump wall" turned out to be mostly inefficient, and the Mexicans never paid for it. The biggest danger I see right now is that I will have to stop watching US news media, because half of them will spout lies about how efficient the administration is, while the other half will spout lies about how much of a danger the measures are.

In the end, a frequent release of new content by DLC or major patch for a 4X or grand strategy game is the same tactic as live service games or MMORPGs: Game companies want you to adopt their games as a lifestyle choice, because they want you to give them money over and over. But I am far from sure that I want that. Not again. I played World of Warcraft for 10,000+ hours, and other MMORPGs for thousands of hours, so I have lived this "game as a lifestyle choice" already. I don't necessarily regret that choice, but do I want to do that again?

The fundamental problem of playing the same game (well, same plus added content) over and over is the opportunity cost. The kid who received Super Mario Bros. in 1985 for his Nintendo Entertainment System probably only had a handful of cartridges for his NES, no other console, and no access to dad's PC. He played the game for months, simply because he wouldn't get a new game before his next birthday or Christmas. But we don't live in that world anymore. Even kids have a huge number of choices for games to play, and several devices to play them on. As an adult, and thus larger financial means, my choice of games is even more huge. Steam alone added 14,351 games in 2023, and the projection for 2024 is higher than that. Epic wants to give me a free game or two every week, and there are plenty of new releases on the Game Pass for PC. I can play games also on my phone or tablet, and I do own a Nintendo Switch console.

I did buy the second expansion pass for Age of Wonders 4. The AoW4 DLCs tend to be exactly what I want: More options to create a distinctly new leader and race, to play another game with different troops, different spells, and different tactics. But I have already played this game for 400 hours, and I don't want it to become the only thing I play. I enjoy other genres of games as well, for example the RPG Drova that I am currently playing.

As a result, the flood of new DLCs and patches for games I already played caused me more negative feelings than positive excitement this month. There are too many games to play, and not enough time. Turning games into a lifestyle and playing them over and over is just aggravating that situation.

While researching SETI, I noticed that about 70% of the BGG community thinks the game is best with 3 players, while only 30% think it is best with 4 players. The poll, as always, doesn't say why people think so. But I would guess that it is a very typical reason: With more players, the game takes longer. That affects both the overall length of the game, and the time a player has to wait between turns. SETI is not a very fast game, it is estimated to take about 40 minutes per player, and for a first game with 4 players we might well need 4 hours, including rules explanation. I can see why some people would prefer a 3-hour game for 3 people to a 4-hour game for 4 people.

I do prefer board games with at least some interaction between players, and SETI has that. But even by just studying the rules, I can see that there are two major ways of player interaction: Moon landings and scanning. Moon landings bring a lot of points, but every moon can be landed on only once. The more players are in the game, the more likely it becomes that somebody else lands on a moon you wanted to go to. The number of moons is the same regardless of player count, so competition is obviously greater the higher the player count is. On the other side, scanning has a small effect when you do it, but then gives additional points once a system has been scanned a certain number of times (usually 4 to 5). Once the system is fully scanned, the person who contributed the most scans gets additional effects and points. Again, the number of systems to scan and the number of times you need to scan them are the same, regardless of player count. But with more players, scanning is more likely to fill up a system, and thus more likely to score points. It is obvious that the relative value of going for a moon landing or going scanning is different with different player counts. And it can't possibly be balanced well for all player counts. From reading between the lines on what strategy is "OP", I think that the game is balanced for 4 players, even if that takes longer to play.

It is thus possible that a game is best balanced at one player count, while the "flow" and time needed is better at another player count. Which makes the game suboptimal at any player count.

How much does a $100 crowdfunding board game cost? Obviously a trick question, and the answer is: It depends; mostly on where you live. The $100 pledge level of a crowdfunded game doesn't include shipping, nor does it include any applicable taxes. In the early days of Kickstarter, there were still board game crowdfunding projects that got away with not paying value added / sales tax. Crowdfunding projects still insist that you aren't actually "buying" anything, you pledge monetary support to the development of a game, and then get a copy of the game as "reward". Tax authorities weren't fooled very long by that charade, and by now it is very clear that sales taxes, like the EU value added tax, apply fully to Kickstarter projects. In a transition period some companies just raised the sticker price, but as sales taxes differ a lot from state to state and country to country, taxes are now usually paid together with shipping cost. So when you pledge $100 for a board game, you might very well pay another $20 for shipping, and if you live in Europe another 20% of VAT. As VAT is applied to both the game and the shipping cost, you end up paying another $44 when the pledge manager opens.

So where does Trump get into this? Trump's main economic policy is based on tariffs, he plans to install a blanket tariff of 10% to 20% on all imports, with additional tariffs of 60% to 100% on goods brought in from China. Now large board game companies producing mostly retail games often have their own production facilities, and those can be in their home country. But the overwhelming majority of small board game companies that produce crowdfunded games don't have any production facilities, but outsource the production of the games to China.

If you back a game on Kickstarter or Gamefound now, it might very well have an estimated delivery date of late 2025. And crowdfunding projects are often late, so it could very well be that the pledge manager only opens in 2026. Now imagine the US customer who pledged $100 for a board game, expecting to pay only $30 for shipping and sales tax, but finds he has to pay another $100 for the China tariff in addition to that. That is going to cause quite an uproar. Very quickly new crowdfunding projects will be required to mention the tariffs in the shipping & delivery section of their project. And once US customers realize that a $100 crowdfunded board game costs them $230, demand will shrink rapidly. The problem for people living elsewhere is that the US accounts for two thirds of pledges on Kickstarter. If tariffs keeps US customers away, the remaining pledges from the rest of the world might not be enough to make the crowdfunding project viable. Some games simply won't be produced at all.

The purpose of tariffs is to encourage manufacturing to the US. The small board game companies that live of crowdfunded projects don't have the capital to build up their own manufacturing capacity. It is possible that US companies will develop which manufacture board games for others. But that sure won't happen very fast. There are other Asian countries that might actually benefit more from the China tariffs, as making a board game in let's say Thailand with a 10% to 20% tariff might still be cheaper than producing it in the USA. Given the length of a typical crowdfunding board game project, it will take years before all of this settles down into a new equilibrium. Until then, there is some pain ahead for small crowdfunding board game companies and their customers.

I already mentioned Dragon Age: The Veilguard here, which by all accounts has great technical quality, graphics and voice acting. But a lot of people aren't happy with the writing and the dialogues, and find the game too linear, with too few actual choices. So I didn't try that game, and went for the exact opposite: Drova - Forsaken Kin. Drova is more of an indie RPG, with pixel art graphics, and no voice acting. It is obvious that making this game only cost a fraction of what is cost to make a Baldur's Gate or Dragon Age. But once you get over that, Drova - Forsaken Kin is a great RPG, with enormous depth. It is very old school, and reminds most people of games like Gothic. There are no features like quest markers, you need to listen to (or rather, read) what the NPCs say to figure out where to go. There are a lot of visible walls, but no invisible ones, and no railroading. If you want to march right into an area that is way too high level for you, good luck, the game isn't going to stop you.

Combat in Drova is action combat, just in 2D pixel art. You can choose between different weapons, which have different speeds, damage, and range. Fighting with a sword and shield feels different from fighting with an axe or a spear. Normally, I don't like action combat, because I am slow. But Drova fortunately has an explorer difficulty, which makes combat easier. I'm playing on the default settings for that mode, but the options would allow me to fine tune damage dished out and received even further. The options also allowed me to turn of the mini-games used to do things like fishing, mining, or lockpicking. You can play Drova on ironman mode, but I'd recommend the opposite: Save early, save often. You *can* get completely lost in this game and end up in the middle of far too many monsters that one-shot you with no way out.

I am still in Act 1, so I can't say how the story is overall. But it sure is a dark one, and gives you plenty of choices on whether you want to be good or evil, up to the option of becoming a drug dealer. The game also has subjects like slavery (and you might end up as a slave for some time), so I really wouldn't recommend this game to snowflake players that get triggered easily. The most important feature of the story is that it isn't too on the nose. After the tutorial you end up in this foreign world, with only a vague sense of purpose. There is a starting area to gain a few first levels and learn things, but you aren't forced to do that. There are two major factions, but it isn't as easy as one of them being good and the other evil. You get a feeling with time what areas are for what "level", but all of that is very open and non-linear. You just adventure and explore, and bit by bit find out more about the world and its lore. The world is both hand-crafted, and an open world.

In Drova, your actions have consequences, and they matter. That part where you are captured as a slave and have to work your way out to freedom? If you kill the people that want to capture you, that will never happen. I was stunned when I discovered that after learning how to extract the claws of animals, I could go back to the corpses of animals that I had killed levels ago and still get their claws. Nothing seems to respawn, not even the inventory of the traders. Which is good, because if you sold some crafting material earlier, but then find you need it later, it will still be there, you just need to buy it back for 5 times the price. There are resources everywhere, and the game lets you use things like healing plants raw, but if you learn how to craft salves and potions, you'll be a lot more efficient. Cooking is also important, as food also heals you, albeit slowly. You can also craft a lot of interesting consumables, like traps. At the start of the game, magic is also available only as consumable scrolls, which are extremely powerful. But apparently you can learn magic much later in the game.

Drova - Forsaken Kin costs €25 on Steam, as is currently rated 96% "overwhelmingly positive". This is not an early access game, but a complete and finished game, although there are patches, and some more content will be added to the game. If you like old school RPGs, I can only recommend this one.

Today I saw (but refuse to honor with a link) a YouTube video using ChatGPT to predict Trump's first 100 day in office "and it is worse than you imagined". No, actually that ChatGPT prediction is exactly as bad as people imagined. Because all that ChatGPT does is take all the fantasies from people who wrote about that subject on the internet and regurgitates them. You get both the horror visions from the left, and the crazy power fantasies from the right, mix them together and get an "AI prediction". Which is complete nonsense.

I was struck by that AI prediction approach, because it is diametrically opposed to my previous post. In that I had looked at various election promises and fears, and subjected them to a reality check. It is exactly that reality check that AI is unable to provide. Large language models repeat language they heard, they can't reason, and thus can't contradict. If I created an Tobold.AI to write my blog posts, it could only tell you what everybody is saying. It couldn't tell you why that might possibly be wrong.

There is no denying that Donald Trump has authoritarian desires and ideas. But realistically, he won't be able to implement many of those. What he will be able to do is to a large extent stop the various lawsuits against him; there is also a good chance of that being accompanied by some smoke and mirror operation in which lawsuits against his political enemies are started. Those won't go anywhere, they would just be designed to make it appear as if all presidential candidates are equally in trouble with the law. But there is no chance that for example Trump would be able to overturn the 22nd amendment and run for a third term, or do any other change that would allow him to stay in office longer than 4 years.

In fact, the probability that Trump's term is shorter than 4 years is significant. You just need to look up actuarial tables for 78 year old men to see that. That is a problem in itself, as the US presidential election system doesn't actually make sure that the vice president is somebody that is suited or popular to become president. Vance doesn't have the same hold over the Republican party that Trump has, and most probably the death of Trump during his term would result is spectacular infighting until 2028. Well, *earlier* spectacular infighting, because that fight for 2028 in the GOP is going to happen in any case.

An estimated 3.3% or 11.7 million people in the US are "undocumented", or as Trump would call them, "illegal". But as most election promises, Trump's "mass deportations" are a lie. That is not to say that there couldn't be more deportations than before, and those will be heavily covered by media on both sides, for different reason. But no country can deport 3% of its population, the practical, legal, and economic challenges of that is simply too great. People also underestimate how significant and effective existing deportation under Biden was. The USA deported 1.1 million people in 2023, which sounds like a lot, but it less than half of the people who immigrated in the same time. Still, Immigration to the US is actually already falling significantly, and no doubt Trump will just claim that as success for himself.

What Trump most certainly also will do, is to claim that the economy miraculously recovered the minute he takes office. If economic data just stay as they are right now, Trump would brag to no end as how great a president he is for the economy. Interestingly that might actually have some effect of dealing with the "vibecession", an economy that is actually strong but perceived as being weak. The most likely economic hardship of the next Trump term is, maybe surprising to people who voted for him, more inflation. His key economic policy, lowering taxes and rising tariffs, is guaranteed to raise consumer prices. It is unclear whether Trump is even aware, or willing to address, the biggest hole in US China tariffs: You pay a tariff if you import a container full of consumer goods from China, but if Shein or Temu first pack those same consumer goods into individual packages addressed to individual customers and then put those packages in the same container, they suddenly don't have to pay tariffs anymore.

Internationally, the next 4+ years will be "America first", which is bad news for anybody who relies on US support, except possibly Israel. That undoubtedly will also result in a much diminished influence of America on the world stage. The overall result of that is unclear, as right now potential rivals, like China or Russia, aren't well placed to increase their global influence either, for different reasons. And of course, a lot of other things could go wrong globally, e.g. a larger war in the Middle East, or a Russian victory in the Ukraine.

Unbeknownst to Trump or to Americans in general, the president of the USA has a lot less influence on the future than most people think, for example they don't directly control gas prices. And even with a majority in both houses and a majority of conservative judges in the Supreme Court, a lot of the predicted doom just won't happen. A federal law prohibiting abortion in the USA is extremely unlikely, for example. And right-wing parties usually stop wanting to shrink government as soon as they control it, which makes most of Project 2025 a pipe dream. One thing you can be sure about for the next 4 years, is that both what Republicans told you what will happen and what Democrats told you what will happen if Trump wins won't happen. That is not to say that America probably missed out on a better alternative with this election, but be assured: The world doesn't end here!

I believe that democracy is under threat. Not only from would-be dictators, but also from groups who believe in their absolute moral superiority, and are ready to declare the valid concerns of large groups of citizens as being invalid. And that isn't limited to the United States. In Europe for example, any politician suggesting that some sort of negotiation would be needed to end the war in Ukraine is painted as a stooge of Putin, paid by the Russians. That narrative got a few cracks when the pope suggested "a stop to hostilities [and] a truce achieved with the courage of negotiations". Which sounds pretty reasonable to me. More reasonable than hoping that the end of the war could be achieved by an Ukrainian total victory. Realistically speaking, if Ukraine or NATO was ever on the way towards conquering Moscow, nuclear missiles would start to fly. Who wants that?

All politics requires compromise. In the current conflict between Israel and Hamas the two extreme positions both demand some sort of genocide on the other side. I can't understand how anyone can actually be 100% pro-Israel or 100% pro-Hamas in this situation. Domestic politics also requires a lot of compromise. There must be some sensible middle way in immigration policy between letting everybody in and throwing everybody out. Most countries also managed to find a nationwide compromise on abortion rights, which seems far more reasonable than having 50 states with different, frequently changing rights on such a fundamental issue.

Staying in power for more than one legislation period requires to some extent to address not only the concerns of the people who voted for you, but also the concerns of the people who didn't. Otherwise unaddressed issues tend to grow in importance and bring the other side to power faster. The current political trend to only cater to the most extreme political base is dangerous as well as unproductive. Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels, parodied a political system in which the opposition was permanently undoing everything the government did, leading to eternal paralysis. The only alternative to that paralysis is compromise, and that at the very least requires both sides admitting that the concerns of the other side are valid.

Thorgal: The Board Game is not a campaign game. The scenarios are independent from each other, and each has some replay value. However, there are narrative elements in each scenario, so playing a scenario once will result in some spoilers for playing it again. But this isn't a "choose your own adventure" kind of purely narrative game, but a game of action economy. Players need to work together to gather resources, and strengthen their characters, to fulfil various tasks and reach one of the win conditions, while preventing one of the loss conditions to happen. I only played the first scenario, which serves as kind of a tutorial and was possibly a bit easy, but I did like the gameplay. And there is a way to try to go for a harder victory condition, which is narratively "nicer", so there certainly is some challenge even here. But maybe not enough for really hardcore board gamers.

Interestingly, each scenario has different special rules, which change the feel of the game and the optimal strategy. Also in setup the different scenarios have different bonus effects on the six possible action cards, making, introducing even more variety. These action cards can even be changed *during* a scenario, making the possible actions better with time. And that is linked to narrative: For example in the first scenario you start as a chained slave, and fulfilling the task to overcome the guards gives you a better movement action card, as you are now freed from your chains.

Character progression in Thorgal: The Board Game is simple, which is good, because it resets when you start another scenario. There is a combat xp track and a journey xp track, with combat xp giving you better / more dice to roll, while journey xp give you better polyomino tiles to lay on the journey track. The game cleverly uses the same polyomino tiles also for your characters wounds, and for combat, while the dice in combat tell you what tiles you can lay.

Thorgal: The Board Game is a medium complexity game, which isn't immediately obvious, as the large number of components suggests more complexity than there actually is. But not all components come into play in every scenario. The difficulty is not much affected by the number of players, as the players always have 4 actions in a round. I played with 3 players, which meant that the starting player had 2 actions in his round, but as the starting player changes every round, that didn't really matter much. With 3 players, setup, and rules teach, the game took us two hours. I do like to have this in my collection, as narrative game that doesn't need too much time to play, and doesn't require a commitment to a full campaign.

In two days, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is being released. I didn't get a review copy this time, which is unsurprising. What is more surprising is how much of a shitstorm the game is already causing on social media before it is even released. So I sorted through a lot of material to find out what is the matter, and why opinions on this game are so divided.

The first part of the problem is marketing shenanigans. EA Bioware is apparently trying to influence early review scores by carefully picking the reviewers. Content creators who had been invited to a preview of the game received review copies based on how positive their reaction was to that preview. Those who, like me in 2009, gave a positive but still somewhat critical first impression didn't get a review copy, while those who gave a glowing first impression then received a copy to review. That led to some of the bigger YouTubers in the RPG domain being excluded, while some very minor streamers were included.

The second part of the problem is, you might have guessed it, the culture wars. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is full of features and dialogues that promote the political correct / DEI / woke / progressive / however you want to call it point of view. There is an option to make transgender characters with mastectomy scars, which is probably not the blood and gore you wanted in your dark fantasy RPG, apart from being out of place in the setting. Political correctness not only upset people being on the other side of the culture wars, but also made more neutral reviewers dislike the dialogues and storytelling as bland. One reviewer described it as "every dialogue sounds as if HR was in the room", others as "millennial writing". Dragon Age: The Veilguard is to Dragon Age: Origins what Rings of Power is to Lord of the Rings.

The third, and maybe most contentious point, is whether Dragon Age: The Veilguard is still a Dragon Age game. Dragon Age: Origins had real-time with pause combat, which was still very tactical. Dragon Age: The Veilguard has a pure action RPG combat, that looks like it was lifted straight out of Gods of War. Also Dragon Age: Origins was very much *not* a politically correct game, and forced people to sometimes make really uncomfortable, dark dialogue choices. In The Veilguard you can only play the politically correct good guy, and never run into real moral dilemmas. The most evil thing you can do to a NPC is not doing the side-quest that helps him. There are also only three choices from previous Dragon Age games that you can input at character creation to have some sort of continuity.

Overall, you'll be probably able to guess the age and political leaning of the content creator by watching his Dragon Age: The Veilguard review. With The Veilguard being 15 years after Origins, and 10 years after Inquisition, there are simply a lot of young players out there who don't have a very deep connection to the earlier games. And if somebody likes action combat and prefers being the good guy, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is probably not a bad choice of game. The disappointed voices are those of people who have waited for a decade or more for a reincarnation of their favorite game, and got something different.

Ara: History Untold announced its first major patch for sometimes in November, promising to improve the economic user interface to something that works better when your empire is growing. But when playing Millennia and Ara back-to-back, I have to remark that the resource management and crafting chains in Millennia work a lot better since the very beginning. Yes, there are fewer options, but that means that you aren't constantly micromanaging what your buildings do.

4X games in general have a middle- to late-game problem of the management of larger empires getting tedious. I must say that Millennia is doing a lot better in that respect than Ara. The different ages in Millennia bring some new challenges to later ages, for example rebels. Some of those still can get tedious for large empires, but at least it is something new to manage, and you won't have the same thing to manage if you play again and go into a different age. Unfortunately the choice of ages is the one point where Millennia has a problem that Ara doesn't: At higher difficulty levels, due to the AI not getting smarter but just getting more resources than you, it is usually an AI opponent that gets to a new age first. And thus it becomes very random what new age the AI triggers, leading to a total loss of player agency on age selection.

Where both games, and pretty much all other 4X games, are rather bad is warfare: Higher difficulty levels enable the AI opponents to produce a lot more troops than you do, but they are universally bad at the strategic gameplay needed to send those troops somewhere to achieve something. All of these games seem to rely on the player's imagination, "I see an accumulation of enemy troops here, there AI must be planning to attack me"; that only works if the player then launches a counter-attack, because if the player tries a defensive strategy he'll notice very quickly that the AI attack isn't coordinated at all.

I am less excited for the next DLC announced for Millennia, Atomic Ambitions, as that probably won't affect the earlier part of the game at all. So maybe Ara still has some time to catch up and improve upon its flaws. But right now, Ara is the prettier and worse game, while Millenia is uglier and has the much better gameplay.