I think it's unfair to lay the blame solely at Corrine's feet. Patrick Weekes was the lead writer on this, and is responsible for some of the most egregious content we've been bludgeoned with. That is a writer who had the privilege to work under David Gaidar. I expected MUCH better of Weekes than what we saw in Taash.
And then there's the report from Gaider back in 2016 before he left that said someone high up was walking around asking how they could have "less writing." Like it isn't Bioware's entire core business.
The problem is cultural there, and Corrinne is only one cog in a very large machine that has changed from a studio that crafted experiences that happened to be popular and make money, to an entity whose sole purpose is generating revenue and who cares if we sacrifice a little bit or art\soul along the way?
But overall, I agree that this game really missed the mark. I was just logged into BG3 and I had forgotten how much I liked going to merchants and comparing pieces of armor. Even that nightmare of an inventory management system, there is something so RPG about min-maxing your build and gathering the best weapons and armor for your class. Veilguard took that from us, as if we're not capable of managing our own inventory. We have to kick open chests and we may or may not get something useful for a piece of equipment we're wearing.
It's little things like that, that really get under my skin. The complexity of these systems is what keeps people hooked, what sparks creative theorycrafting. The best developers are the ones that keep secrets - I still have fond memories of ages past when we had serious discussions around days and directions for crafting equipment in FFXI. Folks would swear by facing a certain direction at a certain time of day when certain weather was present, I mean, it took up HOURS of folks' time trying to figure this stuff out. And then everyone would share notes and it would end up in a wiki somewhere. And maybe some of it was just in our imaginations, but the important thing was that the developers never held our hands on any of it. They let us experiment and figure it out for ourselves.
The wikis we have for Veilguard are about as braindead as the game is, mostly because there's nothing to really guide you through. I did all but one achievement without ever looking a thing up, and the last thing I needed was one of those three codex circle slips and I just hadn't gone quite far enough to pick up the circle around the corner.
Not that the hidden ending was anything even worth watching. It didn't even get me a little excited that they might have had another idea for another DA game.
