Someday, I will find the single area in this game that is not swarming with zombies. (seriously though, this is the third zombie apocalypse this apocalypse, it's getting ridiculous)
I think I saw in one of your post you wondering if Solas was as racist about a Qunari inquisitor in his weird private talk and the answer is: yes. I played a Qunari my very first playthrough and boy did that make me go, very loudly, "What the actual fuck?" Spoiler: The revelant lines transcribed from a video "Qunari are savage creatures, their ferocity held in check only by the rigid teachings of the Qun. But you have shown a subtlety in your actions. A wisdom that goes against everything I know of your people." My first playthroughs always end up with a character who is a total marshmallow who just wants everyone to get along (even if they do murderize a bunch of people along the way *coughs*), so that just made the racism EXTRA SUPER OBVIOUS. Basically, this comic, but with a buff lady Qunari instead.
Does anyone know if he's racist to humans (I imagine he is, but I haven't played a human in DAI), cause he's also racist to other elves--you're not like other girlselves, lethallan. While we're on the topic of Solas being the actual worst, have my favorite solas comic [Spoiler warning]: https://kitsungari.tumblr.com/post/189270393618/ar-lath-ma-vhenan-inquisitordorianpavus
He's racist to humans (though admittedly, given the human track record in DAI, he's not actually quite as brutal as he is to dwarves and qunari) and it was incredibly satisfying having the punch option on Callias on a different playthrough.
Fear demons are my new favorite demons ♥ Also I might be a little too into the roleplaying thing Spoiler: Here Lies the Abyss I still can't get over how casually they dropped the series-wide punchline that all Dragon Age PCs are canonically arachnophobic. That was masterful. Or "Ironically, Spiders".
I went to the Forbidden Oasis and I am never going to look at Solas the same way again Spoiler The DETH NUG is my new best friend forever, though.
Hey, me again :'D (Hope people don't mind all this double-or-more posting.) I haven't had time to play further since, uh... *gestures broadly at the world* happened, but I've wound up satisfying my DA withdrawal by slowly poking away at self-indulgent analysis posts of the cast tarot cards, and it belatedly occurred to me that maybe I should link those here! So far I've only finished writing about Sera and Blackwall's default cards, but I'm working on Cassandra and Varric now, and I have fairly detailed notes on most of the others. I doubt I'm saying much that hasn't already been overanalyzed to hell and back by fandom in the past several years, but hey, tarot nerdery is fun. And seriously the DAI cards are so fucking good aaaaa—
"I'm going to write about Cassandra and Varric's cards next," they said, and got writer's block, and wrote about Solas's instead. I'm still mad that my brother who hasn't even played the game summarized the entirety of Solas's character better in a single sentence than I have in all these posts
I need you to get to An Spoiler someday so I can point out a thing about one particular piece of that design
overall letting the Chargers die makes me too sad so i never want to do it. but also, sometimes i think about how fucking perfect Spoiler: Trespasser with dead chargers spoilers Bull's line "Nothing personal, bas" is. the realization that, oh shit HE'S BEEN CALLING ME "BAS" THE WHOLE TIME is just. chef kiss. Bull betraying you is definitely the bad ending IMO but it's worth choosing at least once just for that moment.
Sometimes, the glimpses of characterization in bad endings are beautiful enough to be worth seeing at least once.
Im torn cause while there was some cool stuff in there BW have fucked themselves over in the past with trying to stretch the hype train to long (see andromeda). I want this game to be good :( I want it to be good but I don’t want it to come at the cost of the team’s mental health and the crunch at BW is apparently pretty bad. This is also pretty much the last chance they have. Since andromeda didn’t do great and anthem flopped hard, if da4 is a bust, I fully expect ea to shutter BioWare for good, like it’s done with so many other studios.
it's definitely a delicate balance but the thing is we've known DA4 is in developement in some form or another since trespasser. And parts of the fandom are *very* mad that bioware ~keeps stringing us along~ without new info. Honestly I'm just glad they've seemingly progressed past preproduction stages if VAs are in studios and there's character models and first environmental stuff being shown off which is frankly farther along than I'd feared, but gosh I'm just happy they showed anything at all and the concept art is gorgeous. since the aimed for release window is like no sooner than 2022/23 atm as of the latest few estimates i saw floating around that shoooooould be ample time to not be crunched to death, the clearly leaned that anthem was horrible and unsustainable what with being actually properly put together in like 18 months after languishing in preproduction for 6 years or so ngl I hadn't even gotten out my clown paints for the stream, i was there for destiny stuff :P glad i didn't need to pull them out after the fact
I am SO worried but SO excited. I want this to be good ))): I want to believe it will be good, but my faith in the company just... isnt there.
I’m not nearly as optimistic. Crunch is utterly pervasive in big game studios, and anthem was not a isolated incident. BioWare has had crunch problems for years. As much as I would like to blame it all on EA being the worst (or among the worst, Ubisoft is sort of king of the trash fire rn), the BioWare execs buy into it. I hope beyond hope that it’s actually a single player focused rpg and not da!anthem. EA had said they wanted it to be in the live service model a while ago. And with BW hemorrhaging it’s senior staff, my expectations right now are, I hope da4 has a few good moments. That being said, I did enjoy most of the art we saw in the teaser.
yes this is... what the fourth or fifth title in a row that was kind of horrifying in retrospect wrt crunch (DA2 -> ME3 -> DA:I -> ME:A -> Anthem) however. Crunch is actually being talked about now and bioware literally had a massive pr fiasco over the anthem crunch to the tune of jason schreier dragging them to the court of public opinion and weeks of outcry. Multiple staff members have on twitter and in the blog posts assured us that it is not going to be anthem-esque, just built on its pre existing code modules for frostbite. it's not a liveservice mmo. there will be 'live service elements' so presumably like. dlc costumes and a multiplayer mode that's set to the side, like normal for Mass effect and da:i. Like people forget that Dragon Age Inquisition had/has a monetized micro transaction driven multiplayer mode? I don't think they're going to deviate much from that tbh. At most there'll be like a battle pass or something since that's the new en vogue thing. I'm not going to be like 'oh there's no way bioware could do wrong' here, pls do not misunderstand me, but i find worrying about crunch when for once they're on a decent not alarming seeming timeline a bit... early? I guess? The ratio of preproduction to production with current projected timelines seems sensible to me, if you take off the time """lost""" due to scrapping the first version of the project. and wrt quality... like i don't. get it. I enjoy Mass Effect Andromeda a lot. What I did play of anthem i also enjoyed when it worked (during the beta, i didn't have a computer powerful enough to reliably run it and im not buying it rn for sure) just on a mechanical level. And the story being lackluster and stuff... well you may have heard but they're working on a full on rebuild of it so like. who knows how that will turn out. Sure there's some bugs in the new bioware titles (where aren't there, jank just kind of happens to big rpgs like this) but a) it certainly isn't Dragon Age 'you can literally break a character quest entirely by doing another first and there's no reason for it it's just trash coding' Awakening, nor is it anywhere near the jankiness bethesda titles just... get away with. if Sylvia Feketkuty brings even a fraction of the writing quality of down among the dead men and luck in the gardens, of the nemesis quests and In Hushed Whispers and Champions Of The Just to DA4 i believe this game can be stellar. But maybe i'm just easily impressed. I'm just happy they basically confirmed the game is still a spy/heist adventure.
