This has been a personal pet peeve for a while, but man did it hit for Dragon Age: Veilguard.

Dragon Age was always personal choice matters. If you choose something seemingly benign it could cause massive ripples. You could have teammates leave. You could have entire factions turn their backs on you. You could have people who were once friends try to ambush you in a back alley! It had real stakes and made you pay attention.

The 4th installment, Veilguard, was so obviously written with HR (People & Culture) in the room. No one was ever angry! There were decisions, but they were so low stakes because no one would ever get angry at you. You could literally destroy someone's home and they'd say "It's okay, I understand why you had to". WHAT? They should be threatening me - OR WORSE. No one truly died, no one ever got mad, the game literally has "team meetings" where all you do is talk about how great everyone is.

Then each character was whittled down to one specific trauma that you had to help them through. Multifaceted characters with actual emotions? No, that might make someone feel things. This one has a hard time talking to people. This one had a mean dad. This one is trans and can't come out to her mom. Each thing individually is fine, but that's literally their only character trait. Friendship with every person was immediate and permanent. If you talked to them it would only be about their exact trauma, maybe one sentence about the last mission and how we all tried our best. It was so fucking annoying.

Even the antagonists kept repeating how good you were and how you were trying your best! They were gods who thought of mortals as puny ants and you were... a single person, yet they still stopped to mention over and over "You are sure doing a super job at defeating us!". Absolutely immersion breaking.

You could just tell that HR had the only vote on every single line of dialog. No one ever gets their feelings hurt, no one ever is mad, the player might feel something and that could be bad. By trying to make everything so "positive" they've carved out the very humanity from these games.

Anyway, thanks for letting me rant, the video does a great job at summing up my feelings. These people should have no say in the creative process or work culture. They are toxic to anything art related.

Please feel free to share if you have other games like this where you can feel the palpable taint of HR.

Edit: Apparently it needs to be explicitly said that while I do absolutely blame "People and Culture", that blame is not a one-dimensional thing and that I can also blame executives? There are also some big leaps of saying that me saying that someone is a one-dimensional character means that I must be a gamer gater who hates wokeness? I actually liked the trans storyline, what I didn't like is that they made trans people seem like all they have is being trans, instead of that there could be a person there too. To me that seems more reductive and even more harmful to the trans community, but again nuance isn't really a thing on the internet. I said a thing, it must mean I'm a horrible person.