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Pattonesque posted:I'm up for multiple scenes of the party interacting in non-combat situations. It's something Bioware's writers are half-decent at. Reference; the entirety of the Citadel DLC.  Seriously, that poo poo was more enthralling to me than the entire trilogy's main arc. If they can stuff even a fraction of that personality into the party-interactions of Inquisition, I won't give a drat how lovely the actual story is.
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Sep 11, 2013 04:21
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Spaceking posted:Do we know the actual time period this game takes place in? If Morrigan is running around, presumably it takes place Post-origins. So if that's the case, might we see the Archfiend Baby at some point? Unless it has been stated specifically, the assumption is that, with Cassandra and Varric both being in your party, the game takes place ~10 years after the events of Origins, plus or minus a bit of spare change. DA2 has come and gone, and the timeline for the events in Kirkwall set the minimum of pretty much a decade passing. Assuming they don't add a few years on top of that, of course. e: On a completely unrelated note- Oh. Oh boy. This... this looks to be quite a read. Bioware on Race, Romance, and (R)Time in Dragon Age Generic American fucked around with this message at 12:57 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 12:27
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TheWorldIsSquare posted:If I remember correctly, he was screaming in pain but he enjoyed it at the same time. And people say Bioware's games are too kinky... 
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Sep 15, 2013 04:58
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oswald ownenstein posted:... and was way more fun than Leliana who was super annoying. Them's fightin' words, my friend. 
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Dec 9, 2013 19:17
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Yeah, as disappointing as the result might be, I'm definitely thinking that our most likely option is going to be one VA per gender, possibly with some slight remixing and pitch adjustments to make it Dwarfy or Qunari-ish, and the mannerisms excused by a common backstory. While it'd be awesome to have something akin to Origins, where each possibility has a distinct starting point, I'd wager on one shared "you were abandoned at the Chantry's doorstep as a child, and raised among humans". So you're culturally just a funny-looking human. Unless you actually play a human, in which case, what is wrong with you?  Though if Bioware does opt for the many choices of The Old Republic, I'd honestly be sold enough to forgive a ~lot~ of other potential bullshit.
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Jan 4, 2014 13:24
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Cloche posted:dragonageseries.txt This is also a huge thing in the Elder Scroll series, most notably Oblivion and Skyrim. Reading all of the in-game books and back story, the lore gets loving weird but in the game itself, you only ever get generic fantasy stereotypes. 
Generic American fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Jan 5, 2014 |
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Jan 5, 2014 11:20
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ElrondHubbard posted:I think you're being a bit unfair. Bioware went through the trouble of also making a series of novels, comic books, and an anime that poo poo all over Origins and even DAII (vomit inducing as the thought might be). Bioware has a long, illustrious career of making GBS threads precisely where they serve their five-star meals.
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Feb 20, 2014 02:29
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Kurtofan posted:Isn't the blonde elf a lady?
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Mar 8, 2014 09:52
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Lotish posted:edit: Speaking of Gaider's tumblr, he just posted this for Vivienne 
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Mar 8, 2014 14:05
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MadJackMcJack posted:I hope spell effects still show during cutscenes. Nothing like being on fire to give a dramatic scene that extra edge. Not to mention just how loving awful Leliana's bard buffs looked, to the point where I would just turn them off completely. Ugh.
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Mar 14, 2014 13:16
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Pulling unique faces from old saves seems like a complete pipe-dream to me, honestly. With dwarves or humans, it's possible, but elves have changed so drastically since we last had the chance to play them that I doubt Bioware would be able to morph those old faces into the new style without looking like mutants. It's just not going to happen, and would be a massive waste of resources. My best guess is that each potential Warden will just be a defined character with a male/female alternation at most, with everything else falling down to what class they are.
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Mar 23, 2014 21:55
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First Bass posted:The real question is if BioWare can write a believable human (you know what I mean) being as opposed to a walking stereotype/amalgamation of creepy tropes. The real question is whether those believable humans will be absolutely insufferable, like Anders.
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Mar 29, 2014 00:08
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Am I the weird one here? Because other than the stuff specifically about the endings which isn't even unique to Bioware (seriously, "[x number of] endings" is such blatant marketing speak that I've never taken it seriously, whether we're talking The Witcher or Fallout), this is nowhere near the standard that they set during the Dragon Age II pre-release. It's pretty bland listing of cool features that might or might not work or even matter, and I don't see anything that's really worth mocking yet unless you really try to stretch things. Or is this thread just kicking into another "haha, Bioware sucks, am I right" phase?
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Mar 29, 2014 05:38
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Krowley posted:Mordin's voice is modulated though, isn't it? I don't watch animes or whatever so I don't follow or even recognize these voice actors they typically use but I don't think the guy naturally talks like a frogman.
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Mar 31, 2014 11:30
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CommissarMega posted:Also try this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_cSxH_JwxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l3zz9qNM7I Tell me more about chicken strips, Garrus. 
Generic American fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Mar 31, 2014 |
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Mar 31, 2014 20:21
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So, Bioware just added some merchandise to their store that I'm sure Dragon Age fans in this thread will appreciate! Don't read the URL. Seriously, it will ruin the surprise. Be sure to try buying it!
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Apr 1, 2014 21:41
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Kibayasu posted:I don't think Hale can change her voice much when compared to someone like Nolan North or has quite possibly never been asked to, but she voices emotion and inflection very well. Trishka may sound like Shan but you better believe she will kill your dick. The girl's got range, that much is certain. I used to have a video on my YouTube favorites list of an interview with her (during the MGS4 buzz) where on request, she pulled out this crazy little kid voice that was jarring as hell to see come out of her, directly after doing her stereotypical "Jennifer Hale as" Naomi voice. But sadly, it was taken down quite awhile ago apparently and I can't seem to find a copy.  So I'd definitely put her in the same category as Steve Blum- maybe not in skill or the amount of range, but in just being pigeonholed into That One Voice. Generic American fucked around with this message at 23:05 on Apr 1, 2014 |
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Apr 1, 2014 22:51
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Unless it really was a bug that has since been fixed, the Orlesian Warden is only ever used when you do not import world states. In every other case, no matter what decisions you made in the main game, you play as the original Warden, and Ultimate Sacrifice endings do not (or at least, should not) "lock" anyone out of Awakening- when used for an imported save, the Warden is just magically assumed to have survived with no explanation given. From what I remember, it was a conscious choice by Bioware so that players who did make the sacrifice wouldn't "be stuck with some new character" while everyone else got to play with their old characters.
Generic American fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Apr 1, 2014 |
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Apr 1, 2014 23:35
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KittyEmpress posted:Mass Effect one has the broken whiny Kaiden,  " Taylor. Even when talking about his tragic past with biotic training, it has the tone of a guy who has already dealt with his poo poo long before this conversation and is just telling you for the sake of context. And I never really got a whiny vibe from him at all, after putting aside the instinctive baggage of basically being Elvis Carth.Don't get me wrong, you're spot on with the rest, but I don't think Kaidan even comes near qualifying for that category.
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Apr 9, 2014 06:01
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Kibayasu posted:The singing doesn't sound anything like her normal voice. I've never bothered to check but I'm pretty sure its not the voice actress who does her speaking lines. It's basically the model weirdly trying to lip synch to a - not sure how to say it - operatic song? One woman choir? One of those mournful and/or uplifting orchestral songs that just sounds like someone making up words to match the music. For the record, you're spot on here. The singer is Aubrey Ashburn, who also does a few other "opera-esque" songs on the soundtrack like "I Am The One", not Leliana's actress. To this day, I still have no idea what the gently caress the person who put that it in was thinking- it's so jarring that I can't fathom seeing it as a good idea. It sounds nothing like her, doesn't even sound like someone singing by a campfire, and is a complete bottle-sequence with no greater meaning to her character. And that's not even bringing up the horrifying animation. 
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Apr 11, 2014 04:10
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SirDrone posted:It's also out of character on Justice's part to become unstable and make Anders lash out, like is it the same character or what?. On the one hand, you have Anders who, as shown in Awakening, is a sniveling "gently caress you, got mine" type of guy who wants to escape the Templars and just be free for a change. But, when pressed on standing up for the plight of other mages, he makes it a point to keep his head down and just help himself. Their freedom is their problem, after all, and those who stick their necks out for others only make it easier to cut. There's also the assumption that, as a mage, he's seen some horrible poo poo go down in terms of oppression by the Templars. He's a selfish little creature who is content to seek his own salvation and leave the larger issue to the martyrs. Then you have Justice, who by his very nature, his detached from his duty. He doesn't have a personal stake in what he does; he is simply compelled to seek out justice at a basic, instinctual level and doesn't ever show the ability to restrain himself from that urge. The justice never affects him, though- he's just the sword of an executioner in his purpose, and doesn't show any real nuance in his thinking. Everything to him is black and white, just and unjust. He's not even human, so he can't parse anything beyond guilty or innocent based on the context of the crime. So, what do you get when you haphazardly mash those two together? You get an Anders who now feels an urge at his very core to dole out justice for everything he has witnessed in his life against the Templars, and is no longer capable of just looking out for himself. He can no longer see the shades of gray- from his perspective, mages were the victims, so after merging with Justice, that is the viewpoint he sticks to. And likewise, Justice is no longer impartial, as everything he does is tainted by the experiences and bias of Anders, skewing everything off from that detached "right/wrong" spectrum while still keeping the arbitrary need to categorize everything into one of the two. Anders and Justice are pretty much the worst possible combination at a conceptual level, and it results in a raving lunatic who simply can't live with everything he has seen, driven to madness by everything he has seen that now eats away at him from within each and every day, to the point that he can only keep trying to fix a complex piece of machinery by repeatedly bashing it with a hammer to see if it somehow works. Again, the writing doesn't hold up and he's just an irritating fucker throughout the game, but I at least like the basis of what they were trying to do (or at least, what I assume they were trying to do), even if I loathed every inch of the execution. Compendium posted:I loathe the execution because it doesn't even loving explain how the merger with Justice and Anders happened. It was a crucial detail that was kind of hand waved to hell making whatever ending you achieved in Awakening really confusing. Generic American fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Apr 11, 2014 |
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Apr 11, 2014 16:02
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Yeah, there's not much that will feel more thematically appropriate to me than my mage Warden's funeral scene after taking down the Archdemon, where to honor her memory, Alistair decided to abolish the Circle of Ferelden that she had spent the entire game railing against as a lovely system at every given opportunity. Of course, Dragon Age II taints that as well with the certainty that all of those freed mages would go on to burn every goddamn thing to the ground by summoning demons each time they stub a toe. But goddamn it if I won't keep that feelgood ending as my personal canon.  The god baby ending always seemed like such a cheap cop-out to me after experiencing that.
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Apr 14, 2014 20:50
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quote:"We want Inquisition to be an experience you can take with you - to [...] bed." 
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Apr 15, 2014 13:55
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Strenuous Manflurry posted:And I'm curious here - any time romances are mentioned in this thread or the ME3 one it's almost entirely negative, but I have enjoyed several Video Game Romances. Even BioWare ones! Not to say DAO's toy doll bump & grind wasn't embarrassing, or that any of the codependent pairings in DA2 were even approaching decent, but there are several BioWare romances throughout its history that are fine enough and allow for some enjoyable moments. Does anyone posting in this thread enjoy them for anything beyond the camp factor?  I rag on them a lot, but it's more of a playful teasing in my case. There are certainly quite a few moments that make me sigh, or just outright uncomfortable, but in general, I'd be disappointed if they were just gone. But then again, I'm also an absolute sucker for love stories, so that probably feeds into it! Playing Dragon Age celibate, for instance, felt kind of hollow to me. There was nothing to replace the sense that my various Wardens were fighting for something personal, instead of just vanquishing the big bad villain. The sex scenes, I would gladly shove out the door and not miss for a moment, but the romance itself is definitely worth keeping in my opinion. Even the bad ones are something, and it's well worth the risk if it means we might get an actual decent one in the bunch.
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Apr 15, 2014 16:26
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Crappy Jack posted:It's their handling that bothers me so much. Like how the culmination of the relationship is a sex scene, and then there's basically no more content in the relationship arc. Congrats, you had sex, achievement unlocked, now you're done with that entire plotline. That and the aforementioned "All or nothing" with romances. If you're not having sex with Garrus, he just sits in the basement of the ship forever. There's not as much focus on non-sexual relationships and you always get the feeling you're missing out on content if you're not seducing somebody. I like the idea of characters developing relationships, and romances are a good way of doing that, but the sex being the endpoint is a really weird thing for me. And friendship paths for all characters are one of my biggest desires for all Bioware games going forward, with Mass Effect 2 probably being the biggest offender there in pissing me off. Playing as FemShep, Jack wants nothing to do with you beyond dumping her backstory, so it would've been great to be able to get that same type of "conclusion" to her arc as in the romance path, but without the magic dick curing her trauma. Or Ashley in the third game, who I think I had a total of two whole conversations with before hitting the wall of "I have nothing else to say" canned dialogue. Ugh. It'd be soooooo much better if any romance was simply a variation of the relationship arc instead of being the entire second half locked behind a "do you want to gently caress me, y/n" dialogue gate.
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Apr 15, 2014 17:06
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Drifter posted:I'd also always forgotten that they'd been living in Kirkwall for like 7 years by the time that poo poo happened, right?
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Apr 15, 2014 18:44
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MoreLikeTen posted:Probably pissing in the cereal bowl level drivel or whatever. I don't think I've ever interacted with a video game's extended universe books or animes or whatever. They always seem like cheap cash-ins. Is there a gold standard for this kind of thing, or is it always just a guilty pleasure?  ), was written by freelance writer William C. Dietz, who is uniquely awful. The rest of Bioware's stuff has been... Well, I would never venture to say good, but decent enough. For EU fiction, at least. For context, Dietz also had the honor of writing "Halo: The Flood" during their initial book trilogy... Need I elaborate? There's a reason they leaned on Eric Nylund to finish out the rest, let me just say that.
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Apr 18, 2014 18:17
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Man, that looks so... novelly. It's like the equivalent of the Mass Effect 2 cover art. I like the style, but I can't quite put my finger on why it doesn't seem like something for a game.  e: Edited for English because it's hard, yo. Generic American fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Apr 21, 2014 |
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Apr 21, 2014 20:53
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Structurally, the Witcher 2 is a pretty great game, yeah. But by far, it's greatest sin is casting "" Geralt as the lead-character. Christ alive, I found Hawke more sympathetic as a character than him, and when the game constantly orbits such a wooden character, it drags the overall impression down quite a few notches for me on presentation alone. That, and clown-suits. So many clown-suits. 90% of the armor was loving hideous, and there wasn't even that much variety to speak of.
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Apr 21, 2014 21:18
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DentedLamp posted:I imagine that with the more... JRPG elements Bioware has recently been adding to their games, players will just end up fighting a Literal God, a la the FF series.
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Apr 23, 2014 16:02
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Drifter posted:The red choice is Morrigan's son, the blue choice is Varric, the Green choice is
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Apr 23, 2014 16:30
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Lotish posted:I haven't read any of these things, but I thought that book was written by a freelancer and Bioware simply never bothered to read it before publishing it. Which isn't really better, but whatever.
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Apr 24, 2014 21:49
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Lotish posted:I looked the guy up and he's not at all what I imagined. Dude is pushing 70. Makes me wonder if he put the cereal pissing scene in just to see if the people he worked for even read what he wrote before publishing anymore. (Oh God, why do I know this, just loving end it  )But yeah, I wouldn't bank on him being some secret troll testing Bioware's attention. He also wrote Halo: The Flood, which was panned as awful even by game novel standards, and from the context of those scenes he wrote, it definitely doesn't seem like he just slipped them in as a joke. I mean, it's possible, but it's the classic problem of good trolls, where it's either straight-faced stupidity or too subtle to tell apart from straight-faced stupidity. It slipped by Bioware regardless, don't get me wrong, but none of Deception really sticks out as a guy taking the piss (no pun intended!) out of his own work.
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Apr 24, 2014 22:08
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I'm going to be boring and probably go female human at first, until I get a feel for how much "give" the game has in differentiating characters. If I can, say, bring up different backstories in dialogue, or just pick them as an origin in character creation that flavors the character, and those sorts of things. From there, I'm going to branch out and go Elf and Qunari pretty much immediately for a more... adversarial playthrough. 
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Apr 24, 2014 23:20
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Crappy Jack posted:Oh, yeah, and then the Exile dies. Like, just gets killed in a fight. So there's that epic conclusion. The Exile, who made a career as a general commanding entire armies with precision and was hailed for her skills as a cunning tactician, forgot that she had a turncoat Sith standing behind her. 
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Apr 25, 2014 16:04
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megalodong posted:I don't know which is better: the "islamic borg" Qunari being an anagram of Qurani ("My Quran"), or THEDragonAgeSetting. Seriously, that line of complaint is such horseshit, and it makes me a bit annoyed every time it comes up to see it raised to the level of actually horrible poo poo that Bioware has done like that Islamic Borg "inspiration". It works. It's not an inherently stupid name, far as I can tell. So what if they got to that point by noticing an abbreviated nickname actually worked as a title? What are the correct and incorrect ways to name something in fiction? It's a silly story about how the name came to be, but treating as anything more significant just reeks of bitter pedantry to me, like we're making an active effort to invent new arbitrary rules that Bioware has broken just so we can bitch and moan some more. epitasis posted:I think it's dumb when your creative processes are inherently transparent. I think it's dumb when the first town you visit is named Lord of the Rings. Generic American fucked around with this message at 03:41 on May 1, 2014 |
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May 1, 2014 03:33
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Dan Didio posted:If a game as invested in being cinematic and filmic as Mass Effect ended with a powerpoint presentation, that would be very silly.
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May 3, 2014 08:02
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Dan Didio posted:What, you don't like Celine Dion? (Okay, maybe a little.  )You put one of her songs right after that conversation with Anderson on the Citadel and roll the credits there? I probably would've ~balled like a loving baby~... even if it meant I'd poke fun at the ending after the fact. Generic American fucked around with this message at 08:44 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 08:40
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Furism posted:Would be a good fit for your Wolves howling at the moon t-shirt, that's for sure!  I dunno, looks pretty fuckin' sweet to me, brah. But on a more serious note- anyone who looks at that unicorn and declares that to be the straw to break the camel's back? I feel perfectly comfortable throwing out their opinions on pretty much everything, because holy poo poo does it not compare to what has already come and gone. If anything, the shield looks the dumbest thing in that pack to me.
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May 9, 2014 08:43
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Red Bones posted:Can you equip armour on your party members in this game or are they just doing the ME2/ME3/DA2 thing where everyone has a couple of costumes? 
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May 9, 2014 09:10
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