so um. that's my recommendation. if you are like me and mostly value rpgs for their writing and haven't already played those, i hope you enjoy one or two. imo not every game has to be disco elysium quality, but i think that in a post-disco world, my tolerance for bad writing has really tanked, especially when triple-a games cost more than some of these games combined

i’ve been feeling for a while that every new game from bioware is probably going to aim to appeal to new players going forth, and i’m preparing myself that the choice importations we know them for are likely gone for good. inquisition was very new player-friendly despite being only a few years after da2 (which is fine) but ten years later, 0% of origins matters, 0% of awakening matters, 0% of 2 matters, and ~5% of inquisition matters. ten years from now, veilguard will be old news too, and it’ll be the next new batch of players they’re after. dragon age's proudest feature, its connective tissue tracking your changes between games, is basically a thing of the past, and i'm honestly expecting the same of mass effect going forward.

it makes showcasing varric and morrigan prominently in the trailers feel even worse, and i was already unhappy with how much space they're taking up. i'd guessed it was nostalgia bait, but now that we know they won't remember or mention hawke, hawke's lover, the warden, kieran, the well... their inclusion feels like insecurity that their game won't do well without these characters, but they don't, or can't, commit to expanding on the many variations that these characters can be.

based off of his lines in the trailers, i'm prepared to just be seeing varric the quip machine, who conveniently won't mention any details about hawke, but i'm sure his possible guilt over his role in his friend's death won't affect his personality at all when he's establishing yet another hero in the making; and a one-size-fits-all morrigan who is now the same character regardless of "i will not be the mother you were to me" or whether she drank any interesting bathwater. who cares, it's morrigan in the trailer! she's swooping! you guys like swooping, right? (by this point i fully expecting them to dig out varric's resurrected corpse in 2035 to get people to buy dragon age 5. and the frustrating thing is that it will work.)

I didn’t get used to coming to your store for hamburgers. in fact your previous owners established a really good reputation for making pizza and I don’t necessarily believe you can make good hamburgers cause you don’t have the best track record with rebranding to other things. you tried to make conveyor belt sushi that one time and it sent some people to the hospital so I get very nervous when you start experimenting.

then your chefs take to social media and start saying “those old critically acclaimed pizzas of ours that you loved so much always had some bad flavors, so in our new hamburgers, we actually tried hard to make the tomatoes taste good. these hamburgers are the Best We’ve Ever Done, You Should Preorder Our Hamburgers”

you are now boasting about how delicious your patties are. now I tried your sliders one time a few years ago out of boredom and they were fine, it wasn’t really for me, but whatever. and now I notice how the first people in line for your hamburgers today are talking about how they can’t wait to rip off the buns and all the other toppings and lick their patty’s bald head till it says “oooh I never should've left you, vhenan, oooh.” i’m mostly a vegetarian these days anyway. please stop talking about patties. I don’t fucking care you brought over the same plates and wallpaper and fishtank when you redesigned your restaurant. for $60 I want to eat a good pizza. even a pizza-flavored hamburger. is there anything on this menu that will suit me?

then I go online to see if anyone else feels the same nervousness. and I meet several other people who say yeah, this is not pizza, the only good pizza they’ve ever made was back when they made only margherita; some others who say yeah it’s weird, but I like hamburgers so it’s whatever; several other critics are just bigots who stand outside the store lobbing feces at the windows because this store also serves rainbow-colored pizza-hamburgers; and several others who say removing the cheese from the pizza-hamburger isn’t actually that big a deal, and neither is removing the tomatoes, or the bread, or the sauce, because enjoying pizza is about the Experience and the Ambiance, so they’re going to love this hamburger anyway because come on, it’s the pizza joint! the classic pizza joint! don’t you miss eating their classic pizzas?? now I have never straight-up told anyone to not buy the hamburgers, and yet when I or anyone else mentions missing when this place served pizza, I get alluded to as a pizza tourist with intentions on par with the aforementioned poo-slingers.

if I then see reviews have come out with video footage they even the tomatoes, which are a commonly agreed element in both pizza and hamburgers, are no longer is up to the quality of any acceptable hamburger joint much less this pizzeria in its heyday, it’s gonna ruin my appetite for your hamburgers entirely, much less anything else that comes out of that kitchen. that was the ONE connective tissue between pizza and hamburgers that I cared about; the one thing that everyone looks forward to from you, specifically, even. and if some folks say “hey, even if this is a hamburger joint, it’s a bad sign that these tomatoes look like they’ve been dug out of the garbage and cut by a nine-year-old, and I worry because I don’t want to see you on the internet later complaining about food poisoning, god forbid, or worse, telling people that mild food poisoning is part of the experience,” I think it’s baffling that people shoot back with “why don’t you buy the hamburger before judging if it has food poisoning for yourself?” as if you and I don't deserve better for sixty goddamn dollars than to have to guess whether a hamburger with a dead fly in it is going to ruin our weekend.

look, even if I weren’t very bitter about my favorite pizza joint changing, I think that people who like hamburgers also deserve a better foodie experience for their time and money, no matter what it is, and we are lying to ourselves if we say all the basic ingredients of pizza never really mattered and everything was just window dressing for like, all those decorative background plates and wallpaper that one guy designed 20 years ago. that one guy is still arguing with fans of his old pizzeria on twitter ten years after he even left the place, so I don’t really care what he thinks.

this restaurant’s menu items, whether pizza or hamburger, costs $60 and take several dozens of hours to sit at your restaurant and enjoy. now I have signed up for your dinner experience in the past despite my wariness and been proven wrong, because enjoying your enormous, delicious pizza for hours has been a highlight of my food experiences since I even started calling myself an #eater. even if I dislike how you’ve used some anchovies or chicken bbq toppings in the past, I actually enjoyed when you changed my other favorite menu item into tacos earlier, even if the taco’s faces looked kinda funny.

and I’m sure your staff worked very hard on these hamburgers under extreme conditions; maybe you had Jeremy Allen White screaming HANDS HAIRSTYLES in your ear back there for 10+ years, and that sucks. while I have not forgotten that you axed several of your line cooks (who designed the recipes you’re now serving) just before the finish line, I am sympathetic that this is a make-or-break moment for your restaurant. you’ve borrowed too much money from Uncle Jimmy and if this doesn’t work, we might not see you stay open for long. I do not want that to happen.

but i do not owe this place my patronage just because they still call themselves a pizza joint. they changed too many menu items. I am no longer their ideal clientele. I don’t have all the time and money in the world to waste on hamburgers I know will make me unhappy and I’m tired of being alluded to as a “tourist” for sharing my concerns about the future of one of my favorite restaurants.

"Uncharitably, previous Dragon Age games got to the realm of 'combat wasn't too bad.' In this game, the combat's actually fun..." —Mark Darrah

"We wanted the prologue to feel like the finale of any other game we've done ... When I think back to Inquisition, how the sky was literally tearing open, the impact of [Solas'] ritual really makes that look like a minor inconvenience." —Corinne Busche, director

but hearing bioware removed those features because of lack of popular use now so now we’ll no longer have unique interactions that did give more characterization, like how all the da2 companions have different funny voice lines for trying to lockpick something which you only hear when you control them, has me pretty