Awww. Thanks :$ I know what you mean. So many inquisitors have raging same face (particularly Lavellans wtf) or are super generic "pretty face" (glares again at Lavellans). I try really hard to avoid that. I like Embriel too. He looks like he's about to shout, "FITE ME" to the sky.
Ugh, I hear you on the same-face. I don't even click on the "Show off your Inquisitors!" threads on the Dragon Age reddit anymore because it's just going to be 20 to 50 posts of Lavellan and Trevelyan clones. :| Very nearly. XD That was his expression after he told Corypheus, in the final battle, that he doesn't believe in gods. It seemed to upset Corypheus a bit that his impressive monologue had just gotten shown up in five words!
I'm super afraid my Lavellans look like Generic Samefecellan ): I tried to make them look fairly unique, but I think they're pretty, so... idk. please do judge me? Especially Liesyn. She's my beautiful darling Origins child and the only warden I'm really attached to, but I always worry she isn't unique enough. This is Idrilla, my main. After the BE update I went back and made her skin and vallaslin a tick darker, but havent changed her facial structure. Spoiler: Idrilla Lavellan Idrilla's older twin, Nellas. I tried to keep some family resemblance, but they aren't identical twins. Spoiler: the other Lavellan girl Most Definitely A Truly Extraordinary Perfectly Healthy And Hopefully Well-Adjusted Adaar - Mosdef for short -, my Only Dude Inquisitor. Spoiler: his parents were new to this whole 'name' thing Petra Cadash. She's the only blonde OC i have, probably, and I love her, she's so pretty, I would date her a lot but since I cant I will live my wildest fantasies through josie or sera. Spoiler: the new girl. AAAAAAS for the other games: Spoiler: Liesyn Surana for Updated Graphics Compare to: Spoiler: Simon Hawke, Hot Half Antivan Mage Rebel Compare to: And Garnet Hawke, who I haven't gotten to remaking in Inquisition yet. Spoiler: MARIAN SOUNDS SO CLOSE TO MY NAME ITS TOO WEIRD
been watching DA2 footage today. Never actually played the Fenris romance and I wanted to see it. I thought I'd leave this little gem here: Mark of the Assassin was a gift. All the companions seem so much more at ease on this dumbfuck adventure than in Kirkwall.
Mark of the Assassin was really fun. DA2 is always so weird to me, because I am very fond of it but it's. pretty atrocious.
DA2 - so deeply flawed, and such a great game I played it twice through in a row when I first got it. @witchknights I think you might have a bit of sameface going on with your Inquisitors, but you've already gotten away from the 'same eyes-straight nose-same mouth-same jaw' thing that's really blatant on the DA reddit - like the ones I tend to see all look like some generic white celebrity you're sure you've seen on a magazine cover somewhere, but you can't remember the name of because they are 20 other celebs that look just like them. Your Inquisitors look like people, not Extruded Pretty Person Product, or Bug-Eyed Anime Girls. You've got a lot of variation in eye shape going on, which is great! It looks like your comfort zone is in similar nose and jaw shapes - from the front, the various noses look pretty similar, although they have different silhouettes to mix things up. The jawlines are also kinda close to each other - Liesyn's got the most obviously different one, with her noticeably more square jaw. However, they all actually look like different people, just maybe different people who are all in the same extended family - which, in Idrilla and Nellas's cases, is the whole point. XD Seriously, I like how they look very plausibly like fraternal twins, but clearly different people. (My secret is that I work from photo reference, and try to be aware of the shapes I gravitate toward most. If I was to make an Inquisitor without reference, I'd probably do like what I do for sims and find a way to get random values for base shapes to choose as well as how to adjust the features - it's a good way to kick yourself out of your comfort zone.) Your Hawkes look similar but that is 100% the fault of the limitations of the DA2 character creator. It allows for fewer features to be changed than even DAO's CC, and much less latitude for how much you can change them. (Notice how almost EVERY GUY in DA2 has a Superman-esque square jaw? And how most NPCs have a narrow mouth? YEAH.) It's really irritating. If I can figure out modding a little better, I'll figure out how to make NPC head morphs accessible to character creation, without being stuck with the eyebrows and facial hair (where applicable) of the morph.
I can't every truly hate DA2 because it introduced Hawke. And Varric. And expanded on Isabella. AND THERE'S SO MANY OTHER CHARACTERS I LOVE. But yeah, it's...oof. Like Mercury said, so deeply flawed. My biggest gripe was how little the companions seemed to care about each other outside Hawke (compared to the first game and Inquisition, Solas notwithstanding). Like, one broody loner constantly insulting everyone is one thing, but they were CONSTANTLY arguing with each other and it made me sad. :( I mean, Varric was Team Mom which was nice, but...goddamn, guys. Stop being such dicks to each other.
They get along better over time, though! By act 3, Fenris has opened up a lot and plays cards with Donnic if Hawke helps Aveline and Donnic get together, Fenris and Isabela have a thing if neither are in a romance with Hawke, Isabela and Merrill always get along, Isabela and Aveline's fighting has turned into a friendship of rivals, almost everyone plays Wicked Grace together, and everyone is sad about and creeped out by Anders. They wouldn't seem so antagonistic if Fenris and Anders hadn't been written with such extreme personalities, I think. A lot of the game is very rough draft, but those two are especially so, with Fenris always very RARR MAGES and Anders always very RARR HOW DARE YOU NOT SUPPORT MAGES. They're painted in pretty broad strokes, which is what happens when you don't have time to refine and re-write a story.
Hmm...I suppose. There's some connection, but it always felt lacking to me compared to the first game, IDK. But yeah, Fenris and Anders constantly going for each other, no matter how petty, really started to get at my last nerve. DON'T MAKE ME GET THE HOSE. NOW KISS.
Definitely this. I think where Anders was written for the whole game would have been a nice ending point for him, and Fenris a nice starting point (wow, that says a whole lot about their character arcs right there). The other characters do have a nice progression, at least in their relationships to each other. Like Isabela and Aveline's disgust that morphs into vitriolic best friends. /That's/ the shit I want. I do wish we'd had more time for it to the crew to feel like the family it tried to be. Sometimes I forget that the reason these characters are so important and interesting to me is because DA and DA2 espeically is both me and my moirail's Special Interest, so we've spent so much time fleshing out the characters. Then I try to play the game and can't get through act 1. But despite all its flaws, DA2 is my favorite, because Hawke just gives me such feels. All my Hawkes. And Hawke and Varric's relationship gets me right in the feels because I'm always a slut for moirallegiance. I also like the story. I like that it's sad, and that Hawke can't fix everything. Like, videogame protags are often the savior of all, and despite being a badass, Hawke /can't/ and I really like that in a videogame.
@Mercury thanks for the feedback!! I work a lot better with the sims 3 character creator than with DAI's (that is so annoyingly Sims 4ish) so I'm always unhappy with my results and, I guess, tap-dancing on my comfort zone. I miss having fifteen billion custom sliders. If I must be honest all the nose shapes in the character creator look pretty similar to me so that's definitely something i'll work on!! I've spent a lot of time trying to make Lis's nose do the hook thing she's got in my headcanons and I'm still not happy with it and her chin is too pointy (pointy is Idrilla's area!), so maybe i'll try to change her too once I get the pc set up here at my boyfriend's. Maybe I'll try to customize my Asshole Default Trevelyan on the ps4 for practice, idk. I'll do something. Idrilla is responsible for too high a percentage of my, like, 8gb of screenshots to be too fiddled with, but everyone else is fair game for changing, so if I find a way to solve these problems I'll go back and adjust. I'll have to retake all of Mosdef's screenshots anyway because I went back to get the Templars instead of the mages for a change 8|| Rivaini/Antivan Malcolm is one of my favorite da2 headcanons, so I guess that reflected pretty heavily on my hawkes, too - and because the customization options for the cc are so limited and so shit for darker skins i was pretty limited. I'll try to take Garnet on a different, more Vivienne-esque direction when her time comes because dai's cc is a lot better in that respect (I... have to check who has her savestate, tho. It might be someone on the PS4. I dont like her because it's the Ultimate Sacrifice with Warden Alistair!Lis import and it just makes me too sad). But yeah, DA2's character creator is fucking annoying. Way too limited, completely unfixable even with mods, and the game looks just enough better than DAO for it to be really irritating!!! I mean, I'm still pissed that I can't have either Lis's soft-cheeks-but-nice-jaw nor her hooked nose in dao, but there's still some freedom that we don't have in da2. ---- My problem with DA2 is that it seems that the writers never realized that they were dealing with seven years instead of seven weeks, and also didnt care about the timeline of the other games (how can anders run away from the wardens while i'm recruiting him in awakenings??? its a mystery) and it's really heavy handed in the anders/fenris department. I wish that, with the right choices, they could be both a little more civil towards each other. So my problem is that it feels really first drafty, which is what everyone is complaining about. but i do love hawke and varric and isabella and merrill and anders, and how the writing has flaws but the structure is pretty good.
@witchknights The noses in DAI are hard to work with! It's in part to do with the textures and their normal maps, which makes them seem to be shaped in a more 'defined' way than the mesh is actually shaped, so from the front they look more same-y than they should. One of the male textures has a less defined nose (the one Embriel is using), but the female textures mostly seem to have a very defined nose bridge and nose bulb. Too bad replacement complexions crash the Black Emporium and don't yet work with the newer DLC. X( (... you play sims? *perk* I had too many weird issues with Sims 3 so I'm more of a Sims 2 person myself, but I'm always glad to see another simmer!) DA2's problems can probably be entirely chalked up to the fact that they only had a year of development time, and I've seen rumors that they had one guy to make the environments. ONE. DAO came out in Nov 2009; DA2 came out in Mar 2011. DAO by contrast had something like 6 years of development time (of which part was them building the game engine), and DAI took 3. And like. When I'm doing well, I can write a novel's worth of words and get it polished in a year. Writing the text of an entire game in a year, while working collaboratively, sounds like hell.
Edited my default Trevelyan. I went in the opposite direction of what I normally do, and she still looks... like every other Trevelyan, I think. Y so generic, I was trying to go for a Malfoy-esque flair, because she's the asshole playthrough, but meh. Spoiler: meeeeeeeeehh I hate those eyebrows so much, and she's a recolor, a longer nose and sex change away from looking like one of my cousins. it's... weird.
@witchknights No no, she's great! She looks REALLY Malfoy-esque to me. And she doesn't strike me as generic at all. She's kind of pinched and cold looking, like a fantasy cruel aunt or miser. Like she would be conventionally pretty, but she's spent so much of her life frowning and disapproving and hoarding that her attitude has etched itself onto her face. As far as shapes go, I almost never see anyone go for sunken cheeks, long faces, or eyes tilting down at the outside. The generic female Inquisitors are usually given soft features and pronounced cheekbones and cheeks juuuust thin enough to make them look like models, but not this thin.
@Mercury I mostly just make sims and take pictures of them smooching, which i'm not sure counts as 'playing'. I tried to get into modding (so i can have the correct custom content to make my otps smooch accurately) but can barely work out how tattooinator works ): I'm glad you like her!! And your acessment is pretty pleasing because, like, I imagine her as a third-daughter narcissist who is FINALLY receiving the reverence and pampering she believes is due. The whole thing about "it was actually the divine behind you"? all lies from demons hellbent on tempting her and planting doubt in her heart, of course!! I'm guilty of the pronounced cheekbones because mine are nonexistant and I live through the people I create x( I gave Idrilla soft features because she's the healer mage stereotype, and Liesyn is supposed to be moderately fat, but i'm trying to stay away from that. not that it works because i guess i have a type. But yeah, the noses are really hard to make look how i want them to. Which is a really weird design choice imho!! I mean, a nose is one of the most defining characteristics of the face, like, it'd make sense if it were... the easiest to manipulate yknow? I would give my left kidney for a nose bridge height and nose definition sliders, because like, with the fem!Adaar I have here, I want to make her look really chiseled and halfway between DA2's Arishok and Sten but like, triangular instead of square, but I just can't make her look right and it's driving me crazy. Hopefully the complexions problem will be fixed pretty soonish now that the last dlc is coming out and the game probably won't be patched anymore. I really wish it would be easier to mod, there's so many talented people in the community and mods always make stuff more fun during replays. I've never written anything big or been that creative, but it makes me sad to think that da2 could have been so much better if they had given it, like, even six extra months of development time.
I really love DA2, constantly fighting companions and all. I'm on my third playthrough and I only picked it up this summer. Anders and Fenris actually work for me, and I think it's partly because of Tumblr. Two people whose have opposite positions partly because of some past trauma and they both have some good points. But neither one will budge an inch. They're not listening and everyone around them gets dragged into it and it ends up a big mess...yeah... (hence the DA Tumblr AU) I did Anders's Act 3 quest first and spent the rest of it going "i know that color symbolism NOTHING GOOD CAN COME OF THIS". After a couple of his conversations with Varric, I started leaving him behind because it was fucking depressing. I went with Team Ladies and it was great. I love the lady friendships in this game. Aveline and Isabela have one conversation where Aveline's wondering why Isabela didn't show up at her party and Isabela's all "its not my scene and im not respectable, you wont want me around your future kids..." and Aveline implies that yes she would want Isabela around her kids and AUGH BBYS. I really want DA2 but on Alternia because quadrants. Some of the rivalries would make great kismesises, Hawke is already the auspistice for everyone in Kirkwall and I really just want an option to spend the entire game shooshpapping Anders. i just want to make all my da quadrant ships canon.
UGGGGH. The noses in the CC are a pain in DAI. I tend to really like long noses, and my options seem to be alright or scrunched way up the face. My usual strategy for avoiding sameface is to doodle my characters before I make them or before I run them through the mirror. I find using the simple style helps me choose a couple of key features to focus on, as well as getting good diversity in face shape. @witchknights I think she looks great! I can see the malfoy inspiration in her really well. I'm certainly guilty of using a lot of the overused features. I just try to spread them out, and have other, more unique features. I'd post screenshots, but PS3...
Patch daaaaaay *vibrates excitedly* Also I'm going to hash out a face randomization method and then see how hilarious the results are. Will post screenshots of the results!
I look forward to those screenshots :DD Gonna kill some dragons to get sweet gear. Basically make sure everything is prepped for The Trespasser.
