#dragon age gw

[mmigrainee]

Trade with @socialprawn 👁👁

[galedekarios]

🛡️⚔️🩸

[pausegame]

Idk if anyone else is as blind as me (or if screenshots are just too dark) but I edited companion rooms' light balance to get a clearer look. Sharing in case anyone else is as blind as me 🤝

[flowersforthemachines]

Remembered I talked about it under one post but never actually posted this here.

Here's a (rough) visualisation of how many times Rook's faction is referenced in conversations. Based on the pics, from most to least referenced it goes like this:

Grey Wardens > Mourn Watch > Antivan Crows > Shadow Dragons > Veil Jumpers > Lords of Fortune

[corvidous]

If GW had a dollar for every miniatures agnostic rulebook I had read...

...they'd still be trying to figure out ways to charge people more money for less plastic and make you pay for another codex again.

[trellanyx]

I finished the siege of Weisshaupt quest last night, and feel like BioWare did a really good job of selling how chaotic it was. I really felt how batshit overwhelmed everyone was, facing wave upon wave upon wave of Darkspawn from all sides, the booming taunt of Ghilan'nain in the sky and an Archdemon destroying every plan and hiding place as fast as the party could come up with them.

The closest comparison to this mission, ofc, is the assault on Adamant Fortress in DAI. But I never felt the characters’ desperation like I did during Weisshaupt. The relentless mantra of “keep moving, keep fighting, make it alive to just the next second, we have to try we have no choice”.

And because of the dialogue options I picked, it made me the most invested in my Rook that I’ve been for the entire game so far. I kept picking encouraging dialogue, and as the mission went on it really began to feel like she was straining, keeping a strong front because she’s the leader, it’s what she has to do, because if she doesn’t keep up a steady stream of “we’re gonna be okay, we’ll figure out plan B, C, D, don’t give up” then not only will she have failed her team when they need her most, but she herself will fall apart and be unable to do what comes next.

It’s Lucanis yelling, “how am I supposed to stab a cloud with a dagger?!” It’s Davrin saying the horns are calling reinforcements to the east battlements - “And where are we?!” “The east battlements!” - and the realization that the 3 of us fighting these Darkspawn alone are the reinforcements. It’s the dying screams of Wardens every few minutes, it’s the wall is gone the bell tower is gone the escape path is gone everyone is gone—

It’s Rook standing by the dragon trap, muttering, “And now I die.”

it’s also Lucanis’ EPIC move with the wings and dagger

This was the first time in Veilguard that I felt truly sucked into the story. If nothing else, I’m glad I got at least one moment like that.

[hceinarchive]

she needed a glow up, no tatts yet but hopefully..

[enchantrum]

Secrets of the Obscure is alright and all but am I the only one kinda miffed that they ripped off a lot of it from Dragon Age: Inquisition and didn't really add or change enough to be it's own unique thing?

even the rift hunting mechanic is Exactly The Same, because you Open the rift, then fight something then close it. the animation is almost 1-1 and even the eye in the rift looks like the Inquisition eye. if it wasn't for the fact that Even The Mechanic is the same I might not have noticed it so much, but the more I play the more blatant it feels

and then their wizard lore also just feels like how demons come out of the Fade in Dragon Age to possess mages. it's almost exact

disclaimer that I'm still enjoying it because it's fun and I like that we get to see Zojja again and have a better map for practicing skyscales for those who don't have one yet, but uh...this whole plot was stolen!

and yes I know there are certain fantasy tropes that re-occur in fantasy over and over, but this doesn't feel like that. it feels like the writers legit just snapped the base ideas from DAI and then barely added or changed anything to make it uniquely Guild Wars

imo it's definitely the weakest of all the packs

which is a shame because I LOVEDDDDD the intro. the whole sequence of having to defend yourself and run for your life was so ridiculously tense, I really felt like I was playing a horror game

but now I'm on Ep. 7 and all the potential feels wasted because I feel like I'm playing the underwritten fanfiction of another game that I already played 10 years ago and didn't like that much the first time

[triaelf9]

Also, side thought, wonder if anyone's done an AU where the Inquisitor falls for an unromanced Morrigan through DAI and they're just bopping around in the crossroads through datv being badass girlfriends & a power couple XD B/c it's UNFAIR how hot Morrigan gets each game >_<

[bingqiuhateabortion]

I think i got too invested in this idea. Separate pics below 👇

Idk if I'll draw the rest but maybe i will sketch them at some point. But if i will idk if i should draw fengqing or JW next so...

[thievinghippo]

The exact moment Davrin thinks 'you have my attention'

I have a feeling I'm going to really like this romance!

[galedekarios]

an old warden that was avoiding the calling.

opening the art book to be immediately directly attacked by bioware >-Io

[crescent--moons]

Meet: Ansel Thorne - My canon Rook

At work: Fierce leader and pyromancer - Darkspawn hear boss music when nearby

At home: Absolute awkward fool in love - Promises his dwarf wife her sunlight back

[vulpixelates]

this post still gaining notes post-veilguard-release... pain. suffering. despair.

i will say, while i wasn't a huge fan of the content of backstories available in veilguard, i did like the way they sprinkled choices about your character's past and personality throughout. also the faction leaders responding differently to a rook from their faction was cool, even if sometimes it was uh. a little lacking in my experience having only really played LOF. 😅 it didn't make up for playable origins but it was a nice detail.

i know it will never happen but i so desperately desire an origins-type playable backstory thing in all games but especially veilguard. i feel like it added so much depth to origins and made you feel instantly connected to your character in a way that gets lost in games like inquisition where you fill in the blanks as you go except for the bare basics. like, i do enjoy the freedom to willy nilly decide where a character was before the events of the story from a creative perspective, but the playable origins were just so good! especially when you go back to where your warden is from and can engage differently with the arcs there

[pausegame]

Replaying Inquisition like going downstairs to my fancy cellar, getting out the new bottle from 1992. Sitting down for a special weekend of evenings in front of fire like the head of the household. Exquisite 🍷

[soraka-in-warhammer40k]

I'm always fascinated when someone at the club rants about "how they just invented T'au to cash on them anime weebs", completly oblivious to the time and culture of their creation. So T'au came out first in 2001, and were obviously conceptualized some years prior, which puts them into the late 90s in their original design. This is slowly hitting "the majority of the populance has no relevant internet access whatsoever" levels of "barbaric analog ages".

So imagine where GW sits in the late 90s - its a small studio somewhere in England barely coming to touch with the first elements of the internet, with the most dominant medium being television which... is not really about "exotic" shows from the other end of the world? Those get ported over when they have proven to be a hit in their own country mostly.

And without the internet as we know it today, the anime community just... did not exist. You have to understand that the whole concept of online anime culture centred around piracy, fansubs, fanart, and the creation of the term "weeabo" was a mid-to-late 00s thing, and it took almost another decade before "weeb" was somewhat reclaimed and no longer an online-slur.

There was a whole generation that grew up with (often horribly localized) japanese shows on TV (Pokemon, Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon) which came over with some delay to their release in Japan. By the time this generation came to congregate into online spaces and form any sort of fan-identity and culture, the T'au and their battlesuits had already been a design over a decade old.

"But wait isn't Gundam from the 70s"? Yes, that is totally correct. However, this is the one glaring mistake people make: you cannot compare modern day media content circulation around the globe to the analog ages. Those of us who remember these barbaric analog times know how it was: you just did not know stuff existed. If it was not in the newspaper or on the telly, it might as well not exist unless you knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy.

Sure, the Internet was slowly becoming a thing that found widespread use, but it would still take a while - not to mention the technical limitations. No streaming episodes. You start the download (if you can find someone who hosted the file of a series you had to know even existed first) somewhere around lunch, to hopefully get something to watch in the afternoon. Oh and also that blocked the household's phone-line and if the download cancelled for whatever reason then it was back to square one. Under such conditions, the online community we know today could simply not exist, as the alternative was importing stuff from the other end of the world for quite the money, or hoping a really shoddy localized VCR-tape ended up at your Blockbuster-equivalent.

Of course there was anime before that time, even those regarded absolute classics in the west, but those mostly achieved that rank over here in retrospective. When in the late 00s people wanted to watch stuff and had the ability to do so they shared what was considered "the classics" first (shared to the best of their ability with one episode cut into 5 parts on youtube with sometimes very questionable subtitles).

So even if we assume there was someone at GW in the 90s who was a total "proto-weeb" and Gudam-fan, there was literally no reason to "make knock-off Gundams" because the miniscule western wargaming audience SIMPLY DID NOT KNOW THE STUFF.

You can't make a marketing ploy to reference something your average consumers have never heard off. If anything, the creation of the T'au as a robotic-centred faction was inevitable: they needed a design that could hold their own in the setting, but Necrons hogged the full-robot niche, Imperials were weird cyborgs, Orks the "madman-scrap-tech", and Nids the "biotech". The only thing left here was "not full robot but also very clean and efficient" - and just like that, the Battlesuits and Drones were born.

It was only in later years when the Internet had come into full swing where they decided to go full-suit with releases such as the Riptide, but if we talk about the OG design of T'au and the first decade? Nothing to do with anime or "fishing for weebs". The fish would not be coming to that spot for almost a decade, and it would take a bit more before their numbers were plentyful enough to make it worth casting a line out.