Want to elaborate on this thought more because so much of Veilguard’s writing in spots seems like it’s trying to preempt the Discourse.
The conversation about the lords of fortune you have with Taash about not taking “culturally important artifacts” seems exactly like the devs realized a bunch of people would probably freak out about a bunch of pirates plundering treasure and selling it to the highest bidder and so they decided to go out of their way to explain that the lords' explicitly aren't going to help create the british museum of thedas.
Crows don't buy children out of slavery and use horrendous, torturous methods to mold them into perfect assassins and now they don't have to deal with people freaking out about having to work with them and your crow rook gets to be a good guy assassin.
Templars are almost nonexistent in the game and either work under the mages like in Teveniter which was pre established lore or don't interfere at all like Nevarra or just don't have any presence at all allowing Bioware to neatly step around the pages and pages of essays about mages vs templers.
Slavery is a major thing in Teventer but they make sure to keep that ugly reality off screen and only have you interact with the good guys freeing the slaves. Even throw in a nice elf guy running a fried fish stand despite Fenris' personal questline in DA2 showing how bad things are for even free elves in Teventer.
Calpurnia as a companion would have been so interesting but considering how many people can't even engage with the subtle nuance of Vivienne's character, no way could they possibly handle having a former villain as one of their companions.
Considering how nasty, vicious, and downright mean some people got when Inquisition dropped when it dabbled in moral grey areas, I absolutely get why the devs choose to take a step back from engaging with the sociopolitical commentary that's been so present in the Dragon Age series.
With how much of the fandom either a) lacked the reading comprehension to meaningfully engage with the nuance of their writing or b) were the type to start sending each other death threats over, at times clunky. allegorical fictional politics, it is no wonder Veilguard feels like Dragon Age for Babies because it is. Because that is the level of emotional control and literary analysis so many fans of the series displayed back in the dark days of 2014. It's not like I'm not disappointed with how defanged Dragon Age has become but it's understandable why the devs choose to side step so many issues especially with ten years of development hell to overthink and rewrite things they realized would probably get more volatile fans grabbing pitchforks and torches about.
For all the interesting lore that's been revealed, the setting itself has been reduced to being very two dimensional with good guys and bad guys and very little grey area in between. I still like Veilguard, it's a really fun game with some decent writing and I'm at a point in my life where I can appreciate a lighter setting and tone to the game especially since it does have its dark moments to balance that out but that doesn't mean I can't lament about some of what's been lost in Veilguard.
Veilguard as a game seems like its scared to say anything because it's scared to say the wrong thing and in doing so refuses to engage meaningfully with the darkness inherit to its own setting.
