SEEN ANY ELVES? A Dragon Age Thread.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > SEEN ANY ELVES? A Dragon Age Thread.

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

babypolis posted:

I really dont understand why after selling really well and becoming a classic Bioware decided to turn the Dragons Age franchise into whatever the hell it is today

DAO was so good

EA at the time wanted to diversify their output and bought up all these prestige studios expecting them to deliver a game of DA:O's quality every 24 months. Bioware was RPG Game Dev, Visceral was Horror Game Dev, etc. Obviously a developer like Bioware who had a characteristically deliberate approach to game design and iteration couldn't keep up with the greatly accelerated timetables and stumbled with DA2 and ME3.

Over time they realized this approach wasn't as profitable as just homogenizing every single product into sports & shootman game with lootboxes and unceremoniously dumped all their subsidiaries.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2017 15:21

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 22:40

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

I see Solas as just another side of the same coin as Corypheus: Haughty arrogant old dudes who want to forcibly revert the world back to some abstract ideal that never really existed, that they themselves played a central role in loving up to begin with. gently caress that noise, Thedas may be a steaming shitheap but at least it's OUR shitheap, so go gently caress off to the veil and leave us alone.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2017 16:31

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Inquisition's combat isn't the best, but it isn't the worst, either. It's just kind of like a single-player MMO where your party mostly does their own thing, which is probably some grand betrayal if you were really into the CRPG roots of the series but not to me since I never liked RTwP combat systems all that much. Some of the specializations are fun and the game is super easy to break with crafting. This is a good thing as I'd have probably given up on the game long ago if the combat was frustratingly difficult.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2017 18:13

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Blackwall is cool because his character arc is one of the few that truly test the limits of the player's own morality. Most people will naturally attempt to be a do-gooder in their RPGs and usually there's very little tension between doing the right thing and generally getting everything you want. But Blackwall's whole predicament puts you in a situation where the unquestionably moral choice is the one that hurts the most if you've grown fond of his character up to that point.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2017 16:31

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

TEENAGE WITCH posted:

letting him join the wardens is the easy way 2 let hhim feel like hes atoned for his sins by joining the punishment ganfg, rather than facing & owning up 2 his crimes on an individual level stripped of the organisational redemption the grey wardens give him tbh

# ¿ Dec 6, 2017 21:03

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Nobody gives Cole enough poo poo for being the worst most horribly written character in Dragon Age Inquisition. All his dialogue is awful magnetic poetry garbage and magical children are among the worst of RPG tropes. Sera is way better, I can roll with Sera.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2017 15:11

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Blackwall and Sera have great party banter, and combined with Vivienne the tension was so real in my first playthrough of Inquisition.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2017 16:41

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Cassandra�s whole characterization is that despite her tough exterior, she�s really into girly feminine things and chick lit romance novels. She�s straight as hell.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2017 14:20

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

A character who doesn't immediately want to gently caress anyone, the rarest of all Bioware specimens.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2017 17:30

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

I don't think Cullen was ever intended as a bi romance, in fact his inclusion at all in Inquisition was due to his popularity among female fans of the series.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2017 10:10

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Mister Adequate posted:

Yeah remember you can kill Leliana in Origins but they sure as poo poo didn't care about that in DAI.

*thought bubble shows Leliana's thoroughly dismembered corpse sitting in blood* "Eh, it just wasn't my time."

Then they ruined the comedy of it by trying to offer an explanation in Trespasser.

# ¿ Dec 24, 2017 09:12

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

As I recall if you play with hair/face textures on medium-low settings they look really shiny, this is on PC.

# ¿ Jan 15, 2018 17:00

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

For Mass Effect 1 I think it was just a situation where male and female VAs read for the same lines and these were later datamined but the romance paths for Kaidan and Ashley were never intended to be homoavailable. Bioware really wanted you to gently caress the blue alien spacebabe anyway.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2018 02:30

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Bioware

# ¿ Jan 24, 2018 21:09

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

The problem isn't about the profitability, it's about the margin. You could invest tons of care, manpower and developer time into crafting a really dedicated single player experience like The Witcher 3 or Horizon Zero Dawn and see a nice return, or just poo poo out what is basically a multiplayer gambling front with lootboxes for insane profits every time. The former involves a lot of creative risk, your product could fail critically which might adversely affect sales, and the latter plugs directly into people's lizard brains so that you make your money back no matter what gently caress da haters buy our $200 super deluxe mega hype edition with 5 free lootboxes. EA has seen tremendous returns on investment from the card system first implemented in FIFA and over the last five years has tried to homogenize all of their products into the exact same thing.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2018 09:38

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

TEENAGE WITCH posted:

the brain drain at bioware has probably caused a sisyphean cycle of relearning mistakes & pain every time dragon age enters developemnt

the cycle continues...

# ¿ Jan 25, 2018 15:11

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

That dude who sat in your camp with the quest marker over his head until you bought DLC is still one of the scummiest moneygrubbing moves in all gaming history.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2018 19:30

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

That was the cancelled MMO project supposed to follow up Kingdoms of Amalur, not the game itself which 38 Studios had very little to do with.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2018 00:36

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Geostomp posted:

Agreed. Amalur was decent enough game, but it was severely hampered by the fact that it was meant to just be a precursor to an MMORPG and played like one. Meaning massive areas filled with repetitive quests and characters that I cannot be bothered to remember. Combine that with the incredible arrogance of its makers and you end up with one of the biggest disasters in gaming history.

Again, the financial disaster was Schlling's brainchild MMO Project Copernicus that never came to fruition. 38 Studios was formed to create that project, and KoA was a currently in-development RPG from another studio that they absorbed relatively late into its development cycle. KoA was a modest success, it just couldn't save them from the endless pit of money that was their failed MMO. The project leads at 38 never actually released their own game.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2018 11:03

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

The classic redemption story of repeatedly saving the life of a man who is practically begging for death, over and over again. Loghain Mac Tyr will live forever.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2018 17:23

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

I sided with Alistair my first time through the game but in retrospect it's way funnier to keep Loghain alive against his wishes throughout Origins + Inquisition.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2018 17:29

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Lord Cyrahzax posted:

I mean, Hawke has more charisma and personality in two voice actors than the Inquisitor does in all four of theirs.

British Female Inquisitor is really good, maybe one of the best in what is by design a generic all-encompassing role.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2018 22:15

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Dwarf Commoner is the best origin imho.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2018 23:24

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

You'll have a worse time with Inquisition the more you try to micromanage your party like a CRPG. You basically play it like an MMO, with the only difference being that the party sometimes listens to your suggestions.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2018 11:01

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

The plight of mages in Dragon Age is an unintentionally hilarious example of attempting to provide a balanced ideological argument that does not match the actual text of the game whatsoever.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2018 12:58

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

That was so stupid in fact that in Inquisition they even gave the PC a dialogue with Varric to say it made no sense, with him going "yeah well what can ya do" in response.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2018 14:38

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

I think Origins might have even gone into development before Mass Effect. It had a very long incubation period. Its narrative similarities have more to do with Bioware's own tendencies, the "you're part of this super secret order of badasses, go to these three places then win the game" was their winning formula from KOTOR onward.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2018 15:25

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

The first Witcher might legitimately be one of the worst games I've ever played. The change in quality from TW1 -> TW3 is like several orders of magnitude.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2018 18:16

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:

This sounds like an amazing run character-wise. I feel Sera, Blackwall, and Vivienne are the most underrated members of the Inner Circle for a variety of reasons. People think Sera�s too annoying/monkeycheese, Blackwall too boring, and Vivienne too cold and haughty. *motions you to come closer* it�s ~~free real estate~~ bad writing - but consistency issues in the writing aside they�re all amazing.

Sera Blackwell and Viv make an amazing main party.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2018 02:34

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

In all fairness, it'd be really hard for me to even come up with a list of 300 games I know to exist, let alone good ones.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2018 08:43

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

precision posted:

you can't name an average of 10 good games per year between 1988 and now? that seems... probably really easy to do, especially given that most of those years have 20 good games easy.

Probably not, no.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2018 10:22

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

I don't think that scene quite hits the mark 100% but I appreciate what they were trying to do.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2018 11:29

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Unless you romance him, then he is saved by the ~power of love~

# ¿ Mar 26, 2018 13:45

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

The Crestwood dragon is probably the easiest, which is to say it's the one challenging fight in the game, because once you have draconian crafting materials things quickly snowball into your party becoming unstoppable killing machines.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2018 16:04

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

I guess your reaction to this scene depends a lot on whether or not you're into musicals. I watch musicals all the time so characters breaking out into song doesn't really bother me.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2018 09:40

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

It�s weird how Leliana�s VA can apparently really sing yet they went with that weird out of place dub for her bit in the first game.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2018 21:30

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Pattonesque posted:

There was a sizable contingent of people who were all on Leliana's VA for having a fake French accent when she's from, like, actual Paris

She's French Canadian IIRC.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2018 03:19

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Dienes posted:

Depending on where you are in the game, you can ride the Bull, then break it off to be with Sera. I don't think you can do it in reverse, though.

Reverse Bull is an advanced technique that some claim to have performed, though I have my doubts.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2018 17:07

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Actually it was because of this. Yes, this was an official trailer for the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOq6-1OLIyQ

# ¿ Apr 3, 2018 20:22

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 22:40

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

It's so uniquely terrible that I think everyone retroactively Mandela Effects it to Dragon Age 2.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2018 20:42

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