#<- because it won't necessarily happen in da game

[14dayswithyou]

Oooh I just thought of an interesting question! What would Rendacted do if the killer in town either tried to kill Angel or successfully did?

✦゜ANSWERED: This is leaning a bit towards major character death (which I don't write on this blog for my own preference + to avoid potential spoilers), but Ren is always watching you, so even if the killer got close enough to try something, he'd step in and interfere.

Also, who said there's only one killer in Corland Bay?? ^^

[tavina-writes]

I have been pondering the recent rash of "post canon NHS and LXC would never ever reconcile bc even if NHS wanted to have Er-ge back, LXC would never ever forgive him for [insert reason of choice here]" type of posts + the "do you think NHS thinks very hard about how much Da-ge would hate him for becoming [the way that he is now] by choosing to seek vengeance" type of posts, and I think fundamentally the reason these posts do not jive with me is that we have no indication, in the show or in the book that uh, NHS gives a shit about either of these things very much anymore?

The first type of post is predicated on the assumption that LXC's forgiveness or lack thereof some some sort of either extension of mercy (which NHS obviously does not deserve <- or so assumes the post) or some form of punishment (which is obviously the correct answer) but the last scene we get with NHS both in the book and the show make no indication that this is a thing he wants? Or cares about? Book NHS has *sauntered off* with his little hat trophy and Show NHS walks off screen after saying something along the lines of "What is my responsibility I won't shirk, what isn't my responsibility I won't care about." Now, arguably, show NHS is having a worse go of it emotionally, but shows no real inclination or interest in either apologies or making up and being friends again with LWJ, LXC, WWX, or other people. Book NHS seems pretty pleased with the outcome of the events as a whole?

The second type of post is predicated on the fact that NHS finds Da-ge's judgement a horrible burden to bear at this stage in the game, which! He might! But again especially in the book we get no indication that he has any fucks left to give about what Da-ge may or may not have wanted since Da-ge is dead. In both the show and the book, NHS went about revenge taking very specific and complicated actions with the desired result of JGY dying, but he certainly took the scenic route getting there, which, he didn't need to? As I've written about before, JGY didn't see him as a threat. If he wanted JGY dead he could've arranged to poison JGY's tea like, 10 years ago and had done with it instead of his complicated Rube Goldberg life ruining scheme. If he is still sickly anxious about how Da-ge might feel about the scheming and the trouble causing and the whole everything, that's certainly possible, but he must've decided it was worth it anyway regardless of that, and I don't know that it necessarily would've changed just because he got what he wanted at the end.

Overall, I think as a fandom we think a lot about like "will and should this relationship ever be repaired or similar to how it used to be?" and "does this character deserve/not deserve the forgiveness of people they've hurt or abandoned?" which can be interesting questions! I do feel like these are often taken as "is a character morally good (deserves to be forgiven) or morally bad (deserves to rot in hell forever never forgiven ever ever)" and based entirely on if Character is the meta writer's blorbo. Under this paradigm the concept of "Character did bad things to get exactly what they wanted and were happy about that and no relationships were ever repaired and the emotional detachment of people they used to care about no longer matters to them!" is uncomfortable.

It's just that for NHS I've increasingly come to the conclusion that canonically, I don't think NHS thinks he has anything to apologize for, nor is he super interested in being forgiven! He got what he wanted the way he wanted it to happen. Which is potentially supremely unsatisfying but I think is very sexy as a narrative concept.

[felassan]

Some more snippets of interest and insight from Mark Darrah, from an older Mark Darrah on Games YouTube video where he was livestreaming playing Dragon Age: Origins some months ago -

"I imagine that the only way that broodmothers would remain in the game [DA:O] would be in a remaster. In a remake I'm sure they would make changes, I would be very surprised if they didn't. But in a remaster you can get away with a lot more. I think they would change their appearance. Also, there's been an effort to unify the look of the darkspawn a lot more, so." "You're never gonna see broodmothers, probably in any form, in the mainline games, definitely not in the form that they're in in DA:O. I don't think you'll ever see a broodmother again. I guarantee that you're not seeing broodmothers in any future Dragon Age thing. I would be very confident in that statement."

Chat commented "Male Desire demons on the other hand" and Mark replied that there is a concept art out there for male Desire demons.

Chat asked "If we won't get Broodmothers, do you think we'll get the original Archdemon design? The Tentacle Monster one?". Mark replied "Probably not the tentacle version for an Archdemon. I could see that being created as another monster or high level boss, but probably not as Archdemon because the, sort've, dragon as being part of an Archdemon is too intertwined in the lore at this point."

Chat commented "I just hope the Mythal death in DA:I was a fakeout". Mark said, "One thing with Mythal is that, Kate Mulgrew, as her stock has risen and fallen, her price has gone all over the place, so 'is Mythal gonna show up?' decisions will be partially based upon if she's priced herself out of the market or not. Though I think she actually was sad, based on the DA:I stuff, so maybe she'd be willing to do it on a little bit of a lower price. But I actually don't know, because is Orange Is the New Black still on the air? Her price may have come down again." "I mean definitely you can see, sometimes characters disappearing is because the voice actor became a pain to work with, or became expensive, those are definitely factors, no question."

Later on this topic chat asked "Would you say Laura Bailey is still in the affordable VA space? I know she's become a mega popular/busy thanks to CR, but she's always been VA first afaik." Mark replied "Depends, you can always sort've write less for them, if you can do it in one session you can kind've afford anybody, it's a question of how much they're gonna show up."

Chat asked "Do you agree with the criticism some people have that DA lore focuses too much on elves?" Mark said "Yeah, kind've, I think it sort've, it's not on purposes, the elves, they just kind've end up sneaking into everything it seems like. I think there's a recognition of the elves kind've being too present." "I don't think elves are going to disappear, I just think that they don't necessarily need to, one of the things that sort've constantly happened is that the stories ended up presenting the elves as, they keep sort've having them make just the worst decisions. So I suspect there's a goal to maybe make them not do that and then that would allow them to sort've rebalance with everyone else. It's also harder to get, dwarves kind've require a, they're either harder to integrate in, because they're off [over there], they're not just in a forest, you gotta go into a hole to talk to them, so they kind've always are gonna be less present unless you're doing something in the Deep Roads or Orzammar."

"It's always hard to kill off the protagonist. Always gonna get people who are against that but y'know [shrug]. I can certainly see the argument for killing off the Inquisitor in Trespasser".

Chat asked "Would it be more likely that we would be able to get answers to the more deep-fan stuff like The Calling etc by assuming those would be in DLC and not the main game of DA:D?" Mark replied "I don't imagine that there's gonna be a ton of, it's possible that you're gonna see that sort've stuff in DLC but I don't know what the live service plan is gonna be for DA:D to be honest because that was definitely, has been in flux over the course of DA:D, that's for sure."

[source]

He also talked more generally about DA:O and the franchise and things in general. These bits are collected under a cut due to length -

[when party camp is ambushed by darkspawn] "That's one of the few times that we actually pay that off"

[during Leliana's party camp song] "Very impressive cinematic design. It shows off the age of the models in the close ups, but the long shots are really great." "They're desperately trying to get the lipsyncing to match and failing"

Chat asked "Any insight as to why class design was made so much stricter in DAII and DA:I? DA:O had dual wield warriors, rogues with swords, etc." Mark replied "In DAII and DA:I I think we were trying to make the roles more clear. DA:O is basically DnD with no clerics and the serial numbers filed off"

In later DA games they suppressed visual effects (like glowing auras from active skills) during conversations. "Probably for the best because I'm also having... weird glowing stuff coming off of me"

[when Dagna in Orzammar talks about a bunch of nerdy magic lore] Chat asked "When you made this part about dwarfs and lyrium, had you then made enough lore to know how it all worked? aka how the Descent in DA:I would play out? Not story, but lorewise." Mark replied "The lore, like the magic sources in DA:O are kind've a mess so there is, there's been an effort since DA:O to kind've draw them back together. There was an understanding of why dwarves didn't have magic in DA:O, so kind've." Chat followed up "'��Like theres four sources [of magic]: Fade, Blood, Lyrium, Blight?" and Mark said "Yeah, that's sort've the problem. You've got lyrium, you've got the Fade, you've got the Blight, you've got blood magic, you've also got some other, sort've genericized stuff where it's not explained. So from my perspective you kind've wanna collapse that down. You either want magic to just generally be from everything, which a lot of settings do, or you want it to have a somewhat unified source or sources, so you can see that there's like, things have been slowly drawn into a more common metaphysical explanation over the last two games."

Chat asked "​I'm not sure when you came on to the DA:O project, but do you know which of the origins was the last to be added? Were any kind of 'last minute afterthoughts'?" Mark said "The actual truth is we cut an origin. There was an origin for the Avvar as well that got cut, so there was supposed to be two elves, two dwarves, two humans and then mage, but we cut the Avvar for time." "I actually really like the idea of us having implemented at least one faction where you come up with the Treaties and they're like 'good to go, just let us get our stuff'. That could've been the Avvar, as well"

"I think that lyrium will eventually drive a dwarf mad. I think that's established canon." "I would say that just because lyrium drives you mad doesn't mean that dwarves would stop using it. It only slightly drives you mad. Certainly there are lots of examples in [irl] history of people continuing to use things that are very bad for them because they're convenient or cheap."

"I've always wondered about dwarves, I mean you're burning big fires in the middle of a cave, and everyone's living together, it does seem like you're gonna run out of breathable air pretty quickly"

Chat asked "Were you involved much in the class design aspect of the game?" and Mark said "With DA:O? Not too much. When I took over, the game was largely design-locked. There was content still being created but most of the game design was done well before I took over"

Mass Effect 1's combat was aspiring to be something it was failing to reach

Chat mentioned that Citadel was a fan service/love letter DLC. Mark said "Citadel in ME is definitely, you're absolutely right, it's definitely a 'please stop being mad at us' piece of DLC." "I don't even know if it hit its profitability goals"

"The asari in ME didn't succeed at being a parody of the 'green space babes' trope. ME races are like Star Trek races, they're all defined by a relatively small number of characteristics. If they're attempting to be parodies of those kinds of races in something like Star Trek they are not succeeding at doing that. It's hard to imagine that you're succeeding at making a commentary about it when you're basically just doing the same thing. If you're using the codexes to talk about how well executed they are then it's not coming through in the main game, if that's what's required."

[source]

(pls note that in places there is a bit of paraphrasing of the info, the best source is always the primary source with full quotes in their original context)

[celinou]

This is just a bit of musing about future DA games.

Since the gameplay trailer dropped we know that we're going to try to stop two ancient elven gods and I was wondering where the story will go from there. From what was said during the Q&A it seems like Veilguard won't be the last game of the saga (they said something about whoever we left in the fade won't be relevant in this game but might be in the future). So I've seen theories floating about Mythal coming back to be the next big baddie and I can see why but I keep thinking about the Blight. In the Game Informer article it says two "blighted gods" and I'm left wondering if defeating them won't necessarily stop the Blight. Because we don't exactly know where it comes from (yet). I like the theory that it comes from The Void (wherever that is) from this Codex entry. And I feel like it could be interesting if the story explores this next. Finding the Blight's Origin and potentially ending it for good. In DAI Solas questions (quite vehemently) that killing the Old Gods wouldn't necessarily stop the Blights. And if you tie the Old Gods to the Evanuris then killing them wouldn't stop the Blight either. I find this very interesting and I'm curious to see if Veilguard will tackle that mystery or if it's going to be left for a future game. Also, we know the Hero of Ferelden is currently traveling west to find a cure, wouldn't it be awesome that they return in the next game with info about the origin of the Bligth?! It won't happen but I would so want to see that! (but it won't happen by that point the HoF will probably be too old and be subjected to the Calling or would already be dead... unless they find a cure?)

[askagamedev]

Dragon Age is my favorite IP ever. I'm reading the news that the new DA project was "rebooted" to "implement more live elements". I'm also reading several people saying that DA4 might not happen if Anthem doesn't do well. Is that a fair assessment, and in your professional opinion does "live elements" most likely mean it won't be single-player?

I can’t comment on whether DA4 will or will not make it due to Anthem. I know that EA had scheduled the next Dragon Age for release before 2020 (as of around 2016), but it’s old information and I can’t say anything more specific than that. That said, let’s discuss what “live elements” actually means, since that’s something I know a little more about.

“Live elements” doesn’t necessarily mean multiplayer. “Live elements” means that the game service will be able to push new data to your game over the internet whenever you log in and start it. This way, you can get live updates to your game in the form of new content, featured things, live events, etc. without having to release (and certify) a patch. You can most commonly see this in sports titles, where players can follow along with the season results and play through pivotal moments and scenarios in the game that were broadcast live mere days before. 

If you ever played Mass Effect 3′s multiplayer, you might remember how they had special bonus weekend events. That’s an example of a live update. Other examples of live updates could be hypothetical new war table missions periodically appearing in DAI, ME:A’s N7 day missions, and the like. In fact, what they could even do is provide incentives to play the game (e.g. collectively kill 10,000,000 ogres across all platforms) and provide rewards to everybody if the criteria are met. 

Now… certainly, this can have a large effect on any multiplayer modes, but there’s nothing that restricts it only to multiplayer. It can just as easily affect single player gameplay as well, as long as the developers can track everybody’s collective contributions. Being able to take live data updates and reflect them in game has a lot of potential, like allowing the in-game world to change over real time on a week-to-week basis, or recognizing the collective efforts of players towards a goal. It entirely depends on how the designers at Bioware decide to take advantage of this. If you’ve observed things carefully at all, you’ve probably realized that most of this stuff can and does already happen in a variety of games.

The important thing to remember is that EA’s ultimate goal isn’t to make every game multiplayer. It isn’t even to cram loot boxes into everything, because loot boxes attached to a game that isn’t engaging won’t earn much money. EA’s goal is to maximize player engagement, because maximizing player engagement is the path to more money. EA doesn’t want single-use one-time products anymore because they’re too expensive to build and don’t have enough of a return. Instead, they want games that they can continue to support (since continued support is less expensive than developing an entirely new product), and that players will want to support. This results in a mutually beneficial situation - you, as a player, get a steady stream of content updates of varying type and size to keep you playing the game, and we get more people who are willing to chip in a few bucks because they keep having fun with the game.

We’re going to do a follow-along project, either designing a Game System or Designing a Level! [Click here to vote for which]. I’m surprised at the results of the poll so far. It seems almost exactly evenly divided between both choices!

Got a burning question you want answered?

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter

Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr

Frequent questions: The FAQ

[felassan]

A few more snippets of interest and insight from Mark Darrah, from an older Mark Darrah on Games YouTube video where he was livestreaming playing Dragon Age: Origins some months ago -

Chat said "One day we will get a BioWare game with good hair. One day." Mark replied, "I hope they have good hair this time. I think they'll have good hair. There's some really cool tech in Frostbite now that FIFA is using for pretty good hair, so might be expensive, but."

[please note this video streamed 4 months ago] "I've been pretty inaccurate on my predictions for DA:D news. I mean I would be shocked if they don't plan to do something for EA Play 2023, but then there would be no reason for them to do anything before then, to try to make their own event, but. Yeah, I would say that, if they're planning to release this year [2023], which would still be my expectation, they'll announce at, they'll have stuff at EA Play and probably date, so they can open up preorders in Europe. If they're still concerned about their date then they won't date. Normally EA Play would be in June, same time as E3. Do we have confirmation of an E3 this year?" Here chat commented, "Could you see them potentially showing up at something like the rumored Microsoft conference?" Mark replied, "It's possible, the problem with going to a console-specific conference is it's implying things that you don't necessarily want to imply. If you're a really big game like GTA or COD or something then it's fine, but for something like DA you never want to even softly imply, you have to be really careful about potentially softly implying that this is a Microsoft exclusive or a Sony exclusive. They could do it, if Microsoft made the deal sweet enough, there's always that possibility. But it's a lot easier for the really big games, you're never gonna be confused that GTA is Microsoft exclusive or that COD is a Sony exclusive, but you could make that mistake with DA, and they'd want to be very careful not to make that happen. But it could happen, but I doubt it."

Chat asked "So for whoever ends up giving the live presentation - would you have any advice for them? I imagine it's a stressful time." Mark replied, "Live, it is stressful, it's interesting though because the press conferences, the stage press conferences, you have a live audience but it's a lot quieter than say doing a PowerPoint presentation to a roomful of say 50 people. So in a way it's a lot easier, but you have to kind've get over the fact that there's 3000 people in the room with you. But if you can then it's easier than a normal presentation, because you can just practise and get smooth. Now EA practises a lot for their press conferences, which is good if you're nervous, but it does have a tendency to kind've squeeze a lot of the authenticity out of the presentation style. You can really see that in the Anthem one where it's me and Casey Hudson. We practised that like fifty times. Maybe not fifty times. At least a couple of times. It's not a good format. It takes a format that's supposed to be authentic and on the fly and turns it into something where all of the spontaneity has been squeezed out of the thing. I do think authenticity is the key, but the problem with authenticity is sometimes you get someone like at TGA saying that the Oscars are garbage. So EA would rather have 20% less authenticity, with 50% less chance of someone going massively off-script. I actually don't agree, I think it's the wrong tradeoff, but they would rather take the safe route."

Chat said "I feel like the Warden and Darkspawn story arcs have taken a back seat to the templars and mages. Do you think it's likely they will ever revisit the Blight threads?" Mark replied "I think the Blight will be probably relevant."

"I would be very surprised if the Architect showed up in DA:D. They could collapse the quantum of him though, if they wanted to bring him back, they would just do that. If he was killed, he body-hopped, same as Corypheus did. They could do that. I don't think they will."

"Isabela is quite quantum."

"Boss design like the Mother in Awakening definitely would not fly today."

"Any of the books that happen after a game are canon only so much in that they, the events that happen in them are treated as happening, but they aren't necessarily treated as 'whose alive and whose dead', for canon. But things that happen before stuff, like The Calling, I think are treated as fully canon. Like I think Absolution will be treated as canon, like Fairbanks will be dead. There's nothing in there that violates any possible worldstate. But sort've like, from a canon perspective, there's sort've like several layers. There's, what is, base canon, in terms of what we choose, like fully canon would mean it applies, is canon for everyone. Whereas there's also the, like, what is the default, what is default canon, what is written to. But if things that can potentially be violated by different playstates, the writers will tend to try to write away from them so that we don't suddenly have something happening that violates your playthrough. So something that can be true for everyone is more likely to occur. Something that might happen for someone else, I mean, obviously that's been violated, like Leliana shows up even if she's dead in DA:I, but that's why it's lampshaded. So that if you kill her, it's explained why she's alive. Masked Empire is fully canon for the same reason, because it doesn't have any way of violating anything. Doesn't mean that some things that are presented aren't recontextualized, but."

"RPGs don't demo [at conferences and events] super-well because they require so much context. The best I ever saw honestly was probably, I saw Skyrim once at an E3 but I didn't play it. They'd set it up in such a way that when you were standing in line to play it or just kinda walking by you could see other people playing it. I actually didn't play it at that E3. Standing there for five or ten minutes watching other people play it was probably the best RPG demo I've ever seen, because you were distant from it, so you kind've accepted a little bit less context. So you kinda want that, but you can't really get that, so you either ended up doing what BioWare usually does which is a behind-closed-doors 45 minute demo, which gives the context, but you can only get a certain number of people through it. Or you have something that's really tight for stage. When demo-ing an RPG you need to set up the story, the conflict, but you also need to somehow sort've establish how this plays. With a shooter you kind've know. Do you show character generation in an RPG demo? You never do but kind've people care about that a lot so you kinda should."

"One of the best [demos] from a story perspective that I ever saw was Mass Effect 2, it showed the beginning of the game, the bit with you walking through, the bit where Shepard dies, and showed it as if it was the end of the game. So a big misdirection. But I think that you kind've have to do some sort've, and I guess we did something, not as effective, but kind've the same in DA:I where we showed Future Redcliffe essentially as an ending of the game or as something that would happen."

"The PAX demo of DA:I was the game as we understood it at the time. A lot of stuff we showed at PAX ended up not getting into the final game, so people get mad when demos misrepresent the game, but sometimes that's happening because the game changes after the demo. Not because it was a lie, it was the truth at the moment, it's much more likely to happen with an RPG than it is to happen with other things. With shooters you might get something like big fidelity degradation but you're unlikely to get significant changes to mechanics."

"Hira in Absolution starts out being really bad at [levitating/flying on a disc], and then gets really good in like a later episode, I feel like she should've, or I guess it's in the same episode, she's way better all of a sudden at levitating, at flying."

[source]

He also talked more generally about DA:O and the franchise and things in general. These bits are collected under a cut due to length -

Chat said "I still say Velanna would have made way more sense for turning Justice into Vengeance." Mark said "Yeah, Velanna definitely has a lot more revenge in her than Anders does at this point." Chat then commented "Like, if it was about justice for the elves, that would have been a better fit for Velanna." Mark replied "Yeah it wouldn't have made sense for DAII, like what is she doing in Kirkwall?"

"With darkspawn [structures and items] it's always a little over, there's a lot of decoration for something darkspawn cobble together"

"Awakening is a bit blobby"

In the Mother's Lair, chat said "The lair is the same as the place Morrigan found the eluvian. Is this on purpose or just asset reuse?" Mark replied "I think it was asset reuse"

"The Sacred Ashes trailer was made by Blur. Blur is not cheap. I don't think you can compare it with in-game cutscenes"

Chat asked "Was the thrown dagger mechanic in Mark of the Assassin too large a file packet to be in the base game? It changed everything for rogues." Mark replied, "It didn't exist in the base game, it was added just to give them a ranged weapon, it's not that it couldn't fit. Why didn't it get put back in? It's not so much that it was definitely going to be big, but it would be hard to know for sure without very carefully testing the whole game all over again. Because it is extra memory. Some of the stuff in Awakening for example does actually blow memory on consoles on the main game if you take it back, which, there was some way you could do that. It did something bad, so it had to be changed"

When the Architect appears to the Warden before the confrontation with the Mother, chat mentioned that he doesn't mention how the Fifth Blight started and refers to being "born". Chat said "I wonder if the Architect is just a magister like Corypheus? He says he was 'born' but maybe that's just a play on words." Mark said "At this point he's acting like he doesn't remember. Yeah, he's acting like he doesn't know what he is. Yeah I don't think you learn any of that stuff here. Does he not know/remember? Or is he hiding it?"

Chat said "I've never killed Leliana, what was the explanation in DA:I for her being alive?" Mark replied "The explanation is pretty loose but it's basically, the Urn was right there so it brought her back to life. Though it is possible that you decapitate her in that fight, so that is a bit of a stretch in certain circumstances."

"Solas is the master of 'didn't think this through'"

"It wasn't that it wasn't being contemplated, DA was just never intended to be a series. DA:O was always conceived of as a standalone game, which is why there are all these weird things in the end screens of DA:O, especially where it's like 'oh, you know, the entire world fell into a volcano'. By the time that DA:O was coming out, EA wanted a sequel. It was actually before EA that it was conceived of as a single franchise, it was to work on a sequel to DAII before DA:O was even out. That's when/why I came on. So it wasn't, what became DAII wasn't what was being worked on in that time. The SW:TOR delay made DAII, but it didn't make there be a sequel"

"I don't know if they'll ever do a Dragon Age legendary edition. EA does not like spending money. With DA:O you kinda have to decide if you're remastering or remaking. If you're remastering, you just let all of the iffy bits stand"

"A lot of the end screens in DA:O and Awakening, they're causing weird things for the future. The one I used to bring up a lot was the werewolves. You could literally end DA:O with werewolves just rampaging over parts of Ferelden. Or there's also like a potential dwarven civil war coming."

"DA:I was definitely considering collapsing the quantum state as much as it could, whereas DA:O doesn't care, it's just like whatever, make the world be a completely ridiculous quantum state, you're basically not guaranteed that anyone makes it through this alive"

"The problem with Oghren in Awakening is it's like they rewind him back to how he is when you meet him, so it undoes everything. Oghren is very 2D in Awakening"

"An RPG is more like a buffet, it's about providing a lot of features and you engage with some of them, you kind've like some of them, you can tolerate some of them, you don't engage with other ones. Whereas a lot of other game genres are much more about excellent execution on your core loop. An RPG isn't really about that as much. I think that's to some degree one of the problems with Anthem has, is that, you know, it's made by a company that's used to 70 B features combining into an A+ feature. And for a looter shooter it's not really that, it's two or three A features combining into an A+ feature. So there's just a friction in some of the pieces of Anthem that are fine for RPGs but not fine for a looter shooter. And you know, looter shooters aren't even the pinnacle of that"

[source]

(pls note that in places there is a bit of paraphrasing of the info, the best source is always the primary source with full quotes in their original context)