Well, I’m back on the hype train again, but at least I know when my stop is this time. Finally, after what feels like along time but is probably only a couple months at most, we have a release date for Dragon Age: The Veilguard: October 31st. Halloween. Which means that, in my little group of enthusiasts, I won the betting pool for when the game would come out (my guess was mid November and no one guessed earlier than I) and now have Bragging Rights I’m never going to use. It also means that it won’t come out for two and a half months, which might BARELY be enough time to play Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and all of the DLC I’ve apparently owned for nearly a decade and never once played. My “book” club has resigned ourselves to putting all our actual books on hold until sometime this winter as we try to blast through all of these games and then the new one in time for what might not wind up being monthly conversations. After all, that two to three hours of talking is time we could be spending on Dragon Age games. It’s going to be tough to do, if I’m completely honest, since I’m not sure I’m going to really enjoy this kind of focused gaming binge. I might wind up streaming again to help me keep up the pace since that helped immensely with getting through Breath of the Wind in just over a month, but that might be more bother than I can muster. The downside to streaming is that it’s difficult to focus on the game itself (a problem I don’t have in BotW) and it is rather demanding to stay that social and verbally active all the time. I’d probably get more game time in a day if I just played by myself.

Regardless, I’ve got my work cut out for me and I’m really not sure if I’ll be able to do it. Not from an hours perspective, mind you, I know there’s enough of those between now and October 31st to play it. I just prefer doing a wider variety of activities with my time rather than fixating on one game. Right now, on top of swapping between a pile of games, I’ve got my book club, my Animorphs reading club (that I’m incredibly behind on, since everyone else stopped participating and my motivation disappeared since I had no one to talk about the books with), Palia, my writing, a stack of books I’ve been meaning to read, my podcasts, TV shows for my podcasts, a collection of anime that I’ve been meaning to watch, and the ever-present specter of finally starting to watch through a bunch of mech-based shows and movies in order to finally immerse myself in the genre. Most of which I’m not even doing now, but all of which I have on hand so I can keep my life enriched with new media, stories, and entertainment as a counter to the stress of my job and my life. I don’t want to silo myself off so completely that all I’m doing is replaying old games again. I did that back in late 2020 and early 2021 and it was a miserable existence. I have no desire to get into a situation like that again. Which means I need to find some kind of balance between new media and Dragon Age games.

Some of which could be accomplished by finally playing through the various DLCs. I genuinely don’t know how I’ve gone this far and never played any of the main story-based DLC content for some of my favorite video games. I’m sure it all came out long enough after each game that I just missed my moment. Or that I was a broke college student and couldn’t afford the expense for the first two. Or that I bought the expanded version of the game during an Origin sale (back when the Origin launcher was still a thing) and promptly forgot about it because things that are wholly digital hold no space in my mind. Or I tried to replay them, got bored, stopped playing, eventually returned, and started the file all over again because I felt so disconnected from it that I couldn’t just start over again only to eventually get bored again. Lots of very plausible explanations. This time, though, I actually have the accountability (via blog and book club) to get through all of the story pieces that I’ve only learned about from what gets hinted at in subsequent mainline Dragon Age franchise entries. For example, I only learned about the end of the DA2 DLC from the events of Dragon Age: Inquisition and even then all I have is a very loose grasp since I only got that far in DA:I once during the month I played the game right after it came out. I’ll finally know… Well, a bunch of stuff I didn’t already and that was probably important at one point in time. After all, games have to pretty good at on-boarding people who didn’t play their prequels. It’s bad game design to assume that people will have played the previous games since that would mean your audience is only ever shrinking. Not everyone finishes every game they play.

This extreme focus will probably mean I won’t finish Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth and while I do feel a little sad about that thought, I also feel a little relieved. I feel like I’ve been looking for an excuse to give up on that and I’ve finally found it. I’d still like to finish the other games I’m playing, though. Or just keep up with Palia for a bit rather than diving back in for two weeks and vanishing again (which is basically what has happened so far, thanks to how busy I’ve been lately). I mean, it’s not like I even enjoy playing Dragon Age: Origins that much since dialing down the graphics got rid of the one thing I sorta enjoyed, though that was mostly the nostalgia associated with the game rather than something about my present experience of the game. Which isn’t to say I’m having a bad time! I’m just also listening to old episodes of Friends at the Table (I’m midway through my yearly re-listen of Seasons of Hieron) while I play and maybe not paying super close attention to everything I’m doing. Which means I sometimes miss what someone said, briefly wish that I had the ability to roll back through the dialogue, and then move on with my life since I can always look things up if I missed an important hint about what I am supposed to do in a future plotline. That’s kind of the upside to playing a game that’s fifteen years old: it’s incredibly well-documented online, mostly by websites that aren’t any of the shitty new guide sites that cram so many advertisements down your throat that my old computer used to struggle with running my web browser AND a video game if I ever had to look something up while I was playing. I don’t miss those days, even if Dragon Age: Origins crashed a little less frequently back then.