DA2 has a solid story and very well written companions. I can understand it is too different from the first game for the fans of DA:O. Full disclosure; I didn’t know there was a prior game and DA2 was my entry to the franchise and I love it to pieces.After playing DA:O, it made Hawke’s story even more meaningful to me, since Hawke was one of many refugees who just did everything in their power to keep their family alive and well. We played through seven years of that struggle. It’s a pretty special game to me.

Veilguard marked a new low in every game aspect of a DA game, so I now consider DA2 a masterpiece, considering it was developed in just 2 years. After the empty world of DA:I, I’ve come to realize, I’ll take reused assets with well written stories and characters any day.

DA:I companions were well written mostly, but there were so many of them and I guess I have a bandwidth of how many companions I’ll care about in a game and that’s not many (cue Iron Bull betrayal because I forgot to complete his companion quests)

I think the title of the article is misleading a bit. According to the article, the game has been in development since 2018 and they’ve been having issues they cannot seem to be able to fix to their satisfaction and it sounds like it’s more viable for the studio to abandon the project than try to fix it by throwing more money and time at it. And it’s a console game, so that limits their market, too.To me, reading the article, “narrative driven games don’t sell anymore” is not the main problem.

It was very telling EA announced almost right after the launch that they won’t release any DLC’s and they’re moving the team to ME5 already. If that was not the sign EA left DA:V for dead, I don’t know what was.

If the leaks to be trusted, they expected to sell 10 million copies but now they’re talking about they maybe can sell 3 million copies for the lifetime of the game.

Veilguard is far from success, and it’s because it’s the worst-written DA game to date. And that is on EA. They had every chance to make it a good game (as the art book they published shows just what a good story it was shaping up to be before EA forced them to start over for a live service version) but they chose to waste everyone’s time for 10 years by changing their mind mid development multiple times, firing the veteran team members right in the middle of development…

What doesn’t sell are the games that don’t have a well written story or well-written characters. Or the games that their developers themselves don’t have any passion or interest in, games just made to please shareholders… Or games that get preachy on issues without proper care…

The colonists you are given all have character traits and there is a social aspect of the game. Colonists can start relationships, start families, break up, start social fights and end up in infirmarry… Sometimes, family members of your colonists come to your colony as raiders. All these stories forming during gameplay is the real strength of the game for me.

For example, there was this one colonist woman in one of my playthroughs. She was the tough, soldier type. She started one or two relationships in the colony but ended them. Then she tried to go back to them. It started creating some complicated feelings among the colony so I sent her to scavenge a nearby abandoned base.

Before she can leave, a band of raiders popped in. One of the raiders was her teenage son! So I start getting so invested in saving the son and bringing him back to the colony. I’m not that skilled in combat or tactics so I save the game multiple times until a trap injures the boy so his mom can snatch him without fighting. She takes him into one of the intact rooms in the ruin and patches up his wound, shares her food. (She takes him prisoner and you can keep talking to prisoners and convert them into your colonists. )

Here is a scene where raiders running around outside, raiding. And a mother and son, hunkered down in a room, trying to reconnect.

While the boy is recovering in the impromptu prison room, she gets out and shoots the raiders one by one. Rest of the raiders leave the map after losing enough members.

Mother and son talk about family, son talks about some childhood memories. Eventually, he is no longer a prisoner but a newly recruited member of the colony. Woman comes back with her son. Son turns out to be a psychopath but that’s ok. At the Rim, we love psychopaths, they do gruesome task of disposing raider corpses, for example, without getting emotional strain.

Mother stopped creating drama in the colony after son joined.

…

If you read people’s stories in the steam comments (there are a lot of war crime simulator stories, too, be warned) you may get why it’s so addictive.

And modpacks…all the modpacks! All of them turn the game into a whole new game.

I was thinking of Stardew Valley and Rimworld while reading your post, sure enough SDW was mentioned at the end :D