#dragon age behind the scenes

[exhausted-archivist]

Sometimes, while I try to backlog some of the lore mentioned on twitter, I come across things that I miss. [Source]

[zaahvi]

GLORY TO THE RISEN GODS

[mourn-and-watch]

davrin dragon age you have to stop. your dalish grey warden swag is too different. the prospects of you getting javik mass effect va are too insane. your monster hunter career is too powerful. your griffon is too cute. they'll kill you davrin dragon age

[revenantttt]

lucanis in the pantry listening to the fight between taash and their mother

[leopardmuffinxo]

so touch me again; i feel my shadow dissolving

[acupofqueercoffee]

eve best and her fucks or the cutest fucks i’ve ever heard 🥺

pleaseeeee she’s so 😩😩😩

[antivanlights]

It’s actually adorable that Lucanis secretly went around asking the team for recipes for the dessert he wanted to prepare for Rook. Emmrich being a saint, as usual.

[felassan]

post from Dragon Age: Dreadwolf developer Luke B. (Game Systems Director for Dragon Age) on the unofficial BioWare forum, discussing the reasons why in Dragon Age: Inquisition there was no healing mechanic and instead the barrier system was introduced in the gameplay:

"I can't speak to any other games directly but I can give a bit of historic context for DAI. The game was initially a more dungeon/linear delving - see how far you can get - experience and there was no barrier of any kind. As a side note: healing has always been a hot topic in design because as soon as you include it there are many other conceits you now need take into consideration for the gameplay - one of which I will call 'the Anders problem'. Anyway, as DAI got the date moved and shifted more into the pseudo-openworld the concept of attrition (see how far you can get before having to return to camp) became less relevant and we needed to help the Players have more moment-to-moment agency around their survival. Unfortunately for various reasons (one of which is the sad reality of designing a game with a shifting timeline) the healing couldn't be re-added so we ended up with more of a mitigation strategy in the barrier system. It went through a lot of iterations but eventually landed on what it shipped with which I would call... acceptable (but just barely). Now, I will concede that a part of the reason it didn't return after that shift was an aversion to holy trinity gameplay specifically for MP but it wasn't the core reason. As a side story, trying to balance the game (as that was my job on DAI - and yes, it could be much better haha) we had to all but force Players to take barrier. It is intentionally the first skill in the first tree for the Mage and all the autolevel (I also handled that) is designed to get it right away. Feel free to ask other DAI questions, I'm happy to answer about things I was directly involved in 😁. Anything DA:D related you'll have to wait for at least a few months after launch to grill me...though I'm hoping they let me stream at launch as an official thing 🤞." [source]

a user asked about what the hardest class to balance in DA:I was:

"I feel like anyone who was around for the post-launch content will already know the answer to this as it was the bane of my existence when I got put exclusively on MP after launch but the Knight-Enchanter barrier absorbing was a pain. Stuff like that is very challenging to feel good without being broken as they are relative to damage so scaling is fairly open-ended. Too little and the casual players won't get use out of it, too much and the character builders will be wildly OP. We actually had a 'no nerfing' guideline for the SP side so it was a hard battle to fix that silly thing 🙃." [source]

[ode-to-fury]

So I haven't thought of a way to end the Lucanis arc with House Dellamorte still in tact and in power BUT I do think that with the combined brain power and sheer determination of Caterina Illario and Rook they will be able to find a way to sort that shit out. It might involve tons of murder, maybe manipulation bribery and/or blood magic but by the maker they've got to keep the two idiot cousins alive somehow

[damn-daemon]

Words cannot describe the burning desire I have to see Dragon Age: The Veilguard fail. Sorry, not sorry. I tried to give it a chance, but with every subsequent article, it just got worse. And when I thought it couldn't get any worse, it got worse.

The abysmal art direction, the lack of a third companion, the God of War esque action emphasis, the refusal to include any decisions of major consequence from the series in favor of a soft reboot to lure in new players, it's too much.

[exhausted-archivist]

A really interesting article from EuroGamer talking about map making in fantasy, but specifically Dragon Age, was released yesterday.

I've found it really interesting to hear from map makers of games and fantasy but also Gaider talking about how the Thedas map was made. I will probably break this down later because I have a lot of thoughts.

I'll include the maps below the cut. These are photo copied maps that Gaider made to map out the history of Thedas. Strongly recommend reading the article to hear the thought process that he shared.

It was also shared that while he did these maps, the final map we're all so familiar with was done by an artist without his input. To quote:

Some things bother David Gaider about the Dragon Age 1 map, still, and they occurred when artists prettied his sketches without his involvement. "Oh," he said awkwardly when they were presented to him. "I didn't want it to look like this, exactly." He says they added a lot more rivers and mountains, and flipping between his sketches and the Dragon Age: Origins map, you can see some have moved around, or gained prominence, and places like Redcliffe have shifted. Apparently people would take to the BioWare forums after the game came out to complain about the map's geography. "And I'm like, 'You know what? You got a point,'" Gaider says. This is mostly anger at himself, though, for not doing more about it. Similarly, he wishes he'd been able to sit down with artists and work out what the rest of the continent you don't see in his sketches looked like, so they didn't have to have "the continent just keeps going..."-like messages at the edge of it. "But to where?" Gaider says.

[wolfsong-the-bloody-beast]

I went back because I wanted to make some nice screenshots, and I ended up getting distracted with... whatever this is. He's covering her from almost all directions.

I'm suggesting nothing.

Sir, be careful with that.

[tenebriism]

// I wish I had booked my flight home for today instead of tomorrow. A lot of my friends are at Veilguard end game and I wanna be right there with them. 😔 Alas, I have to wait until tomorrow to return to my Rook and her eventual boyfriend Emmrich.

[de11amorte]

The 𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐈𝐕𝐀𝐍 𝐂𝐑𝐎𝐖𝐒, also known as 𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐒𝐄 𝐎𝐅 𝐂𝐑𝐎𝐖𝐒, are an elite organization of thieves, spies, and assassins renowned throughout Thedas. art here. Mun &. muse are 21+. read rules before interacting !

[maleficore]

I've been reading a lot of fic lately and it's always so fun when people go the "oh I fucking hate them, why are they hot" route with Cullen/Inquisitor because my personal version of the dynamic includes zero attraction whatsoever until they leave the enemy part of enemies-to-lovers entirely. While the trope is fun, not having them fall into it in my worldstate is Very Important to me.

I see Haven Cullen as a mid-withdrawal wreck and the Herald is Very Scary so he wouldn't go "smash" even if Cerys was a hottie (she's not, they're very mid4mid to me). It would probably take like one conversation for him to start avoiding them at all costs and just switch to watching from a distance like a hawk because again, they really set off all the deeply ingrained Dangerous Mage alarms in his head whether he likes it or not. He can't help it. And on the flipside, Cerys is so in survival mode before being named Inquisitor, especially in Cullen's presence, the thought of finding him attractive (even if his fresh-off-lyrium ass didn't radiate the energy of an elderly dog begging for a pentobarbital injection) would literally never cross her mind. It's only after In Your Heart Shall Burn and Cullen's big realisation that she's literally just a mortal woman -- flesh and bone, not this terrifying walking, ticking bomb of a mage (which he's actually SO wrong about, but whatever gives you peace of mind Templar Boy) -- that things begin to change. Because it somewhat tames his fear and Cerys can hide theirs behind the power of being Cullen's boss :)

Still, the whole thing is so slow burn I straight up have trouble fitting it somewhat into the framework of the game progression-wise. A strong friendship has to come first and romance is just something they sort of... fall into. A natural progression of things when they finally get over their respective shit enough to look at the other person and really see them, you know? The attraction not being there beforehand really adds something to the whole thing, I think.

[foxmulderrr]

i gotta be honest. my hopes and excitement for the new dragon age and mass effect games are just kinda...non-existent anymore. there's just been too much Bad happening over at bioware for me to get excited even a little bit.