#i wish they’d just let Bioware do their thing

[rookinthecrownest]

I think the thing that Gets Me about Veilguard is just how much of an impossible task it had heaped on it from EA from the start of its inception.

It’s arguably supposed to be a soft reboot for the series while ALSO being a follow up to Inquisition. These are two fundamentally incompatible goals in my opinion. This game had to walk the most insane line of any video game in recent memory. I guess EA wanted to have their cake and eat it too.

And the more I think about it the sadder I become for the original team who worked on Joplin. From what I’ve seen of the art book, Joplin was going to be about as firm a sequel to DAI as you could get - with references to rescuing whoever was left in the Fade, having Calpernia and Imshael as companions, having to fight Solas’ agents, etc.

Then EA makes them scrap it for live service. Fine. But wait - now we’re scrapping it again. Back to single person RPG but you also kind of need to distance yourself from the previous games as much as possible while still somehow being a follow up to the previous game.

New setting, few returning companions, and new Big Bads in the form of Elgarnan and Ghilanain to get a clean slate. Any mention of what’s happening in the South (where we spent 3 whole games!) needs to be relegated to letters and codex. ** I dont have the art book yet, so I dont know if these two were supposed to appear in Joplin beside Solas - or if Solas was supposed to be the sole antagonist in that iteration of the game.

But.. I hope you see what I mean when I say this game had a monumentally, borderline impossible task ahead of it. And when I think of it that way, I think it did as good a job as it possibly could. Especially since the actual development time was closer to 3ish yrs to get what we know of as datv today even though it’s been 10 whole years since DAI.

I hope it’s successful enough to get DA5, but who know’s what’ll happen.

I wish everyone except the EA execs who meddled with this game’s development and are seemingly trying to kill dragon age a pleasant day. I have a cynical detective I need to romance 😔

[felassan]

Some DA trivia and dev commentary from Twitter

There’s a lot of different tweets, so I’m just pasting and linking to the source rather than screencapping them all or making several different posts or something. Post under cut for length.

User: Was dragon age 2 your favourite in the franchise?

David Gaider: DA2 was the project where my writing team was firing on all cylinders, and they wrote like the wind- because they had to! Second draft? Pfft. Plot reviews? Pfft. I was so proud of what we all accomplished in such a brief time. I didn't think it was possible. [source] DA2 is, however, also where the goal posts kept moving. Things kept getting cut, even while we worked. I had to write that dialogue where Orsino turned even if you sided with him, because his boss battle had been cut and there was no time to fix the plot. A real WTF moment. >:( [source]

Mike Rousseau: I remember bugging that! And then being told it wasn't a bug, and being so confused. Doing QA for DA2 was an experience. Trial by fire. [source]

DG: So I think it's safe to say DA2 is my favorite entry in the DA franchise and also the sort of thing I never want to live through ever again. Mixed feelings galore. [source]

User: (I personally blame whoever it was for ruining most romance arcs in other games for me; they don't live up to Fenris's romance storyline)

DG: I wrote Fenris, so uh - me, I guess? Or maybe his cinematic designer, who put in the puppy dog eyes. [source]

User: If DA2 had just been an expansion, do you think it would have been better received? There was a lot of great stuff in there, and I think my initial dislike of it was because of the zone reuse. If it hadn't needed to be a full game, would that issue not have arisen?

DG: Hard to say. It was either going to be an over-scoped expansion or an under-scoped sequel. If it had stayed an expansion, it might never have received the resources/push it DID get. [source]

User: I'd love to visit the universe where you had an extra year or so to work on it. You did a very good job as it stands, but it definitely had rough edges. Not just the writing team either. The whole game had hit and miss moments, that just a little more dev time could have fixed.

DG: On one hand, DA2 existed to fill a hole in the release schedule. More time was never in the cards. DA2 was originally planned as an expansion! On the other, if we had more time, would we have started doing that thing where we second guess/iterate ourselves into mediocrity? [shrug emoji] [source] 

Jennifer Hepler: This is what I love about DA2. Personally, I greatly prefer something that's rough and raw and sincere to something that's had all the soul polished out of it. Extra time would have helped for art and levels, but it would have lost something too. [source]

DG: Right? I think we could have used some time for peer reviews (and fewer cuts), but I think the rawness of the writing lent a certain spark that we usually polished out. [source]

JH: Definitely. I think the structure (more character-driven) and the tightness of the timeframe let each individual writer's voice really come through. Polish can be very homogenizing. [source]

DG: I should add I'm not, by any means, against iteration. Some iteration is good and necessary. The problem that BioWare often had is that we never knew when to stop. Like a goldfish, we would fill the space given to us by constantly re-iterating on things that were "good enough". [source]

Patrick Weekes: I appreciate your incredibly diplomatic use of the past tense on "had". :D [source]

User: DA2 was my gateway into the series and I’m so happy it is. I love the game the way that it is. It’s one of my favorites of all time. But I am also aware of everything that was said here. If it were remastered, do you think it would change?

DG: I'd be surprised if it was ever remastered. If it was, do you really think they'd change things? Do remasters do that? No idea. [source]

User: Both sides got undercut as I recall. Didn't that whole sequence also end with the mage leader embracing blood magic? It was very much "a plague on both your houses" moment, at least for me.

DG: Yep. Orsino was supposed to have his own version of Meredith's end battle, which only happened if you sided with the templars. That got cut, but the team still wanted to use the model we'd made for him. So... that happened. [source]

DG: I would personally say that DA2 is a fantastic game hidden under a mountain of compromises, cut corners, and tight deadlines. If you can see past all that, you'll see a fantastic game. I don't doubt, however, that it's very difficult for most to do that. [source]

PW: I love DAI with all my selfish "I worked on this" heart, but DA2's follower arcs and relationships are probably my favorite in the series. [source]

User: As I've expressed many times, I love the game, especially it's writing and characters but, for me, the most impressive aspect of it, in consideration of it's lack of time for drafts and revisions, is the 2nd act with Arishok.  What amazingly complex character and fantastic duel

User: Just played it again and I have to agree. Though he is bound by the harsher tenants of the Qun, he makes valid points about free marcher society. Though it is obvious that he and Hawke will come to blows eventually, the tension builds gradually and understandably

DG: Luke did such a fantastic job with the Arishok I found myself sometimes wishing the Qunari plot had just been THE plot. [source]

User: What do you think would have changed, story wise, if you had more time for DA2?

DG: I would have taken out that thing where Meredith gets the idol. It was forced on me because she needed to be "super-powered" with red lyrium for her final battle. Being "crazy", however, robbed her side of the mage/templar argument of any legitimacy. I hated hated hated that. [source]

User: I deeply lament that there wasn't/couldn't be some sort of DA2 equivalent of Throne of Bhaal's Ascension mod.

DG: I'd have done it, if DA2 had allowed for anything but the most rudimentary of modding. ;) [source]

User: I mean, and I think I understand where you were trying, but how much legitimacy did the Templars and her as top Templar have after they're keeping the mages locked up against their will in the old slave quarters? Feel free to not reply.

DG: I think it's the kind of discussion which requires nuance, and which discussions on the Internet are not prone to. [source]

User: Was a compromise that the quest lines don’t branch? It felt like it was supposed to be that way but then you end up in the same place later regardless of what you pick. Like I hoodwinked the templars so good to help the apostates escape but in Act II they were caught anyway.

DG: I remember us having a lot more branching in the initial planning yes. Most of this got trimmed out in the first or second wave of cuts, in an effort to not cut the plots altogether. [source]

DG: "If you could Zack Snyder DA2, what would you change?" Wow. I'm willing to bet Mark or Mike (or anyone else on the team) would give very different answers than me, but it's enough to give a sober man pause, because that was THE Project of Multiple Regrets. [source] I mean, it's the most hypothetical of hypotheticals. It's never gonna happen. I wouldn't be surprised if EA considered DA2 its embarrassing red-headed stepchild. We'd also need to ignore that in many ways DA2 was as good as it was bad BECAUSE of how it was made. But that aside? [source] First, either restore the progressive changes to Kirkwall we'd planned over the passing of in-game years or reduce the time between acts to months instead of years... which, in hindsight, probably should have been done as soon as the progressive stuff was cut. [source] I'm sure you're like "get rid of repeated levels!" ...but I don't care about that. All I wanted was for Kirkwall to feel like a bigger city. Way more crowded. More alive! Fewer blood mages. [source] I'd want to restore the plot where a mage Hawke came THIS close to becoming an abomination. An entire story spent trapped in one's own head while trapped on the edge of possession. Why? Because Hawke is the only mage who apparently never struggles with this. It was a hard cut. [source]

User: I would LOVE to hear more details about this! I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a short story?

DG: I don't even remember the details of the story, sorry. There was a fight, and you caught the bad guy and then realized none of it was real and woke up idk [source]

DG: I'd want to restore all those alternate lines we cut, meaning people forget they'd met you. Or that they knew you were a mage. Or, oh god, that maybe they'd romanced you in DAO. So much carnage. [source] I'd want to restore the Act 3 plots we cut only because they were worked on too late, but which would have made the buildup to the mage/templar clash less sudden. Though I don't remember what they were, now. Some never got beyond being index cards posted on the wall. [grimace emoji] [source] As I mentioned elsewhere, I'd want to restore Orsino's end battle so he wouldn't need to turn on you even if you sided with him. And I'd want an end fight with the templars that didn't require Meredith to have red lyrium and go full Tetsuo. [source] Heck, maybe an end decision where you sided with neither the mages nor the templars. Because it certainly ended up feeling like you could brand both sides as batshit pretty legitimately, no? That was never planned, tho. No idea how to make that feel like an actual path atm. [source] Maybe an option to go "umm, Anders... what are you DOING?" 👀 [source] And, of course, a Varric romance, because Mary took that "slimy car salesman" character we'd planned and did the impossible with him. I can feel Mary glaring at me for even suggesting this, tho. [source] Lastly, the original expanded opening to the game which allowed you to spend time with Bethany and Carver BEFORE the darkspawn attacked. And, um, that's about it off the top of my head. Zack Snyder, WHAT PANDORA'S BOX HAVE YOU OPENED. [source] Shit, I remembered two more things: 1) Restore the "Varric exaggerates the heck out of the story" at the beginning of every Act, until Cassandra calls him on it. Yes, that was a thing. 2) Make DA: Exodus. Yes, I am still bitter. [source] God damn it, I meant "Make DA: Exalted March". The DA2 expansion, NOT Exodus since that was DA2's original name and makes no sense. Because the expansion ended with Varric dying, and that will always be on my "things left undone" list. [source]

User: Whaaaat?

DG: Well, you know that scene in Wrath of Khan where Spock goes into the dilithium chamber because he's a Vulcan? Well, imagine that but with Varric and red lyrium and because he's a dwarf. ;) [source]

John Epler: I distinctly remember referencing the bit from MGS4 where you crawl through the microwave corridor in the split screen, while cinematic battle rages on the other half. [source]

DG: It would have been glorious, John. Glorious. [source]

JE: I don't think I've ever been so certain what a shot should look like as I did Hawke coming in and finding Varric in the broken throne, just like when he was telling Cassandra his story. [source]

DG: It would have come full circle! Auggghh, it still kills me. [source]

User: Lord, you folks are a little too good at this.

JE: The true secret behind videogame narrative is knowing how to make yourself seem a lot more clever than you actually are. [source] 'Oh, we TOTALLY planned that.' [source]

User: Ok, this thread [the DA2 regrets thread, which is the big chunks above] but Inquisition.

DG: My regrets about Inquisition are, more or less, the normal kind. Nothing so dramatic, I'm afraid. [source]

User: You can keep your Varric romance, I want a Flemeth romance goddamnit!

DG: I would allow for one flirt option, and then a recording of Kate Mulgrew laughing for three minutes straight. [source]

User: I had a hypothesis about the repetitive caves in DA2. They're repetitive because it's Varric telling the story and he didn't consider them important.  They're like sets in a play.  (Okay, I really suspect it was a time/money/resources thing but I like my fake explanation better.)

DG: Hang a lampshade on it, maybe? Cassandra: "But that's the exact cave you were in last time?" Varric: "Whatever. They all look the same, I'm not THAT kind of dwarf. Can we move on?" [source]

User: that makes sense, hypothetically to make Varric romanceable and keep his arc—that had to happen for the main plot—I imagine you would have to make double the content (or more)? which would've been a tall order given the time/budget constraints the game was under

DG: Right. When it comes to "romance arc" vs. "follower story arc", we generally only had time to do one or the other. Never both. Romancing Varric would have meant not getting the story of his that you did. [source]

Mary Kirby: The one exaggeration I really, REALLY wanted, that we never got to do was Varric narrating his own death scene with Hawke weeping over him, then cutting to Cassandra's pissed off glaring at him. [source]

DG: Haha! The one I wanted was Varric's plot where he takes on the baddies single-handedly, sliding across the floor like Jet Lee, action movie-style, until finally Cassandra gets irritated and he has to admit Hawke & the rest of the party showed up to help. [source]

MK: We did that one! (He didn't do any Jet Lee moves, though.) Jepler gave him letterboxing to get The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly showdown vibes while he shot a ton of mooks single-handed. [source]

DG: Wow. Shows how much I remember. [source]

JE: I found it! I remember seeing this sequence as my treat for doing a bunch of much more challenging work. It was fun to see how far I could push our limited library of animations. [link] [source]

DG: Heh awesome. I could have sworn it was cut, honestly. I think I was even in that meeting. [source]

User: no disrespect but that’s surprising and rich of Mary “Hard in Hightown” Kirby to think DA2 shouldn’t have had a Varric romance when she wrote an entire book of Varric’s self-insert character pining over his Hawke insert character… HIH is the reason we had VHawke Summer 2018

DG: I can't *really* speak for Mary, or how she feels about it now compared to back then. I only know how she felt about it back then, and I'm not sure it was as much the concept of the romance but that Varric's entire story would be bent to "romance arc" ...a very different thing. [source]

JH: I remember pushing to have the first DLC start with Hawke having an option to ask Varric, "Did you tell Cassandra about us?" and if you picked it, Varric would answer, "Of course not, baby. I told her you were sleeping with X..." and then proceed as if you had had a full romance. [source]

DG: I still wonder how that would have gone over. x) [source]

JE: Okay, one more DA2 thing. Putting together the cinematics for this scene was a blast. [link] [source]

MK: These lines are my greatest legacy. I want "Make sure the world knows I died... at Chateau Haine!" inscribed on my tombstone. [source]

JE: I was so glad no one said 'no' to the crane shot. [source]

MK: It needs that crane shot. It's the perfect icing on that cake made from solid cheese. [source]

DG: The designers were all "we need more combat" and I think we were all "I think you underestimate just HOW interesting we can make this dinner party". [source]

JE: And finally. I think @SherylChee wrote the one-liner. I think we had a collection of like, 20. [link] [source]

Sheryl Chee: Yeah! Something like that! I remember submitted a whole bunch and Frank said you only needed one. Wish I'd kept the other fifteen. [source]

JE: A random chooser where, each time through the scene, you get a different one-liner. [source]

JE: DA2 is the project I'm the proudest of. I also absolutely get that it didn't land for a lot of people. But I don't think it's inaccurate to say that, in a lot of ways, DA2 defined my career. [source]  Everyone spent a year working at their maximum ability. I was a fresh cinematic designer and was given all of Varric's content, as well as the Act 1 Finale mission. It was a lot for someone who had been doing the Cinematics thing for literally 6 months. [source]  There's some stuff in there I can't look at without wincing. And there's some stuff I'm genuinely proud of. Not to mention, it was my introduction to most of the writing team. Several of whom I'm still working with today! Albeit in a different capacity [source] Also, weirdly, one of my most enduring memories of Dragon Age 2 is how much Bad Company 2 we'd play at lunch. It was a LOT. [source] Every game I've worked on has a game I played attached to it. ME2 is Borderlands. DA2 is Bad Company 2. DAI is DayZ. I, hmm. There's a progression there. I don't know how I feel about it. [source]

User: Is DA4 going to be tarkov then?

JE: I've kind of churned out of Tarkov for now. Probably Hunt Showdown, at least right now. [source]

User: I think people also don't take nuance into consideration -- like I FULLY acknowledge the flaws in my favorite games and will openly criticize them, but that doesn't mean they're not my favorite games anymore??? You can like and thing and still be critical of it.

JE: A lot of my favourite shit is deeply flawed! I acknowledge it and I think it's interesting to dissect the flaws. [source]

User: I still wish Justice was an actual character in DA2 rather than a plot point.

DG: There was a moment during DAI where we *almost* put in you running into Justice with the Grey Wardens, and he's all "Kirkwall? I never went to Kirkwall" [source]

User: Does that imply that Justice was shoehorned in to DA2?

DG: Nah, it was an in-joke where we thought it'd be fun to suggest that "Justice" was simply some demon that tricked Anders in DA2. Wooo those tricky demons! We didn't do it, though. [source]

User: [about templars]  except, I don't think it had very much legitimacy to begin with. keep in mind, we interact with other characters with the same argument. The one that comes to mind is Cullen, a sane templar in power. The templar's side of the argument is inherently flawed.

DG: I don't doubt that many people agree with you, and yet people can and do argue on behalf of the templars as well. My place isn't to pick a side, but to provide evidence that players can interpret for themselves [source]

User: Can you shed some light for us on how DA was able to do multiple same-sex romance options for different genders but the Mass Effect team treated them like the plague? What process existed for your team that just wasn't their for the other tentpole franchise?

DG: Different people making the decisions, almost different cultures. I don't know what it's like now, but for many years the Mass Effect team and the Dragon Age team were almost like two different studios working within the same building. [source]

User: It truly boggles the mind. Kudos for doing demonstrably better on consistent queer representation than the ME teams. Y'all never needed us to make petitions to try to get the studio's attention and ask them to do better by us. That's the fight we're once again embroiled in now.

DG: Honestly, I don't feel like tut-tutting the Mass Effect team. They did their part, and if they were a bit later to the show than the DA team they certainly did more than almost every other game out there -- and willingly. [source]

Updates begin here

User: So what was the reason for naming Dragon age 2 "Dragon age II" and not using a subtitle?

DG: As I recall, that was purely a publisher decision. I think they wanted to avoid the impression it was an expansion. [source]

User: Is there no chance of ever remaking DA2 under better circumstances? -Somehow remove the repetitiveness of gameplay by making changes and updating the tech and adding much more to the storyline. It could almost be a new very exciting game.

DG: I'd say there's zero chance of that. Let's keep our hopes up for the next DA title instead. [source]

User: I am a little confused here, help me out here please! How exactly was the cut boss battle with Orsino supposed to work out? How it would've kept him from turning against the player?

DG: It means that, if you sided with the templars, the entire boss bottle at the end would have been against Orsino and the mages. No fight against Meredith. The end decision would have been more divergent. [source]

User: I do remember that one of the reasons going around for that, was that resources were going to the transition to Frostbite. I'm still not fully sold on that having been a good choice. I felt that more time should have been given for that transition considering it was made for FPSs

DG: We didn't transition to Frostbite until DAI. Given our time frame for DA2, I don't think we *could* have transitioned to a new engine. [source]

User: Since your talking about the what could have been for DA2. Could you say what your script was for Anthem? Cause I remember reading that you wrote the plot on that game.

DG: I created a setting for Anthem and scripted out a plot - but, as I understand it, almost none of that ended up being used. So it's a bit pointless to talk about what I'd planned, as that'd be for some completely different type of game. [source]

User: [in reference to the exchange above where DG said “Being "crazy", however, robbed her side of the mage/templar argument of any legitimacy. I hated hated hated that.” re: Meredith] except, I don't think it had very much legitimacy to begin with. keep in mind, we interact with other characters with the same argument. The one that comes to mind is Cullen, a sane templar in power. The templar's side of the argument is inherently flawed.

DG: I don't doubt that many people agree with you, and yet people can and do argue on behalf of the templars as well. My place isn't to pick a side, but to provide evidence that players can interpret for themselves. [source]

If I missed a tweet, got the wrong source link or included a tweet twice, feel free to let me know and I’ll correct.

Edit / Update: Post update 22nd April

[queen-scribbles]

🖊🖊🖊

You get some of my SWtOR girls; two of them things I’ve been sitting on for a while, and then the new blueberry Jedi, Endrali

So, the first two are semi-related and I’m just gonna sorta do them together. Vica(Jedi Consular) and Khii(Smuggler) both made the opposite choice from what people might expect given their classes and backgrounds when presented the option of Odessen joining the Republic at the end of Onslaught. Vica stayed independent, and Khii joined. (I may have mentioned one or both of those in passing before, but I need to ramble about motivation and that decision as part of their character arcs.)

🖊  That was a really great character moment for Vica. Honestly, the only thing that was on par or bigger was when she started pursuing a relationship with Theron, and I feel like it’s an even bigger deal for her than completing Echoes will be. See, she’s always been the quintessential Perfect Jedi. Humble, kind, self-sacrificing to a literal fault, follows all the rules bc they must be there for a reason.Helpful, sweet, serene, etc etc. She was actually a perfect fit to be my first run through the Consular story, and my “no DS points” toon. The Jedi were her life. She was found to be Force Sensitive at a very young age and whisked away from her parents early enough she doesn’t even truly remember them (doesn’t even know she has a younger sister *cough* Bry *cough* until after founding the Alliance  >.>). So she, of course, happily did the self-sacrificing thing to save all the Masters in Act 1. It was her duty; a Jedi’s life is sacrifice, she’s the only one who can do this, she can Save Everyone, no matter what it cost her(sidenote: I really wish they would do something mechanic-wise for the whole “you getting weaker” thing as you shield people).  Her views start shifting in Act 2, when she gets to Balmorra, for two reasons:

her massive crush on Tai Cordan that has her questioning the whole “no falling in love” thing even as she tries to ignore her feelings into nonexistence, despite the fact he’s idealistic and kind and driven and a whole host of good, attractive things and she can’t. stop. THINKING about him. It doesn’t go anywhere since BioWare won’t let you flir- I mean, since they both have Responsibilities and she’s trying to be a Good Jedi, which means no attachments like that. 

Zenith. The two of them become extremely good friends, even if they seem like polar opposites, and he challenges a lot of the stuff the Jedi spent roughly twenty years drumming into her head, really makes her think about and defend what she believes and why. Some things she’s not budging on; like showing mercy and giving second chances, so they butt heads sometimes still, but they’re unflinchingly loyal to each other and 100% trust each other to watch their backs. (Zenith saying he trusted her felt as much like a victory as completing a romance) He’s the one who really made her start wondering if there was a way to balance her own needs and desires with serving the needs and desires of the Republic and Jedi Council and the Rift Alliance. 

She spent the rest of the base game working things out for herself, which means she missed Iresso’s romance, and honestly still feels conflicted about being  “selfish” all the way up until the Shadow of Revan prelude stuff, where she meets Theron and goes “OhNO” bc if she thought her crush on Tai was bad, the way her heart sticks in her throat and her words get all jumbled up now are so much worse. And she decides to be selfish for once in her life and thus Theron is the first time she lets herself want something(someone) and actually pursue it, instead of burying the feelings until they go away. (There’s a reason the traitor arc hits much, much harder for her than it did Jaaide, and this is a big part of it)

She finds it a.... tricky but worthwhile balancing act--even if she is a terribly inexperienced flirt, sorry, Theron--to show interest in someone and still mostly be a Good Jedi.But it works. And it makes her happy and the galaxy doesn’t come to a screeching halt, so it’s okay, right? 

Over the following years(at least, the ones she’s not frozen in carbonite thanks, Arcann), she also develops her skills at being a leader, not just a diplomat or Jedi, actually a leader. She gets the hang of making decisions not based solely on what the Jedi Code or teachings say, because sometimes they don’t help(sometimes they make things worse), how to run something like the Alliance where everyone is looking to her. And sure, Theron and Lana are a big help and do their share of the work(and then some, on occasion), but she is the Leader. The Commander. And she is proud, in the proud-parent sense, of what they build, and what they endure. And much as being a Jedi still means to her, when given the chance to rejoin the Order and tie Odessen to the Republic she served for so long, she finds she likes the idea of being an independent ally more. She likes being her own person, just with Jedi values as part of her moral code. She likes having that independence and not having to abide by rules and decisions she didn’t help make. (she likes waking up next to her husband every morning, his fingers running over her tattoos, as both of them wonder how they got so kriffing lucky) It was definitely a defining character moment for her that she said no to the Chancellor’s offer. I was honestly sort of proud of her; she was my fourth toon through Onslaught and I thought she’d want to rejoin. But she went “Nah, that’s not me anymore” and it made my day. (nothing against the Jedi or the Republic; I just love it when my characters develop and grow and do unexpected things)

🖊 And Khii. Khii was the opposite; she grew up on Nar Shadda, with no parents after age six. She doesn’t even know if they abandoned her or were killed or what; just that they left one day and never came back. So she got thrown into the life of a street orphan and had to take care of herself. No family, no home, no knowing who she could trust. Not daring to get attached to anyone bc you never knew when a gangster would decide you looked at them funny, or someone would OD or a slaver would come though... there was a long list of ways to lose friends. Better not to have any to start with.  Over the course of the base game, the Republic started to feel like a home. An imperfect one, sure, but better than where she came from. And she got attached. Her crew is her family, Bowdaar is her wing Wookiee, and she’s actually pretty happy with the privateer gig. Girl does what she has to to survive, and a steady paycheck from one of the biggest powers in the galaxy is a pretty solid way to do that. (Darmas and Dodonna’s betrayal really stung for her. She’s my only Smug so far who actually killed Darmas bc she was so darn pissed at him. Also, she never liked him. Wanted to shoot him any time he hit on her.). So, of course, much as the Alliance also feels like a home and a family by this point, she really liked the sense of belonging she had as a Republic Privateer and she likes the idea of funding help, so she was saying “sign me up” almost before Chancellor Rans finished talking. 

🖊 For Endrali, since she’s only just landed on Coruscant, we’re going with pregame backstory. SO. She’s a child of the Sabosen family (Sabosen’dra’listral for her full name), who are responsible for social aspects like justice and education among the Ascendency in Legends canon. Given the Chiss views on the Force, it was something of a problem for her family when two year old Endrali started making her toys float just by wiggling her fingers. Her parents are both highly placed in their fields, and having a Force sensitive child would be damaging to an extent they weren’t sure they could weather. They managed to hide her away with excuses about being a sickly child until she was four. At that point, her powers were strong enough they couldn’t hide her anymore, and whispers and rumors were starting as to what could be wrong with this child that no one had seen her in two years, and they knew they’d have to give a more satisfactory answer soon.

Her father was.... acquainted with a trader who occasionally visited the fringes of Chiss space, but was not Chiss himself. He happened to come through as they were deciding their course of action, and so Endrali’s parents gave her to this trader, told him to find her a home somewhere outside Chiss space, and paid him handsomely for the trouble. They told any who inquired that Endrali had succumbed to her illness and they were devastated by the loss of their child(which they were; they did love her, they just knew if she stayed it would be death or exile for her and shame for them). 

The trader actually kept his word. His first stop was Coruscant, where a Jedi sensed how strong Endrali is with the Force and persuaded the trader to let her take this little Chiss girl for Jedi training. It fulfilled his goal, and Jedi are trustworthy, so the trader agreed rather easily. Endrali’s parents had given him some of her things, which he passed on to the Jedi--including documentation with both her full name and her core name, and a note insisting whoever adopted her never let her come “home”.Those records went in an archive somewhere and were essentially forgotten. She was introduced as Endrali, raised as Endrali, happy as Endrali. The Jedi are her family, and she is content. 

[theseerasures]

Conspicuous Media Consumption, 2020

it’s that time of year again! *saddest toot from the party horn*

for those of you just joining us: it’s a “consume a different content every week for 48 weeks of the year” challenge. for a longer explanation, check out last year’s write-up here, and as always, feel free to pop in and ask questions about any and all of this content.

(same disclaimer as last year too: content for this project ONLY here, and not certain...*looks at my billion Sad Cop Lady posts*...hyperfixations.)

(man remember when i was big into X-Men comics earlier this year? better times than these, if only because no one's discoursing about Emma Frost’s woobie/war criminal ratio anymore--her w/w, if you will)

(...i swear at one point i didn’t exclusively like platinum blondes but alas)

Bitter Root (comic, 1 issue finished 1/1/2020): still very cool on a basic concept level, but runs into the Image Comics problem of just not having enough content to keep my interest beyond that. part of that is on me, for picking it up again BEFORE the second arc rolled out, but the first five issues didn’t really follow (or resolve) any cohesive story either, so...meh.

Immortal Hulk (comic, 3 trades finished 1/17/2020): still not gonna be something i care deeply about (maybe one of Bruce’s Hulksonas dyed his hair???), but i do want to give kudos to Al Ewing for sheer consistency in terms of sustaining this level of quality storytelling month by month for more than two years now. working with the dense archive of the Hulk mythos and managing to make it interesting and thoughtful is impressive even if i personally would not expend the same effort.

Disco Elysium (game, finished 1/18/2020): honestly i should have twigged onto what this year was gonna be like when the third thing i drew from the barrel was pure uncut Eastern European flavored depression. i faintly recall people ragging on it for being pretentiously cynical, but i actually thought its core slid more towards idealism than people give it credit for. also gratified that i haven’t heard anything about Robert Kurvitz using slave labor to finish it, which is a thing we have to say about our video games now!!! fun.

Watchmen (TV, 7 episodes finished 1/27/2020): i am a fool who wants to believe in Damon Lindelof and I WAS RIGHT!!! honestly still cannot believe that he pulled off this highwire act with such deft aplomb. might be my favorite TV this year, which is a pretty high bar given how much TV i ended up watching.

On a Sunbeam (comic, finished 2/1/2020): Tillie Walden rightly deserves all the praise for inventive queer storytelling, but i will say that on reread--since i first read this as a webcomic--there ARE some issues with pacing here that clearly come from the foibles of its original intended medium. still just excellent, even if after some plot significant haircuts i was having trouble telling a few folks apart.

Lazarus (comic, 1 trade finished 2/8/2020): it’s so good and i want moooooorrrreee--though obviously Rucka and Lark have the right to take all the time they need. the newer longer issues work really well with the epic prestige drama vibes of the story! i’m into it.

The Good Place (TV, 4 seasons finished 2/18/2020): i’m gonna be super honest: i actually wasn’t a big fan of the finale, nor the last season as a whole. it felt like all of Eleanor’s flaws vanished for a majority of the season, and the Chidi-centric episode where they tried to give a legible justification for why he’s Like This was...i didn’t care for it. still, it’s so good and unique on the WHOLE that we’ll literally never get anything like this ever again, and that counts for a lot.

The Old Republic (game, finished 2/21/2020): it’s an MMO so it will never actually Be Finished so long as the servers aren’t shut down, but i caught up on the content i’d missed in the intervening months. Onslaught thus far has mostly been...kinda bland tbh; going back to Imps vs. Rebs after all the shakeups in the previous expansions feels like a waste.

High Road (album, finished 2/22/2020): someone should tell Kesha not to say that word!! otherwise i was very happy with this album, and happy FOR her even though we don’t know each other. being able to find joy again in the same genre of music you made while you were being horrifically exploited is very cool.

Young Justice (TV, 13 episodes finished 2/28/2020): given how much the middle stuff dragged--STOP KILLING YOUR HIJABI CHARACTER IN HORRIFIC WAYS--i was...actually kinda mad by how the end managed to stick the landing anyway. the day being saved by Vic’s self-acceptance and Violet’s sublime compassion was A+, and even the Brion/Tara switchup was a pleasant surprise, though it relied on me caring about Brion MUCH MORE than i actually did.

Manic (album, finished 2/29/2020): do people still care for/about Halsey? i feel like even That One Song that was on every tumblr gifset ever has kinda faded into obscurity at this point. this album was...okay. i feel like people give Halsey a pass for extremely obvious lyrical turns that they wouldn’t for other folks because of her subject material--which is fine. not really my cup of tea, but i also listened to lots of Relient K this year, so that’s probably a good thing.

Jade Empire (game, 3/10/2020): the only 3D-era Bioware game that didn’t franchise out, and for good fucking reason!!! the Orientalism and appropriation really haven’t aged well, and even beyond that the story was...standard Bioware faire. even my usual “my wife’s a bitch i love her” Bioware type didn’t do it for me, and i just ended up romancing no one. it did make me think a lot about what level of cultural borrowing is accepted nowadays, and why: people still look fondly at Avatar and talk about how ~accurate and respectful it was, for example, despite it being staffed almost entirely by white folks, and the Orientalism ALL OVER the monk class in DND is still fine for some reason.

Alif the Unseen (book, finished 3/31/2020): interesting to have read this AFTER reading The Bird King last year, because it highlights how the intervening years have shifted G. Willow Wilson’s thematic interest and improved her craft. i’m actually quite fond of how her characterization work is rougher here--Alif is extremely flawed to the point of being insufferable, but it makes his development by the end more satisfying. Dina is also just good and i love her

Baldur’s Gate (2 games, finished 5/31/2020): well, having finally finished the series i’m happy to say that it...still doesn’t really do it for me, sorry. any awesome story moments were overshadowed by the EXCRUCIATING inventory management system and the combat (i still don’t know what a THAC0 is and at this point i’m afraid to find out). these games crucially lack the Home Base that later Bioware games were so good about, and that (coupled with the huge cast of characters you can drop off and never see again) really hurts the intimacy for me. by the time we finally did get one it was the Hell Dimension in Throne of Bhaal, and i was just...trying to get through it. (yes, i did just say that about one of the most beloved expansions ever to one of the most beloved games ever.) THIS particular iteration of “my wife’s a bitch i love her” was very good, but the game wouldn’t let me romance her :(

The Underground Railroad (book, finished 6/19/2020): honestly what is there even left to say at this point! it was exactly as good as every critic on the planet said it was, even with my usual aversion to hype. draining and horrifying in turns but still insistent upon a future for Black folks.

Steven Universe (6 seasons and a mooooooviiieeee, finished 7/11/2020): yes, i DID finish the show and almost immediately begin a rewatch. this series is now one of my top five most formative things, and the amount of love and respect i have for it is incalculable. that said: i once again did not love how the central conflict of Future was resolved (just the resolution--i loved the finale just fine). for all of Steven’s breakdown was built up, resolving it with “EVERYONE HUG HIM UNTIL HE CRIES” felt...cheap, especially since up until this point the show had been so good about treating trauma and mental illness with the respect and nuance it deserves. it made me wish some of the earlier, less substantial episodes had been cut so we could spend more time at the end.

What It Is (comic, finished 8/19/2020): y’all i love Lynda Barry SO MUCH. for the longest time i was worried that One Hundred Demons was more a lightning in a bottle situation but every book of hers i pick up makes me feel obscure emotions i didn’t even realize existed. the compassionate way she’s able to describe her child self and how weird and fucked up she was (and still is) is honestly aspirational.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (TV, 5 seasons finished 9/26/2020): so here’s a reversal of what i’ve been complaining about with other shows: i was mostly lukewarm-to-warm about She-Ra, but the later seasons and the finale made me much more into it as a whole. more shows should improve in stakes and overall quality as they age tbh!! i still don’t actively love Catradora (my sole quibble with season 5 actually has to do with the way Adora kept backsliding as a character to make certain Plot/Relationship things happen), but i’m very happy for them nonetheless. i can certainly appreciate a show that will go for High Feeling over tight plot. dark horse standout moments: trees growing everywhere proving that Perfuma Was Right, and Hordak and Adora seeing each other--that weirdly intimate moment of recognition.

Fetch the Bolt Cutters (album, finished 10/7/2020): again i find myself not having much to say that no one else has said. it’s good! once again love it when an artist reclaims something they’d attached with negative affect (anxiety, depression, disordered eating) for better and brighter things.

Solutions and Other Problems (comic, finished 10/25/2020): i was very into Allie Brosh’s ambition with this book, which feels weird to say but i stand by it. it’s cool to see an artist try to make a new medium work for them instead of just sticking to what already works. not all the experimentation was 100% effective, but it was still delightful and occasionally devastating to read, so.

Legend of Zelda (3 games: Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Link Between Worlds, finished 11/1/2020): this was the third time i’d played Ocarina of Time, which made it the nice, comforting groove i settled into before Majora’s Mask blatted me in the face. i’m not usually a completionist Zelda person because...the gameplay in Zelda is bad, do not at me it just is, but i really felt like i HAD to be one for Majora’s Mask since the whole point is to get attached to the banalities of the town. i’m sure nobody’s surprised that i loved it, even if it gave me an existential crisis about how life goes on in the game for NPCs when you’re not there to save them from it, and there’s not enough time to save them all all the time (also not a surprise to anyone: Romani and Cremia gave Personal Feelings). Link Between Worlds...bad. not like in a “this is a bad story by every measurable gauge” way, but i was already struggling with the 2D playstyle shift enough that for the whole story to end with some “yes it’s v sad that Lorule is Like This but trying to steal Hyrule’s privilege is Even Worse Actually” noblesse oblige bullshit left a VERY poor taste in my mouth, this year of all years. i did audibly gasp when Ravio took off his mask, though. i’m currently playing Breath of the Wild in cautious increments; it’s the first time i’ve enjoyed early Zelda gameplay, but if they wanted fully voiced cutscenes i wish they got voice actors who...knew what words sound like.

folklore (album, finished 11/6/2020): my belief that Taylor Swift is Just Fine continues, i’m afraid. i LIKED this album, don’t get me wrong, and respect her constant drive to innovate, but i didn’t love it substantially more or less than any other Taylor Swift album. mostly i’m just tickled by how she thinks leaning into the indie aesthetic means borrowing Vita Sackville-West’s entire wardrobe, though i will admit to feeling Something when she swore in a song. i think it was like. savage vindication?? you go ahead and swear, Taylor Swift. you deserve it.

Shore (album, finished 11/19/2020): do people still care about the Fleet Foxes? i think there was some Drama with Josh Tillman a while back but i don’t remember where the discourse landed with who was being more problematic. it was nostalgic for me to listen to their new album--made me remember being an undergrad who exclusively listened to men who mumbled and played acoustic guitar all over again.

Star Wars (3 movies: original trilogy, finished 11/27/2020): there is So Much bad Star Wars these days that every time i rewatch the original trilogy i’m afraid that they will suddenly be bad, but guess what! they’re not. i love these children and their hot mess stories, i love that Lando doesn’t know how to say his best friend’s name. what stood out to me this time was the way Obi-Wan described the Force in A New Hope, which strongly implied that ANYONE can be Force Sensitive; that obviously faded with each subsequent movie, but part of me does wish they’d kept it.

X of Swords (comics, 22 issues finished 12/5/2020): i am enjoying Hickman’s X-lines!!! not so much here for the Grand Conspiracy or whatever, but the character work and highkey weirdness is fabulous--they FEEL like X-Men, despite all the shakeups in-universe. this crossover is a nice microcosm of all that: grandiloquently all over the place, but still full of cool standout moments and genuine hilarity. ILLYANA DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO SPELL MAGIC.

Fire Emblem (4 games: Sacred Stones, Path of Radiance, Radiant Dawn, Awakening, finished 12/14/2020): this was the thing that i was closest to giving up early on, but i ended up hyperfixating on it instead. that’s a credit to what the gameplay does to my lizard brain more than anything else, because the story and character writing is...insipid. it was very bizarre to witness this franchise blunder around with its animal-people racism allegory around the same time i was getting back into RWBY, and ITS animal-people racism allegory blunders. Awakening was the first time i felt anything for the franchise beyond “teehee red units disappear make exp bar go up and brain go ding,” so i’m excited for more mature storytelling in subsequent games (they MUST get better. they MUST). the child husbandry thing is...very bad tho, and Apotheosis being “challenging” entirely through the game changing all the rules is also bad.

once again no vidya games that came out this year--i’ll probably pick up Spiritfarer or Hades after the New Year, though (or maybe TLOU II! but probably not. sry Laura and Ashley). more TV and franchises this year, which made me feel In Touch with the Children but was also kinda exhausting. nothing was so egregiously terrible i dropped it without finishing! in a year like this that feels almost like an accomplishment

[bluekaddis]

You almost mentioned Cullen as the best written character, but tbh he is written quite bad, his abuse and hate is never confronted in Inquisition and he is made victim by narrative, while he was the very problem why Chantry sucks. Even his fans admit that. He is mostly liked because of romance.

Ugh.

I was waiting for that moment when admitting I like Cullen’s character and story arc will bite me in the ass.

TL; DR (for those who don’t want to get through my long rant) 

Let everyone enjoy any characters/romances/game choices they want. I have my reasons for having Cullen as a fav DA character and liking his story arc and I don’t think there are more problems with writing of his character than the majority of other companions in DA games. 

Full answer below

First of all – I don’t want to argue that everyone should like or dislike the same elements of fiction as I do – it would be stupid. We all have different tastes, like different character archetypes and have varying opinions on what makes a good story. I’m trying to keep my blog character positive and unless someone asks me directly to share my opinion on a certain character or plot element I prefer keeping my critique to myself. I also don’t feel entitled to confront fans who, in their own posts, state they find Cullen boring, unredeemable or overrated, even if I personally disagree with all these statements. 

If your ask, anon, stated the words “i think” or “in my opinion” I wouldn’t probably bother with such a lengthy answer, HOWEVER, you write your personal opinion like it was an objective statement, like you were in position to tell me how I should view the certain character. What did you expect, that I would suddenly realize “oh crap, NOW I see that a character and plot I had liked for my 200 hours of gameplay is actually bad, I was just too stupid to notice it!”.

Haha, no.

So, let’s go through your comment.

“tbh he is written quite bad”

In. Your. Opinion. There are people who don’t like Cullen’s character development. Some like the general idea but would make some changes if they could. Others (like me) don’t have problem with his story arc and just like to add some headcanons to fill the gaps.

It is understandable that when years pass between games, fans have time to develop their opinions and wishes of what they’d like to see. And because none of them actually writes the story it is very easy to feel disappointed and say “well, I would do it better (= my way)”. But the truth is - your way is not necessary a better way. It may be the case that “your version” would be even more hated by the fandom. Some opinions are just more popular than others and therefore may seem like they are objective but it’s an illusion. A well designed pool, with large sample size and good statistics may be objective. Opinions, on the other hand, are like farts – you always think yours are less stinky than the others’ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But I digress.

Yes, I think Cullen is a well written character and yes, I like his story arc. Cullen’s redemption works for me because I see it not as much about atonement for his actions as for his lack of action.

Let me explain.

Anti-Cullen fans tend to assume that he personally did a lot of atrocities, but when you look not at fandom assumptions but at his actual actions we see in games or WoT, you can see that he caused most evil by not doing shit.

He should have protected the mages.

He didn’t.

He should have questioned Meredith’s actions.

He didn’t.

He should have noticed she’s going mad.

He didn’t .

He should have stopped her before she evoked the Rite.

He didn’t.

He was very passive and basically let either Meredith or Hawke make all the choices for him. If he let Meredith decide – people died. If he listened to Hawke (based on player’s choices) he voted for whatever Hawke had proposed.

Why was he behaving like that? Probably because he had lost faith in his own judgment so he put all the responsibility on authority figures (Templar Order and Chantry teachings). Cullen’s core motivation throughout all games was to protect people and it never changes. What changes is his belief of what methods are moral or necessary to achieve that goal and whether he, as an individual, should be in a position to decide it.

In Inquisition Cullen does the opposite. He is a workaholic. He makes his own decisions (leaves Kirkwall, stops taking lyrium) and takes full responsibility for them. He doesn’t follow his leader blindly but openly states his own opinions and advice (whether they are correct or wrong is another topic). He gets really furious when someone in position of power lie to or sacrifice people under their command (like in case of Samson or Rainier). Finally, he dedicates his life, health, skills, basically everything, for a cause - to stop the war that can be blamed mostly on his former organisation, without complaint or asking for forgiveness.

And I love that aspect of his character.

In Inquisition Cullen is still a work in progress. He tries his best but his templar past comes back sometimes - and it’s good. If he was completely free of his biases, it would be damn unnatural. 

I would never say that Cullen is a flawless ray of sunshine. He can be stubborn, biased, narrow-minded, hypocritical, bitter, aggressive and vengeful. But guess what – so can all the other characters. That’s why they are interesting.

“his abuse and hate is never confronted in Inquisition”

It is, at least for the standards of this particular game. DA:I doesn’t have full developed friendship-rivalry mechanics like DA:2 and you can’t even get approval points from advisors. The Inquisitor basically has far less options to condemn the Inner Circle’s actions or change their worldviews than Hawke (you don’t really argue with Dorian about slavery or with Iron Bull about Saarebas or Reeducators either).

But even if the Inquisitor has limited dialogue options to confront Cullen’s actions directly, Cullen himself brings the topic to the player. Cullen’s dialogue and actions in DA:I show that

he is ashamed of the person he became after Uldred’s uprising    

he knows he needs to atone for his actions and he wants to work for it

but doesn’t really believe he can fully atone for what he did

supports the reform of the Chantry, Templar Order and Circles rather than agreeing to their traditional methods

That man already hates himself, give him some rest.

And if you still think he needs an extra punishment for his crimes - Cullen is actually one of only 3 companions/advisors in DA:I whose life you can literally ruin through your choices (the other two being Blackwall and Iron Bull). If your Inky thinks that Cullen’s actions are unredeemable and he deserves nothing better than to forever be chained to the templar life he has chosen as a kid - they can order him to take lyrium again. For me it’s a heartless and morally wrong choice, but anyone can play their game however they want.

„he is made victim by narrative”

Ok, that part really bothers me. Are you saying that it is a bad thing that a narrative treats a person who has been physically, mentally and sexually abused for weeks as a victim of that abuse? Or encourages empathy towards a character fed drugs, manipulation and propaganda? Acknowledging Cullen’s PTSD doesn’t automatically result in ignoring or diminishing traumas and abuse that happened to Anders, Carl or any other character. Empathy doesn’t have to be reserved to people you personally agree with, just saying.

„he was the very problem why Chantry sucks.”

I’d say he was an example showing why Chantry sucks. A symptome, not a cause. Chantry benefits only high ranking members of that intitution + some nobles and rich dudes. Mages are abused and denied most of the rights because of the Chantry. Templars are drugged and brainwashed because of the Chantry. Common folk can’t freely benefit from things like healing magic because of the Chantry. Non-humans are treated like heretics and barbarians - because of the Chantry. The Chantry, as we see at the beginning of DA:I is a corrupt, powerful institution that has forsaken almost all ideals it had been built upon and desperately needs a reform. Everyone can see that. I have NEVER met any fan who said „yeah, Circles, Templar Order, the Chantry – they were perfectly alright, no need to change lol”. Same goes to characters labelled by fandom as pro-Chantry (like Cassandra, Cullen or Vivienne). They all see that major changes must be done, they just believe the reformation is better than abolition.

„Even his fans admit that.”

Some, yes. Others don’t have a problem with his arc. Personally I don’t think there are many Cullen fans that would agree with every single point you made.

„He is mostly liked because of romance.”

Um, no. The reason why the game developers even bothered with making Cullen a romance option in DA:I is that he was already quite liked and popular among fans, despite being just a secondary character. I’d agree that the romance plot made Cullen even more popular, especially among players who didn’t play previous games, but it is wrong to assume that the only reason people enjoy his character is because he’s a pretty boy. I played the games in order and Cullen was one of my fav characters in DA2 - I just like paragon anti-villains with redemption potential. Fight me. 

To conclude this overly long rant - I’m generally under impression that some DA fans tend to point certain aspects of Cullen’s character and story as “stupid excuses made by Bioware and fans to redeem a son of the bitch” and then use almost exactly the same arguments to defend their own favs. It’s the topic for maybe another discussion, but I think it’s a good thing to confront your own biases sometimes.

P.S. I also recommend watching this video about writing redemption arcs. Just for fun.

I rest my case. 

(thanks, Ania, for the high quality picture to sum up my feelings)

[annakie]

An Annotated Mass Effect Playthrough, Part Eight

List of Posts: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

I accidentally messed up the numbering on part Seven’s link to post six, so if you missed post six (or yesterday’s part seven), the numbering up there is correct.

Wherein we get back out into the galaxy, explore, help some people, and kill some others!

So now that we have Liara, it’s time to really dig into the galaxy.  We have a few people we talked to on the CItadel who need help, and maybe we’ll stumble into a few more things along the way.

First of all, let’s check out the galaxy map...

Hey wait a sec, what’s this?

Petra Nebula!?  Oh hey, another new addition by the ME1 Recalibrated mod.

Gorgeous map, only one system available.

Heeeey we recognize this place, we’ll get to go there in.... two games!

Can’t land there (or anywhere in the system) but it’s cool that it exists! There are a couple of other neat little things in the system I didn’t screenshot so that you can have a cool new experience yourself if you decide to use the mod on your next playthrough.

What I really miss from ME3, by the way, is the % markers which note when you’ve fully explored a system or if there’s more stuff to find there.

Anyway, my PLAN had been to take a screenshot of each planet or spacecraft before I entered it to help orient the playthrough better, and then the non-screenshotting couple of hours happened, so we lost some of that along the way, sorry.  

Still, let’s see what kind of trouble we can get ourselves into.

I love this planet.  The lava juuuuust below the surface, peeking out.  Just some of the coolest terrain in the game.

What a great view, let’s get a little clo--

OOPS.

I meant to do that.

Wide open spaces with no fears of a thresher maw living in the lava! ...I hope?

Ah, here’s our objective, a distress signal being sent from this location, let’s see if we can help...

FUCKING GETH AMBUSH.

Aw yeah, jumping over those explosives like a pro!

...most of the time.

Well this planet was a bust.  Let’s see if we can actually help someone.

Another planet, scanned a few things, not sure what we’re doing here but hey, I found a lone building!

Ah yes, a prefab which is totally different from all the prefabs we’ll enter because the creates are stacked in a different configuration.

Honestly they should have put one of these prefabs in ME3 for Old Times Sake. (The ones that actually look like homes/labs/whatever make so much more sense.)

Annnd we’re being attacked.  Not sure why, but here we go!

Awww yeah, Throw!  And Ash and Kaidan managing to be useful I think?

Except they let a guy slip by us, but luckily there’s a convenient explosive nearby.  That got ‘em.

OK back to facing forward OH FUCK A KROGAN.

Kaidan’s biotics and my shotgun, a favorite combination.  Now stay down!

Sweet, level up!

And that fight’s over, time to explore this pla...

Whew, thanks Kaidan.

This guy thought he could sneak past me.  Well me, my shotgun and my 20 shield strength sure showed him.

ME1 combat is so... messy though.  I mean, I honestly still enjoy it, but I’m in the camp that agrees combat gets better every game, Andromeda included.  Of course, I just REALLY LOVE Vanguarding in ME3... charging into a group of enemies, hitting Nova, spamming charge again praying that I’ll find a good target to charge to in time.  ME1 combat is basically all just... spam abilities from cover and hope your companions are doing something useful.  Being a Vanguard is more about style over substance in ME here.  I mean you do get some really useful abilities, but your shotgun isn’t that much use unless things get too close.

Which, you know, they do pretty often.

Anyway, remember... I WILL DESTROY YOU!!!

FUCK I hadn’t been back to the Citadel to pick up Nassana Dantius’ quest yet.  Let’s just reload the quicksave from outside and we’ll... come back and do this the right way later and see the entire quest.

I do this more often than I care to admit.

Also no screenshot for this but... I also found Wrex’s personal quest planet and recognized it only when I saw the building, since it’s in a pretty memorable location.  Still, grabbed everything else off the planet so it’ll be quick when it’s time to go back and do that quest.

Well let’s go back to poking around the galaxy.

Message coming in.  Patching it through.

Ah, yeah, hey Hackett.  What’s that?  You’ve got some dirty work you need me to do for you?  Cool, be right there.

Before the ME2 DLC Arrival came out, Hackett was one of Mass Effect’s biggest mysteries.  Who is this guy?  Why is he telling us to do things?  Does he have some secret agenda?  Why is he so sketchy?  Our Shepards seemed to trust him but WOW he sure did send us on some touchy missions.  Speculation was all over the place on what he looked like and what he was really doing.

Turns out, he’s just a pretty cool guy who wants you to take on all the secret spy missions the Alliance doesn’t want to take credit for.

I wish I’d saved it, but just a week or two ago I saw a pretty great post circulating about Hackett.  He IS the guy that’s going to make sure a job gets done, even if he’s not going to do it himself.  He’s the back-room Admiral with the squeaky clean image up front.  He’s the Gus Fring of the Alliance.

Also getting Lance Riddick to voice him was great.  Just a real authoritative, steady guy who you actually want to trust.  

And it turns out he looks basically exactly like most people thought, but maybe with a few more scars. (I mean, he really looks a lot like Lance Riddick, tbh)  But we don’t know that yet.  For now, let the mystery be.

Time to actually go help someone.

Ah yeah, Chairman Burns, we do negotiate with terrorists, in this case.  But they needed negotiating with.

Maxing out the Paragon-meter is worth it for moments like this.  These guys have probably suffered and it’s no surprise that no one has really listened.  Sounds like a lot about the galaxy hasn’t changed since we got out there.

This is also an excellent moment for Kaidan.

Being able to let Kaidan reason with them is fantastic.  Although he probably ultimately doesn’t make a difference mechanics wise, it’d be nice if maybe the check is easier if he’s here.  I don’t know.  But Kaidan knows, even if he’s one of the “lucky” ones who “only” gets migraines.  

One of the grossest posts I’ve seen about Kaidan are people who argue she shouldn’t be on the team because of his implants and since he has a “disability”.  Or that it’s “kinder” to sacrifice him on Virmire.  That’s some real gross ablism you’ve got there.  

Anyway, I love being able to keep this situation under control. Burns actually comes through if you do, even if those guys probably go to prison for awhile for terrorism.  Better than being dead.

Time for... another planet!

Again, didn’t take a screencap of this one but... there’s a missing survey team? I must have picked this quest up in the elevators, because normally you get it on Noveria.  Anyway,  Let’s go find them on Trebin, I’m sure they just can’t broadcast anymore or something.  It’s cool

FUCK. SHIT SHIT SHIT.  FUCK!!!

I probably could have actually used Warp or Throw or even Barrier there but... too late now!  We lived!

I was all ready to blame this on Cerberus, but creepily, there’s no explanation for who huskified them or why.   I’m still going to blame Cerberus, seems like something they’d do.

Well, time to move on.

Honestly, I can’t believe anyone who says ME1 isn’t beautiful.

And driving the Mako is FUN in places like this!

Oh there’s a camp up ahead, we’re here to find the remaining crew of a crashed ship for our new friend in the Citadel Tower.  

Again, no footage/screenshot but eventually you find where the mercenaries tracked down Willem (the brother) and killed them.  Shit.  We were too late.  I actually tear up sometimes telling Garoth that his brother died.  They held out for awhile, too, but we were too late.

It would have been nice if, say, if the very first thing we did after leaving the Citadel was to come here, we could have saved him, but I guess this quest is another way of Bioware telling us that sometimes, there’s just nothing you can do to change things.

One more quest this update, then we’re stopping back off at the Citadel next.

Presrop, one of the most well-known of the sidequest planets. (OKok, technically it’s a moon.)

One of my favorite landing sequences, just because the stars make it so... dramatic.

I mean DAMN.

Klendagon's most striking feature is, of course, the Great Rift valley that stretches across the southern hemisphere. What is most fascinating about the Rift is that it does not appear to be natural. The geological record suggests it is the result of a "glancing blow" by a mass accelerator round of unimaginable destructive power. This occurred some thirty-seven million years ago.

It took a solid three minutes of Flycam flying to get that closeup shot, btw.  I actually flew all the way in the first time I came here, and didn’t take screenshots.  Took about six minutes.  The updated texture is impressive.

Well, Hackett sent us here, let’s deal with Major Kyle.

Being nice and non-threatening gets you into places.

I’ll admit, before I came in here, I decided to cheat in enough paragon points to max out Paragon already.  For me personally, I’m trying to make sure this is an “ultimate” playthrough, a save file I can just use over and over from here on out.  I want everything to import into ME3 the first time around with all the plot flags set how I want them without messing with Gibbed’s Savegame Editor, so making sure I can convince everyone how I want them to is important.  So hey, Major Kyle, stand down.

I don’t think I’ve ever played as a Ruthless Shepard in ME1, or if I have, it’s been so long I’ve forgotten how it goes.  But he was the commanding officer at the battle of Torfan, and your CO if you’re Ruthless.  He’s also a reminder of how serious PTSD can be, and what it can do to a person.  

I also love this tidbit from the Wiki, which I didn’t know since I’d never done these particular choices before:

(In Mass Effect 2)  If Martin Burns was not saved in 2183, a news report on the Citadel will announce that Kyle is trying to form an all-biotic community as the reparations were not given to L2 biotics and they have become even more alienated from galactic society.

I really liked that if you reason with him, he doesn’t give you any trouble and turns himself in like he says.

Hey, this negotiation thing is easy when you’re the best person in the galaxy at it!!

[dgcatanisiri]

I said I’d hoped to get this out by the end of the month. FINALLY, the next installment of my series of Hypothetical DLCs. 

Welcome to DG’s Listing of Wish These DLC Existed, where I theorize, speculate, and just kinda generally throw ideas at the wall about DLCs for games I love that never happened and never will happen, but damn, I’d like to see them anyway. 

Because I have ideas, I can’t get them made as mods, I don’t have time to make them into fic, and they’re never going to happen anyway, so why not put them up in a public place? After all, they’re tie ins to games I have no control over anyway, so it’s not like I’ll ever make money off of them anyway. And, as I’m not bound by any hardware limitations in terms of crafting ideas, or production cycles dictating when the game’s endpoint is, these can and do go on a great deal longer than the standard lifespan of a game.

A review of the format: There will be a name for the DLC, a brief synopsis, a reference to when this hypothetical DLC would become available/if and when it becomes unavailable, and then an expansion/write up of the ideas going in to them. Some ideas will have more expansion than others, because I’ve just plainly put more thought into them - in a lot of cases, I wrote them down just on the basis of ‘this idea seems pretty cool,’ and then gave them more context later on.

Feedback is welcome! Like an idea? Don’t like an idea? I welcome conversation and interaction on these ideas. Keep it civil, remember that these are just one person’s ideas, we can discuss them. Perhaps you’ll even help inspire a part two for these write ups! Because I do reserve the right to come up with more ideas in the future - these are the ideas that I’ve had to this point, but the whole reason this series exists is because I come up with new ideas for old stories.

With the KOTOR games both dealt with, we move on to the next category of the BioWare franchises, Mass Effect. This one took a while, considering the much more open-ended aspect of choices within the Mass Effect universe. And ME2′s edition is going to take a good long while as well, considering... Well, I’ll explain that when I get there. 

Anyway. Given the way that Mass Effect carries decisions forward, there is an additional category for the ideas within these editions, where there’s a brief summary of the way they will impact future games - granted, most of these are ME2 letters and ME3 war assets, but it’s still worth making a note of.

Also, given the context of ME1′s rather open-ended structure, where there aren’t really any serious plot breaks or boundaries that prevent advancement too soon, aside from Virmire and Ilos not being unlocked until events in the plot, assume that, unless otherwise noted, these DLCs are all available at any point after Shepard is made a Spectre and given command of the Normandy, and, obviously, must be played before Ilos. 

To business!

First Contact

As a Spectre and Alliance officer, Commander Shepard is called in when an Alliance team goes missing after reporting they had made contact with a new alien species. The Normandy is assigned to recover the team and establish peaceful relations if at all possible – yet there is a mystery here, one that the natives are not happy to welcome meddling in...

So, yeah, the basic idea here is simply that, with the whole Reaper thing, we don’t really get to see much of the more basic ideas of space exploration – big plot trounces little ideas. And first contact is as basic a concept for a scifi series as you can get. In my book, that’s the advantage of DLC in this series, to go for the smaller scale stories.

So let’s go into detail. We’re going to need a character to act as the exposition fairy – I vote that, at least in the briefing, this is coming from Pressley, so we can offer him a little more characterization and involvement (let’s honestly consider “Pressley gives a briefing that offers him more characterization, involvement, and general utilization” a thing for all of these, since he really doesn’t get a lot of usage in ME1, which is probably why he’s not really replaced on the Normandy after this game, and take this opportunity to give his character some expansion so that his death can mean a little more when ME2’s prologue goes down). He’s giving the baseline facts about why the Normandy is going in and handling this situation.

Obviously, the First Contact team has gone out of contact, and the Normandy is tasked to discover what has happened to them and make the best of the situation they end up in. I’m not locking this to after recruiting Liara, but I do picture her, Kaidan, and Ashley getting some fair use in any and all of these (a few in particular – we’ll get there when we get there), both because of their role as love interests and because of their general attitudes and thematic roles – Liara’s the wide-eyed idealist (considering her romanticizing of the protheans – any culture that refers to themselves as an “empire” is not going to be a peaceful collection of philosophers and scientists), Ashley’s the reasoned cynic, and Kaidan is something of the balance between them – cautious optimism and ready for if/when things go to shit.

The arrival finds Shepard and company on our new world (location to be decided – given Citadel rules on activating dormant Relays, it’s probably best that this is a planet within an already existing cluster, and we probably ought to put it somewhere within the boundaries of Alliance space, what with them taking lead on this first contact). The locals seem welcoming and friendly, but there’s a clear air of uncertainty – are they a threat, where’s the Alliance contact team, why are they acting like they know something that Shepard and crew don’t?

I know, we’re running the risk of retreading the ground of Feros and the thorian here, but, one, honestly, I like Feros, so I’m okay with revisiting it as a concept at least, two, it’s not like BioWare doesn’t recycle their own plots all the time anyway, even granting that they usually don’t do it within the same game, and three, I see it ending in a different place, so we’re going with this.

Anyway, investigation, suspicion, blah, blah, blah... I swear, the fun would be in the investigation, the building mystery, so I’m skipping over the work for the sake of a summary. The end result is that of course the natives killed the team, but the reason is because this is a group of descendants of a prothean subject race. They’d engaged in a revolt, adapted/stolen a colony ship, and flew off into the black, and done this right around the time of the initial stages of the Reaper invasion of the prothean empire – the protheans had bigger fish to fry (or be fried by, depending on how you use the metaphor), and given how proud the protheans are, I can see them covering this up in the name of saving face, both of which allowed these people to escape the notice of the Reapers – systematic destruction or not, finding one lone ship in the depths of space isn’t “needle in a haystack,” it’s “needle in the midwest.” It’d have been one thing if they’d found a planet to establish themselves on right away, but they dove into the black without a clear destination – also use this to emphasize WHY most Council explorations tend to stick to familiar clusters with an established Mass Relay nearby, that space is vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big.

As a detail for this race, I’m gonna include one of my headcanons for the protheans, since, hey, my DLC idea – while the protheans developed their technology around the Mass Relays and such, as the Reapers intended, the tech of their own design, without the influence of external powers, would have more of an organic bent to it, that they were more inclined to “grow” their tech than build it. Like they accepted the Mass Effect as a foundation for their tech, the Citadel as a base, but they weren’t all that happy about it, just never quite getting their own designs really match the designs of “inusannon” technology in effectiveness. So in response, this species turned towards cybernetics (maybe they’re members of the zha’til, to connect them having this knowledge with the tidbits Javik offers in ME3? *shrug* I’ll use them as the name for this species for simplicity’s sake, because that’s less awkward than no name at all, but I’m not married to it being them), to not just give them an edge against the protheans when they came after them, but also to serve as a taunt towards them, a statement of “you fear technology, so we’re going to become the personification of your boogeymen.”

So the survival of these zha’til has been their hidden nature, and they have developed into a pure xenophobic society – no aliens are accepted among them, and, with the appearance of Shepard’s team, they are fully of the belief that there will be those who come after. They can recognize that the appearance of outsiders once means it will happen again. And they will be ready – Shepard’s crew is a boon for them, allowing them access to biologies of not just humans, but asari, turian, krogan, and quarian. They’d prepared for the damage the protheans could do upon finding their retreat, spent fifty thousand years becoming something the protheans would have to fear. Of course, Shepard’s gonna have to ruin it. I can see them trying the ‘we’ll erase the coordinates, put up a warning buoy, ensure no one comes here’ argument, but that’s not flying with these guys, since organic nature tends towards curiosity, and just blanking the system would leave a mystery, one that organics would want to solve, and a warning buoy can malfunction or be ignored – they want total isolation, and, even if the odds are like one in trillions, that’s too high for them, so they’d sooner be the only life in the galaxy.

I’m thinking the solution is in their reliance on their tech, having attained this symbiosis with it that they all are implanted – tech can be hacked, it can malfunction, it can be a vulnerability as much as an asset. Going way back to the start of the involvement of Kaidan, Liara, and Ashley, here’s them all getting to voice their solution, with Ashley going the straightforward route of “they’re a threat, they’ll keep being a threat, they don’t want to change and stop being a threat, I don’t want to commit genocide, but I also want to defend the Alliance, and those options look mutually exclusive right now,” Liara is all “think of what they could offer us, their history is invaluable, they were contemporaries of the protheans, what might they know, and even if we have the ability to wipe out an entire species, that’s an action that can never be undone,” and Kaidan is the middle ground of “the leaders and people we’ve spoken to made a threat, but we can’t call the entire population of this planet genocidal maniacs, surely there must be something we can do to find a reasonable solution.”

It basically comes down to Shepard getting to hack the tech, and then faced with the decision – a) wiping them out by way of effectively setting all their implants to electrify themselves – they’ve shown themselves to be a threat, they have violent intentions towards other life in the galaxy, and nothing indicates that there is any dissent among their population, especially if their implants can allow for like planetary consensus or something, b) shutting down the tech, their greatest threat, as a way to keep most of them alive, but reducing their civilization to like Bronze Age – the Citadel races would certainly be willing to help the zha’til recover, but it’s not like they’d be happy to accept it, or c) use this as the way to force them to come to the table and negotiate in good faith, under the threat of destruction as a result of them using this weapon, give them a chance, with the downside being that they have done nothing to indicate that they deserve this chance, or that the second they develop a workaround, they’ll be back to threatening all alien life.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Letter from the head of a Council-approved research team, investigating the planet, with or without inhabitants.

ME3: Assuming the zha’til survive, a representative is on the Citadel, offering their aid. If they were reduced, they are a significantly smaller War Asset.

Investigations

The Citadel’s Wards house people from across the galaxy, and murder is a common occurrence. When the murder victim is a prominent Alliance politician, however, one whose controversial opinions made him a target for non-humans, the Alliance can only trust one person to investigate on the Citadel – the first human Spectre, Commander Shepard. 

Honestly, the Citadel could absolutely support its own game. Just the pieces we get of it from the trilogy and the Citadel DLC tease a massive station that probably has a population higher than some planets. So there’s A LOT to do here (indeed, looking over my notes for this, I have at least one DLC focused entirely on events on the Citadel in each game, and all of them can utilize entirely new areas, so...). And, really, who doesn’t enjoy an old-fashioned ‘whodunnit’ murder mystery?

Obviously, we have more than just the basic mystery happening here, or else we’d just have a standard sidequest, not a full DLC length story. I feel like this needs to go in depth on corruption within Citadel politics – poke around my blog, you’ll find I’m HIGHLY critical of the Council’s handling of the Saren matter, where they appoint a C-Sec officer with a reputation for not playing by the rules as the only investigator of the Eden Prime incident, give him roughly a day to look in to things, (Shepard’s out about sixteen hours, according to Doctor Chakwas, they arrive at the Citadel, get summoned to the Council, and encounter Garrus, at which point the trial is about to start, with no indication that more than hours at most have passed) and then TELL him that his investigation is over, Saren is allowed access to the files of the man he is accused of killing, an eye witness report of Saren’s murder of Nihlus is completely dismissed, while the data file Tali extracts from a geth, which Anderson says upon hearing that he’s never heard of this happening (to say nothing of the quarians’ status among the Citadel races) is deemed “irrefutable evidence”... There’s A LOT that is at best questionable about how the Council handles things. And that’s just sticking with the first game.

So I’d like to pull back some of the veil on Citadel politics, and use that to explore the human-alien friction. Due to Shepard’s rising profile throughout the series, we kinda lose a lot of the big level details of this, and it’s one of those things I like about the Mass Effect universe circa the first game – humanity ISN’T the big kahuna, they’re the latest arrivals, and the rest of the galaxy thinks they’re a bunch of jerks trying to take what they haven’t earned.

Hence where we start – our victim is an Alliance politician, someone who’s got one of those jobs that makes them friends and enemies of the same people. Obviously, this means that there are a lot of people on the Citadel (and outside the Citadel) who would easily be picked up as suspects – again, we’re going an investigative route, to help show off Shepard as a tactician, to show off their brains as well as their brawn.

This is going to lead us first to explore more of the Citadel Tower, the place where the Council and other assorted political figures meet. Udina probably plays a part in things, considering he IS the ambassador at this point, so he’ll probably be talking to Shepard about matters along the way, something of our regular check-in point (plus good to offer him some more characterization and expand him somewhat).

Obviously, with a murder mystery, we investigate through the location, taking us through the Tower and into its deeper structure, to the point that Shepard ends up in the Tower’s basement (or whatever we call the lowest level). Down here, the discovery is that there’s (what else) a conspiracy. Humanity is moving too fast – they’ve only been here for about thirty years and they already have an embassy, are angling for a spot on the Council, how long until they replace all the races who were here first on the Council, make the Citadel humans only?

I feel like we could also get some retroactive elements of Cerberus’s human supremacy in play here, suggest that our victim was being manipulated by them and used to advance their agenda – not just to foreshadow how Cerberus gains prominence in the next game, but also to show that even well-intentioned people are preyed upon by Cerberus’s actions (hello Paragon Shepard). Cerberus didn’t mind using him for their objectives, even if he’s not some pro-human bigot.

Speaking of, let’s tie in Terra Firma a little more into this – they seemed to have some influence in the first game, then drop off the face of the earth, so yeah, let’s throw them in somehow. Like I see that as part of our concluding decision, where the replacement political figure is one of their people, so they seem like the “obvious suspect” red herring – I think by this point we’ve established with these that one of my priorities is worldbuilding, and, again, Terra Firma dropped off the face of the series when it seemed to have developing prominence in the first game.

Anyway, back to the plot. Obviously, Shepard has to do something about this conspiracy. The problem is, of course, while extreme, they represent a dominant view among the Citadel races. And it’s one that has validity to it, humans are demanding more power than any other race in the Citadel’s history (this cycle, anyway, who knows about the previous ones?), and to these races, they are seen as aggressive in that pursuit.

Here’s the thing, and I’ve gone over this in my critiques of the Council before – humans are aggressive about getting more representation because of a handful of things. Number one, humans are out to advance, we recognize that we learn best from making mistakes, while the Citadel races seem to abide by a code of “none shall advance faster than the slowest.” That no advancement is made until all are “capable” of benefiting from it in certain ways, despite how we have the example of multiple species not even being able to compete on a level playing field with races like the asari, the salarians, or the turians – the volus are a client race of the turians, despite having been a part of the galactic community longer. It’s why we see the relative stagnation – the asari discovered the Citadel two thousand years ago, and yet so much of it is still a mystery.

Number two, humans are aggressive because the Citadel races were aggressive to them first. The First Contact War started because Citadel law is that no one shall activate dormant Mass Relays. Thing is, humanity opened Relay-314 at a time that they’d never even heard of the Citadel and its government. So the turians who opened fire first? They were holding humanity to the standards and rules and laws of a governmental body that they didn’t even know existed until the shooting started.

That the turians enforce this law so rigidly, and that the asari and salarians don’t seem to understand how much the asshole it makes them, is the honest source of a lot of the tension between the races in the game.

Like, I vehemently disagree with the racist attitudes of the Terra Firma asshole we meet, but he’s not wrong in pointing out that if you see a kid playing with a matchbook, you take the matches away, but you don’t shoot them for good measure. The turians started the conflict, and you can tell that the Citadel races never acknowledge their responsibility in this – it’s all “humans are so aggressive” without any understanding of why a species whose introduction to the greater galaxy came at a cost of life and involved acts of violence inflicted on them, literally on the basis of information that by definition, they could not have, just MIGHT hold a grudge.

...So, uh, bringing this back around to the topic at hand... This is where we get to the central conflict. Our Terra Firma assholes who are all “Earth first!” have a valid point that the Council and the Citadel races mistreat humanity, and wrap it up in condescending bullshit, so the fact that they’re looking to take some kind of action to do something about this is understandable, even if they’re doing it wrong. The opposition is the conspiracy folks, the ones who murdered the outspoken human, all in the name of protecting their people from perceived human aggression.

And yes, it really does all come down to something that simple, as both sides are right and both sides are wrong, and now someone has to clean up the mess their hostilities have created. I do want this to really come down to something so simple and, on paper, easy to resolve, because when this kind of thing happens in our world, it’s frequently just as on paper simple, but, because of the emotions involved and the personal grudges accumulated, no one is able to take that step back and try to make amends (not saying that as a value judgement, just a fact – sometimes it is appropriate to address the personal grudges, sometimes you need let them go for the greater good).

There’s an interconnectedness to the Citadel races in the course of the series, and this is one of the ways to showcase that, by displaying that both of these peoples need each other in the course of the continuation of this cycle’s civilizations. So Shepard’s ultimate decision is about making a decision, and the hard work is in making them both recognize and acknowledge that they are both wrong – pulling this off right, meaning Shepard found all the ways to make good in-roads with both factions so they’ll listen when they make a big persuasive speech, we have the legitimate grievances acknowledged and at least on course to be redressed (one of the galactic news reports can, if the Alliance fleet is sacrificed to save the Destiny Ascension, say that the turians are considering reparations – maybe with this option, this happens regardless). Pulling it off wrong, Shepard has to side with one faction or the other, leaving tension and hostility remaining unresolved, impacting future relations.

Post Game Followups: 

ME2: Emails from the sided faction, talking about their political advancement.

ME3: Impact on Citadel politics, affecting the attitude of the populace in the Citadel Defense Force

Old Wounds

Shanxi was the site of the First Contact War. Since then, the human colonists have resisted alien interference and involvement on their world. But things become complicated when a turian effort at reparations ends up as a hostage situation. Naturally, the Alliance has one person they want to send in to help smooth things over – Commander Shepard.

An Ashley focus mission, we’re giving her the spotlight here – consider this something of a proto-loyalty mission, since the game itself didn’t have these. Because Shanxi is a place that means a lot to her and her family, so we’re going to say that she is on this mission. That obviously also limits this to a pre-Virmire position in the plot, because she may not make it off of that planet.

Shanxi is talked about, but it’s never even given a flyby in the games proper, and so we head there. And, especially with the context of the last entry in this list, I feel like there should be some effort to acknowledge that there should be reparations to humanity – like I said there, the turians discovered humans on Shanxi and decided to openly attack them, hold them to laws and rules that they had no way of knowing existed, and then decide that humans are the aggressive ones because of how they respond? Yeah, that’s bullshit.

So we have a situation where a group of turians have this realization and are trying to convince the people of Shanxi of their good intentions. Shanxi is, understandably, reluctant to believe it. Shepard is going in to smooth things over, try and ease the tensions that are inevitably flaring up, and Ashley is, ultimately, conflicted about how to feel about this whole matter – this is Shanxi, Williams are not exactly welcome here. But there is still a feeling of responsibility here all the same, because her family impacted this world and now she’s here to help try to build a bridge. The “hostage situation” of the synopsis will actually take place during the course of events – before that happens, we get a chance to explore Shanxi, learn about the history there.

This seems like a point to bring it up: Ashley’s grandfather surrendering Shanxi, in the name of preventing a massacre, and being branded a traitor for it makes little sense to me. Of course, I get that surrendering looks bad, if you’re only looking at the act, and not the motivation. People were losing their lives, he acted to protect them. The Alliance military being unforgiving assholes is not unbelievable, but the general public going along with it, refusing to have his name cleared, even decades later, is.

So we’re going to have to dig into the reasons for this. People on Shanxi will resent the Williams for the surrender – they wanted to fight to the bitter end, and they passed this along to their kids. The “death before dishonor” crowd think it would have been better to have fought to the last – sent a stronger message to the Citadel about the wrongness of that whole “shoot first, ask questions later, blame the victim for everything” approach. They’re the ones who lead the charge against Williams’ actions, saying he was weak for surrendering to the turians. Meanwhile others are aware that he saved lives.

If anything, this makes things difficult for Ashley. As much as she lives under the specter of her family, she is not quite sure about what life would be like if he’s cleared – even knowing that things would be better, her family not getting shit details and crap assignments, it means getting a new perspective on the future that she never expected and needs to process that.

Core plot is still the hostage situation, one that Shepard ends up being involved in. The hostage takers are a group demanding more for the turians in terms of reparations – they can’t bring back the dead, of course, but the turians aren’t giving enough in their eyes. I don’t know, let’s say that it’s coming across as a perfunctory kind of apology, the “We’re sorry you feel we disrespected you” kind of reaction, which... Yeah, I totally see the turians doing that and the humans calling bullshit.

I mean, yeah, you want more to it than just “we’re angry” and such, because that’s a pretty straightforward mission, but the idea here is as much for exploring Ashley’s character and development over just an outright mission story. This is about her, and we’re going to explore her through this as much as the plot, so the plot can get away with being fairly limited in scope or scale, because this is about the character.

And this means that Ashley needs to have the big moment of resolving the crisis, rather than Shepard. Like, RPG, we’ll say Shepard gets the option to decide who gets that moment, but let’s be real, to culminate her arc in this DLC, it should be her. Bookend the portrayal of her grandfather with her – depending on how Shepard’s interacted with her, with how much digging they did into the history of the place, how they’ve interacted with the people, and it leads to Ashley (or Shepard) being able to talk down the hostage takers, defuse the situation, resolve things peacefully. If they can’t, violence ensues.

Resolution-wise, we’d be looking at the turians being upset and nearly starting conflict all over again because “you humans are too damn aggressive,” “the turians aren’t negotiating in good faith and wish they’d blasted humanity back to the stone age,” blah blah blah. Variation is in how the situation was resolved – peaceful resolution leads to the agreement to try this again later, let hostilities die down a little before trying to fix these long-standing grudges, violent is that the turians walk away, the human diplomats basically going “well, we’ll try this again at some point, hopefully.” And, for Ashley, she’s resolved some of her family’s old ghosts – best case scenario, she’s given Shanxi a different memory of the Williams clan, and can walk away with a tangible note on her record that, regardless of how anyone else might try to creatively reinterpret her record, says that her contribution saved lives.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Email from diplomatic representative about the advancement of the talks over the previous two years.

ME3: If peacefully resolved, a joint human-turian task force is a war asset.

Ascension

The Ascension Project is a home for human biotics. Rumors reach Captain Anderson that there is a biotic extremist group attempting to subvert the teaching and draw them towards pro-human interests, and he asks Commander Shepard to investigate what could be a threat to the human-Citadel alliance.

We had Ashley’s loyalty mission, here’s Kaidan’s. The advancement of human biotics was a running thread through the background of ME1, but sort of fell by the wayside as the series expanded its scope in successive games, so this is a chance to explore that further. And we’re going to do so in part by building on the mission in game that involves Chairman Burns, the Alliance Parliament member who is taken captive by L2 biotics seeking reparations.

Obviously, we see Grissom Academy, the site of the Ascension Project, in ME3, but hey, for one, I like the idea that (retroactively, anyway) this means that Shepard is returning there in the course of the third game, and for two, it’s entirely reasonable to make the Academy large enough to house areas that we just didn’t see in the course of the mission there. Plus we’re seeing it (at least to start) in less of a state of chaos as exists in ME3.

Again, we’re starting lowkey. The idea here is more infiltration first – if extremists are trying to coopt kids’ education, odds are sending in soldiers is gonna tip them off quick and easy. So instead this is going to be framed as an “Alliance biotic recruitment” kind of thing – “The Alliance wants you!” and all that sort. That’s the cover as Shepard’s team heads in. The name of the game here is stealth, that we’re not here to set off alarms, just to ensure that there’s no attempt at subversion of the Alliance’s goals of peaceful coexistence with the Citadel races.

As a sidenote, both this and the Ashley DLC are basically me engaging in retroactively applied stories to further justify why it is that Kaidan and Ashley get the Spectre wings come ME3 – as it is, that kinda feels more like a bone being thrown to humanity in the name of appeasing them with Earth captured by the Reapers, as well as Udina wanting a loyal bodyguard, as opposed to something that their skill and ability has earned them the position. I want some exploration of the skill that justifies them getting that position.

So, yeah, we see the Ascension Project in its glory, causing a bit of a stir of memories for Kaidan, aware that this is more like what he should have experienced at BAaT. He’s glad that there are biotics who are getting to learn about their abilities in a safe environment that isn’t going to treat them like trash – whether or not that’s the military boot camp way, these are kids who have been, by a quirk of fate and chance, given these incredible powers without their consent, they deserve sympathy and understanding regarding their lives abruptly turned upside down, not demands that they show the same level of skill as people who train through their lives to be weapons.

Another investigation story, as we look in on the various teachers, learning more about what the state of affairs with regards to biotics are – if Mass Effect Andromeda is going to say that Cora felt outcasted and isolated because of her biotics, lets at least make this have a tangible feeling of what the actual culture and society she left behind is dealing with, considering that this is something that I’ve seen EVERYONE side-eying at best with her. At least offer it some grounding in the universe so it’s not just her, in effect, whining that she felt alone when we have characters like Kaidan, who killed someone with his biotics as a teenager, and Jack, who was tortured from infancy in an attempt to build a better biotic.

Anyway. The idea is to see more about what the biotics go through, and to better explain what biotics even are to the uninitiated (re: the audience). Biotics are just an accepted part of the universe in the games as is, but these are still a relatively recent thing for humanity, and we don’t really know how people are handling it.

Honestly, I’m kinda inclined to fully lean into a “biotics = homosexuality” metaphor. Like, personal stuff here, that’s one of the things that really... bothers me about the way Cora is handled in Andromeda, that she has this very queercoded story in terms of her self-acceptance, to the point of at one point, in reference to her biotics, saying “what if someone had told me ‘that’s okay’?” about herself. And that’s a line that defines queer narratives, but it is coming out of this cis-straight person’s mouth. So yeah, I’m gonna fix that how I can, since canonically, Kaidan is a bisexual man, and he gets the focus here, and we’re gonna take advantage of this. I may have issues with how BioWare handles their not-straight characters, but since they’re not actually making this, I’m gonna take full advantage.

Oh, right. Plot. Something, something... We get to the overall plot. Of course, we can sway a few people over – these biotic extremists are looking for belonging and acceptance above all. We see things like Major Kyle’s biotic cult, biotics are looking for something that gives them a place, beyond just the military stuff – what happens to the biotic who is a pacifist, where do they fit in when the only place that really seems to accept biotics is the Alliance military? Yeah, sure, these extremists would be testing the idea of “pacifism,” but it’s still the general concept we’re going with.

Like with the above Ashley story, it comes down to Kaidan getting the option to take the lead on this. You know how in the situation in the base game with Chairman Burns, Kaidan will interject about being an L2, like those extremists? Last time I played through, I kinda felt like he should have been more in the lead on that mission, that it should have been his answer to Garrus and Doctor Saleon, or Wrex and the family armor, something like that. So we’re going to have a similar situation here. Like with Ashley above, his ability to talk down the leader of this group depends on how well the player investigated – find the details, talk to the right people, that sort of detective stuff (because I like there being more to gaining experience in games that just combat).

That’s especially meaningful because this particular pro-human person, the one leading these biotic extremists? He worked at BAaT, was one of the people supposedly tasked with watching the situations with the turian biotics who had been brought on. He knew Kaidan. Kaidan knew him. In some ways, because of what happened with Kaidan, that’s why he was inspired to this – letting aliens teach biotics to these children, dictate those terms, WAS abuse, and, in his mind, humans can’t let their children be so violently abused by aliens again.

Kaidan says he dealt with his past in the game proper. But this is still an echo of it, someone who he once knew, worse, someone who cites what happened to him as reason for what he’s doing. Which is why it’s important for Kaidan that he be the one to resolve this. As ever, it can be resolved with words or violence, yay Paragon/Renegade system. For Kaidan, though, it’s just important to see this through and make sure that he has this dealt with.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Email from a class of biotics saved.

ME3: Student saved during the Grissom Academy mission is among the students encountered here, their presence gives a boost to the biotic students war asset

Ruins of Preita

An asari colony world has discovered a prothean archive that could rival those on Mars. Due to the concerns of the Reapers, Commander Shepard and crew go to investigate – and find an empty world, the archaeology team missing. Finding the missing team leads into a world lost to the galaxy for over fifty thousand years – and a threat even the protheans locked away!

So, now we have a Liara loyalty mission story. If you’ve paid any serious attention to my blog over the years, you’re probably having a laugh at my expense here – I’m always complaining about an overfocus on Liara, and yet here I am, adding to her content specifically. Hey, I’m at least playing fair and giving her time alongside Ashley and Kaidan. Hell, that’s why I’m doing this. I gave them time in the sun, and it’s fair that I give her the same.

But yes, I want to explore Liara’s character through the lens of her as an archaeologist, which basically gets a little lip service in the games proper, but ultimately means nothing. She is supposed to be an expert on the protheans and an archaeologist of renown, and yet that gets dumped as her actual profession in ME2, so that she can “be a very good information broker,” which... Not to dismiss her in what is meant to be a focus mission for her, but that ends up being told, rather than shown. Let’s let her play to her strengths.

This is a mission about her getting to flex that muscle. She learns about this archive – actually, thinking about it, let’s say that this was a dig that she had the chance to go on instead of the Therum dig, and chose it instead in the name of it being more isolated (more on that later). With the latest report she’s read about it, she thinks it’ll be an assist to Commander Shepard – if nothing else, the fact that Saren was interested in Eden Prime’s prothean beacon means that a new prothean archive might well be a lure for him, and he might well show up, or have Benezia or one of her agents go there in his stead. It could lead them to Saren, is what she’s using as her justification for telling Shepard to go and check this out.

Obviously it won’t, because game mechanics, but it’s a solid enough reason to get us where we’re going, which is an asari planet. Here’s where we get a chance to see Liara in her element AND see this pushback against her theories. It bugs the hell out of me that Liara says that her theory of the cycle of extinction is dismissed by other asari because of her youth – by framing that dismissal of her peers with having to do purely with her age, it says that in the two thousand years since the asari discovered the Citadel, to say nothing of anything that might have been included in the prothean archive in the Temple of Athame, NO ONE ELSE has put forward the idea of the cycles. That Liara is the first to put those pieces together. In more than two thousand years. And, as things turn out, she is 100% correct about there being a constant cycle of civilization and extinction.

My suspension of disbelief breaks at that. That she and she alone has developed this theory – this theory that is absolutely fact – in two thousand years. Bare minimum, I would have said that she was part of a fringe collection of scientists who just don’t have the evidential support to justify this being the mainstream view. But it’s the canon we have to work with, so, fine. But this disagreement when it comes to theories on the extinction of the protheans would be another point of why Liara didn’t go on this excursion, that these other researchers are those who do not share her beliefs, and, as she believes, that would mean they would shun her.

But it’s important that these researchers not just be strawmen – they may have held opposing views to Liara, that doesn’t mean they would dislike her. In point of fact, one of them has to have considered herself a friend to Liara, for reasons I’ll get in to in a bit. But these are going to be people who are all for the most part entirely likeable and reasonable. They just don’t agree with Liara’s stance.

Or at least, the records and logs they’ve left behind make them entirely likable and appear reasonable. Because, of course the research team is missing when Shepard and team arrive – like research teams in these scenarios are ever able to avoid going missing and being presumed dead.

This sparks a conflict with Liara – she’s glad that they’re able to try and find them, maybe even rescue them, but she’s also guilty because she should have been on this expedition, should have been with them. Liara’s got a tendency to put things on her own shoulders (see her reaction after Thessia, assuming you don’t have Javik/don’t take the interrupt to get them to an accord). Hell, ideally, this would be something done after Noveria and her mother’s death to explore that some – I hate how by the time you try to speak with her about it, she’s already pulling that “I choose to remember Benezia as she was” thing, seeming to either be accepting or repressing what happened, when what happened is that, regardless of the why, her mother is dead, and Shepard pulled the trigger.

So yeah, while this is a mission available at any point after doing Therum, in my mind, it’s best to take this after Noveria for the ability for Liara to lash out at Shepard for not being able to rescue her mother, how do they think that they can save these people, one among them a friend of hers, look at that, it’s another situation where Shepard is going to fail to rescue someone who mattered to her!

That is her breaking point, where she can’t bottle this all up anymore. That, for the sake of the mission, for “the greater good,” she’s bottled up her feelings and anger and resentment and fear, and yet, here and now, she can’t help it, she has to address it. She knows it’s unfair to Shepard – she heard about indoctrination, understands that it was something horrible for Benezia, that Benezia accepted no alternative to death, but people she cares about keep getting caught in the line of fire, all in the name of what, exactly? “The greater good”? “The ends justifying the means”? Chance and circumstance?

Hell, include some elements tying her closer to Ashley and Kaidan at this point – it connects the crew together more for when the Virmire decision hits, considering that this game only has banter in the Citadel elevators, which, given fast travel, is heavily skippable, and competes with news reports. There needs to be more development of the character interactions, so let’s do some character interaction here, if nothing else. (And maybe also include a post-Virmire conversation with her about how SHE feels about the loss of Ashley/Kaidan, yes I’m moving out of the scope of this DLC idea, but it’s good for characterization, dammit!)

Investigation happens, records and logs do the ‘ominous mood building’ thing... The end result is that what happened was that this planet once housed a prothean lab. A bio-engineering lab. They were creating something that (stated ambiguously, since Shepard won’t know about the Reapers properly yet at this point in the timeline) was meant to fight the Reapers, be something that could stand against them and protect the protheans. But by the time that it was done, the war was all but over, the protheans having lost. The protheans never got the chance to let it loose, pulling up stakes from the facility before the Reapers hit it. But as time wore away the tech, this thing they created has gotten loose on its own after a few thousand years. This thing is like the rachni on Noveria, having been grown in isolation – there was nothing else on this planet, it was literally the only kind of life around, even before getting to it being engineered as a weapon above all else. It’s too mad to save, must be put down.

Easier said than done, of course. The archaeological team are contained inside of it (I’m thinking held in some kind of crystal-like stasis pods on its back), and is drawing on them for life, sort of in the same way that Malak used the Jedi captives on the Star Forge in KOTOR, where it taps into them and heals itself based on their life force. So the Paragon/Renegade choice in here revolves around how much effort Shepard’s going to put in to saving the captives. Freeing them before they get used as batteries, probably with Liara using her biotics to rescue those who they manage to get loose (meaning she’s unable to act as support in combat because she’s busy focusing her biotics), or just killing them first – with Liara distracted and unable to provide support, that justifies the Renegade stance, because it’s one less source of firepower against the thing as it tries to either kill them or add them to its collection.

That’s important because that aforementioned friend of hers is going to be rescued either way the player chooses – Liara will insist on getting her out alive, even if Shepard foregoes saving the others. Regardless of the player choice, Liara’s friend survives, and, once the creature is dead, she’ll respond to how Shepard chose to resolve the situation, if she’s the sole survivor or if Shepard made an effort to rescue everyone. She’s grateful for her survival either way, but she’s angry about the failure to save the others if they were abandoned.

For Liara, though, the ultimate result is seeing something of the protheans being knocked off their pedestal – regardless of the reason (which, yes, we know to be extinction by Reapers), they abandoned this creature, left it to be consumed by madness. The point here is seeing Liara have a moment where she grows up – she has to acknowledge the protheans she pictured for the last century were flawed (Partially because it bothers me the way she speaks of the protheans with such rose-colored glasses even by ME3, when she says “it’s clear they prized knowledge, growth, and cooperation with the rest of the galaxy,” even before Javik sends that image crashing – a species who form an empire, whose legacy is memorialized as an empire, is not going to be first and foremost wise scholars). She’s realizing that whatever the reasons were for creating this, whatever caused them to leave it behind, they still did this to an innocent being that they were responsible for. It’s something of her “loss of innocence” moment, considering that Benezia’s death currently doesn’t really provide that (though, again, we ARE also addressing that... Details.)

Her friend is also going to get a few moments with Liara, talking about the archaeology team, and commenting about how Liara’s development has gone. This is a moment for Liara, to really help give her a character arc in the game proper – considering that she can be left on Therum until right before Ilos, she kinda doesn’t have much of one as it is. Also, this gives a chance for Liara to exist outside of Shepard’s world, considering how she bubbles herself into it as the trilogy progresses. This is someone who’s only really in Liara’s orbit, not Shepard’s, and it gives her a little more grounding and existence outside of Shepard.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Letter from Liara’s friend, commenting about how she handled Shepard’s death, expressing concern for her losing direction

ME3: The creature’s remains have been examined, providing a War Asset, if the archaeologists were saved, they provide an additional boost, Liara’s friend has a cameo on the Citadel after Thessia

Incursion

An Alliance space station on the fringe of the Terminus system abruptly goes silent. As the Normandy’s stealth systems can get there without letting any invaders know, as well as Commander Shepard’s skill, Captain Anderson sends them to check on the station. The batarians specifically have been known to be in the area, but there remains the possibility that this is something worse...

Okay, out of the loyalty mission structure and direct character work, back to isolated stories in the setting. So, the frontier of space? I say this as a lover of scifi from a young age: It is TERRIFYING. You are on the edge of all that’s known, and any number of things, things you could never conceive of because they are so outside of your frame of reference, could show up and kill you. A flimsy barrier of glass (or transparent aluminum or whatever material they make those big honking windows out of) is all that separates you from a suffocating death.

Yeah, we’re doing a psychological horror story here. I suppose technically AGAIN, considering the stuff around the disappeared archaeologists in the above DLC idea, but that was as much about Liara as the atmosphere. This is pure paranoia and suspicion.

The inspiration I’m going with here is KOTOR 2’s opening on the Peragus mine. Something happened here, and the people are all dead or missing – a handful of corpses, but, yet again, we’ve got logs to find, and they’ll include people who we can’t identify among the dead. Because that gives motivation to stick around and solve things, rather than just blow the place to hell.

The first guess is that there’s a batarian slave raid happening here. There are indications that the Alliance officers here were thinking this at first, that this was some raid in progress – sure, it wasn’t open violence, but maybe they were softening things up, trying to get on board, lower defenses, and then let the slave ships show up and take everyone left. That’s what their last attempt at an outgoing message suggested, it’s what Shepard and company show up expecting.

But that wasn’t the case. The investigation continues through the station, with Shepard searching for signs of anyone still alive. And as they proceed through the station, there’s something that seems to keep just passing out of view. Something else is here with them.

Again, I’m skimping on the exposition here, just because the investigation is the important part, and that’s hard to develop without a layout of the station itself in front of me, and what and how the narrative has to adapt to the environment, but also because this is a very atmospheric style story, where the focus is in the build up, the mystery, the way to get to the big reveal of just what it is that happened here. In a story like this, the tension in this is built with how many times you think you’re going to have an encounter with “the monster” before you actually do.

This particular “monster,” as it turns out, is some kind of energy creature, something that came to the station from the unknown depths of space, drawn by the station’s power core emissions. All indications are that this is simply some space-born lifeform that evolved naturally, and isn’t like some Reaper weapon or anti-Reaper weapon. Just some non-sapient lifeform, drawn in by the power core (maybe it had been specially modified, to further explain why this station and why now), and ending up killing the inhabitants of it.

The thing about this is that I’m going to emphasize here is that I DON’T want this as some kind of creation of the Reapers or their servants OR something that was cooked up to combat them. This thing is entirely independent of anything to do with Reapers. One of the things that I appreciated with ME1 over the later games was the “lived in” nature of the galaxy, where there were a handful of things shown and revealed in the course of the story that just spoke to there being life and civilization wandering through the galaxy for countless millennia. Life is pretty persistent when given the chance, and there’s surely life that exists in the depths of space that is so completely alien to our understanding that we might not even recognize it as such. This creature is one such example of life but not as we know it.

Obviously, there’s a straight up Paragon/Renegade choice of killing or sparing the creature, finding some way to lure it off and away from the station. I’m also inclined for a neutral option of trying to humanely capture it – it’s a creature unlike anything they know, it could show them so many things about the greater universe in the examination – but I’m not sure I feel like there’s enough room in the series for that kind of variation, given the limitations – this IS meant to be DLC, you know? Or at least, hypothetical DLC. Either way, though, the end result is that there is a boss battle, Shepard having to either kill it or weaken it, the station is cleared of the threat and the Alliance gets to have the station back, with talk of it being repurposed into some kind of early warning system regarding threats from outside Alliance/Citadel space (hint hint, nudge nudge).

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Emails from the new station commander, referring to the reopening of the station and the fate of the creature

ME3: Station as a war asset, exo-biologists as a war asset, how they examine space-faring life in the galaxy and if they can be adapted in some way to resist the Reapers

Evolution

A mercenary contacts the Normandy, claiming to have information regarding Saren. Following this lead, however, proves to open a separate can of worms, as the mercenary reveals their connections to a cult of people who view synthetics as the next step in organic evolution, and, knowing of Saren’s ties to the geth, seek to stop Shepard – or convert them.

So the idea here is to give more attention to something that seemed to be a running plot thread during ME1 and ME2 – machine cultists. The ExoGeni survey team on Trebin got huskified by an unknown artifact, and in ME2, there’s the mine on Aequitas. Yes, technically that hasn’t happened yet, shush. But we observe this in action in the games proper, and no one ever actually acknowledges it beyond the simple immediate reaction.

So what we have here is a merc, trying to contact Shepard, claiming they have info on Saren. No one really believes it – if Saren’s working with geth, he would have no need for the liability of organic agents. Yet they also can’t really ignore the idea either because Saren is why they’re out here (I really intend to take advantage of the idea that the whole party cast comes back for these with a full on mission briefing/discussion to kick this off – sounds like some fun opportunities for character dynamics with them debating the validity of this claim).

The result of going in takes Shepard and team to a planet where, initial impression, something is OFF about this place. It’s a prefab colony in early colonization, and something about how the people act just doesn’t seem right. They seem to be in an almost trance-like state that no one can snap them out of, a fact that immediately puts everyone on edge.

The merc is here (let’s say he’s a turian), and keeps things frustratingly vague until the arrival of a leader of the colony. The kicker with him being that he appears partially huskified (sorta like the Cerberus goon on Mars that Ashley/Kaidan find). Yet he still seems to be able to act seemingly independently. Of course, someone this obviously not-right has made himself a target, but all the people in the colony, including the merc, are all on his side.

Shepard can try to fight out of this, but they’re overwhelmed – there IS an entire colony of people, and there’s still the possibility of getting them free, Shepard has a responsibility to not shoot civilians (no matter what trigger-happy Renegades might think), and the team at least is willing to take that stand.

The explanation is that this is a group of wanna-call-themselves “next phase of organic evolution,” people who believe that they are the future. That’s what got their attention about Saren and Shepard, knowing about how he is working with the geth (it was an open session of the Council when they got made Spectre, after all). They look to Shepard as a potential threat.

When we encounter Machine Cultists in the game proper, they’re too far gone to really give any explanation. The comics seemed to draw on this – in Mass Effect Evolution, Saren’s brother uncovered one on Palaven, the Illusive Man was involved, Saren had to nuke from orbit the location of this device and his brother with it. We’re kinda going into the same territory with this, but, you know, Shepard gets to save the day.

So the merc shows up, trying to explain, offer the sales pitch (i.e.: the carrot), try to convince Shepard that their leader has the right idea, that this is a true joining of organic and synthetic, and that it will avert the “coming apocalypse” (just in case the whole ‘Reaper artifact’ element wasn’t certain for anyone playing). Then the cult leader shows up to offer the threat (i.e.: the stick), the warning that whatever Shepard expects to do, they will not be able to succeed.

For pacing reasons, I think of this as a pre-Virmire thing, so there’s not a direct awareness on Shepard’s part that just being around a Reaper artifact is a cause for Indoctrination, leading to a period of wondering how this happened and assuming it comes from direct interface – this is as much an explanation for why, if the implication is that the cult leader got to interface with a prothean beacon of some kind (actually Reaper, in the same manner as the vision that Object Rho offers in Arrival), they don’t have Shepard try to interact with this one, that they’re afraid of Shepard becoming like these people.

Anyway, jailbreak sequence! Because we can do better than just running a game of Simon in order to get Shepard out of their cell. Shepard finagles a way out of the cell block and to the colony’s science lab (it’s a frontier world, they need a science lab just to stay aware of all the new things they discover here). Among the things there is the record of what happened here, and specifically the existence of the artifact. Leads to a simple solution – blow up the artifact, and see what that does.

Of course, the artifact is guarded in the heart of the colony’s main site. We meet up with the merc again, who’s seeming a little uncomfortable – the indoctrination hasn’t completely taken root in him, and so there’s some question of maybe he can be reached. Paragon/Renegade here about dealing with him – kill him or spare him. That sparing will come back in a short while

Because now there’s the colony leader – the cult leader, effectively, at this point – to deal with. He’s angry about the damage Shepard has done to everything, ranting about plans to bring the glory of evolution to the galaxy. Yeah, he’s round the bend, the device effectively having melted his mind (okay, yeah, I’m getting flashes of Kenson here, but hey, same tech, so it’s not ripping off, it’s continuity!)

After dealing with him, the plan is to blow the artifact sky high. Here’s where the merc comes back into play – he says he’s too far gone, and wants to be the one to push the button on this thing, die with it. It’s his way of having a good death after this. Another Paragon/Renegade choice about his fate before blowing the thing sky high – the colony, unfortunately can’t be saved, anyone not killed getting there dies when the device is blown.

There’s an after action briefing, too, where, because, again, the idea here is that this is pre-Virmire, the crew really discuss the horrors of what “these Reaper machines” can do, and what if they’re not some geth red herring or something.

Basically, my idea here is that this is adding to the atmosphere and mystique of the Reapers, in a way that, with the game proper focused on the concept of advancing the plot, doesn’t get a chance. This is a more traditional feature of building up the menace, by showing the insidious nature of things, having the Reapers’ subtle side at play – we see references of Indoctrination, but we don’t really get the horrors outside of some talk – sure, there are the salarians who are in the Virmire facility, and Benezia’s talk, but it’s all second hand. This is a case where we see the effects spread across the entire colony, which, given resources in the game, is all of a planet we get to encounter, and Shepard and company are the only ones who aren’t, and that can go to the paranoia, where the people surrounding them all are giving off the vibes of being a threat, but they’re not doing anything. What can I say, I am a sucker for a good atmospheric story.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Email about the aftermath of the colony’s destruction, and the research done on the corpses on the effects of Indoctrination

ME3: War asset surrounding Indoctrination research, preliminary anti-Indoctrination tech being introduced around the Catalyst facility, if the merc sacrificed himself, his family offers a boost to turian military morale on the basis of how one of their own resisted (pointedly ignoring Saren)

Relativity

The Mass Relays are the ancient devices that allow faster than light travel throughout the galaxy. The Charon Relay specifically was one that opened the way for humanity to join the races of the Citadel. This only makes a sudden distress call from the Relay all the more urgent, and Admiral Hackett believe that of everyone in the Alliance, Commander Shepard is right for the job.

So the Mass Relays are these massive facilities that are a key point throughout the entire trilogy. Why, exactly, do we never see one up close aside from transition screens? We should totally get to explore one! Like, I realize that it’s never explicitly said if there’s any kind of command station, or if “guarding a Mass Relay” was a ship-based action or if there was actual, physical contact with one, but I’m saying that something of the size of the Relays, even if much of it is a solid object, you maintain SOME sort of command structure within it in order to monitor and examine things. Even if the Reapers have some kind of robotic drones or Keeper analogues running around, doing standard maintenance, I cannot be convinced that there is not SOME areas of the actual Mass Relay that house facilities for organic life to work in. Especially considering the design having the light sources along the hull that we traditionally associate with acting as windows on starships and space stations.

So yeah, this is an adventure taking us into the workings of a Mass Relay proper. The general idea is that there’s a distress call from the Charon Relay, which is something that really worries the Alliance – lose the Charon Relay, humanity loses their connection to the galaxy at large. And the Alliance doesn’t want the Citadel to know about this, at least not right away – if something is impacting how the Relays function, the Council is going to demand getting involved, and the Alliance DEFINITELY doesn’t want to give the non-human races a free pass into humanity’s home system, so they’re calling on Shepard.

Also part of the novelty of this is that I kinda want to have the chance to explore what it’s like for those who are not exploring the stars in this setting – the Mass Relay’s crew is alive and intact and interactable. This isn’t one of the many cases of showing up too late to be able to properly save people (I’m looking mostly at ME2 on this count, even before we add in the above and below of my own creation).

Head of the team on the Relay is an engineer, not a soldier (pulling a name out of hat for them in the name of simplicity in this write up... Let’s go with Sarah Manning, just because my Orphan Black DVDs happen to be right next to me as I’m writing this and it offers as good as a placeholder as any – feel free to picture Tatiana Maslany as this character if you so choose, though, by the rules of this series, in an ideal world, this would have been DLC produced for ME1 in 2007, so this character would probably be at least a decade, probably more, older than she would have been at the time, oh no, I’ve gone cross-eyed...). She’s not just concerned about the Council finding out – not that she’s a Terra Firma type, just that she has Earth related pride and considers the Charon Relay humanity’s, and, on a personal level, HERS, given her responsibility for it – but also the lives on board. She wants to protect and preserve as many lives as she can.

The interior of the facility is a mix of reasonably sensical designs, in the areas meant for humanoid habitation, and something far more Eldritch abomination-y when we start moving out of those areas. And, you know, we pretty much HAVE to move out of them as time goes on, since that’s like half of the fun of this concept.

But we start in the more familiar areas, where everything seems normal. Except the people are missing (yes, I know I’m relying on this concept a lot, but it’s good as an in universe mystery and out of universe programming so that the game doesn’t have to account for like a dozen NPCs to fill space). In this instance, the distress signal itself indicates that the Relay’s station commander had ordered their people to a designated safe zone within the Relay’s structure, which is where Shepard will need to head to uncover things. Sarah’s staying in the control area, trying to ensure that nothing else goes wrong.

At some point in the midst of this, I do want the question of if the Relay will be/has to be destroyed to come up, better establish the idea that will come up in Arrival of the destruction of Relay in the game proper.

The exploration takes Shepard into the Eldritch-y areas, which, sadly, because I am a wordsmith and not a picture kind of person, I can really only describe as messing with perception and going all Escher in the design. Basically, the idea is to present the interior and heart of the Relays as being these massively complex and complicated machines that function on a level not really human (or, in the case of the non-human races in the game besides the Reapers, human adjacent). Because, first of all, this is faster than light travel, which means this is this is this franchise’s handwave for how anything happens on multiple planets and is dealt with in (in-universe) real time, and second, Sovereign talked about a level of existence beyond our own and such. This leans into that kind of concept – yeah, sure, we may have the Reapers be shown as effectively fundamentally understandable, but let’s at least justify the hype a little, huh?

The big idea here is that we’re kinda throwing back to the puzzle style of play that you used to see in computer games in like the nineties. That’s why perspective is going to be a part of this. Basically, the engineers on the Relay found something that tripped the security systems, sort of “unhinging” standard reality around them, getting them lost in the various extra layers (dimensions?) that the Relay works in.

I don’t really know if I see any kind of real boss or major decision here, because this is basically about the gimmick over anything else – Mass Effect isn’t a bad place for a gimmicky throwback, right? Maybe... Ah, something’s clicking here for me – the guy responsible for all of this happening in the first place. He was trying to access an archive – he initially thought it was prothean, but he’s been able to realize that this is much older. He wants to get this information, and is the last one we rescue. The issue is that it’s going to be a choice – rescue this guy and lose the archive, or save the archive and he dies. Like, I’m thinking that there’s some kind of rip or maybe a miniature black hole that’s sucking in the both of them and Shepard can only save one. That’s a solid Paragon/Renegade choice, especially since I could see arguments for both.

Anyway, once the crew’s all rescued and the choice made, Manning gets back to Shepard and says that this is about to get slapped with a security clearance so high she’d “probably have to kill [herself] just for remembering [she has] it” (because yes, I want that as an actual quote), and recommends that they get off the Relay before any superior officers show up to rake them over the coals for their involvement – Shepard’s a busy person, doesn’t need to get bogged down in the red tape that’s sure to come.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Email from Manning regarding the Relay’s subsequent stability

ME3: Manning’s team as a war asset/the archive being tapped for Crucible data and information on the Reapers (mutually exclusive – the team will have disbanded after the loss of the one member if the archive was recovered)

Planet of Peace

An attempt at colonizing a planet, with the aid of all Council races, in an effort at fostering galactic peace, sounded great on paper. The diplomats jumped on the opportunity. The reality has been... less than stellar. Considering the first human Spectre a bridge between races, the Council asks Commander Shepard to try and help smooth over relations.

Frankly, while I understand the focus on the threat of the Reapers, honestly, this seems like a legitimate issue that would be an instant demand for the first human Spectre. And, given the tension and hostility between the races (even beyond humanity against everyone else), it seems like a natural fit, in all honesty. Because it does seem like all the canonical colony worlds always start as one species attempting to tame a single world, rather than taking advantage of the unifying effort of the galactic community.

At the forefront of this colony is the retired human ambassador to the Council, Ambassador Goyle (Anderson mentions her when talking about his candidacy for the Spectres and we see her in the first of Alec Ryder’s memories, now we get to make her a character we get to interact with). This was her passion project specifically, thinking that all races had something that they could offer one another and need to come together.

Basically, she’s underscoring what I like to think of as a core concept of the series, being stronger together than separately.

But, of course, there are tensions. I mean, not even just because we wouldn’t have a plot without it. She is concerned that there might be some extremists getting involved – aren’t there always? When things are tense, some idiot’s always going to come along, see the stacks of dynamite, and decide to light a match. She is specifically asking that Shepard come to help resolve some issues, using their symbolism. Her request is fully aware of this being an exercise in flag waving, but it’s an important bit of flag waving – doing this here can make the galactic community a more stable place.

Bringing back in the element of having the cast back for these, I want to include quite a bit of companion content in this one, including something like how Dragon Age 2’s Mark of the Assassin DLC had a short companion quest for everyone. On a planet that’s a melting pot of the various races that make up the Citadel species, there’s going to be something for everyone here somehow. I don’t know what specifically right now – these write ups focus on the main plot, not the sidequests. But these are things that are there.

As for what is happening on the planet, on the small scale, there’s your standard culture clash brushfires, things that seem small and petty, but have accumulated for the people involved because they’re in such close proximity. But there is a strong Terra Firma presence as well, the “Earth for humans!” type, in addition to similar groups among the traditional Citadel races – this is still only a handful of decades past humanity’s entry, and as we’ve discussed before, the arrival of humanity has made things much more chaotic than they were before, and there’s more than a little resentment among the non-human races for humanity’s attitude and approach to things coming across almost as if they’re demanding more, without anyone Citadel side acknowledging that First Contact was a shit show of THEIR making (scroll back up and see Investigations for more on that...)

But the larger scale conflict is a group out to make sure that this planet fails in its mission and goal, drive a wedge between factions. I’m thinking of going the Star Trek VI route on this, that this group is an ironic banding of humans and non-humans, determined to see peace fall apart at the cost of allying with their supposed enemies, and using “look at how easily they turned on their own to stop this!” as a justification for their own hypocrisy.

Going with the Star Trek VI reference, this group is gearing up for an assassination attempt on Ambassador Goyle herself, believing that stopping her will stop the advancement of this idea. Now, Commander Shepard HAS to save her, we’re not doing the question of “can they stop it in time?” but, for all those pro-humanity xenophobic “Cerberus was right all along!” types, the response of Shepard will be to either name the conspirators and why or utilize their designated fall guy.

BUT WAIT! That’s not the end of this one. See, we’re also going to get an aftermath – the results of this will impact how the population react, and there’s a second story mission that requires a plot progression to access.

Returning to this planet (I feel like it would get some ambitious name like “Hope” or something, but I think it’s kinda provincial for the planet to carry a human name, so...), things are even tenser than before. We get to actively see how the fallout is impacting things, with people drawing lines based on the earlier assassination attempt. This is a lot like how the turian weapons merchant on the Citadel in ME2 will respond differently based on how Shepard resolved ME1 – side with one faction in the first part, their supporters approve of you and their opposites are angry with you, and vice versa.

Goyle appreciates Shepard’s return, because she’s seeing the place beginning to collapse. She’s feeling ready to throw in the towel because of how poorly things are going. Still, until the place closes its doors, she’s going to stand up and act like the leader she’s here to be. Shepard saved her life, she’s going to commit it to preserving this colony. But she wants Shepard’s help all the same, because they can leverage that heroism to helping put things here right.

Of course, here’s where we get to the big finale choice – are you going to strengthen this colony or break it? And sure, it seems straightforward on the idea of what’s good and what’s bad, but here’s the thing that the overall narrative develops through investigation – the Alliance and the Citadel need to allocate their resources. Part of the reason that the sanctioned colonies tend to be dominated by one species or another is a matter of need – when you have a primarily human/asari population, you’ll have to import in resources for turians, things like that – even if they’re trying to grow them on their own, they probably need to import like soil for nutrients and such.

And that not only gets costly, that can divert resources that are more greatly in need. In the long term, this could tie up resources that are needed elsewhere. In the short term, if trying to make these disparate races and cultures work together and play nice is taking up this much time and effort, isn’t it possible, isn’t it plausible, that there are better things to be doing with those resources?

So, do we try and heal the divide and potentially tie up resources in what has been an uphill climb from the start, and right before the Reaper War begins (for all you forward thinkers reading this), or do we cut our losses and focus on making these types of cross-species initiatives at a later point in time? That’s the Paragon/Renegade choice here.

The resolution comes and Ambassador Goyle will be either thankful for the effort or resigned that her great initiative isn’t going forward. Regardless of Shepard’s actions, she’s thankful that they at least made an attempt – she isn’t going to see them as failing if they opted to cut the losses, but herself.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Letter either from Ambassador Goyle, reporting on the colony, or a news service announcement of her having further withdrawn from the public eye after the colony’s failure.

ME3: For Paragon choice, there’s a decrease in dextro-food reserves, given the colony’s need, but an increase in interspecies morale, with efforts to incorporate multi-species crews underway, and vice versa for the Renegade

Daedalus Station

A space station on the fringe of Citadel space sends out a distress call. When the Normandy arrives, however, no one there claims responsibility for it. Yet the station is in a spiral, a path that will, slowly but steadily, lead the station directly into a sun. Commander Shepard attempts to save everyone aboard from the inevitable death, and discover why they seem unfazed at the idea.

Okay, let’s just acknowledge first, yes, I’m aware that the synopsis sounds not just like a rip off of the first mission of Leviathan but also “Incursion” above. I’m aware. Look, the synopsis is a short brief, not the full details, okay? Strictly speaking, it’s more in line with the events of Leviathan, certainly, but I want to at least acknowledge that I’m aware that there are similarities. Okay, they’re there, LET’S MOVE ON.

Anyway. Distress call, brings in the Normandy. Station is obviously in a death spiral. The moment that Shepard and company board the station, everyone is going about their routine. Obviously, something’s a touch screwy about this set up. Another investigation must ensue.

Of course, as we’ve established, details of the investigations are not where my expansions really shine – it’s easy to stretch out a discovery of this sort, with development A leading to clue B and making revelation C... Yadda, yadda. I’m about the what of these things, not the how.

The ultimate thing about this is twofold. Part one is that this is basically going to be an introduction to the concept of Indoctrination – someone discovered a Reaper artifact, and is trying to adapt it to their benefit. Because frankly, the idea that someone wouldn’t try and take Indoctrination for themselves... Yeah, let’s be real here. Someone WOULD.

Obviously, since we’re still in game one and the Reapers are still mostly a mystery at this point in time, there’s the question of what this is. But, hey, it’s still something that should have happened, and this is the time when there’s the most mystery and least immediate “oh shit, this will horribly backfire if we don’t just straight up blow this up now” reactions.

So, our villain. They’re gonna spiral into insanity (thematic mirroring – as the station enters the death spiral, they spiral into madness), so we’re not going to push too much on making them seem sympathetic, in the traditional sense. Honestly, in writing this, I’m kinda getting parallels to your average dangerous incel aspiring mass shooter, so we’re gonna go with that, someone who perceived themselves as more isolated and alone than they were – the investigation will have us find private journals from other crew pre-artifact that mention him, usually in the fashion of ‘he doesn’t talk much, but doesn’t seem that bad’ kind of messages. Meanwhile, his own talk about the others has a more downcast approach, that he knows they’re not interested in hearing about him, etc. etc.

You know, this is the kind of person who, upon getting the ability to manipulate minds is basically doing it in an effort to bolster his own self-esteem, turning people who were once a little sharp with him one time into his whipping boys, and making himself the king of this little hill.

The problem of his plan? The mental degradation. The last of those to fall under his sway sent out the automated distress beacon, and knew that there was a danger in this guy leaving – but they also couldn’t be sure that their efforts would be successful. It’s a case of the distress beacon being a double-edged sword – can their rescuers save them, stop this guy, or will they fall under his sway as well? But there’s no other solution. They set the collision course (and yes, I’m aware that this is happening on a space station, hey, the pilot episode of DS9 showed that the station could travel through maneuvering thrusters and such – the idea is that they wanted to find a way to destroy the station), and then destroyed the controls so it couldn’t be undone, and disabled the alerts so that the station wouldn’t alert anyone, setting it up to make it that the station’s sensors all seem to send the green light to the rest of the station – the false data would hopefully prevent the station crew from noticing.

Yes, of course I want there to be an apocalyptic log, why would I deny that BioWare staple?

Another thing that I want to do here is kinda retroactively at least make it a part of the universe that Shepard is resistant to the efforts of Reaper Indoctrination. The idea I’m going with is that some of the scrambling of Shepard’s brain (which, sidenote, I also want to take some time in this and call out the fact that it’s a PLOT POINT that Shepard’s brain gets messed with repeatedly throughout this game and no one thinks that might actually be a questionable matter – if a key point of this DLC is “dude, you’re messing with people’s minds, that’s rather unambiguously Not A Good Thing To Do,” then it’s an elephant in the room to not bring up that this is what’s happening with Shepard) has made them more resistant to these effects, though that probably means justifying this as having a watered down effect so that the companions are feeling the tug to fall under our villain’s thrall.

That’s basically where I picture the boss battle going, that Shepard has to fight against one of their companions, who has been compelled to be this guy’s defender against them. I’d say both companions, but that might be a little much, in particular on lower difficulties. So I’m going to say that Shepard can knock out one of their companions before they fall under the sway of the big bad’s influence, but the other escapes. I feel like there could be ways to offset the difficulties of this by way of like finding objects that counteract the signal or whatever, but the idea is Shepard versus companion. While it obviously has to end non-lethally, I feel like this is the kind of thing that is morbidly fascinating to see in just about everyone’s book. I’d also figure that it would depend on a handful of variables that make them resist more or less (because the game should reward investigation, right?)

When that’s completed (I figure it ends with Shepard destroying the controller artifact), it’s time to deal with the station about to be caught in the sun – the station’s going to be locked in a death spiral, but the people of the station can now evacuate. Which leaves the person responsible. On the Paragon side, Shepard is not judge, jury, and executioner, this guy should be given a fair trial. On the Renegade side, he’s a dick who took over people’s minds with no remorse on the matter. Whatever decision Shepard goes with, the station’s population will abide by – they probably want him dead anyway, right?

Aftermath does come into play, with a conversation with the companion Shepard fought against, because, especially if they’re a romance, that’s gotta mess with their heads. Also some general discussion of the artifact itself – obviously, while I expect a variation in the event this is played after Virmire, my idea of this is that it happens some time before it, so things like Wrex and Ashley/Kaidan’s deaths (or possible death) are variation options, this is basically something that I feel can influence matters – if Shepard and Wrex have already fought, for example, I feel like that would earn them enough influence come Virmire for Wrex to stand down there, it’s got parallels/foreshadowing... That kind of emotional work.

Also there’s some consideration about that artifact – once a technology exists, putting that genie back in the bottle is nigh impossible, so now it’s known that you can use this tech to control minds, someone’s sure to try and take advantage of this tech somewhere down the line – Shepard and company will discuss what kind of precautions can and should be taken about these kinds of developments in the future (hint hint, Cerberus/Illusive Man, hint hint).

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Letter from a station survivor, variation on the matter of how the responsible party was dealt with.

ME3: Efforts have been undertaken to block Indoctrination tech, based on the information that Shepard gathered on the station.

Fleet Crisis

With the concerns of Saren and the geth rising, Admirals Hackett and Anderson want to get a chance to upgrade the defenses at the heart of the Alliance. Arcturus Station, home to the Alliance government, is housing a defense meeting, and Commander Shepard is being recalled to speak at it. The Alliance may be facing another crisis, however...

(Two plot planets completed)

We have very little actual Alliance elements involved in the game, did you ever notice that? Like, there’s Admiral Anderson and Admiral Hackett, and we get the inspection tour thing from Admiral Mikhailovich, but other than that, we really are not given much about the Alliance proper. So the idea here for us to go to Arcturus Station and actually encounter the Alliance government proper. We only ever properly encounter the Citadel Council, not the government that technically, Shepard is under the authority of. The closest we ever come is the (rather useless) Defense Committee at the start of ME3.

So yeah, we’re going to the home of the Alliance proper, and seeing the Fifth Fleet – like my first time playing the game, I had no real concept of the Fifth Fleet until it shows up at the endgame. I kinda would like more foreshadowing, more textual acknowledgement of the fleet that is the reason why we end the game as we do. Like, we get to do a fleet flyby in the process, allowing us to see the size of the fleet and talk about what makes the human fleets different from those of the other races. Although the Citadel races do have their bullshit reasons for distrusting humanity, the fact that humanity has this massive force is a reasonable excuse for the behavior.

I also see this as a very different style DLC. As it is, we got one DLC that was basically a shooting gallery, so here, we’re in the opposite direction, where combat is taking almost a total backseat to dialogue – I mean you have a dialogue system like Mass Effect, where every line gets voiced, you would think that would imply that there’s a lot of faith in the writing, wouldn’t you think? And, the whole beauty of DLC in general usually is the fact that everything’s option – if you’re really all shooty-shooty bang-bang, you don’t HAVE to do this. But the whole series paints Shepard as this inspirational figure, and their oratory skills should be on full display as much as their ability to fire a gun.

I’m also kinda anti-“going to Alliance vessels and the in universe equivalent of the House/Senate halls/White House combined and freely shoot up the place,” just on principle.

Anyway, here we are, visiting the heart of Alliance space. We honestly really should have more of an idea of what humanity has accomplished in the universe. Arcturus Station, the home of Alliance government. This is a big deal for the crew, of course – it’s getting invited to speak at the Senate in Washington DC. For the various non-humans, it’s a big deal as well.

Now, of course, in the heart of Alliance government, the involvement of a bunch of non-humans is going to be considered questionable at best. I won’t go straight to “you can’t use any companions other that Ashley and Kaidan,” but there is going to be more of a sense of observation from the other Alliance officers and officials when the non-humans are in the party.

The first thing to note about this is that Shepard’s position as Spectre has made them a combination of being a political tool for humanity’s better advancement, but (as evidenced by Mikhailovich’s ranting) some are concerned that Shepard may be – intentionally or not – turned into a pure Council flunky and only doing the work that they approve, regardless of acting in humanity’s benefit.

That’s part of the reason Shepard’s even here – their position is getting humanity’s foot in the door with the Spectres, but this is creating a conflict in various corners, wondering about where their allegiance will be if pressed. Admiral Hackett is, of course, speaking in Shepard’s favor, but just because they have the approval of Hackett and Anderson, there’s still concern among the brass.

This is going to start out seeming very low-key – we’re in the heart of Alliance territory, who would be foolish enough to come along and mess with anyone or anything here, right? So a lot of initial tone-setting, discussion and debate – the first half is a debate sequence, with Paragon/Renegade points abound as Shepard discusses with the various Alliance officials what they’re doing as a Spectre. That culminates in Shepard’s oratory really getting to stretch as they approach the seat of governing for the Alliance, and all those earlier discussions start to add up to how their performance is among the bigwigs – if you talked up human dominance in the one-on-ones, then talk peaceful coexistence, for example, you get called on it.

After Shepard’s speech is over, that’s where we start to see the real fractures starting to take place. We’re not quite at ‘military coup’ levels (let’s leave SOME plot elements for the later games, huh?), but there’s clear dissatisfaction, that Shepard’s words have only fanned flames for – regardless of the way their speech went down, there are some among the fleet, admirals and other high ranking officers who were involved in the First Contact War and just don’t like how the Alliance is handling things.

It’s not a coup, but it is, in effect, breaking away from the Alliance to set up an independent nation, separate from both the Alliance and the Citadel. It’s still in its earliest stages, of course, but it’s easy to see how it might well turn hostile to both – it’s got several military figures from the Alliance leaving, meaning a vulnerable gap for the Alliance military, and it’s got lingering hostility for the Citadel races (turians in particular, but let’s also not forget that the asari, the famed diplomats of the Citadel, seem to have never picked up on the fact that the human resentment towards aliens comes from the fact that an alien government came along and tried to impose their rules on an unaligned species as humanity’s introduction to the greater galaxy – they are complicit here).

Shepard’s task becomes trying to prevent this offshoot from happening. These are orders being cut by President Shastri himself (let’s make this major Alliance figure a presence we actually feel in the series, huh?), with Hackett’s blessing – meaning if things devolve into a shoot out (which will be possible), Shepard will not be held liable for the deaths of several Alliance military figures, that the record will show that they were acting in the interests of the Alliance in response to an imminent threat of potential armed conflict, even a human civil war. No one wants it to come to that, but it’s also going to be one of the most likely outcomes in the minds of those involved – even if Shepard weren’t a Spectre, if someone of their rank and stature on the galactic stage gets involved, it’s because diplomacy isn’t working.

So there’s another segment of trying to sway the people involved. Shepard will have the choice of approached armed or unarmed (like I said, I dislike the idea of a shootout, but I feel like Shepard’s in a position both to be legally entitled to wear weapons in this situation AND uncomfortable going in without any weaponry), which will feed into the metric of how well their argument is received. Because it’s a mechanic so good, we’re using it twice! (Okay, really, it’s because “dialogue” is the gimmick of this idea, but shush.)

Anyway, the various ‘points’ accumulate to the ultimate confrontation with the heads of this group planning this splintering. Shepard’s arguments are going to be along the line of (to summarize) “you’ll only weaken the Alliance, that can’t be your goal,” “if you have problems, work within in the systems and listen to both sides of things,” “put this aside or else,” or “I support your efforts, but this isn’t the time.” Yes, I’m going with four paths for this, the dialogue wheel does offer that, and I want Paragon/Renegade options for each of these. Like you basically pick a path at the start and argue from that position. Depending on the “points” accumulated through dialogue (and probably a handful of sidequests) in the lead to this debate), it will come to either a peaceful resolution or Shepard pulling out their gun on a handful of high-ranking Alliance officers, ready and able to pull the trigger.

While shooting them isn’t an ideal solution, it can bring the others back into line. It’s just going to cause resentment within the Alliance itself – threat or no, these were respected figures among the Alliance. Meanwhile, folding them back in is an ideal solution, but it still means the resentment lingers, because Shepard’s only delayed the boiling over, not prevented it. There’s still tension in the Alliance because this was about issues that can’t be solved with a few words, especially when this was about the involvement and actions of the Citadel. Shepard might be a Spectre, but whether or not they’ve affirmed themselves as giving the Alliance its due, they’re now wrapped up in those politics.

The curveball in things is that last one, Shepard suggesting that they should wait on this issue. I think it’s a valid possibility among the various permutations of the decision point, to have Shepard support them, especially given that ME1’s Renegade Shepard could be a pro-human asshole, but, considering that this is DLC, and particularly DLC that, by my self-imposed rule, cannot change the base game’s story (because if I could do that, I might as well be rewriting all the games in this instead of just created additional content, and this is all hypothetical to begin with), we can’t introduce some new faction into the galaxy, especially an optional one. So the idea here is that Shepard is supporting it, but saying that they can’t make this A Thing right now.

There is an aftermath discussion with President Shastri as well, discussing implications for the future. I also figure that the companions should have a lot to offer in both the aftermath and the core interactions – again, I see Ashley and Kaidan as greatly recommended for this story, and the Alliance officers should have a lot to add, including conversations in the midst of the crisis.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Email from Shastri as an update of the tension in the Alliance – it’s also something that should be impacted by the decision of the Council at the end of ME1

ME3: Tensions between Alliance and Council forces are impacted by the outcome – if they were swayed by persuasion to rejoin the Alliance, there’s actually a bump in assets, as well as the Alliance bigwigs being a tactical resource, while there’s a decrease in cooperation if the bad blood was fostered.

The Clean Up

The Battle of the Citadel is over, but even if the geth and Sovereign have been defeated, there is a lot left for Commander Shepard and the crew of the Normandy to do. Investigating the damage done to the Citadel leads to a possible lead on the Reapers. In the wake of the battle, Commander Shepard and company set out to chase it down...

(Post-Game)

So, as I said in the KOTOR editions, we’re adding a Post-Game to ME1 (since this is all hypothetical to begin with, so we’re going to make that alteration to the mechanics), pretty much solely because I want to do some development of the aftermath of the game, as well as do some retroactive set up for Mass Effect 2. Because I don’t think there was a lot of emotional wrap up to the characters at the time. I will grant that we’ve got an awkward period of time between the games here, but, hey, we’ve got enough wiggle room I think to lead in to the opening of ME2

Basically, we can start in what’s basically the immediate aftermath – Shepard’s now out of their recovery, is looking to get back in the game. But, with the Council either still reacting to the events of the Battle of the Citadel or still needing to be reassembled, there’s really not any particular indication of what to be doing. This is some mood setting, looking at the rebuilding effort, how the Citadel was impacted and seeing the response of people to the attack – some are still shaken, mourning their loved ones lost in the attack, hoping for the lost to be found safe, and all that sort. Others are angry about the attack, and the ultimate approach to it seems to basically be blaming everyone, and Shepard in particular since they’re there, for the failure to protect those on the Citadel – and yes, we absolutely get to call out this bullshit for what it is, because Shepard tried, but the Citadel itself is something of a complacency trap, and even if the politics weren’t a distraction, the fact that the Citadel itself remains aloof is an actual problem

Anderson speaks with Shepard, regarding the geth that are still out there in the Traverse, and the need to deal with them before they put more human colonies in danger. The bigwigs are already trying to downplay the Reapers – Anderson basically tells Shepard that they need to go out, find proof of something that ties back to the Reapers or the Council will likely turn around and make this all about the geth and call it over (uh, yeah, Shepard, about that...).

The lead involved is going to be heading out to the border of geth space, which is also the line of what used to be quarian territory. This is convenient for Tali, who wants to return to the flotilla now that Saren has been dealt with. There’s a trading outpost that will be out there that will give her the opportunity to get a ride back to the Migrant Fleet (because, despite a couple of references, I have never believed that Tali lingered too long on the Normandy – either she has to get her data on the geth back to them, or she has to discover an alternative). Because part of this is also going to be the “characters splitting apart” stuff as set up for ME2. Tali’s going to assist through this branch of the mission, but she will want to come back here before the Normandy returns to Citadel space proper.

The trading outpost is Omega-esque, something of “the poor man’s Omega,” again, setting that up for ME2 (we’re doing a lot of world-building patches here, okay?) The citizens here don’t care about the Alliance and they’re not all that concerned about Spectres, either. This is not a friendly place and will not just accept the appearance of anyone with the supposed authority that Shepard is representing.

This is kind of an introduction to ME2’s merc gangs – ME1 seems to play the systems of the Terminus to have their own government, species not represented among the Citadel races, and just this general atmosphere of the Terminus being more developed than it ends up being when we actually go there (which, yeah, that’s how writing and developing and world-building goes, but we’re here to smooth things over). I’m leaning towards not having the big three on Omega be all that represented here, considering that, lawless border or not, this is not really a place where they care enough to expand their influence. But they should at least be mentioned and referenced as the big dogs of the pack, that the gangs that jockey for power here want to take them on. Probably some poaching of members (through recruitment or snipers) from those gangs that make their numbers never get to where they might pose a threat.

Anyway. What needs to be done here is find out where Saren discovered Sovereign – that’s the idea we’re going with in trying to track down evidence of the Reapers. Sovereign had to be hiding out somewhere, you don’t just stumble across something like that. Considering this is one of the last places you’d expect to be able to find a Spectre, especially a Spectre who is one of the Council’s top operatives, it’s a decent enough starting point for us as the audience – we’ll say that there are records that Saren was out here shortly before the Eden Prime mission and such, explaining why we’re starting here.

Garrus is also going to have a realization about the merc gangs, about the horrible things they’re inflicting on the people who are living here, and being infuriated at the injustice allowed to happen – the effective attitude of the officials here are basically ‘look, unless the merc gangs come after us, we don’t care.’ This is going to dig under his skin (plates... you know what I mean), lead him to why he ultimately breaks with C-Sec, despite Shepard being able to lead him to a better understanding of the rules and regs – he understands the need for them, but sees them being used and abused to allows these injustices to continue, that it becomes a personal mission to see ‘justice’ and ‘law’ be synonymous.

As for the plot, yes, we’re getting there. This does, of course, lead to a shoot-out with a major gang force here, some people who are indoctrinated spies (because, hey, we’re looking for evidence of Reapers). They were left behind as part of Saren’s contingency plans, meant to stop anyone hunting for him – it’s just that the investigation that Shepard went on in the base game didn’t send them here. Even with Saren and Sovereign dead, they’re still here, still indoctrinated – a reminder that this is a permanent thing, a devastating thing, because there’s no way to take the Reaper compulsion away. But this leads to learning about a place that Saren ventured to from here, a place wracked with dangerous phenomenon. The only way to get there is with a crack pilot – which, fortunately, Normandy has.

There’s a brief pause from plot for some further expansion with the others – Wrex has been contemplating the krogan, given what went down on Virmire. His people are dying out, maybe not in the way we traditionally think of it, but still in practice. What is there for the krogan but to be used and abused by the Sarens of the universe, so long as all they care about is getting offworld and fighting and dying, usually being pit against one another as the proxies for stupid, pointless conflicts. It’s not right, and it’s beginning to eat at him.

And then there’s Ashley/Kaidan. Given the events of Virmire, both of them are thinking about the family that was left behind – Ashley’s sisters lost one of their central figures, Kaidan’s family lost their only son. They both are trying to write a letter of condolence to their counterpart’s loved ones (and specifically asking Shepard about the one they should be writing), trying to figure how they can make it better that they were saved at the other’s expense. It’s a complicated matter, and I want to just explore, even retroactively, how these two were friends, were close, potentially (if Shepard shuts down a romance with both of them) starting to come together. Just a bit that not only reestablishes the friendship and emphasizes that the fallen character is not forgotten, plus giving more context to how they’ll say that they and Shepard got through the other’s death together in ME3

This is a point for some romance content, which, I realize I have yet to bring up Liara’s character bit for this – don’t worry, it’s coming. But we do pause for some smoochies.

Anyway. The Normandy arrives in the hazardous area and we get a team meeting – remember how back in the first of these outlines, I brought up wanting to give more for Pressley? I haven’t directly mentioned him much since, but here’s a place to feature him, in the same way that the landing on Ilos does, showing him having a greater involvement in the strategy and such. Team Shepard needs to figure out if there even is a place to investigate within this area. There are sensor ghosts that might be something that they could land on and investigate, though it’s too small for a Mako mission (I may love that tank, but I feel like its final ride being the trip through the Ilos Relay is poetic and I’m not going to mess with that). Joker gets his moment of putting the Normandy through her paces (which is also going to add to the pain of her loss in ME2’s prologue, that she could pull this off, but couldn’t out-fly the Collector ship).

They detect something with a similar energy signature to the prothean beacons on an asteroid large enough to land on, which makes it reasonable for Liara to go with – take the prothean expert to a place that could hold more information on the protheans. She’s nervous because of the confirmation of the Reapers has just made things really real for her – this is facing the same thing that destroyed the protheans, and how can they stand against them, given the protheans’ advanced nature?

Let’s also take a moment and, given the indoctrinated nature of the mercs who attacked back on the outpost, to have some follow-up for Benezia’s death – I may only be speaking for myself, but it has NEVER sat right that Liara’s response to that is to simply go “I choose to remember Benezia as she was,” given that Shepard was, regardless of their reluctance, responsible for the actual bullet that ended her mother’s life. She’s struggling – could the mercs have been saved? Could her mother? Could what they find below offer a way to have saved them, and, if so, would Saren have had it, could he have freed her mother before her death? Did she have to die? Why did her mother have to die? Cue Shepard offering their support for her emotional struggle.

And yes, for Liaramancers, this is where they get their smoochies.

As for what they find... Geth. Plenty of (heretic – though Shepard doesn’t yet know this) geth. They are crawling all over the facility, it’s a firefight all the way to the central database, and, as our big final boss, we deal with a geth augmented with some of Sovereign’s tech, meant to be a Reaper upgrade for the geth. Obviously, this is not going to make it into the geth consensus (heretic or true), and this is effectively the only existing prototype.

The result of this is that they do find an archival interface, the same kind that allowed the communication with Sovereign on Virmire. Unfortunately, it can provide nothing – without Sovereign connected to it, it’s got minimal functionality – something might be recovered, with some time and effort. But the facility is about to move into the areas of this area of space that will fry any systems that get close to it – Sovereign probably had this place selected in the name of being a place where anyone who might stumble upon its hiding place would decide to move on because it’s suicide to remain in the area.

The only choice is to return to the Normandy, without any additional evidence. There are indications of geth vessels having moved out of the area and into other sectors, which could give them something to go on for further investigations. But, with this stage of the mission being a bust, Shepard is going to have the Normandy return to the earlier outpost in the name of allowing all ashore who are going ashore – Tali, Garrus, and Wrex, specifically, but also any other Normandy crew willing to stand down for the time being. Investigating this further is a strictly volunteer mission. This will, of course, lead us to ME2’s prologue...

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Mentions of Shepard’s activities on the outpost while on Omega, a letter from a scientist, passed on by Anderson, about further studies made on indoctrination being done on the sly, considering the lack of approval from the Council.

ME3: Further research has been done on indoctrination, now publicly, and makes for a scientific war asset, the remnants of the merc gang that were indoctrinated have reformed and reassembled as a roving band of resistance fighters against the Reapers.

Miscellaneous 

Bisexual Ashley, Bisexual Kaidan, proper close outs to other romances, romances require proper flirts to start, additional conversations for all characters

Look, no one in space is heterosexual, okay? I don’t make the rule, I just enforce it. Actually, considering the context of these, I DO make the rules, and “no one in space is heterosexual” is one of them, so deal with it. Kaidan is canonically bisexual as of ME3, so there’s no reason he shouldn’t be canonically bisexual in ME1. And we’ll throw Ashley in for good measure, because why not? And we definitely – DEFINITELY – need to do something about the romance mechanic that seems to assume “I would like to get to know you better” means “you, me, my cabin, the way to Ilos, yes/yes?” There needs to be explicit markers for closing out a romance WITHOUT locking you out of conversations with the character in question (particularly considering that now, all of this game’s romances can be options in a given playthrough). And yeah, I think there could stand to be a few extra conversations with the characters, that focus on the characters proper – for most of the crew, they basically end up acting as glorified Wikipedia entries on their species, or, in Kaidan’s case, the plight of human biotics. Let’s give them some more personalized material that lets them tell Shepard something about themselves (and offer Shepard something similar, as character development for the both of them).

[o-captain-elcapitan]

Steel Horses - Prologue

Title: Steel Horses Author: ElCapitan Game: Dragon Age Characters/Pairing: M!Adaar x Dorian Disclaimer: All recognizable content belongs to Bioware

Summary - 

Valo-Kas M.C. is not a 1% motorcycle club. The security work that they do is above board, legal and licensed, squeaky f*cking clean. What their clients get up to, however, is none of their business. And their strict "look the other way, ask no questions" policy is what keeps them in business. That is until a new Tevinter client puts the MC in federal cross hairs. Ozet Adaar wants to protect his sister and save his club. When a Tevinter ambassador knocks him on his ass his heart is pulled in yet another direction and there's nothing more terrifying than knowing that he can't protect them all. His twin, Ozena, might consider herself "barely a mage" but that's still enough to damn her if the wrong people find her out. Federal scrutiny is the last thing they need. Maker only knows if they can shake it with their lives in tact.

Read on Ao3

A/N: I realize that this is an extremely niche AU, so I won’t accrue much of a following on this one. But if you like Sons of Anarchy and Dragon Age, and want the mutant bastard child of that unholy union, maybe give this a look?

It wasn’t the harsh shove to his shoulder that knocked Zet down, but the kick to the back of his knee that went along with it. He caught himself on his hands and glowered back at the door as it slammed shut behind him, chest rising and falling at a furious tempo as he grit his teeth and reined in his anger. If there was ever a time to keep his cool, it was now. 

“Amatus.”

Focus snapping away from the door, panic flash froze his blood. There was a lone figure seated under the low hanging phosphorus bulb, which had been sent swinging by the slammed door and was now making the room’s shadows dance. Clothes better suited to an art journal than a fashion magazine were rumpled and torn. He looked like he’d been yanked from a runway and dragged behind a truck going 50 down inner city backroads.

“Dorian.” He scrambled onto his feet and launched himself the two yards between them, falling on his knees in front of the russet skinned human and desperately staring up at his down turned face. Anger like he’d never felt before burned too cold to melt the ice crystallized in his veins. It fogged his mind, the chilled mist of dry ice fuming dangerously in his chest.

Zet lifted his hand to Dorian’s face but hesitated before touching him. His hand hovered centimeters from the crimson gloss of his skin, steady despite the guilt clawing his chest open. On a growl he swore, “I’m going to kill every last one of them.”

They’d hurt him, his beautiful Vint, they’d dared to put a fucking hand on him. His face was ballooned and bloody, beaten so badly that his right eye was swollen almost completely shut. The blade straight line of his nose was bent. Sinfully soft lips --that Zet had taken to trailing calloused fingertips over-- were now split, fat despite the blood covering his whole face so thickly his neck and shirt were drenched in it. Soaked crimson from the collar of his shirt down his chest, blood had even dripped onto his pant legs.

It flowed from the cut on his brow and trailed down his temple to blend with the gash on his cheek. More blood poured from his broken nose, joining the trickle from his split lip. Blood dripped along his jaw and down his neck in a slick scarlet that matched the red closing around Zet’s vision. When they got out of this room someone was going to answer for this. Someone was going to pay for hurting him.

Grunting, Dorian lifted his head just high enough to meet Zet’s gaze. He stared at him with fervent grey eyes and bit out a pained, “You came.”

“Of course I came,” replied Zet on an incredulous scoff. He crawled closer, pushing himself between Dorian’s spread knees. He reached up to his face again, wanting so badly to cup the man’s cheek in his hand, but reluctant to hurt him any more than he’d already been. Instead Zet pushed the damp clumps of Dorian’s hair away from his face and tucked it behind his ear, softly murmuring, “You didn’t actually think that I wouldn’t come for you, did you?”

Dorian leaned his face into Zet’s hand as it lingered near his ear, wincing only slightly as he nuzzled into his palm, eyes shut, breath shuttering. “I hoped you weren’t fool enough to walk knowingly into a trap.”

He forced a weak smile onto his mouth. “Come on, babe, you know me better than that.” The pained grimace that followed Dorain’s scoff wiped the small smirk from his mouth. Still too reluctant to hurt him to touch him the way he wanted to, all he could do in that moment was hold Dorian’s cheek in his palm and stare at him ruefully. “You’re only here because of me,” was Zet’s quiet rebuke, each word drenched with more guilt than Dorian’s shirt was with blood. 

He was supposed to protect the people that he loved. How could he had let things get so out of control?

He turned his face in Zet’s hand and pressed a kiss to the center of his palm, holding his breath until the pain of it passed. “I knew what you were when this started, Amatus, and I fell in love with you anyway.”

Not at all liking the finality of Dorian’s tone, the “thanks for the good times” he could feel waiting in the wings, Zet pushed off from his knees and rounded the chair that they’d propped him up on. Ears too full of his heartbeat for him to hear his own thoughts, he inspected the zip ties securing Dorian’s wrists behind his back.

In that second he wished he was more like his sister. Ozena would know what to say to deflect the semi-fatalistic tension coming off of Dorian in waves. She’d have said something like, ‘I warned you you would,’ or ‘yet, supposedly, I’m the fool.’ In the face of Dorian beaten bloody, tied to a chair, and disconnected from his magic, Zet was too caught up in his urgency to bother with sass. They didn’t have a lot of time, and he needed to get Dorian out of here more than he needed to break the tension.

“The others are coming,” he muttered under his breath as he pulled at the sturdy nylon material securing Dorian’s wrists together, testing their give. Confirming that there wasn’t much, he removed his keys from his pants pocket and searched the key-ring for the folding knife hidden within the glinting metal pieces. 

“Here I thought you were the cavalry.”

The zip ties snapped with a little effort and a grunted, “I’m the distraction.” He thumbed the knife back into place then shoved his keys into his pocket.

“Don’t I know it.” Dorian moved his arms in front of him and rubbed at his wrists. He pushed himself out of the chair with a groan only for his knees to buckle under his weight. 

Zet stepped in in an instant, his hand grasping firmly at Dorian’s elbow and holding his weight as the mage found his footing. He watched, guilt-ridden, as Dorian hissed and held his ribs. Voice a low timbre that was more vibration than sound, he swore, “I’m going to get you out of here.”

Blinking the blood from his eyes, Dorian turned his gaze up at Zet and tried for that smirk that had once come so easily to him. “Don’t you mean ‘us’, Amatus?”

He stared into those grey eyes for a long, silent moment.  No . The confession caught in his throat and choked him. Zet wasn’t likely to make it out of this alive and, so long as Dorian and Ozena survived the night, he was okay with that. Before he could say as much to the mage reading the truth in his face as clearly as if he were saying it out loud, the door to the room opened. The darkness on the other side was broken by a red glow before his eyes could adjust. But it didn’t matter. He knew what he was facing, and he knew he’d face worse if it meant saving the man he loved. 

He reached blindly for Dorian’s hand, needing the comfort more than he did his next breath. “Stay close,” he muttered when he meant to say, “I love you.”

___

I hope you liked it <3 Reblogs are love, reblogs are life. 

[squigglysquidd]

As a fellow Shakarian writer, I'd love to hear your thoughts on our mutual ship. If it's all right, I'm highlighting the whole row under 002 | Send me a ship and I will tell you:

002 | Send me a ship and I will tell you:

When I started shipping them: The first time I played ME 1, I actually wasn’t as into it as I was in later playthroughs. I’ll say up front that I was playing renegade (because I always play renegade my first rpg game playthroughs while my BF plays paragon) and stopped playing because I wasn’t expecting my Shepard to have sex with the Consort when she asked for more than credits. That surprise sex dropping on me really turned me off of the game and I stopped playing for the longest time. However, when I watched my BF play, I immediately fell in love with Garrus as a character, both because of looks and his personality. At the time, however, I didn’t really think about romances in games, so it didn’t become a ship until I was given the idea from playing the games. I wanted to romance him and was disappointed part 1 was only human LIs and Liara, but figured it was because Bioware didn’t think people would be into alien looking characters. Needless to say, I was so excited when I heard you could romance Garrus in a leak. 

My thoughts: I’m not too sure what exactly this question means, so I’ll go with some basic thoughts on them. I really like Garrus’ look, though I think it has a lot to do with my being into Jurassic Park as a kid and really into the velociraptors. My main Shep is always modeled a bit after a self-insert, not gonna lie or feel bad about it, so I get a little giddy whenever I replay that particular Shep and think about romancing Garrus again. As for the ship itself, I wish there had been a way to lock it down sooner so it wasn’t just the end of the games where you were in a relationship, especially in 3. Kinda wish they hadn’t written the entire thing like a FWB relationship even after Shep says multiple times that it is more important than that to her.

What makes me happy about them: Their friends to lovers build up is what I really love. Falling in love with your best friend is a great trope for me and I’ll admit that it really reminds me of my own relationship, so it feels relatable. That, and I really enjoy the growth Garrus has through the games, so I like to think that leads to their relationship growing and changing as well even if Shepard is such a blank slate for players.

What makes me sad about them: I really wish Bioware didn’t have Garrus call it an ‘inter-species liaison’ even after he spilled his heart out to Shepard before the Omega-4. That’s not something you do before just sex between friends and though the writers wanted to leave it open-ended for players, you can definitely tell it’s more when you break it off and see his reaction. Sure, he is saying it to be light-hearted, but we should have had a chance to make Shepard set things straight up front. Although that’s just one of many peeves about the writing for romances I have no matter the ships, but I get it, Bioware wanted to make things easy for the player.

Things done in fanfic that annoys me: I know I’m in the minority, but I don’t like how writers like to make Shepard control the direction of Garrus’ life in part 2. I know, I know, it’s the whole Sidonis debate, but I see them more as equals in 2 and 3 than 1, so Shepard should let the man make his own decisions. I don’t see it as a healthy situation for someone to stand in the way of another getting their closure by saying they know what’s best and the two almost immediately start the gears moving for an intimate relationship. I’m sorry, but no, I would definitely not want to have sex with a supposed friend who acts like they know the situation better than I do when they’ve been dead for the last two years. Garrus was never meant to be completely paragon like Shepard no matter what they let you say to him in 1, so writers forcing him into that position through their Shepards really irks me.

Things I look for in fanfic: Can I say smut? Okay okay, serious answer. I like to read fics where they are still friends even as lovers. Some relationships have it either one or the other, but having both just shows how well they get along because putting intimacy on the table doesn’t necessarily mean that they are missing out on one thing or that they are only close because of it. Having a nice, bantering, just caring couple with these two is something I always enjoy in fics.

My wishlist: More fanfic and fanart of Shakarian! lol Really, I just wish for there to be a never ending flow of it, but I really look forward to things that think out of the box, like AUS and what not.

Who I’d be comfortable them ending up with, if not each other: Hm ... I kinda like Shep and Tali being together, but Tali and Garrus are my NOTP. Those two are better off like siblings and the games really build that up, so a romance between the two really threw me and just didn’t feel right. Of course, with Shep being so blank for players, she could really be with almost anyone. Garrus, though, feels more like he’d stick with turians if not with Shepard. I wouldn’t mind seeing him with that female turian in the Citadel DLC. He just, idk, seems like Shep is so out of his comfort zone that he wouldn’t try another species unless the two had that same kind of connection, which he doesn’t in games.

My happily ever after for them: You mean Shep surviving the Crucible and Garrus tracking her down so that they can settle down on a beach somewhere and only take the occasional mission that they have complete control over? Because we all know they couldn’t settle down completely, but maybe they’d start a security company or run security for whatever small town they decide to live close to.

Thanks for the asks! It was really fun :D

[juleshawke]

Chapters: 93/? Fandom: Mass Effect Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Female Shepard/James Vega Characters: Female Shepard (Mass Effect), James Vega, Jeff "Joker" Moreau, Kaidan Alenko, Garrus Vakarian, David Anderson, Steven Hackett Additional Tags: Romance, Sexual Tension, Science Fiction, War Summary:

He'd worshiped her from afar, always wanted the chance to say hello, maybe to serve under her. Then his mission had gone horribly wrong and he blamed her, resented her for it. Or did he. James Vega finds himself in a position he never expected and has to come to terms with his own pain and doubt. Bioware owns all thing Mass Effect, I'm just playing in their sandbox.

Have a snippet -

He needed to focus on their situation and trust Stokes to get out and get help. Moving back to Shepard he sat and lifted her head into his lap, stroking her hair, devastated when it came away under his fingers where it had been scorched. He looked at his hands, red with blood, her blood. Inhaling sharply he looked at Kaidan, hunched over and protecting them all, a light sheen of sweat on his forehead. Shepard would kill him if anything happened to the man they both considered their closest friend.

'How are you doing, Kaidan?'

'Managing.' He closed his eyes and shifted his fingers slightly. 'Let's hope help arrives soon.'

'Garrus, you good?' He pulled a ration bar from his pocket as he spoke and went to move Shepard's head but Garrus stopped him.

'Yeah, although I'd love a beer right now.' He huffed out a laugh, taking the ration bar and sliding to Kaidan who bit into the bar as he held it up.

'Drinks are on me when we get out of here.' Shepard deserved a happy ending, a good life with no more fighting. 'I think we deserve a fucking party. You hear that Lola, we have a party to organise.'

'Hopefully without clones this time.' Garrus settled on the other side of Shepard once Kaidan finished eating and gently lifted her hand into his, 'Not ready for that bar in the sky yet, Shepard, so you'd better wake up.'

Useless. It ate at him, dragged up memories of his mother. He'd been useless then too, unable to save her, useless against his father who saw him only as his next fix. He'd done amazing things, saved lives, fought the enemy. It didn't matter. Right then he could do nothing to help the woman he loved or the man he thought of as a brother.

Time passed. No matter how many times he looked at his omnitool it didn't move any faster. If the coms weren't working Stokes would have to get out of the tunnels, hope there were still people alive and bring them back to help. Reigler and his team had got out before them so there was a good chance he could find them. If they hadn't been buried alive and he didn't have to fight off Reaper troops. Doing it alone … he really didn't want to think about it.

That's assuming he got all the way out, which he guessed he had because he hadn't come back, and there had been no obvious collapse of debris. Then it all revolved around the Citadel being intact enough for him to find survivors, there could be open space on the other side of the rubble. He scoffed at himself, if there was they wouldn't be sitting here waiting, they'd have been long dead. The frustration of not knowing sent his thoughts into a spiral of what ifs.

James jumped as Garrus lifted his rifle and he followed his lead. Someone or something crawled towards them through the hole. They were well and truly fucked if it was the enemy.

[karanan]

SWTOR SPOILER TIME

I naturally jumped right on the new content, ready to get on the Arcann romance train. And boy was that sweet! That awkward trashman has my boy unexpectedly weak at the knees. I took like 3 hrs to play through that one (very gay right off the bat) conversation. Who knew Prince Pissbaby would later turn into a rambly mess, sweating to talk feelings in front of the PC. SO CUTE!

So I get the strong impression that Arcann’s self-image isn’t all there... I mean not just for all the vile shit he’s pulled but also the emotional abuse he lived under from papa Valkorion. The boy’s a mess. And I think for a healthy relationship he needs someone emotionally mature who doesn’t take advantage of his desire for love and affection (that are very clearly there). As someone who fights with garbage self-esteem irl I know how easy it can be to fall into the trap of being with someone just because they pay you attention and you think that’s as good as it’ll get for you regardless of how you feel or how healthy or unhealthy the relationship is for you. I know I’m projecting but I don’t care because I think it’s an important thing to talk about even through fictional relationships. SOooo that’s what my Roscoe will have to look out for. He’ll have to do his best to help build Arcann’s self-image back up to where he feels they’re not “together” out of fear of otherwise being proved he’s not worthy of love. Which will be a challenge what with Roscoe’s polyamory and also the mental illnesses (so it’s essentially going to be a lesson in learning to love urself for both of them). So yeah this is gonna be an interesting thing to explore for sure.

Now, what about Theron? Well first off, quick question:

what the fuck, bioware? I was wondering how they’d technically solve the whole conflicting romances thing since Arcann’s happens outside the plot, while Theron’s romance is (potentially) part of the plot. I was NOT expecting this disjointed retcon-attempt. It’s obvious now that they intended the Arcann romance to be started after KotET/before Iokath, which makes it hilariously awkward if you do it now when Theron’s supposed to be long gone. I feel absolutely ROBBED and DEPRIVED of the juicy drama that would’ve been exchanged in the coming story chapter once Theron finds out you moved on and are banging your old enemy. I’m a simple man, I live for the intrigue. Roscoe’s petty as shit and unbelievably scorned by Theron’s actions. It played out perfectly in my head. Instead, we get this weird ghost of romance past and a short conversation about ending the relationship (which also by the way contradicts my whole headcanon about them having an open relationship). Also sad I won’t get to have Roscoe dump Theron as mercilessly as the game lets me now.

So naturally, I have to do a whole lot of headcanoning around this whole conflict. Disregarding my wish for the game to allow open/multiple simultaneous relationships since Theron doing the whole backstabby thing makes it irrelevant anyway--Roscoe’s not letting him back in after what he pulled. So I guess he’s come to the conclusion that it’s actually over between them for real--probably took a long time to conclude because first he had to reluctantly admit that Theron actually meant a whole lot to him--probably shortly after Copero. He just can’t get over what a personal slight it was (which might seem kind of hilarious and hypocritical compared to how he’s all willing to let Arcann close--but he’s never claimed to be the galaxy’s moral centre). Now my only regret is I won’t get to see how the betrayal arc will resolve for a romanced Theron. Maybe I should’ve waited with the Arcann romance, but done is done. So I’m gonna headcanon the fuck out of it based on what I get from the non-romanced path (and probably from youtube videos of the romanced path). I will have my goddamn drama.

In conclusion: Very sweet content that I enjoyed a lot, but it introduced a bunch of problems courtesy of incredibly lazy writing and poor planning. This is definitely not how you solve conflicts in ur story bioware smh. But I’ll roll with it and see where it goes, I’ll just have to apply a bunch of art/writing to fix the messiest parts.

Also yay Vector’s back! Cute conversation but way too short. Got the whole Agent crew back now. Sort of.

[aurimeanswind]

Your E3 Predictions!—Sunday Chats—6/3/18

I’m very excited about this week’s Sunday Chats because it’s all about E3 predictions! This time next week, we’ll BE INSIDE E3! I’ll have seen Microsoft/EA/and Bethesda’s pressers come the next Sunday Chats, and I’ll be writing about them, probably! I may or may not do a Sunday Chats, but we’ll see!

To catch folks up, this week has been a full-force build up to E3 for me. A new Episode of Get Acquainted posted, with my friend Brandon Gann, who is just an incredibly wonderful and amazing loquacious individual, and we spend two plus hours talking E3! We had a ton of predictions and great conversations around all of them! You should give it a listen!

http://irrationalpassions.com/brandon-gann-e3-predictions-get-acquainted/

On this week’s Irrational Passions Podcast we had my other good friend Logan Moore on to make some E3 BETS! Nabeshin was kind enough to put together 25 amazing bets for us and a ton of lightening round bets on top of that, and it was super fun. You can watch the video version of that WITH bonus content right now, and the fully edited version will post on Tuesday.

So it’s all about E3, but before we get to that, a little personal update.

Personal Update for June

So any one close to me will no that the last week of my life has been exceptionally difficult. Some folks close to me, both physically and emotionally have been making decisions that have been pretty toxic, I can’t lie. It’s led to a pretty unhealthy living situation that I’d rather not get into, and whether things blow over, get worse, I’m not sure. I obviously don’t want to spill any personal juice here, but anyone who has seen me out here tweeting like the dramatic boi I am on the inside about how I need some good vibes, that’s a general overview of the situation, if you were concerned.

I’m thankful for all my close friends out there texting me, checking on me, and making sure I am doing okay, even if I’m not. It is upsetting that this just so happens to coincide with the busiest time of the year in video games, so if this bleeds over into our content over on Irrational Passions I apologize. Sometimes its a bit unavoidable.

Anyway, I appreciate you all taking the time to interact and be a part of my silly Selfie Saturdays or Sunday Chats, it means the world. I’ve been working hard with the team @ Irrational Passions to make some really fun stuff, including a new show that acts as a spiritual successor to our roundtables from 2017 Game of the Year talks.

That’s all we need to dwell on in regards to the bummer business, let’s get to games!

What’s on Tap

Moonlighter

So I just started this tonight and I have to say: right away I just love it.

The idea is you live in a small town that neighbors these ancient ruins that lead to these very dangerous dungeons, and once upon a time travelers and adventurers used to come here to explore those dungeons, and merchants would sell supplies and goodies to gear them up for those journeys. Eventually it grew too dangerous, but you are someone who Moonlights as an adventurer and runs a shop on the front end.

You dive into these dungeons and get awesome treasure and loot and goodies to then sell in your shop to expand your shop, get better weapons and armor, and continue deeper into the dungeons. It’s an amazing idea, and it’s executed on so well.

The game sustains such a great and rewarding loop, and it’s also got tons of charm and amazingly well executed on pixel art.

On top of that the UI is also just very good? It’s super slick and smooth. 

I’m only a couple hours in but I just adore it. Mike Burgess, producer at IP, did a video review on it that I saw the first cut of today and it’s actually what sold me on it. See it soon!

Detroit Become Human

I’ve already said so much about this game I’m exhausted. I love this game.

It has so many issues and in spite of all that, I genuinely adored my time with Detroit.

Our roundtable discussion was about this very game, so look for it soon.

Dark Souls Remastered

This game is still so good. I think I may like it even more than Dark Souls 3, a game I picked up just very briefly a few weeks ago.

I’ve now got the power to fast travel and am just warping around and exploring again. I even dipped my toe into the DLC area which I have never seen before. 

It’s excellent, and seeing it run smooth has been super rewarding for me, a longtime fan of the title.

Your E3 Predictions

Let’s get to it! This week, something I haven’t done in a bit, I asked you for your boldest E3 predictions, and while some of you gave me a good joke, a lot of you came back at me with some great predictions!

Let’s get into it!

Remember to look for my tweet on Sunday afternoons/evenings with #SundayChats in it and respond to it with your reply to be a part of Sunday Chats!

Now listen, I know this was clearly written as a joke Sam, but I think that this announcement is coming, just not here. It’s a PSX announcement, if ANY, because that’s the only place it can be really gernally accepted as an “announcement”. It’d get a big riot of an applause.

I’d love this. I think they have such a “robust” (#branding) library of handheld games that it’d make too much sense to carry them over to their now partially handheld big console.

Will it happen? Well, I mean Nintendo has said no virtual console on Switch. But they’ve changed their mind, even if it has been rare, in the past before. While it could happen down the line, this up coming direct is about 2017, so I don’t think we’ll see it there.

Nah John.

You need to stop.

But... Well

I mean maybe?

MAYBE.

Maybe?

Finally. Some announcements we, as “hardcore gamers” care about.

Some cars

Fuckin.

On stage.

The cars have sex.

And birth a motorcycle.

I love this Peter. I mean, for some reason I guess folks think that Emma Stone will be the female actress pulled into Death Stranding, and I think there will likely be a big female reveal at some point, I don’t know why everyone thinks it’ll be Emma Stone? I bet there is a good reason out there, I just don’t know. I’m not complaining, Emma Stone is great.

I am definitely with you on the “deep dive”, though I don't think there will be a long explanation of things, just a nice gameplay demo. My theory I posited on Get Acquainted was like an 8 minute trailer that leads into about four minutes of gameplay at the end, but it’s just enough cinematic that we’re convinced there will be no gameplay, and then BOOM. There is.

I could see them saying 2019 at the end too, though I doubt they’ll hit it.

YOU DONT BRANDON GOODBYE.

Nah of course. 

We talked about this on our show, obvs, everyone please go listen to it, but NO FINAL FANTASY 7. IT WONT HAPPEN. Square Enix needs to figure that shit out, and so they’ll come back to it when it, and more importantly, THEY’RE ready to.

Here’s hoping for some dope Xbox Avatars.

I mean, it’s gotta be the time, right? I need to know what this Resident Evil 2 Remake looks like. I know the director was out there talking about it not terribly too long ago, and it just feels like ages since we heard about it. With Capcom announcing RE7 and then releasing it 6 months later, on top of Monster Hunter World’s recent success, they are on a great path! Time to continue it!

As for DMC 5 I mean everyone seems convinced it’s coming and I just don’t care.

I love the Rocksteady prediction, because they’ve been cooking that bad boy for a good long while. I hope it’s Superman because I have supreme faith they’ll knock it out of the park. Maybe even an origin story? I’d love to see Rocksteady do one of those.

And I do, also, believe that Shadows Die Twice is Tenchu.

Dishonored getting a reboot I just don’t see happening. I think it’s time Arkane moves onto some new IP. Something that is hopefully a bit more eye-catchy so they get get back into a popular circle, then maybe spend a few years making iterations of that. Maybe in a few years past that they can return to Dunwall and take another crack at Dishonored.

Doom 2 can be wherever the hell it wants and I am HERE for it. But judging by the sounds of things that may not be at this E3, and that’s okay. It makes me sad, but it’s okay.

Man. I fucking wish.

Them or Bioware. I’d love to have just an original story told at Hogwarts where you create your character and go through 7 years at the school and it’s great and it has dialogue wheels and it’s great. Feed me Bioware.

It’d never happen tho.

This would be very cool. I feel like this Star Fox Grand Prix rumor is too big to ignore, but it’s still a little far fetched. I wonder how they’d sell it, if it is real.

Honestly, not that far out there. Kingdom Hearts don’t give a fuck about Red Dead.

Here is my thing, I just don’t think an ARMs character will make it into the Smash roster because no one cares about ARMs and I don’t think they’d be crazy interesting. Who would it be? Twintelle? I mean she is super cool, but who knows!

THey’d make great assist trophies, and I know that’s a slight but I’m sorry.

PUT GENO IN.

Anyway, if they put Banjo and Kazooie in I’d literally start crying right then and there, and it may happen, who knows, but I would. I’d cry.

I think there could be a direct apology. It depends. I think within 15 minutes or so we will know if EA has changed their tone or not. Hell, within 2 minutes we’ll know. If they want to actually be well regarded, they need to start making big moves, and right now, they’re not. Period. Come out and own up to what you’ve done wrong, or GTFO. They need to make up ground on the PR front, even if they’re still making money hand over fist. 

I’m sorry times are tough Silver, but know that I’m sending good vibes your way!

I wonder if Microsoft would make such a bold move. Regardless, it’s a great bold prediction. I hope that they are gonna give it some more time, and let this generation cook a little more. I’m digging my Xbox One X, and them implying a replacement is coming next year or so would bum me out.

Finally. The battle Royale Battle Royale we’ve all been waiting for. 

And as the dust settles, there’s sha’boi Griffin. Standing on top. Winner of them all.

And let’s not front: I’d kill to listen to Donald Glover sing Parappa songs.

Thank you all so much for your predictions! I’ve had a ton out there all week, and the Get Acquainted Episode I think has them out there in the best way. Go check them out! Either way, I’m so excited for E3, not necessarily to see if my predictions came true, but just for the hype of it all and my inevitable editorial after its all said and done about my thoughts and feelings coming out of it.

So. Big Sunday Chats update. I may be making a BIG CHANGE to Sunday Chats in the coming weeks. There is some ironing out I need to figure out personally, but I just wanted to give you faithful readers a little heads up. This could be something that becomes a proper part of IrrationalPassions.com, and for that, I’m very excited. The biggest thing is it may mean I start soliciting questions on Saturday! Stay tuned for my twitter for that.

It wouldn’t be a big change for you all, so don’t stress about it too much, but I wanted to seed it out there.

I love you all and your support, especially in these dark dog days of summer I am in. Thank you for the perpetual good vibes. 

I hope you all are here for the E3 hype, but if not, that’s okay. Regardless, thank you for reading, and

keep it real.

(the Naruto kick not only continues, but never ends.)

[felassan]

Jon Renish (Foundation Technical Director @ BioWare, working on DA4) recently did a Twitch stream where he played through some DAO. Although he works on DA, this is his first time playing through DAO. He’s playing through it looking at random details from a dev perspective as he’s currently working on DA4 and therefore wants to know more about the previous games.

On the stream he mentioned some tidbits on the development of DA4. There were also some insights and anecdotes about the development of DAO and similar. It’s a 3 hour stream so I collected them here in case that’s of use to anyone (for example not everyone can watch streams which don’t have subtitles/captions). The stream is a fun/interesting watch though, so if you’re curious or able to watch I recc doing so. 😊 The rest of this post is under a cut for length.

Please note that there’s some paraphrasing on my part, this is not a transcript.  There are also some additions from another dev who featured on the stream to give some commentary. The stream also contains more snippets that at times I couldn’t make out (I tried my best!).

(There is a mention of Cullen’s VA in the text below.)

DA4

Jon said he can talk about things about DA4 that aren’t “consumer-facing”, but he can’t say anything about the game that would be consumer-facing but which isn’t already publicly available. There are several reasons for this. One, that’s not his job, there are people whose job this is and they let each other do their respective roles. Two, BW are a publicly-traded company, so if he said something that could affect that that would be insider trading. Three, they’re not done making DA4 yet, so if he said that they have added [x] to the game and people got all excited about that or pre-ordered on that basis, but [x] ended up being cut, people would be like ‘BioWare lied to us’, when it’s just that things changed during the course of development, as is often the case

He’s glad that fans are excited for the game but notes that fan expectations are always double-edged. It can be really tough as some people started ‘playing’ the game in their heads as soon as they heard of it. That’s fine, he loves that, but he hopes that peoples’ expectations don’t turn into requirements. Clearly BW have alluded to certain characters, like Solas, being in the game, but some fans say things like “If [say] Morrigan isn’t in the game, then, rahhh!” Y’know, there’s a lot of talk about how certain characters have to be in the game, and yeah.

On characters which are quantum (i.e. characters which can die or which can have similar end-states as death in previous games): their being quantum makes it really hard for the devs to work with those characters in subsequent games. The devs naturally aren’t going to put as much effort into characters which could have died previously. A character can have had an amazing appearance throughout/role in a previous game, but if there is a risk of something happening to them and of them being removed [effectively] from the plot, it just doesn’t make sense to have them as a major character in a subsequent game. If a character can, say, sacrifice themselves in some glorious ending, the devs have to make sure that if they use them again, in worldstates where the character didn’t do that, the character is kind of ‘muted’, as the devs don’t want to disrespect the players who made a different choice

A comment in chat expressed a wish for Shale in DA4. Jon’s response is that he has no idea on that front

Bugs don’t come out of crunch, they come out of development in general. Crunch does impact on the quality of a game though. In recent years BW are always really trying to reduce crunch, they’re currently working really hard to bring it down. The best way of doing that is by controlling scope. As creatives it’s tough to balance wanting to make great stuff and be industry-leading with the desire to constantly do extra passes over things they’ve created like the audio, art etc. Their biggest enemy is time, other ways of reducing crunch or time spent in general include iterating tools to make often-repeated processes as time-efficient as possible

I think the following was an observation on the industry in general as opposed to a BW-specific/-exclusive comment: he thinks that as a result of this sort of thing [working to reduce crunch], a lot of games are going to have to be smaller and a lot more focused in scope i.e. the devs will have to focus on hitting the key selling points of that particular game/series as hard as they can, and cut down on branching out sideways/wide on a bunch of random other stuff

Jon doesn’t personally engage in character creators in games, but he knows that for some players that expression is worth a lot of time and focus. BW want to be industry-leading in this kind of stuff as it’s something which is interesting/key/integral to their games

In a way BW have made their own nest of problems what with every DA game being so different to the previous one. Still, he notes that each game has a staunch fanbase that says that their particular favorite game is the best one in the series

He doesn’t want people who think that DA4 isn’t what they want to buy it and be upset - there are so many other great games out there! BW are going to make the game they’re going to make - if some people like it, that’s great, and if some people don’t, that’s cool. Sometimes waiting until reviews are out and/or really seeing beforehand if a game is something that you want [has things/features in it that you want] prior to getting it - as opposed to jumping right in or pre-ordering - is a good idea. Fans don’t always know what they want, but they do know what they like - these are 2 different things

He hopes that whatever they ship for DA4, people go “I enjoyed this experience”, and that then, if there’s additional content for it down the road, people can decide, “do I want this further content?”

On hair: BW are using the new hair technology in the latest version of the Frostbite engine, so they’ll see what they can do! This was said in response to a comment about the hair in the latest FIFA games (as EA make FIFA)

A comment in chat asked about a flying mechanic (griffons). Jon’s response is that flying is such a heavy gameplay mechanic that you can’t put it in a game without everything in the game being built about it (see Anthem)

Relating to the above comment, in DA4 mounted combat would be cool but then they’d have to make the game ‘around’ mounted combat and make the mounted combat feature meaningful

On the underwater concept art: it should not be interpreted as a promise of gameplay. BW have amazing artists who sit down for a couple weeks while they’re in early production and just draw loads and loads of all kinds of stuff. Concept art is like a moodboard or Pinterest board. Elsewhere in the stream he advised, take all the concept art together like a mosaic and ask, ‘what is the overall theme[s] here?’, and to zoom out from individual details. [This stuff echoes PW’s word on concept art]

BW don’t generally write things or the choices as bleak as the choices in DAO were anymore. This is a conscious choice on their part, they want their game to be fun [note: this was said when the side quest in Orzammar where the Warden has the option of convincing a dwarven mother to abandon her young baby to die was being played through. It seems to refer to intensively grimdark choices/beats of this kind]

I think this was more of a general comment on games: SSDs (solid state drives) mean that players will see shorter elevator rides (Mass Effect - was this a reference to the remaster?) and fewer switchback corridors (those are actually loading zones). Generally, these are going to change mechanically the time it takes to do stuff in games

The devs have lots of features on their backlog that they’d like to offer players but each will ofc involve implementation and subsequent maintenance, and each one that is chosen to add is being chosen over something else. And sometimes, it’s hard for them to tell if [x] feature or [y] feature would be better to add to the game

They’re about to work on a giant feature (a pure tooling feature, something that isn’t consumer-facing) that is probably going to take ~2 staff years of effort [I think “staff effort” includes multiple staff working concurrently, so 2 years of staff effort doesn’t = 2 years of time chronologically] to get done in the next few months. They’re investing all this effort across the people working on it because they don’t want their artists and designers etc to have to deal with the problem that it’s going to solve anymore. I’m not sure what this feature is but elsewhere in the stream they referred to tooling and automation and gave the example of, the better your tooling is, the fewer times you have to manually set the camera for a human vs elf vs dwarf position, for dynamically-generated [cinematic?] content and for the first pass to be automated (if this is the case, less time is spent/wasted on redoing it and manually touching it up) [see last bullet point in this section]

He doesn’t know how big DA4 is going to be but said “let’s ballpark and say like most games it’ll be somewhere between 70 and 100 GB”

If we kept our Wardens as the PC throughout all 3 games, at the end they would be so powerful that it’d be a bit like “Let’s just do [thing], I’ve killed gods before, whatever”. He thinks it’s good that they have fresh characters each time in DA in order to reset that power level. Some people want more Commander Shepard in the next Mass Effect and he feels like, ‘what else could you possibly want / what else could that character possibly do after 3 games?’

When asked how much freedom he/they have now to focus on next gen, he said that there’s actually almost no difference on that front. The problems never change. They now have better renderers, better ray-tracing, better graphics cards etc, but they have always made DA games for high- and low-spec PCs, so it’s actually about gameplay systems. The freedom isn’t power-based and them getting access to more cores and more RAM generally isn’t going to change how the games are played. The games still have to be made for hard drives on PC. Dev creativity matters more than power here. The challenge of building a BW game is more about/from managing loads of different plotstates, loads of different art pieces, etc

On the title situation (two): names are the last thing they worry about because names have to go through legal before being approved. Every name, including character names, has to be checked in case it’s a famous person, or associated with something bad, or offensive in a different language due to localization etc

They don’t do face scans of people with big beards

There was also a bit about changes/developments to/in the cinematic design process and associated tooling [?] but I found it too hard to follow sorry >< This bit of commentary begins at timestamp ~ 1:52:45 and continues til ~ 2:00:05 [keep listening through the bit where they pause for a cutscene]

General BW

There’s currently ~350 staff in Edmonton, ~200 in Austin and more elsewhere

He notes that DA games sell pretty well, but relative to EA games in general, they’re a drop in the bucket compared to FIFA

DAI

5% of players of DAI never created a character [Q: does this refer to people who just used the default appearances/presets with no editing, or people who only played multiplayer?]

The mounts don’t actually go faster than running, this is an illusion

I think they said it has 55,000 lines of dialogue. [I’m pretty sure I remember devs elsewhere saying it has 80,000 lines of dialogue]

One of the companions had to have their name changed during development because of legal/translation reasons. It sounds like the original name sounded too close to something offensive

DA2

Back when DA2 was internally code-named “Nug Storm”: this was at the beginning when it was pitched to the team on a set of slides. The image on the slide for that pitch had devil horns, a metal hand and no flesh, it was just made out of fire and flames

DAO

The engine DAO is made on is the third engine that they tried for it during development. [David Gaider has gone into the DAO engine stuff some on Summerfall’s series of DAO playthrough streams]

The cracks on the cracked eluvian asset are modelled after the crack on the Tardis in Doctor Who from around that time, as at the time some devs had been talking about Doctor Who a lot. A dev actually added this factoid to DAO’s entry on TV Tropes but someone else (evidently not a DA dev) came by and deleted it saying that it was too much of a stretch x)

Before the game had its name there was an HTML script that randomly generated possible titles for consideration, it adds verbs and nouns together e.g. “Grim Dark”. One of the craziest possibilities that it once generated that the devs always remember is "Bone Wind”

One of the portraits that’s used for decoration around the world in-game (it’s of a bearded human man) is actually of a specific BW staff member

He played through Stone Prisoner, where Wilhelm’s son Matthias gives exposition in the cellar. Matthias is voiced by GE and this had been pointed out to Jon earlier on. Jon: “I don’t think that character’s voice acting was super strong there”

On the in-game area towards the end of Stone Prisoner: Outdoor areas in games are large and one of the things needed for them is streaming, so different chunks can be ‘streamed in’. There’s a tower [?], and technically the top of the tower was made an outdoor level so that sky stuff could be there, though it didn’t really need to be. The person that made it an outdoor level chose the very smallest chunk size for the terrain mesh, which determines how fine of a streaming they do. So when playing, every time you moved like 4 meters, the game would stream out 50-100 chunks behind you and the same in front of you (this is the bubble around the player of what actually exists). Because it was so small, it was constantly thrashing the CPU and disc to do all the loading. The devs were like “this isn’t going to work”, but they barely had any time. The solution: they made a new level that was outdoor and copied all the sunlight and other settings, but with the largest chunk size. They copy-pasted the entire level from one to the other. The problem with that many chunks then is that there was a giant expanse of flat terrain sticking out of the middle of the tower. They didn’t know if the story was going to involve shots of the outside of the tower for this sequence or not, so they took the terrain deformation tool and bundled all the terrain vertices at the bottom of the tower in a giant clump. So to this day there’s a mess of vertices and twisted terrain at the bottom of the final level that probably no-one has ever seen [not sure though if this anecdote is in reference to a place in that DLC or somewhere elsewhere in the game?]

There were also some tidbits on Anthem, however I didn’t note them down (sorry).

If you think I misheard or misunderstood anything from this stream please let me know and I will edit/fix it. :) 

(Thankyou to some of my friends who explained a tech detail from this to me.)

[source]  <-- current rewatch link

[queen-scribbles]

Some thoughts after playing Imp-side Jedi Under Siege last night, under a cut for spoilers and ranting

I love that Theron and Lana are back on the brotp banter. It’s so great. Even more great when you still have to Copero Cut custom on him. >:3 (I like it, fight me :P)

I appreciated that for the majority of the expansion, I could get by with only killing Geonosians and droids, didn’t have to kill colonists or Jedi. Seeing as Tragen’s defected to their side, I wanted to keep the casualties low, and was mostly able to do that until the library at the end.

ANRI. <333 I love her. Wish we got some level of explanation for why she’s fighting to advance the people who enslaved her, especially given her clearly low opinion of her former master, But she’s great, so I’ll just side-eye BioWare and roll with it, I guess? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Her back and forth with Brax was adorable and she’s actually a kickass healer(considering Tau suuuucked at that at first, this was a pleasant change). Cool as Tau is, I like Anri better.

I was EXTREMELY IRRITATED when the game took Anri away from me for the most boss-loaded chunk of the game and gave me frigging MALGUS who--my issues with his plot-convenient resurrection aside--was awful. He WILL NOT heal. He wouldn’t do it. I tried swapping his role to tank and back again and still nothing. We almost died like six times in ten minutes after Tragen and Anri wiped the floor with everything up to that point. So I know it was Malgus’ fault. I wound up switching him to tank and praying for the best for the last fight. Which brings me to my biggest gripe with the Imp-side:

Gnost-Dural. While I like that they’re trying to tie to other stuff(Malora for a Sith Alliance Commander etc), if you’re going to make my options for a defeated boss imprisonment and torture vs death, can we maybe NOT make that tie-in someone who’s a good friend of a potentially romanceable companion??? It was bad enough with Tragen, who’s pretty good friends with Theron and respects him. I’m dreading that part with Jaaide, bc Gnost-Dural is a friend of her HUSBAND (did you forget the proposing thing, BioWare? The Spy Nerds are married, and she’d shoot Malgus in the face before she let the Sith take someone who’s important to her hubby) and the best she’s gonna be able to do is hand him over to the Empire???? NO thank you. She knows way more than she likes about Imperial/Sith interrogation tactics. I’m actually now debating not playing it at all with her, cuz aside from her noping out of playing double agent for, what, the THIRD FREAKING TIME, there’s this. (But I’ve seen we get to hug Theron? And that’s really, really tempting ngl. Maybe play it to see the content and then say it ain’t canon)

Also, I had to solo almost half of the Gnost-Dural fight bc won’t-heal-to-literally-save-our-lives Malgus apparently isn’t that great a tank either and frigging DIED. I then ran around screaming I wanted Anri back do you hear me BioWare and praying interrupt abilities cooled down fast enough. Tragen had 3% of his health left when he won. THREE. KRIFFING. PERCENT. Because mister big bad all that and a bag of chips wannabe Emperor is basically useless as a companion. Fuck you, Malgus.

So happy to have Jaesa back. And while, yes, I can see where people might have issues with how the romance starts, it’s also really friggin cute. And with how her and Tragen’s relationship developed in the base game, it honestly works pretty well.

And, I mean, CUTE. AS. HELL.

So, in summary, aside from Anri <3 , I like the Pub side light years better than Imp.If you maybe switched Gnost-Dural and Daeruun(much as I like Daeruun), they’d be a tad more even, but it makes me real uncomfortable that your final boss is a friend to one of your inner circle members, and a potential love interest at that. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if they gave Lana and Malora some kind of connection so it was more even. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (And I know, logically, it probably ties to the whole Theron-can-be-dead thing, but it’s still hella squicky to me)

[ramblinganthropologist]

Meetings 1

Summary: Ok, maybe they got off on the wrong foot. Alistair Shepard realizes all too late that he didn’t even get the name of the guy he ran over. Still, fate might have other plans for these two weirdos. Or, at least BioWare does. Characters; Alistair Shepard, Garrus Vakarian (with cameos from Kaidan Alenko and @reallyfuckinggay‘s Bo Peep Shepard) Setting: ME1 Word count: 1.1k

--- 

Well, all things considered, this was a shitty visit to the Citadel.

Alistair sighed as he walked towards the Presidium, entire body still aching. They had said he was fine after what had happened, but... he didn't feel alright. A soreness had settled into his bones and wouldn't leave no matter what.

“Commander, swing left.”

Kaidan's voice behind him led him to veer slightly to the mentioned direction. Just in time, he missed slamming into a pole. Alistair swore he heard the man sigh – definitely was him. Bo usually just told him to echo-locate or something like that – behind him.

“Thanks.”

“You really should get that looked at, Commander.”

What was there to look at? His right eye hadn't worked since Akuze. It was a miracle he even had the damn thing still, the hell he went through. Replacing it might just throw off his balance and  - what many considered to be a lack of – aim. Besides, the one dead eye and the heavy scar that accompanied it was great for intimidation.

He needed that. It was hard to intimidate people when he only came up to their chin.

Alistair shook his head as he got back on course. “Let's keep going. Probably shouldn't keep the Council waiting.”

Hopefully, he at least sounded calm. It was all a ruse. Really, he was about ready to die on the spot from nerves. It wasn't every day that you went before the Council, especially to tell them something they probably didn't want to hear. And oh, they really didn't wanna hear all about the shit that had been beamed into his head by the weird antenna of doom back on Eden Prime.

It had a proper name, but it was a fucking antenna of doom so there.

“There's no way they're going to believe any of this.” Bo was as much used to this as he was, so she was probably right on the credits as always. At best, the council would just give their small group some weird ass looks while patting them on the head and sending them off. Udina would have a temper tantrum, he'd get a headache, and they'd all go back to the Normandy wishing they'd never done it at all.

Lather, rinse, repeat. It was like clockwork.

“We still have to try, though.” Kaidan was far more optimistic. How, Alistair had no clue, but it was good to keep him around just for that. His tone changed, however, as he suddenly swung around. “Commander-”

“I know, I know, swing lef-”

He didn't swing left nearly fast enough, unfortunately. Or maybe it should have been swing right. Neither of them had really gotten communication nailed down. And instead, something got nailed by a 140 pound biotic.

Alistair felt himself collide into something hard that was far too warm to be a piece of architecture. The fact it let out a strangled noise that might have been annoyance and shock definitely meant it was sentient. Since it came down with him and he didn't hear bones or electronics cracking, that narrowed down the list of species he would have to apologize to in a few seconds. Luckily, it wasn't a Krogan. They were built like tanks and he still had bruises from the last time.

“Oww...”

“That's my line.”

The slight hum that came with the smooth voice confirmed that the dulcet tones were translated. So did the weird fucking knee jutting into his side. From the looks of things, Alistair had run smack dab into a Turian.

Wouldn't Alec Ryder be proud?

Alistair jumped to his feet, face turning red enough to match his hair. He would have offered out a helping hand, but his victim was already pulling themselves back up to their full height. Naturally, they were at least a head taller.

“Watch where you're going.”

Alistair couldn't speak at that moment, thanks to the fact his tongue had shoved itself down his throat. It was the voice, of course. When it came down to it, he was a weak man for voices. Even translated, this one was hot. So was the Turian it was attached to, for that matter. And as was just his look, said dream in blue armor was giving him a rather put out expression.

Wasn't he just the master of first impressions?

Since his commander clearly wasn't able to speak, Kaidan filled in. “Sorry about that. He has some vision problems and didn't see you coming.”

“I was standing still.”

Oh, why couldn't Eden Prime had killed him? Alistair's face was full on crimson now as he managed to find his own special brand of dumbassery. It was right where he had left it, of course, next to his social anxiety and inability to aim straight. How had he forgotten that?

“I'm having a whole lot of vision problems.” Red faced, he began to walk away and only paused once more to glance back at the annoyed Turian who looked to be heading back to the C-SEC offices. Maybe he had just gotten out of a bad meeting too; he could feel for the guy.

He had also basically felt up the guy too. Yep... he was going to be thinking about him for quite some time.

“Again, really sorry... please don't arrest me for hit and run.”

The bad joke leaked out between his lips before he could stop it. Somehow, his face managed to get even redder. At this point, all he could really do was book it the fuck out of there and hope nobody caught it on film. Problem was, there was no way to do it politely.

The Turian blinked in surprise and his mandibles twitched. “Uh... right.”

Yep... he was dead. This was truly hell.

Luckily, Bo had his back as she pushed him forward. Maybe it was his imagination, but her gaze lingered on their hit and run victim for the briefest of moments. “Didn't we have a bunch of useless aliens to talk to? Or did we just come here for tea.”

Of course they came here for tea, but that came after the universe's most pointless conference. Still, it was the kick in the ass Alistair needed to get back in as decent a frame of thought as possible. Focused, he began to move forward, towards where Anderson and the Council were waiting for them.

Though, he did spare one last look back at the Turian he had smacked into. He was already heading in the opposite direction, definitely not maybe catching one last look as well. That was fine by Alistair, because it saved him some extra embarrassing.

Plus, he got to watch his ass move.

“Focus on the talking asses, not the walking one.”

She was right. Alistair frowned as he went back to work. There were much more important things in mind. Besides, it was likely he would never see the other man again if he was lucky. It was kind of hard to come back from something like that anyway.

Oh well. Easy come, easy go.

[dent-de-leon]

ooh who did u romance in the dragon age games if i may ask

YES absolutely,, here we go:

Origins: Alistair. I played as female city elf the first time and following the brutal murder of my Warden’s fiance I showed up at Ostagar in a bloody wedding dress feeling Very Upset. And then Alistair showed up and I dunno, he just seemed very nice and meant well and we didn’t always agree on everything but he still made me laugh and was way Too Kind. 

Unfortunately, I screwed up and didn’t realize hE SACRIFICES HIMSELF AT THE END FOR YOU IF YOU DON’T DO THE OTHER THING REGARDLESS OF YOUR DECISION,, I WAS SO MAD,, like I didn’t start this game with my fiance dying for me only to end it the same way and I went back and replayed the last leg of it sooo many different times to find some Ideal Scenario where we both survive and Alistair didn’t dump me. I love my Hawke so much, but I saved Alistair again in Inquisition because I didn’t go through all that shit the first time just to lose him. That being said I also have a major thing for Lelianna, but I never got around to romancing her just cause I like Alistair too much lmao.

You know what though? I really like his interactions with Morrigna in DAI. Like, seriously, if there was an option to tell Al to leave me and go raise his kid with Morrigan, I would. I want him to be there for that kid more (as long as Morrigan herself opened up more and was okay with it)

DA2: fenRIS,, played male and female Hawkes but prefer female Hawke’s VA but anyway, I usually always go mage. And as soon as Fenris showed up, I just knew I loved him. Liked his intro. Loved his personality. His character arc really got me and he was the person I was most invested in and wanted to grow closer to and keep safe. I have a fair lot of issues with the way his story was handled though. I realize part of the theme of DA2 is outcasts and forgiveness and how far your companions can go before they’re beyond redemption, whether or not they still deserve it. 

But the way the narrative tries to frame it as people saying it’s Fenris’ fault his life was tainted by dark magic–You wanted this, you competed for it–really sickens me. It’s not wrong he was trying to escape or earn a better life for his family. Yes, for at time he still felt like there was really no running away from Denarius and did horrible things for him but he was enslaved, manipulated, stripped of all autonomy until the last of his will to fight was completely gutted. It took him so long to realize that another life was even within the realm of possibility, and the fact that he’s able to grow into someone ready to stand their ground again is really incredible. And he doesn’t even want to hate his abusers either, tries so very hard to let go of that hatred and heal and find his way in his new life and I just. Have a lot of feelings about him. 

I hated some of the ways his route was handled though. Namely that you’re required to sleep with him, which triggers memories that are extremely upsetting and causes him to distance himself from you for years. I wish there was an option to not be that intimate (or at least not so soon) and let him take his time and go at his own pace instead of pushing too far and hurting himself and needing to withdraw back into his own space. I really don’t like that he has to be hurt like that. I’ve romanced Anders and Merrill and even Sebastian (though I got divorced because he left cause I wouldn’t kill Andy) in other routes, but Fen is always my fav. Not just in DA2, but out of all the available love interests. 

Inquisition: played a female elf again for nostalgia’s sake, and went mage route again. Being mage in DA2 and DAI is honestly just too much fun for me not to. I was actually trying to romance Sera, but…elf, mage, approval was really hard. And Solas kept giving me approval left and right, so I was like–eh, I can work with this. Plus, he was like so good to Cole?? I read Asunder before DAI and Cole was my absolute fav, so the thought of dating someone who made my boy happy and took care of him was also super appealing so…yeah. I romanced Solas instead. This of course inevitably led to a lot of heartbreak and that’s a whole essay in itself, but I will forever still call him “my elf god ex” and be incredibly upset about. Shoutout to Trespasser for letting me know that if I had dated Cullen I could have had a wedding and a new dog like,, I don’t even like Cullen very much but a mABARI pUPPY,, way to rub it in Bioware thanks 

My next play through I played a male mage elf and romanced Dorian. Could write up a whole other thing on him too, but I have very mixed feelings about it. But I super liked that they gave me the option to opt out of the more physically intimate aspects of the relationship and also have a conversation with him about why I preferred that (I also liked that other routes like Solas and Josie didn’t include a sex scene at all). And you don’t rack up disapproval for not sleeping with him the way you do with Alistair (“It’s fine,” he says. -8 disapproval, the game says. Thanks man). I honestly think Dorian’s route was one of the ones I felt most comfortable playing as an ace guy. Anyway, I loved Dorian even if he was sometimes frustrating, but I’m happy to see he’s going to try and change Tevinter for the better. And I really hope to see him in the next game. 

I romanced Josephine in another route too, and she was a real sweetheart. AND I’D ROMANCE KREM IN A HEARTBEAT IF THEY’D LET ME,, PLEASE I LOVE HIM DEARLY–