#bioware ill never forgive you for this

[rookinthecrownest]

Extremely rude of Bioware not to let Lucanis have a magical Gondola ride with Madeleina in ‘Now I See The Light’ style from Disney’s Rapunzel

I GOTTA DO EVERYTHING AROUND HERE

[honestlyitsjustsam]

also back to me being petty again, but my ex mutual who called me a terrorist bootlicker because i said anders for 2020, actually was the one calling him a dilf because i said he was 40 or smt in the trespasser.....i guess thats what happens when u dont play the game and hate a character because someone said so

[onlysoulhere]

I close my eyes and pretend I’m Scott when I play his romance. 

[bubblegumnebulaa]

TAMLEN, Varric, Cole, Finn, Nathaniel, Sten, Fenarel, Abelas, Ser Gilmore

What’s the one, non-romanceable Dragon Age character you wish you could have an in-game romance with?

(Includes Origins, 2, and Inquisition.)

[poweredbycoffeeandwine]

Three Fandoms, 10 Questions!

I was tagged by my perfect sunflower @lechatrouge673! Thank you sweet love!

RULES: Choose any three fandoms (in random order) and answer the questions, then tag 10 people you want to know better.

Three Fandoms:

Dragon Age

Mass Effect

Realm of the Elderlings (Farseer/Tawny Man Trilogy by Robin Hobb)

The First Character You Loved:

Alistair Theirin - I was young and he was sweet. Also the jokes. So much like hubs.

Kaidan Alenko - The voice, the bashful flirting. I fell so hard so fast.

The Fool - Always my beloved

The Character You Never Expected To Love So Much:

Sebastian - I just do okay. Fight me

Conrad Verner - I mean, how can you not

Fitz - I get over those lead role stereotypes real fast, but he matured and I will murder for him.

The Character You Relate To The Most :

Sten - I am often grumpy and also love cookies

Tali 

I’m stumped...no idea here

As for me, I would have chosen:

Recruited both the mages and the Templars (stupid forced dichotomy there, Bioware). <---This and just let me eat the despair cheese.

To make the end game choices for ME3 not suck. <---This plus more Kaidan everywhere

Damn it. The Fool and Fitz were meant to be, just let them love each other forever.

The Character You’d Slap :

Arl Eamon Guerrin, his wife, Goldanna, Marjolane, (I have an extensive list)

Udina

Galen

Three Favorite Characters (in order of preference):

Flemeth, Varric, Fenris

Kaidan, Tali, Joker

The Fool, Fitz, Burrich

Character You Liked At First, But Don’t Like Anymore:

Solas - He broke my heart and I’ll never forgive him

Liara - Bioware threw her at me way too much

N/A

A Character You Didn’t Like At First But Do Now:

Sera - sorry ok, but I love her now

Arua T’Loak

Kettricken

Three OTPs:

Varric x Bianca (the crossbow, not the dwarf)

Shepard x Kaidan

The Fool x Fitz

This was fun, and a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. Guess I’m not actually getting any writing done tonight. Lol. I won’t tag anyone, but if you haven’t done it, and would like to consider this my tag for you! Just tag me back so I can see!

[askagamedev]

So what is your take on the recent controversy involving what bioware employees have said on the death of TotalBiscuit.

As far as I know, it was just one person and that person was speaking on a  personal twitter and and not “employees” representing the studio or publisher. The person’s rant certainly seemed personal. That said, here’s my take on it.

Once again, I am reminded of why I keep two personal policies:

I don’t break anonymity

I don’t vent in public

And it’s because of situations like this - If I were ever to lose my anonymity, anything I’ve ever said could be taken as an official position endorsed by my employer. If you remember the whole debacle involving the writer at Bioware who suffered huge amounts of harassment because of her opinions, those opinions were given in an interview with a gaming blog five years prior. The internet never forgets, and the internet never forgives. Just look at how many people are still sore about EA closing Westwood Studios back in 2003. 

The thing that stood out to me regarding any “controversy” is that every single “news” outlet reporting on this has put the developer’s employer and publisher front and center in the headline, even though these news outlets should know that it isn’t an official stance by any means. Gotta get them clicks somehow. People get into arguments on the internet. That, porn, and sharing cat pictures are the foundations of the internet as we know it.

Regarding Bain’s death, I don’t have a lot to say. Cancer sucks and I don’t think anybody deserves it or an early death. I only knew him as that weird youtuber who placed an inordinate amount of weight (and time) in his reviews going over game options menus. I know that he caused and encouraged several things that I personally found distasteful and disagree with. Like almost all gaming youtubers, I didn’t find his commentary particularly useful or insightful. I probably would not agree with or like his views. I certainly understand why some developers did not like him, especially when his opinion regarding the products they had spent years of their lives building was particularly harsh.

However, in our culture, it is taboo to speak ill of the dead unless the dead did something so socially unacceptable that the majority of the people decide it is ok. I don’t think many people mourned for Saddam Hussein or had problems with those speaking ill of him. Bain had a loyal following of people who liked his opinion and agreed with him. That makes speaking ill of him socially unacceptable where they are around. In public and on the internet, everybody is always around forever. While news outlets depend on clicks and controversy to pay their bills, they’re going to court it as much as possible. So, while I sympathize with the people who are going to get reprimanded by their employers for dragging the company into it, I am ultimately reminded why I don’t engage in it myself.

The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus.

[What is the FANTa project?] [Git the FANTa Project]

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Frequent questions: The FAQ

[sonodaten]

Personal Write-Up of the 5/10 for Mass Effect: Andromeda

I know I promised this a while ago, but I just finished my second playthrough last night because I wanted to make sure I covered everything.

TL;DR: Mass Effect: Andromeda, though extremely fun to play, runs into A LOT of problems when it came to writing and plot. Spoilers under the cut.

Let’s start with the good. 

- The updated combat system is phenomenal and works very well in the latest installment. It reminded me a lot of the Fate system from Kingdoms of Amalur:  Reckoning with the synthesis of pre-existing classes and the ability for you to change your profiles on the fly while in battle (and having a favorites system to allow you to switch your profile and selected abilities). For me, this really allowed flexibility and adaptation while encountering enemies over the course of a long firefight. The barrier I was using for cover gets destroyed? No problem; just switch over to the Explorer profile and use the combat barricade to make my own. A high-powered enemy just appeared? Change profiles to Tech specialist and bolster myself and my party members to eviscerate armor. I was skeptical when I first heard about the jump jets and the inclusion of hovering as a way to maneuver about the battlefield, but it really is a good way to flush out enemies who are camping behind cover and force them into your party members’ (or sometimes your party members forcing them!) line of fire.

- For the levelling system in general, I was really happy with the abilities they gave the party members, especially the ones that can be used to bolster yourself and other party members. I never felt like I was wanting for ability points to spend. If anything, for the amount of ability points we were given, I felt like there just weren’t enough abilities to use them on. Once you achieved loyalty with your party members and upgraded their skills to level 6, they levelled and just had more ability points that couldn’t be spent on anything. Maybe the devs intend to add more if there’s DLC planned for the future? That’d be nice to see.

- Of course, with Frostbite, the level designs are absolutely gorgeous, if a bit choppy with loading times (even on my PS4 Pro, some textures took a good minute or so to load up). And the devs really went out of their way to increase exploration not only horizontally, but vertically as well. I am still slightly miffed that they saved the best and hands down the most beautiful world--Meridian--till the very end where you just haphazardly tear through it in the Nomad, and even after defeating the Archon, you never actually get to explore it, just look enviously out a window at the world you only scratched the surface of (literally) but can’t touch anymore.

- The one good thing I’ll say about the writing is that it managed to maintain the kind of humor (mostly in dialogue) I’ve come to expect from the writers over at BioWare. I’ll even admit they even got me to laugh out loud a couple times.

And now the bad.

- For me, personally, it felt like Andromeda was supposed to feel completely new. That you through the PC were going to be exploring worlds that had never been touched by human hands before, see stars that we’ve never seen before, and encounter species that we could never have imagined possible before now. And for a single glorious moment in the prologue, during your ill-fated expedition to Habitat 7, we did. We explored a world that was totally and completely knew, threw everything we thought we knew was possible against a wall, our time spent exploring allowed us to have extra dialogue that expanded upon what we were seeing and it’s implications, and we stumbled upon a mystery:  the kett and the Remnant. And then it never fucking happened again. Exploration was rewarded with a few bits of new dialogue for the PC and your present party members, but could never be brought up in dialogue or decision making. Worlds we were exploring had been already been trampled by humans before; we already knew what we were expecting. Which leads me to my next point:

- The story started way too fucking late. If the writers had wanted to give their players a sense of newness, the whole thing with the Arks being late and the Nexus rebellion, and the exiles ruined that feeling. I understand where they were trying to go--first contact was ruined by these “exiles” and their bad behavior and now you have to convince the local alien populace (which is literally just the angara? I have a whole other thing about them, just wait) that #NotAllHumans on top of trying to carve out a niche in this new and unfamiliar galaxy which, by the way, was not the job you were trained extensively for like your father. But it just completely overshadowed and took away the rush of being on the bleeding edge of a new galaxy. We missed finding these planets raw and uncut, we missed out on that absolute rush and giddiness of exploring new planets for the very first time because there was no point. People had already explored them. We were just retracing somebody else’s steps, but doing it better because we had an AI in our heads that could read Remnant. You get to the Nexus for the first time and tell everybody that Habitat 7 was a bust? Well, meh, everything was already shit before, so there’s no real impact to finding out one of the golden worlds was a dud. It would have been much more effective to start as the Initiative was initially intended to start. Ark Hyperion reaches Habitat 7; it’s a bust and your dad dies and makes you Pathfinder. You return to the Nexus, full of groggy but hopeful workers who are just so excited to see one of the Arks return with news about one of their golden worlds--one of the places they could potentially be calling home in Andromeda. And you just drop the bomb on the Initiative leadership:  it was a dud and your Pathfinder is dead. And then Nexus leadership drops the next bomb:  the other Arks haven’t shown and they can’t locate them. So then there’s the question of what you do to go from there:  do you tell the people the truth, maintaining transparency but potentially inciting panic, or do you lie to them, keeping them hoping for a home that might never come? You still retain the tension of having to find a home for the people on the Nexus and the Hyperion, but you aren’t stuck having to retrace somebody else’s footsteps. Or fix something somebody else has already broken. It’s all new.

- Andromeda is awfully empty. I mean species-wise. There are hundreds of planets and a ton of systems to explore, but there’s a devastating lack of alien life. I’m a little rusty because it’s been a while since my last astronomy class, but I think the Milky Way is like 3 billion something years younger than Andromeda? Or maybe that’s just arm formation? Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that the Milky Way has shown to be home to at least 8 (that I think of off the top of my head) different, civilized alien species, but Andromeda only has . . . 2. And one of them is not even from the galaxy, but conquerors from another. So, one native, sentient species:  the angara. Were there other species before, but they fled the galaxy to escape the Scourge? Did the angara ever have trade or alliances with other species, but any Unless so, it was pathetic to try and pass off that a galaxy with as many systems and planets available as Andromeda is home to literally only one other intelligent species until the kett invaded. I’m sorry, but it was just lazy. If they come back and say that the other species were exalted by the kett and records of it were lost because of the Scourge, maybe I’ll forgive them. Probably not, but maybe.

- The Remnant. Or specifically, Ryder/SAM’s ability to interact with Remnant technology. First of all, the Remnant are adorable and I hate that there’s not dedicated stealth system to sneak around them because I hate having to destroy them. Throughout the plot, SAM has been accessing Remnant consoles via Ryder’s omni-tool (at least, from the game, that’s what I assume is happening). But then once you find Meridian, and the Archon severs your connection to SAM, Ryder . . . can still interact with Remnant technology? I mean, it’s cool and all and makes for an inspirational “SAM-isn’t-what-makes-me-special!” deal, but there’s literally no logical explanation for it? Unless Ryder has been learning (whether actively or subconsciously) the Remnant language while deciphering codes during the plot and not telling anybody? And then they could literally pull it out of their ass after coming back to fucking life thanks to their sibling to open a door and weaponize the Remnant ship/city? It was cool, but it was kind of a weird Deus Ex Machina.

- Also, what the fuck was that shit with the Remnant fighters having the Scourge follow them to disrupt/destroy the Archon’s fleet? Like we still don’t know what the fuck the Scourge even is? But Ryder can somehow use it in this battle suddenly with Remnant ships that I’m assuming she is controlling with their mind somehow? Like the above point, it was really, really cool, but doesn’t make a lot of sense in retrospect?

- The mandatory animations while travelling through the galaxy. I know they added a skip option to some of the animations, but there are others that are still mandatory and it takes up a lot of time while trying to explore new systems and planets with very little reward in terms of XP gained and materials gathered. And very few missions triggered by finding things floating around in space.

- The open world was too open. Yeah, I know, I never thought I’d fucking say it either, but here we are. I’m a huge fan of open world. I practically died when I heard BOTW was going open world. But for a game that pushed for exploration, it gave very little weight or reward for actually doing that exploration. In my first playthrough, I completely discovered the entire map of each planet’s explorable area. In my second playthrough, I only went to places required for quests. And I think between the two, there was maybe one or two quests that I found in my first playthrough that I didn’t in my second playthrough. And there was a decent amount of map left uncharted in the second playthrough. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times:  if you are going to make an open world that players are going to want to explore, for the love of all that is holy fill it with something worth finding. I’m not saying you have to pack it hundreds of fetch quests or detailed side quests, but open environments should also be used for more than just “hey, it’s nice to look at.”

- Similarities to previous series. So, this one is entirely personal and subjective, but I thought it was a little redundant that the Reapers kett invaded a galaxy to harvest Exalt intelligent species to add to their own fleet genetic code in order to do it again in 50,000 years to another galaxy. 

So, for those reasons my final rating for Mass Effect: Andromeda is a 5/10. While’s it’s insanely fun to play and nice to look at, it’s hard to overlook the weak plot and blatant holes in the writing.

[stardust-on-the-boots]

I really hate to break it to you, but origins wasn't at all the first fantasy story was "spun around" and the opposite of "classic" tolkienesque high fantasy genre, where elves or mages were opressed, where "orcs" are intelligent etc. It all happened in fantasy long before, be it tabletops, books, comics or videogames (even other bioware games, too). Dragon age 2, however, was a very original fantasy story, it was very flawed, but also very challenging for us players. It really is sad that because of the amount of flaws it had, the game was pretty much a flop and writers didn't want to risk writing something similarly theirs anymore.

DAI was dull because they took a safe road, the villain wasn't fleshed out (god I hated what they did to one of my favourite characters of the franchise), we beat him pretty much evrytime we meet him; the ethical conflict surrounding mage rights (that was so fun and interesting to explore) and the war that was taking place are never truly explored in the game, it just ends, huh; where in DAO all companions (well, except maybe Sten and Shale, but they both are so well written and don't hold the same function as other characters, they're here for you to explore the world even more) were chess pieces in the grand scheme of things and therefore were fleshed out through motivation, and in DA2 the companions were always Hawke's equals, had their own lives, made decisions regardless of what the protagonist wants or stands for, in DAI, lots of them are just..there. Or not explored enough. Vivienne could be so much more. Dorian could be so much more (!). Sera could be so much more. Cole could be so much more. They all could make you experience the world and understand it's politics and social tendencies better. They could be there to make you disagree with them. Instead they're just sort of silent witnesses to whatever you're up to. Yeah, the approval system was there, but it never actually changed anything. It was also really easy to fix anything through dialogs. The main storyline is weak. There are elements of things that could be so engaging. Show me families seeing their dead sons and daughters coming back from the exalted plains. Show me a soldier having to kill his best friend twice. Show me what the elves living there made of all this, show me how they put it all together in their worldview, show me them being compassionate or repulsed by this war. Show me them exploring the ruins. Show me one of your party members slowly losing it because of all that red lyrium in Emprise du Lion. Make my inquisitor hear some echo of the Song. Show me what working in this mines truly was like. Put literally anything in the hissing wastes. Don't make the second half of the game exclusively a "let's learn some elven lore" adventure. Put in some goddamn deep roads! (Really I don't get why people hate them so much, it's like the best part of DAO).

I think ultimately, there was a huge tonal shift in DAI. DAO and DA2 explored things like addiction, mind control, self-actualisation, uncontrolled science, radicalisation, sexual violence, racism, sexism, cultural appropriation, forms of control, mental illness, colonialism and slavery, genocide, religion and fanaticism, all this and more sprinkled with political and economical discourse. And there was still time to add in themes of love, friendship, compassion, kindness and forgiveness. In DAI, everything is so much brighter (literally and figuratively). Everything is in the background, while the hero beats the bad guy triumphantly. Did you feel triumphant when you killed Orsino and Meredith?

I wouldn't say it's all bad or boring. There are pretty cool new things that I'd like to see in dragon age more. But it feels very different from other games of the franchise. To me, it was extremely noticeable through first hours through music. Remember Inon Zur's soundtracks? You would recognise dragon age right away. It had a distinct character and sound. DAI sounds pretty, beautiful sometimes, but so...generic. Nothing like dragon age.

So I’ve probably said this before, but I’ll say it again.

The reason Dragon Age Inquisition feels so much like a misfire is because it missed a lot of the point of the previous games in the series. Where Inquisition was a story about a Chosen One figure being the only one who can fight and stop this threat, the kind of story we’ve seen repeatedly and constantly in the fantasy genre, Dragon Age Origins and especially Dragon Age 2 were designed to deconstruct the familiar tropes of the genre.

I mean, Dragon Age 2 is pretty much explicit in that fact. The point and purpose of the ‘Varric as narrator’ device is that Cassandra has heard the tale of the Champion of Kirkwall and now wants to know the truth, wants to know about the person behind that myth. What she ends up getting is a tale of an ordinary person dragged into situations beyond their control and, by virtue of a little luck and some faithful companions, ends up being the one still standing at the end of it. Hawke is no Chosen One. S/he’s just a person who was in the wrong place at the right time and got to be remembered as a hero.

And even the Warden has this trait - the Warden, by virtue of the origins mechanic, could not be ‘the Chosen One’ either. We get plenty of information on the other origins that indicate that, regardless of whether we chose to play as that character, those origins still occurred. Howe still invades Highever and kills much of the Cousland family. Endrin’s middle child is blamed for the death of his eldest and sentenced to the Deep Roads. Brosca entered the Provings and ends up dying in Jarvia’s prison cells. All the origins happen, it’s just your decision tells Duncan where to go to recruit.

Origins itself was meant to deconstruct a lot of the standard tropes in fantasy. Here, the elves were beaten and down-trodden, long past the days of their ancient, glorious empire, where any arrogance on their part was purely meant as the only way they really can fight back with humanity - ‘we may have little, but we will take pride in that little.’ Mages are not the wise and respected advisors to some noble, but instead are locked up and shackled in a tower because the abilities they have are dangerous and deadly if they’re allowed to run free. The dwarves, often considered ‘as constant as the stone’ are a stagnant and dying culture, and the one dwarf we ever really meet who embodies the stereotypes is Oghren, who is a pariah among his fellow dwarves. Hell, in many ways, the qunari are orc-analogs, and instead of being the simple bruisers whose first instinct is to crush and smash and destroy, they’re highly intelligent, to the point that they have technology far beyond what the humans have.

Dragon Age started as a deconstruction and even examination of old fantasy tropes. On a personal note, that’s what made the series so interesting to me - instead of just taking a Tolkien-style world at face value, Dragon Age took those tropes and turned them on their head. In some ways, it was asking the genre to evolve, because as influential as Tolkien has been, we’re at a point where the fantasy genre isn’t really moving outside of these narrowly defined categories of what fantasy has been. And fantasy that doesn’t imagine moving beyond that? That’s a waste of the genre and ideas.

But Inquisition… Inquisition wants to play those Tolkien style tropes far straighter than they’ve been in the past. And it doesn’t reconstruct them first. It just acts like that classic interpretation of things has been in play since the beginning, even though it hasn’t, and, in multiple cases, actively set out to go against them.

Dragon Age began with a lot of deconstruction of the fantasy genre, in some ways asking ‘is fantasy going to stay where it is or grow and evolve?’ And if Inquisition is an indication, the answer is apparently ‘stay where it is.’ Which if you ask me, that’s a damn shame, because there’s a lot that can be done with fantasy, if someone would just take the chance. I hope future games will.