#I also feel like the inquisitor reappearance is going to be disappointing

[zahra-hydris]

I'm actually really sad about the lack of world state reactivity.

it was such a cornerstone of the series: feeling like characters and the world evolved as you, the player, interacted with it (lived in it! over 15 years!). and it's not even - as i've seen some, including key devs, suggest - a question of making every single choice matter. the "throwaway" lines, simple war table missions, and codex entries still mattered! they still contributed to that feeling of a world that evolved with you.

and what really worries me is what this means for the returning characters. how can you have varric without the potential loss of hawke? how can you have morrigan* without the potential for kieran? is your inquisitor going to be even semi-recognisable? how is the well drinker choice not relevant? and, again, these don't necessarily need to have huge impacts? they can just be one off lines or codex entries or something that shows that this is a world that you've been a part of, these are people that you know and love.

idk there's just such a huge middle ground between 'every single choice needs to dramatically impact the plot/characterisation and that's just not feasible' and 'absolutely no reactivity to anything beyond three things'. the devs keep acting like there's not, but it's just bullshit. they managed it to a decent degree in inquisition, after all.

it's not necessarily a dealbreaker but idk i'm just sad about it.

*honestly starting to lean towards that theory that it's not actually morrigan but flemythal in her body

[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 -

Chat asked Mark's thoughts on the quantum state of Kieran. "I think they're gonna collapse Kieran down. Probably what actually happens is they're just gonna push Kieran into the background."

Chat commented on being sad that the Inquisitor won't be the main character going forwards. "I mean the main character doesn't have an arm, kind've makes some of the classes a bit tricky".

Chat commented that any quantum character basically guarantees that we're only going to see a cameo of them going forward. "Yeah, if they're quantum they're going to be pushed into the background for sure." Chat then mentioned Sera. "I don't think Sera's quantum, or not very quantum." "Yeah, we don't typically bring back romance options in major roles because they, you have to sort've deal with that quantum. That's not the worst thing".

"I wouldn't expect to see Shale again because they are so custom, but they're also quantum aren't they, can't they die in Orzammar? Like if they were building a golem rig for some other reason then I could see it. Everyone is quantum basically. That is why actually so often followers do not reappear, is because everything is pretty quantum".

"I don't think we'll see something like the broodmother again, I don't think it fits with the tone that the game is striving for anymore. The stuff before the broodmother, that I could, that sort've stuff, that kind've creepy tone stuff, I could see that being something that occurs again. But the broodmother itself, or something like that, I'd be surprised."

Chat asked "How canon is Darkspawn Chronicles? Did that team just go nuts and completely leave the map or is 'Wade is a Desire demon' actually a lore nugget?" Mark replied, "Darkspawn Chronicles obviously can't be canon." "That's a valid question. I suspect at this point the team would treat it as non-canon so anything that's revealed there would be considered completely non-canon, but I mean I would've at the time assumed that any lore revealed in it would be considered canonical assuming it was something that happened before the branch from reality. But I think they would probably at this point treat it as totally non-canon".

Chat asked "Why couldn't y'all hire the DA:O Warden voice actors? I heard the voicing is why they didn't include the Warden in DA:I with Hawke". Mark replied, "The Warden is a quantum character in DA:I, the answer as to what to do about the Warden from a voice acting perspective is a very open question. Do you leave them silent? Do you voice them? All of the answers are not great. I think if you're gonna have them in a relatively major position, you better have an answer to that question." "Yeah, I suppose you could hire back the voice actors. It's a lot of different voices, so that can become a problem as well. I don't know that people consider those exactly as the voice of their character. I mean I certainly don't. I mean yeah, they are technically, but. Yeah, it could be done." Chat commented here that "literally any option is going to disappoint someone". Mark said "Yeah, that's my feeling as well. No matter what you do with the Hero of Ferelden in another game, it's going to be problematic. You know, if you brought the Hero back you could just keep them silent and you could actually even give a reason, like 'oh yeah, they've survived but the Blight has taken their vocal chords', or whatever".

Chat then mentioned again about the Hero of Ferelden having many voices in DA:O. Mark paused to explain "the problem of why they're probably not gonna use the voice actors from DA:O. First of all, there are a lot of them which means you have to bring back those actors. The Hero of Ferelden is a very quantum character, might be married, might be alive, might be dead, might be not married. The other reason is that people are basically used to their character being quiet for all of the conversations, so if you bring them back and voice them there's going to be some people that are going to be upset by that. So it could happen, but not as a major perspective, it would be as a cameo at most so that's what I would say is, that it's unlikely but it could happen. But I doubt they would just hire these voice actors back, it's too many and it would require too much wrangling, so there you go."

"The reason why Hawke doesn't do much in DA:I is for the same reasons, we don't know how you built your character, we don't wanna have them do something iconic that isn't appropriate to the way you built your character."

Chat said, "Ideally, BioWare would release something before DA4 where we can create our Hero, Champion, and Inquisitor ahead of time, and then just import them in". Mark said, "Because the character creators have changed so much it has been discussed to add something into the Keep. I'm not sure if they're going to maintain the Keep or not, but add something into the Keep that would be a character creator for previous games to kind've bring them up to standard. I think that's a good idea, even if they don't end up showing up in the game, just to have sort've standardized the look for everybody. Yeah, but I don't know if they're gonna do that to be clear. There was a conversation about it, but I don't know whether that'll actually happen, because that requires getting something that either runs Frostbite in a web browser or a standalone application to make sure it looks like how it's supposed to look."

Chat said "A person who decides to pick up DA4 who hasn't played the other games is unlikely to start up from DA:O and play all the games AND DLC before DA4 to get hype." Mark replied, "No, I wouldn't, certainly the Dragon Age team is not building [DA:D] with the assumption you've played all the games previously. That's always a concern, that people think they have to do that and then it just closes the door to new people entering the franchise." "I would expect DA:D probably won't even expect much DA:I knowledge given the time between games." Chat said "Most people who will pick up DA4 as their first Dragon Age game probably won't even use the Keep". Mark replied, "Yeah, the expectation is that most people would not use the Keep, but that's actually not so bad because there's lots of, we know what the default player looks like for DAII and DA:I, we have canonical choices so that's not too problematic". "Some people definitely will play everything but you don't want that to be a barrier to new people playing the game".

[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 -

Dragon Age sets up a lot of consequences to things such as lyrium and the Taint. They "don't always play it off for the player very well"

[on DA:O] "What I would say on why do enemies have stamina/mana is, because the game is built perfectly symmetrically, which is why. Should you do that? No you should not do that but that's why everything is just built in this way, everything is completely interchangeable, which sounds like a good idea, but in practise is basically unbalanceable. It does mean that you can have an enemy or an NPC enter into your party, everything can be done in both directions without a concern, because everything is interchangeable, but I don't think it's worth it. DAII swings the pendulum way too far the other way, it's so asymmetrical it's basically incomprehensible. I think DA:I hits a good balance. It's kind've what's happened I would say with D&D. Third edition D&D, very symmetrical, fourth edition ridiculously asymmetrical, fifth strikes a balance"

Chat asked if the BioWare team ever ran any DA TTRPGs as part of development or just for fun. "I don't know, I've never run a DA tabletop"

"I think Flemeth has always been Mythal, I don't think she was retconned into existence"

"You were asking before about why everyone has stats. It allows to basically do what just happened there, the templars are just marked as people, when the combat starts they can just join in without throwing the combat completely out of whack"

Chat asked "'If you were to give us a 'Citadel DLC' for Dragon Age, what would your dream DLC include?" Mark replied, "I think that the last DLC in DA:I is pretty much in line with being like a Citadel-style. You get to interact with all the followers again, it provides a lot of closure, so it's a pretty good version"

Chat asked "'​I was wondering how did you get the game to run? I tried playing it on my new computer i9 with a 3090, but it keeps crashing?" Mark replied, "So are you wondering how I got DA:O to run? There's a fan-made patch which I think I tried to install. The big reason why it's unstable is that it's limited to [...] or if you can't get that patch just drop your settings down. If you set the settings up to something that your game is capable of running it's going to use too much memory and it'll over-run 4 gigs, there's a memory leak in there, so if you drop it down to something a little bit less and it'll run pretty well. I've had some crashes, not too bad. It's not an official patch so you won't find it on the EA website. Honestly, if they ever remaster, that'll be one thing [...]"

Remastering the first three DA games is a much more difficult prospect than remastering Mass Effect was. "That's not to say it won't happen but it definitely is a whole extra mess"

"I do not miss the BioWare forums. They were out of control. It became pretty hard for a lot of devs to interact with the forums in a positive way even with the positive people for sure"

Chat said "I was always curious, do devs tend to play their games after the release or is it just not the same after all the hardships of the development and testing?" Mark replied, "Honestly, devs, it's a mixture, some devs do, but I think most actually don't, either they've played the game many many times before it released or they just reticuled onto something else. I would say on average probably no, but it does happen"

Warrior abilities are way better in DAII and DA:I than they are in DA:O

Is lyrium technically blood magic? "That's one way of thinking about it"

[on quantum characters] "Oghren is in DA:O - Awakening because he's one of the few characters that's definitely still around after DA:O." "I think he might be the only one or one of the few from DA:O that is definitely alive for Awakening". "Re-establishing new followers for an expansion isn't the best. You know, they wanted somebody."

Originally Mass Effect: Andromeda was going to have procedurally generated planets. "They never really were, that feature was never really given enough resources if that was the goal. I think they had some early stuff that was kinda cool but it was never ready for primetime"

"One of the interesting things about Mass Effect is it was always in its DNA imagined as a kind of Star Control thing. It never really was that, but there was always that underlying thing. So I think in ME:A that's what they were trying to capture, that Star Control stuff, but yeah, it is pretty hard to tell a story in a procedural world. Doable"

"There's a story behind the ending of ME3 but that's not my story to tell"

[pls note this video was from 1 year ago, so the call being referred to here took place 1 year ago] Chat said "During the recent earnings call EA said that there's going to be a major IP release. I mean, I don't want to be all too optimistic, but I literally couldn't think of any IP other than DA". Mark replied, "About the earnings call, it's possible that it's DA, it could also be something like Bad Company, a remaster of Battlefield Bad Company. I can't think, because they said remaster, so I can't think of what else it would be other than DA, Bad Company, everything else is either so old that it would have to be a remake. I don't know what it could be but I could imagine it being bad company. They have a ton of IP, I just don't know what they have that, it would have to be less than say 15 years old to be possible to do a remaster as opposed to a remake. Could just be that they're mis-speaking. I guess it could be Army of Two, that would be weird. They've already announced Dead Space, so I don't think it's 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)

[dgcatanisiri]

Tried to read through Callback, the story in Tevinter Nights that sparked my brain screaming the other night, again, and realized WHY I disliked it so much right away.

I wanted this story as DLC. This was the kind of story that would have been PERFECT for the Inquisitor to experience, not Sutherland.

I mean, from day one, I had money on the idea that there would be a “History of Skyhold” DLC, that was what I expected to play at some point. I was disappointed it never materialized, this is on my list of hypothetical DLCs.

And, by not getting it with the Inquisitor, using it to develop them... It just feels like a waste. Not to mention that if there was going to be a conflict with a Regret demon, one that grew fat on Solas’s long slumber... That would actually have been important for the Inquisitor.

Hell, I speculated once that Trespasser had been intended to be two separate DLCs, one for the Qunari invasion, one for the Exalted Council, getting crammed together into one when they decided that they were topping off at three story DLCs, and that, with the Qunari invasion the one that had been in production first, it got the Exalted Council tacked on to things, explaining why that’s basically window dressing. If that’s the case, maybe the Exalted Council had been intended to take place at Skyhold, but they couldn’t reskin/build new maps and such, so just reused the Winter Palace assets, and this was meant to be the story there.

Given that I don’t care for the Descent, particularly on the basis of it having nothing to do with the Inquisitor’s story, just foreshadowing setup for subsequent reveals, I’d easily have swapped these two story ideas, make this story DLC and put Valta as the viewpoint character of the Descent as a short story.

Anyway, still not going to acknowledge this story, even if Regret reappears, because I stand by Skyhold is NOT abandoned - hell, Inquisition or not, considering the association, surely Thedas would mark it as a historical and holy site and have it preserved. Cassandra at one point says Skyhold had become a pilgrimage, and with the Temple of Sacred Ashes destroyed, surely the Chantry would consider it an opportunity to step in and claim it as a new place of the sort.

Also, again, the ONE detail we get about Voth is that he doesn’t speak, how the fuck do you fuck that up?

[valntinemorgenstern]

Review: Lord of Shadows

★★★★★

As always, my thoughts on Cassandra Clare’s books are prolific, multiplicitous, entangled, sometimes joyous and delighted, sometimes troubled and difficult; I could happily write numerous lectures and essays on this woman’s books, and Lord of Shadows comes as no exception. So, in the interest of keeping this as readable as possible, the first section of this review will contain my general thoughts, and the section after it, a more detailed (and, probably, sweary and incoherent) fangirl mess list of my very spoilery thoughts/opinions/feelings.

General 

In my opinion, Lord of Shadows is a huge improvement on Lady Midnight (I wrote an exceedingly long review on it last year that more resembled a disorganised splurge, but in sum:). For me, LM was an enjoyable, enthralling read as Cassandra’s books always are, but I was baffled by the claims that it was her best-ever book. For me, it consistently failed to hit the right chord, the characters didn’t spark on the page; the pacing lagged, and then rushed; I had a multitude of issues with plot, structure and character decisions. Most of all, the characters failed to draw me to them in the way that I was accustomed to with most of Cassie’s vast cast of characters. I’m pleased to say that I feel mostly over all of that now. I’m certain that this was also present in LM, but I think I appreciated this a lot more, given how much easier I was with the story as a whole — I was consistently impressed in this instalment with the quality of writing. LoS is strewn with some fantastically lyrical, poetic flashes of prose that, as I was reading, I just had to kind of sit back in astonishment, turning over that scintillating metaphor, or that line of dialogue, or that paragraph of description in my mind. At the risk of repeating myself, it’s obvious that Cassandra is, stylistically, far more mature, daring and sophisticated than the Cassandra writing TMI 6 years ago (I also think that this is related to a greater tendency to indulge in some flowery and exploratory prose, hence the ever-growing length of her books, but I’m not complaining).

I think by nature of the fact that this was the second in the series, there was no time that had to be spent lingering over long expositions and the tediousness of setting up unfamiliar characters; it didn’t take 300 pages for the motor to start turning. One of the developments that surprised me was how much the narrative eye in this instalment really starts to wander from Emma / Julian as its primary focus, as it mostly is in LM. I absolutely loved how much it started to scoop up the rest of the Blackthorn family, and even other characters like Arthur and Kit (though I can imagine there are some Jemma fans who might be a bit disappointed with this decision). For me, having this distance from Emma’s POV was wonderful / I really welcomed the opportunity to attach myself more deeply to other characters (to be honest, I wasn’t hugely enamoured with Emma in LM) and this made the story so much easier to invest in. In the end, it has actually warmed me to Emma a lot more, so I’m happy.

Very Spoilery 

FREAKED OUT by how many things I ended up predicting (without knowing I ws predicting them?) Consistently dogged by the feeling of déjà-vu and that I’d secretly thought that thing might happen. By no means had an exhaustive list of theories, only a couple of solid ones, and the rest ephemeral, half-baked, flippant daydreams of ‘oh, what if x got with x? wouldn’t THAT be a twist!’ and then….it happened. It happened with: Dru and Jaime becoming a thing (what sort of thing has yet to be seen, but HMM); Kit x Livvy (like, Livvy what even was that? hey you’re a male; you’re in my line of sight!); Arthur’s death (this is a whole topic in itself and Don’t Get Started™); the hinting that Ty and Kit may become parabatai in lieu of an immediately romantic relationship (their dynamic reminds me so much of Will and Jem) and thus HA HA history repeats itself in both ways…

OVERJOYED about the fact that Mark x Emma never properly materialised. Last year, this was not only an alarmingly popular ship, I thought, but also one that Cassandra seemed to be teasing would be become canonical in LoS. At this point I legitimately and seriously considered whether or not I’d bother reading Lord of Shadows, as this was probably the biggest NOTP I’d ever had. It was a deal breaker for me. So, very pleased.

I went into this determined not to ship Mark / Cristina / Kieran as a three way, and wow oh WOW, did Cassie utterly, remorselessly obliterate this! Major, major FUCKING KUDOS to Cassie’s skill and craft here for managing to completely overturn the way I feel about this polyamorous ship. I completely take back everything I said about feeling uncomfortable with this, because DUDE I am struggling to see how they’re gonna avoid a threesome at some point. This ship is electric and has so much chemistry, I’m not gonna lie, there were moments where I was thinking I was shipping it even more than Jemma…

LOVED everything in Faerie. Just! Ugh! Loved how dark and dreamy it was and the high-fantasy overtones and how reminiscent it was of mythology and Goblin Market and Arthurian romance.

All the classical + 18/19th literature allusions! The lit student in me was elated. ‘The nightmare life in death was she’ MY SOUL WAS IN COMMUNION WITH YOU CASSIE.

So lovely to return to London again! (and, woah, wasn’t expecting them to be there most of the book?) Tempered, though, by its portrayal as run-down, neglected Institute that has (somehow? I WANNA KNOW CASSIE) fallen out of The Herondale’s hands and into the management of The Highsmiths? Made me very sad indeed to see this.

i could write a whole meta of the depiction of Herondales in this book. (Lmao for a series allegedly supposed to focus on the Blackthorns and, for once, not-about-the-herondales, they still end up being a pretty damn important)

There is like, not a single POV from Kit (shocked by how huge his role is in this book?) where his Herondaleness is being mentioned, questioned or alluded to. HA I EAT THIS SHIT UP

How delightfully frustrating that, with regards to Kit, far more questions posed than answered. (The woman in his dreams? So he remembers his mother? How come only now? How the hell do the seven riders of Mannan have anything to do with him / how do they recognise him? Evidently the mysteries surrounding his heritage are tangled up in Faerie as well…) Loved how protective he was of Ty, and how brilliantly they work together. In LM, Kit was depicted as very sheltered and innocent, but he really comes into his own in LoS — loved how he was starting to mould what he’d learnt from his father with what he was learning as a Shadowhunter.

TMI DREAM TEAM REAPPEARANCES FUCK YESSSSSSSSSS MAGNUS YOU’RE A BABE AND HAVE THEY MADE STATUES OF JACE YET??

THE ENDING

T H E  E N D I N G

T   H   E     E  N  D  I  N  G

WHAT IN GOD’S NAME

It was like: trundling along nicely, some angst, but danger is mostly over, cue some boring meetings (Idris tho!! I have missed you!) and then — BANG BANG BANG BANG! Magnus (and Tessa?!) is/have been illWHAT?! Robert is dead, and Livvy is dead. CHRIST ALIVE. One thing after the other.

Did not see any of that coming. At all. Gut-wrenchingly, heart-stoppingly shocking stuff. I had to put the book down, and gaping, looked up laughingly and whispered a series of profanities to myself. That said, I expected Robert to die at the end of TMI (and was sincerely surprised he managed to survive it — had a whole theory about it) and wondered, at the time, why Cassie kept him going. Now I see why she waited till now: a strategic decision, so that there would have formed a dark force i.e. the Cohort to replace the vacuum his death as Inquisitor would leave with.

Livvy!!! I am so, terribly sad.

I am also so so scared for Queen of Air and Darkness.