Where I live, two of the three trades you listed require completion of 4-year apprenticeships, including a minimum of 6 weeks of in-school technical training per year. It’s much cheaper to train as an apprentice than it is to pay other post-secondary tuitions, and you earn an income most of the time you’re an apprentice, but the reality is a lot more complicated.

And it’s also very easy to be employed in most trades and not make that much. It depends on which trade you’re in, how much punishment you can take, and whether you’re in a union job or not.

Have you played the game?

I haven’t.

Do you have to interact with that character? In all the BioWare games I have played, you don’t actually have to interact with any companions at all outside of critpath questlines. Even big blowup moments like the Miranda/Jack fight only trigger once you’ve completed both of their loyalty missions, and you have to choose to talk to them to unlock those in the first place.

And since I’m assuming you’re referring to the Qunari companion, and I’ve watched a couple of critiques of the scenes I believe you’re referencing - it’s not their sexuality that’s being discussed, it’s their gender.

What happened to BioWare, in your estimation?

Who’s this project director with a corporate background? Are you referring to an actual person, or is this how you assume the industry works?

Of course there are minorities who don’t like Veilguard. No group is monolithic. I found two quite different critiques of the trans representation in Veilguard by trans creators, but yeah I’ll admit I had to do some digging, not because I had to sift through so many agenda-pushing journalist reviews, but because youtube is absolutely FLOODED with anti-woke reactionaries pushing - guess what? ragebait content featuring thumbnails of the Qunari companion.

Complaining about forced diversity and wokeness isn’t critique. When it comes down to it, these are buzzwords that wind up meaning different things to different people. This bandwagon-jumping VEILGUARD BAD, BIOWARE DOOMED shit adds nothing of value to games discourse. People who claim to care about games need to stop engaging with it and seek out or create constructive critiques instead, because it only damages the most human parts of the industry, not some corporate bottom line.

As for sales figures, it seems like it’s doing just fine tbh, but I think you’re wrong to assume that you could really find any sort of critical opinion by sifting through that data.

And just for the record, re: my first two paragraphs:

Over the course of development, the franchise lead writer, the EP (and actually maybe a second EP?), the creative director, and the art director all changed. This is extremely unusual not only for BioWare, but any game.

That said, the people who replaced them were not, from what I can tell, people with corporate backgrounds. They all appear to be industry veterans, many of them internal promotions and longtime BioWare employees. Go check the mobygames credits if you want to see for yourself.

Additionally, BioWare laid off “approximately” 50 people, many from the Edmonton studio, in August of 2023 partway through development of Veilguard.

Dragon Age 4 was not developed in a stable, secure environment. From what I’ve read, significant changes were made between the game’s inception as Dreadwolf, and its release as Veilguard.

That the focus is now almost exclusively on the game’s minority representation speaks volumes about what these supposed “people who care about games” actually value.

I wound up spending a significant amount of time today looking into the development history of Veilguard, and what actually got released, and what people have liked and disliked about it.

And you know what? I don’t think it’s an example of forced diversity at all.

I think a team trying to make a game under immense external pressures made something imperfect, but earnest and deeply personal to some of the team. And it isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine, actually.

I agree with you, slapping a veneer of diverse identity on a character post-facto is often just performative bullshit. At best it’s bad representation, at worst it’s cynical pinkwashing and pandering for profit.

But that’s not a distinction I have ever seen an “anti-woke gamer” railing against.

What I do see them railing against is any representation in games that does not pander to their own personal preferences.

Did you not encounter any of the backlash to Ellie’s sexuality? Honestly I think FNV only escapes a lot of that kind of vitriol because it was released pre-gg.

Shaun hits a lot of my major concerns in his new video.

Add on top of that that the games industry has laid off TENS OF THOUSANDS of devs in the last three or four years.

I know a lot of talented people who are no longer working as devs, or who have been job searching for months.

Of course this doesn’t mean that the studios still producing games have narrowed their scopes, they just dump more work on the survivors.

And “woke DEI SJW snowflake game dev” is far from the only thing making games worse, it’s just what a lot of gamers can easily identify as a problem.

By the time I left, my last industry job had been reduced to what felt like manning the slop hose of mtx store items made by overseas outsource studios producing soulless trash under fuck-knows-what kind of nightmare working conditions.

We started seeing more diversity in games because devs are diverse and wanted to see themselves and their friends in their art.

The problem has never been queer or black characters in games. It is, and always has been, the prioritizing of profit over quality craft.

How do you differentiate between a character “written for the sake of checking a diversity box”, a poorly-written diverse character, and a “random fact of the world”? It’s a fictional world. Nothing is random. It’s all creative decisions made by a team of writers and producers.

I don’t think shoehorning in of diverse identities and character backgrounds is good representation or good art, and I completely agree with your point there.

But I don’t think that the people driving the current backlash bother to make those distinctions.

What I see is a lot of outrage being stoked by people using the (updated) language and tactics of gamergate, and I don’t think the result of that will be “better representation”.

I think the result will be devs being harrassed and pushed out of an already brutal industry.

Only if you’re completely unwilling to unpack what things like “be a man” and “like a man” generally mean in the anglosphere, and how phrases like that have often been employed to reinforce the worst and most destructive aspects of masculinity.