I’m playing the “demo” and just met an elf companion who said something like “whoopsie! My gods are real and they’re going to destroy the world! 🤷” And it just undercuts the whole story.

Marvelization is the perfect way to describe it. There are zero stakes.

Origins had humor and snark, but it was mostly used in service of the story and themes.

DAO sets the tone during the harrowing when one Grey Warden candidate dies drinking Darkspawn Blood, then Duncan straight murders the other candidate when he freaks out.

Veilguard just seems saccharine and safe.

A few years back, I handed out candy for friends while they took their kids around the neighborhood, and a group of kids jokingly asked for potatoes. I obliged and grabbed them each a potato from the pantry.

When my friends came back, the potato house was apparently the talk of the kids in the neighborhood.

Happened to me nearly 40 years ago on my baby teeth. My mother finally had enough and took me for a second opinion and the next dentist found no problems. It’s given me 40 years of dental anxiety so bad that I have to go to a specialist that deals with it. The only time I had to have work done there, they drugged me to the gills.

Not sure I’d have bought it on launch day but definitely early as long as reviews were positive and it ran okay in Linux.

I kickstarted the first one, so I’ve got no problem waiting until it’s on GoG or at least Denuvo-less on Steam.

I’m not a fan of Gnome either but Pop was the most stable distro I found for an Nvidia card.

This Gnome extension let’s you move everything down to the bottom panel.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/

I’ve had good luck using Pop!_OS to game on Nvidia systems. Can’t speak specifically for those two games, but several other games that gave me trouble on other distros worked smoothly on Pop.