#like are you fucking kidding me bioware/ea?

[cyberneticdryad]

.

[rivilu]

You know. Now that I've finished it I can say with some confidence that about 90% of the criticism this game faces that I have seen (not counting the anti-woke crybabies- those will die out in time. as they have with every installment of this series.) is sort of. Not missing the point, but missing the reasoning as to why some choices were made?

Heavy spoilers ahead for everything pretty much.

[And also I mean I'm going to speak as an inquisition hater here so in case this breeches my tiny bubble on this site you can stop reading if you enjoy any tiny aspect of that game at all. I am not kind.]

Yes. This game is not Origins or 2. This Thedas is very wishy washy about the core topics they tackled. Some things are straight up not mentioned at all when they REALLY SHOULD BE. Being an elf has you facing 0 negative interactions in TEVINTER for example. But. A lot of these choices were clearly made as a patchwork. Because of how much inquisition shat the bed. Yeah you can't easily bring back the chantry in a critical way when the last game spent 100+ hours bootlicking it against your will. There is a tiny nod to the mage- templar conflict being one sided and cruel in a side quest? But you can't elaborate and examine mages and how they're treated when the last game had a very clear bias and set them up as unreasonable/ pathetic/ willing to shell out to slavers etc. Similarly with elves how the fuck are you meant to move on from. Anything at all inq set up. Without wiping the board on a few to many places.

I'm looking at you, "the Dalish abandon mage kids above a specific count" NPC.

And the gods themselves. Solas himself. I still consider the most absolute dogshit, stupid, horrible, downright deplorable on a coding aspect writing decision in the series. One that I thought was impossible to create ANYTHING of value around before I got to this game. And. Let me tell you. For once the retconning is the glue that holds this thing together instead of being the thing tearing it apart. - Because it leads the game to feel like an au- in a decently good way. It's not recognizable as the Thedas we know - but it's close enough if you squint, and LEAGUES above the inquisition, which also felt like au fanfiction but in the "religious imperialist 100k essay on why minorities are suckers and the status quo rules actually" sense

Yes. We sort of elaborate on the nature of the blight here and the arch demons being?? Essentially lich phylacteries for these blighted gods. Which directly contradicts established information from awakening of the archdemons not being blighted by default. But I played through that and didn't blink because frankly none of this world feels anything like the one awakening takes place in. And the plot point works for the purpose it serves so really? It's fine. Or something like Bellara being able to do what Merrill spent 7 years attempting in a day or so. It works in a self contained way, but if you're trying to view this as a whole- it creates a dissonance.

An that's the thing. It's not a whole. Trying to view it as such is setting yourself up for failure. The devs said that this would be sort of a blank slate- a reset installment. But it isn't.. quite? Inq was. Inq was the one that decided to change the entire genre from dark to high fantasy, botched the transition, and watered everything down until it was an unrecognizable centrist pile of slop (at best). This is working with the horrible decisions made there- and trying to make something good out of them. It is a VALIANT effort. And I do think they mostly succeed. For what it is- it's good. I don't think it's fair to this game that's been in development hell for 10 years to blame it for not keeping things that its predecessor ruined just because they were handled better in origins or two or whatever. Trust me. Origins is still my favorite and always will be. But if you want origins, give bioware- which is currently half laid off- a break, and start barraging EA with interest for a faithful remaster/remake (i'll gladly join). Or do literally anything other than complaining about this not being that. It helps no one.

[kaija-rayne-author]

Reaction to Dragon Age Veilguard Gameplay Preview. Editorial Critique.

Heads up... this isn't the most positive of reviews. And I'm a die hard (bleeding into the dirt) solavellan so if that's not your cup of tea you can stop reading here. Images and videos are all copyright of Bioware/EA. (Updated after the Q&A on June 14th)

Spoilers for all previous games, books, comics etc.

Content warnings for extremely colourful language.

I've worked really high powered corporate jobs, so I can play the part of cool, calm, perfect professional. But this is my gaming blog. I don't censor myself here. I grew up around truckers and it shows 😂.

I'm also neurodivergent so please know my emotions about this are confusion, sadness, a bit of horror, and depression. I've been told the way I use words can be read as confrontational. It's unintentional. (And again, it's my blog, I don't particularly feel it's right or necessary that I mask my AuDHD traits here, too.) I'm honestly not angry, or pissed off, or anything like that. Shrugs. I'm just sad. I don't bother to critique things I don't love. (Unless I'm being paid for it.) Much less to this extent. How much I've written here is in direct relation to how much I love Dragon Age.

Well.

I've watched it. Twice. Once on slow mode so I could get a better glimpse at the details.

I re-watched the trailer that I hated twice more. Again once on slowmo.

What. The. Actual. Fuck. Is. That?

It sure isn't Dragon Age. If it didn't have Bioware copyrighted material, I really wouldn't have been able to tell that it was supposed to be Dragon Age. If Rook had whipped out a light-sabre, it wouldn't have seemed out of setting. I want to play Dragon Age, not some weird Star Wars knock-off.

And yes, I know most of the fandom is going gaga at this point, but I don't understand why people can't see the issues amidst the excitement. Being the odd enby out in this situation is depressing as hell. I want to love it as much as everyone else seems to. But my editor brain won't shut up.

I'm used to having unpopular opinions. Just don't bloody crucify me for these. Editing media is my actual job. It's what I do. It's a highly developed, niche skill set I've been practising for over a decade.

Some people are extremely good with cars, I'm extremely good with editing. I only started doing it professionally because my writing critique partners told me my suggestions and the things I noticed were worth their weight in gold.

TBH, it wouldn't surprise me if I have some savantism when it comes to editing and writing. When I look at a piece of fiction in an editorial perspective, it's a lot like looking at a 4d puzzle for me. I can instinctively see what works, what doesn't, and how things that don't work can be tweaked so they do. I don't meet many others in my profession who do that.

And I have multiple NYT bestselling clients. I'm truly not talking out of my ass here. I'm not perfect, no human being is, but like many middle aged AuDHD/neurodivergent people, I know where my strengths and weaknesses lie. It comes off as arrogance for some reason to many people.

So, back to the preview.

It's got the right voice actors. It's got the copyrighted characters. It's got an absolutely terrible art style that is far too reminiscent of the comics for my taste. Because those comics were a travesty of both writing and art style.

And again, why the fuck does Varric have black hair? He's a strawberry blond! He looks like Varric and Blackwall DAI had a kid together. Or like they shrunk Blackwall DAI down. I don't want Varric to look like Blackwall. I didn't like him that much.

What? Did Varric have some sort of end of life crisis and dye his head, beard, and even his chest hair black? (Much reduced chest hair, fuck Bioware, why did you reduce his chest hair!) Did it all caterpillar its way up to his face? There were story significant reasons Varric was a dwarf without a beard. Did you forget that?

(Update from live stream Q&A. One of the devs said it's because Varric has been adventuring for a time and is mostly grey. That he's shown in dark light so it looks black.) Uhuh.

Reality bites sometimes, cause my dad is a strawberry blond gone grey and he never looks like he has black hair. Not even in the dark. But whatever. They've got an excuse for it. I don't buy it because it doesn't track with y'know, how hair usually works.

I could maybe get used to the steampunk vibe? Big maybe. That's still within the realm of Dark Fantasy.

Also... I've seen some reaction videos and y'all... Dark Fantasy is a genre. It has absolutely nothing to do with the colour palette! It means it's fantasy with dark/horror elements FFS!

I swear the reading comprehension of people has suffered since I was a kid.

But, but, but... if you've been reading me for a while you had to know that was coming.

What. The. Fuck. Is. This?

Walmart Sans? Bad Halloween decor they couldn't sell until it was 99% off at a home goods store?

Is that... is that supposed to be a Darkspawn? SERIOUSLY!?! Given a Warden was fighting it, I have to assume someone at Bioware has ergot poisoning.

It looks like a modern cartoon version of Skeletor. Which is definitely insulting to Skeletor. This dude looks like he's got on his tights, speedo, boots, a bitchin' mohawk, and orange lights on his garb for the Halloween party at the club. He might win best costume, but he fails at being a Darkspawn.

They didn't just swing and miss with going to the club dude, they couldn't even find the bat and glove.

And yes, I've heard the 'lore' excuse that it's the red lyrium warping them that way. I could buy that if they were A) red lights, not orange. B) Kinda spiky, crystal-like in structure. Y'know, like the red lyrium infected creatures in DAI? (That's called continuity.)

The lines are too smooth, bone doesn't warp like that, and he (the ogre version too) seriously just look like really bad Halloween decorations.

Also, whoever drew that needs to study human anatomy a bit more. That skull shape is so wrong. In so many ways. Former forensic anthropologist and artist. I've held more human skulls than people can probably guess. I've literally pieced them back together. I'm not awful at drawing either. That image is just bad.

I'm not a player who lusts to have DAO back as the only kind of Dragon Age. I've loved them all for different reasons. Games change over the years as new ideas, new creators, and new technology comes out. That's honestly a good thing. Innovation is awesome. Most of the time.

Sometimes it's a complete miss. Like with going to the club dude up there. I love a lot about the art in these games. It's a large part of why I play them. And that thing up there? That's not a Darkspawn.

THIS is a Darkspawn.

This is a Darkspawn.

This is a Darkspawn

This is a Darkspawn

They're supposed to be kinda gut wrenchingly horrific. The graphics are older yeah, but maybe you get my point? If you know the Lore of Dragon Age... I've marinated myself in it... the Darkspawn are blight corrupted humans, dwarves, qunari, and elves.

It's supposed to be the whole concept of 'what used to be, but no longer is' that's often used in horror. You know... the thing that looks like it was at one time a deer but is walking on its hind legs with a broken neck and glowy eyes that sends atavistic shivers down your spine?

They aren't... modern cartoon Skeletors or the Halloween deco you hide in the back of the garage 'cause you're embarrassed you ever bought it.

WTAF were they thinking? I honestly can't get past my utterly confused shock on this whole thing.

I've been saying for quite a while now that Bioware needs better developmental and diversity editors. (Or maybe even any? Do they have any? 'Cause that preview really makes me doubt it.) And uh... well. Yeah. That. (I'm an editor, yes. I do both kinds, yes. I'm very good at it, yes. No, this is not me hoping for a job at Bioware/EA.)

I suppose me writing all this down is mostly just to get it out of my head. And to maybe let other disappointed Dragon Age fans know they aren't alone. Given some of the things I've seen on the 'net. I'm far and away from being alone in these opinions. You're not wrong. They've absolutely changed it so much it doesn't even remotely feel like Dragon Age.

And no, before you take that and run with it in an anti-diversity direction, I utterly love that they depicted Rook as Black. I love that Davrin is a Black elf. I love that Neve has a prosthetic leg. It's not the diversity changes I have an issue with. I adore those.

Snorts. Would I accept a job if a Bioware fairy dropped into my life and offered me a good living to look critically at that game for problems that could maybe be fixed?

Probably. They'd likely pay better than my current job. And I really do love Dragon Age so much that if I could contribute to it in a way that made us middle-aged gamers happy too? It would be pleasing.

The likelyhood of that is probably akin to winning the lotto though, so no, it's not the point of my post.

But I'm going to slide this monstrosity of a post toward the devs. Maybe they'll listen to the free editorial critique and make this game make a wee bit more sense? Or at least feel like Dragon Age, sheesh.

Because who the actual fuck wrote most of that dialogue?

I want to point my finger at the ground and scold them like a puppy who peed on the carpet.

Then give them a really basic 101 lesson on dialogue.

It was either boring for the player characters (I absolutely assume it will get better there, it was just the beginning of the game, to be fair). And I definitely trust Patrick Weekes to have done an amazing job as lead writer for most things.

But I really would've figured that Bioware would know by now that fans want to know what the character is going to say exactly before picking an option. Not just a yes, no, mediocre choice. Players have been pretty loud about that. BG3 gave us (mostly) what we wanted and it swept GOTY.

The rest of the dialogue was such freaking factory canned bullshit that I almost rolled my eyes out of my head. Which would've been awkward. Fishing them out from under the dresser and all.

A Venatori shouting 'avenge our fallen brethren' (or whatever, I'm not watching it again to get the exact dialogue) has so much stanky cheese on it I can't even. People don't talk like that. Apparently, a few Bioware writers could stand to take a few writing classes. That's basic.

Patrick Weekes is an amazingly skilled writer. But obviously, not all Bioware writers are. (Snorts, which I know very well and it's why I'm so disappointed they chose Lucanis.)

Although, since Mary Kirby did the writing for him for the game (glares at Bioware) there may be hope for him.

Music? There was music? Hans Zimmer was a bloody mistake. Everything he's made in the past decade has sounded the same. Such a shame, because the soundtrack of DAI was epic.

The demons are fine-ish? I guess? If you utterly ignore how similar they look to Fortnite demons. They look a bit weird, but demons are just emotional emanations from the fade so could conceivably look like anything they wanted. (Lolz, the rather skilled artists I know are kinda pissed off at the lack of artistic skill used for their development. Even the under 30 years old ones. Especially them.)

But also... they had really cool demons already designed from DAI (from what I understand they used the same engine, Frostbite). Why didn't they just give them a glow up and use them?

This dude would've been way better for the pride demon. Plus, there would've been some continuity between DA:I and DA:V. In series work, some continuity is important. Or the thing doesn't feel like the thing. Just like based on those previews this doesn't feel even remotely like Dragon Age.

While I don't have epilepsy, I can guarantee those demons as pictured/audio in the preview are going to give me and probably many other gamers massive headaches. Gods know what they'll do to people who actually do have epilepsy. I mean... there are epileptic gamers. Gaming is supposed to be inclusive.

And I don't really want to fight Fortnite demons. I want to fight Dragon Age demons. I don't like Fortnite. (Or, y'know, I'd spend my money and time playing Fortnite?)

Why are there so many freaking Venatori? I mean... I'm flattered to have been right when I called it that we'd be fighting them again. But in Tevinter Nights they're depicted as being on their last legs as an organization.

They're freaking everywhere in the gameplay preview? You fight so many of them! They're like toadstools after a rainstorm. Popping up like daisies! Whatever. Guess the major amount of bad guys in the Tevinter cities is likely to be Venatori. Which is just weird considering their god, Coryphyfish, is dead.

And dear gods he had better stay dead. He was such a lackluster villain in DAI to start with. And bringing back a previous defeated-supposed-to-be-dead villain is an overused fantasy trope that needs to die the miserable death it deserves already.

Again with the Venatori. A little uninspired to be completely frank.

I bet they have huge spiders in this game somewhere, too. Sigh. Why is it always spiders? Or wolves? Or big cats? It's fantasy! Where is the creativity? (Also, you know that's kinda ableist against people with arachnaphobia, right? Which is a lot of people.)

But I've gone on at length before about Bioware and their ableism issues. (Which is why they need diversity editors.) I personally like spiders, but they could at least stop having them everywhere. Or give arachnophobic gamers the option to turn them off or replace them with a different image.

Moving on from their complete loss of the horror element with the Darkspawn; I wouldn't be scared of that thing even if it surprised me in the dark. I'd laugh at it. (And I'm a jumpy person. A lot of things can scare me if they come at me in the dark.)

And I'll ignore the absolutely uninspired bad guys in Minrathous, and the Fortnite clone demons.

What is that thing Bellara is holding?

It sure as fuck isn't a bow. Someone has been playing Final Fantasy a little too much. Don't get me wrong, I've got a lot of hours in FF. I like it a lot. But one of my major complaints about it? Is the completely, utterly, ridiculous weapons. Someone is compensating. Not sure what exactly they're compensating for but it's for something. Sheesh.

I've always loved the somewhat realistic-ish weapons in the Dragon Age universe. I mean, yeah. Still heavy on fantasy... but they at least looked like they'd work. I loved Neve's reduced staff, that was awesome! Whatever Bellara is holding does not look like it would work.

I remember grinding for days in FF to get a special bow. Bows are my thing in a lot of games. When I got it made, it looked like someone had glued two surfboards together and tried to call it a bow. Bows have to be, y'know, functional? All weapons do? That's rather the point?

So... I'm not an archer and if you are, do feel free to weigh in, but would that thing even work?

A bow is a precision instrument. Our species has had bows for a long damned time and their form hasn't really changed all that much. Because they, y'know, work the way they are, and don't if you change them too much?

You've got the curved wood/horn/other material with a string kind (I'm being deliberately simple in terminology, I do actually know what a bunch of bow types are called) and you have the cross bow type.

What we do not have is front heavy monstrosities like that thing. Okay, okay, she's a veil jumper. Maybe she got it from some ancient Arlathan temple or something. But the ancient Elvhenan were supposed to be technologically advanced. Not Final Fantasy obsessed gamers.

Oh, but what about Bianca, gods rest her beautifully crafted soul. They excused that as a one of a kind thing never to be replicated. It's handwavium, but fine, rule of cool works for her. It doesn't work for whatever Bellara is holding unless they come up with a damned good story reason for it. (And it had better be damned good 'cause that thing might be pretty, but it's just severely uneducated about weaponry, at best.)

Also, why couldn't it have been the less useful Bianca Solas blew to bits? (Can't stand the dwarf version in the slightest.)

Moving on.

The settings look interesting. The teams doing the backgrounds and settings have always blown it out of the park, so I imagine they'll be suitably gorgeous when we actually do see the game.

Though I had sorta expected Arlathan to look a little more... jungley forest like, rather than paved shopping mall. But whatever, I'm hopeful there'll be better parts of it later in the game.

Rook looks like they'll be fun to play. And I really hope we're not class locked as a rogue. Rogues are my usual choice but I'd still like to have the choice. (Edit. Reports say we have complete flexibility in our character creation. I just want to know if I can make a fat adventurer.)

The steampunky science-fantasy vibe. Enh. It's not my favourite. I feel it was a mistake to try to horseshoe the depicted kinds of science into the fantasy of Dragon Age that way. Because it really feels shoved in whether it fit or not.

And I write science-fantasy, so it's not like I don't love it. I adore it. It's just something that sort of has to be designed that way from the start. Which Dragon Age most certainly was not. Don't they ever get sick of retconning stuff? I sure get sick of seeing the retconned stuff.

I could see how Minrathous might use magic in a way that we use neon lighting. Or for any number of cool fantasy type magical uses. I just don't get why it had to look like a Star-Wars knock off. If I wanted to play Star Wars, I'd, y'know, play Star Wars?

I think they did capture the grunge and dirtiness and personality of an ancient city pretty well. Like it almost has a consciousness of its own. But as I've said many places, the settings artists are freaking amazing at what they do.

Although, if they have floaty spaceship like things why exactly are the Qunari even a worry? I don't have strong feelings one way or the other on the Qunari, but I know a lot of gamers were hoping to see a Tevinter/Qunari war. If Tevinter has space shippy things, what threat could the Qunari possibly be? Or even the teased Minrathous monsters?

Last I checked (which was a couple of days ago, re-reading those awful comics) the Qunari were still using bows, swords, spears, and knife type war implements. Some bombs, too, because gatlock. And enslaved, lyrium addicted mages.

Big floaty space-shippy thing means small floaty space-shippy things because that's how invention works. Where are the small ones? That thing is just a plot hole the size of Canada. (And a skilled developmental editor could've told them that before they put it in the sky. Sheesh.)

The fighting and conversation options look very similar to DA2. I liked the fighting in DA2 so after the usual adjustment to a new game it would probably be fine. Not sure how I feel about only having the ability to have two companions.

That art style though? I just cannot imagine having romantic scenes with characters done in that art style. And the Romances in Dragon Age are a large part of why I play them. Cartoon sexy times aren't my thing.

You do you, I'm not judging. But for me cartoony sexy times are just weird. Not sexy.

And no matter what they said after that disastrous character reveal the other day, the gameplay reveal doesn't look different enough for me to not call it cartoony. Especially for those Halloween decorations.

Now, I need to get to the end where we see some weird looking mage who I think is supposed to be Solas.

Really? That's supposed to be Solas?

This is the Solas my solavellan heart fell for so hard I've been simping over him for the entire time since I started playing these games.

Regardless. THIS is Solas.

Beautiful, nerdy, a little stylized, but with an art style that really worked for me (and probably most other solavellans given how much we love him).

So who in the living fuck is this?

I guess he's Solas shaped. But he doesn't make my heart squeeze in that OMG he's finally back!! way. He doesn't do anything for me. All I feel is numbness for that version of Solas. Which is disappointing as hell.

I didn't really have high hopes for him given his early looks for this game, but dang. Just dang. He's like a plastic ken doll. Very much like a too shiny plastic ken doll. And while I know Gareth David-Lloyd did the voice acting for him, he somehow doesn't even sound like Solas?

I've also been sadly informed by someone who would know that that is the absolute best they could do with him. We're not getting him fixed no matter how much we scream. He doesn't even have freckles! (And your eyes are fooling you if you think you're seeing them. Our brains often do that. Fill in things that should be there when they really aren't. There was some sort of design issue snafu which is why he doesn't have and cannot have freckles. This is confirmed insider information.) Freaking Lace Harding is peppered with them. Why can't my Solas have freckles?

Edit from Q&A (I think? It's second hand). Someone said they wanted to make everything look more 'painterly'.

Listen. I paint. Digitally and traditionally. You really have to work at it to get something that texture free. That's not 'painterly' its like... glossy modern playing cards. I hate it. Especially given the kind of fresco style paintings that Solas did in DAI. There is ALL sorts of texture with those.

Sigh. Maybe he'll grow on me. Like virulent mould. (Edit. He honestly hasn't. Every picture I see of him kills Dragon Age a little more for me. Which is bloody heartbreaking.)

IDEK man. I keep asking myself what Bioware was thinking. This game feels like it was made for a much different type of gamer than those of us who have loved the previous games for so very long.

It feels like they were trying to draw in a younger crowd while almost keeping the appeal that held us older gamers. That 'almost' is important there. (Edit. Confirmed by John Epler during live Q&A. This is exactly what they did. I feel incredibly betrayed.)

We older gamers are the ones who've kept hope for this game alive. Who have kept Dragon Age alive. The company made it, but without us hoping for it, talking about it, making mods for it, repeatedly replaying it? Would it ever have gotten there?

And we get Fortnite demons, Ken doll Solas, Halloween decoration 'darkspawn', and space shippy nonsense that kills about 50% of their foreshadowing.

I know I'm not the only older Dragon Age player feeling a little (lot) betrayed right now.

Based on these two trailers (and I'm absolutely praying I'm wrong) I think they failed project Dragon Age. Miserably.

I am pleased to learn that there are confirmed non-binary options for character creation and decent hair. So that's a plus. (Looks at the drops in the bottom of the almost empty bucket and sighs.)

I'd still like to play the game. I'd honestly LOVE to be wrong in my opinions on this. I'd really, really love to be wrong as much as I love Dragon Age.

I will happily sit down to a meal of crow if I'm wrong. I want to be wrong, because I love Dragon Age.

Though, I'm pretty good at prediction. I have stereotypical autistic pattern matching, which is a lot of what prediction is.

But I'm sadly coming to an end of what I'll be able to write about Dragon Age, no matter how much I love it.

My computer, which is literally duct taped together, isn't going to be able to handle DA4. It can barely run BG3 without overheating. As much as I love my computer, (and I really do, I get attached like a lot of AuDHD people do) it has broken or missing keys, and several of the more important keys just don't work. The screen is also starting to go.

I have lived and breathed the art and lore on these games since I started playing them. They're one of my most prominent AuDHD special interests. It's killing part of my soul to know I won't get to play it.

I'm a disabled, neurodivergent editor/author with a family to support. There's absolutely no extra for me to save up for a new rig. I'm ineligible for disability aid because I'm an immigrant. (Not that you can actually survive on disability here, anyway.) And I live in Canada, which is having a rather obscene cost of living crisis right now.

Even with my issues with the... er... everything, I still want to know what happens. I want to see it for myself.

Being an editor makes reading/tv fraught for me. If a piece of media makes me feel like I'm at work I can't really enjoy it. And 99% of books/shows do. (Don't become an editor if you love to read.)

Games tend to have fewer things to trip up my editorial brain. (Not this particular game, obviously 😂.)

That's all to say that gaming is basically my only form of accessible entertainment. I do it a lot in whatever spare time I have.

Even with my misgivings on the previews. I really would like to both play it and be utterly, completely wrong about it. I'd love to be able to keep writing about Dragon Age. But without being able to play the next one, all I can really do is rehash old stuff.

My work of words is my only income. And most writers really don't make all that much. Editors can, but I'm currently working a job that pays less than minimum wage doing editing. I'm under NDA, so I can't even tell people which huge corporation a lot of people use every day pays their editors so poorly.

Doing freelance work, I make between $50 and $70 an hour. Because editing is skilled, niche work. Experienced editing even more so.

That's why someone can be an amazing writer and a shit editor. You really do have to dedicate yourself if you're going to be good at editing anything. Most people don't put in the time or effort. I'm a better editor than I am a writer. (I'm not an awful writer, I just know where my strengths lie 😂.)

But there isn't a whole lot of freelance work available since COVID.

My partner has a broken back from his last job so can't work (and they denied his disability because that makes complete sense) so we barely scrape together enough to pay the bills each month (and lately have been failing even on that).

I think Rook and company fucked up badly by interrupting Solas' ritual. Lolz, I rather hope Solas 'greatly disapproves' in Rook's head or something. That would be bleeding hilarious.

I suppose if Solas had... I dunno... talked to people and told them why he felt he needed to take down the veil it would've helped. But his arrogance always does get in the way. In the writing trade that's termed his fatal flaw.

I think what Rook did at the end there is probably going to get Varric and a whole lot of other people killed.

Solas killing Bianca was awful, yes (and the merciful option, btw, Bianca can be fixed, Varric can't). But I think it's just the prequel. I don't think our beloved Varric is gonna be around long enough to miss her.

[fanfoolishness]

Jedi: Fallen Order musings

Ahhh I finished the game! I suppose I don't really need to put spoiler tags for it, since it's several years old. But it was highly enjoyable and I loved it!

I love how much games are embracing character work these days. I expect it from Bioware, of course, but seeing it from EA and a major property like Star Wars is still really refreshing. I should have guessed that a story set just a few years after Order 66 about a young Jedi would be full of trauma, but I wasn't expecting it to be as in-depth and sensitive as it was. Trauma colors everything in this story, from Cal's wounded connection to the Force, to Cere cutting herself off from it entirely, to Merrin's fear and grief. Even BD-1 grieves his old friend and master and Greez still misses his great-grandmother.

I've seen a few articles about how Cal seemed like a flat or boring character, but I didn't get that at all. He's an 18-year-old young man whose childhood was obliterated by war, who's so afraid of his past and his power that he hasn't tried to leave Bracca in 5 years. He's so guarded at first, because he's had to be. He's slow to trust Cere and Greez, and that trust is broken when he learns what happened to Cere's Padawan. In his youth he reacts like many of us would -- arrogantly and self-righteously -- but it all flows from the deep scars he carries and is so afraid to face from losing his own Master. Fear leads to anger, of course.

He's afraid of trusting again, afraid of being hurt again, so afraid that it isn't until 3/4 of the way through the game that he finally bears to revisit the memories again from Order 66. Facing that loss, and that guilt for not being able to save his master, incapacitates him so badly that a Force vision shatters his lightsaber. (The game remembers it, too, and the animation of Cal reaching out of habit for his lightsaber and realizing it's broken every time you try to use it is heartbreaking.) When he goes to Ilum to try to forge a new lightsaber, he can't help but remember when he came here as a Padawan. BD-1 checks in on him and Cal tells him, no, he's not okay, it's hard for him to be there. The kid is just a massive ball of pain and trauma and watching him slowly unravel that and move forward through the course of the game is a powerful journey. No personality, my ass, LOL.

And Cere's journey! Her grief is far more complex than Cal's because she bears more guilt, and she was a fully fledged Jedi who thought she could keep others safe, and she failed. Fear and anger rule her, too, but despite that she's stubborn as hell, holding onto hope through everything. Her grief and suffering are revealed slowly and carefully through the game, and seeing the way she starts to heal by mentoring Cal is beautiful. When he falls down, she picks him up, even when he distrusts her -- and when she falls, too, he echoes her teaching back to her and helps her rise. Seeing her recovery of her confidence, her skills, her trust in herself -- ahh I'm tearing up again thinking about it. Also, she is fucking badass with a lightsaber!!!

I'm really excited to see what happens with Merrin in Jedi: Survivor (no spoilers, please!). Can't believe a Jedi and a Nightsister could find common ground, but "I'm the last of my kind" is a trauma bond like no other! I love her weird unsettling energy and the fact that she teases Greez and that when she had a choice to stay in the graveyard of her people and the past or strike out into the unknown, she chose to go.

... Reminds me, I still gotta go find all the seeds for Greez's terrarium. How else will he have the best space garden if not for me? Love him too. I'm always a sucker for gruff scoundrel accidentally catches family feels, and he's no exception.

And BD-1. My buddy, my friend, my savior, my companion. I loved Cal able to warm up and be relaxed with BD, and I loved BD's absolute helpfulness and sweet little noises. If anything happens to him I WILL kill everyone and then myself. ... same goes for Cal, in the end...

Note, I am hoping that whatever happens to Cal and BD, that it's hopeful. Jedi have a nasty habit of all dying out by A New Hope, but uh... maybe Cal will be different! We can hope!!! ;_; Well, we're just not gonna think about that.

I liked the ending. The further we kept going I started agreeing with Merrin and thinking "is this holocron such a good thing to have?" Cal's vision of the Padawans being tortured and himself as an Inquisitor, and the wisdom from the Zeffo sages bemoaning their hubris and the extinction they faced, certainly made it seem like trying to rebuild the Order wasn't the right choice, at least for now. As Cordova said, failure is part of the journey. Honestly a hopeful life lesson and one I need to remember when things don't come out as planned or hoped.

Also. How about Darth Vader just DESTROYING you? I had to look up how to get away because I just kept insta-dying with the Force choke XD The ONLY way to have him duel you is to just show instantly that you are NOWHERE NEAR HIS LEVEL! Dude didn't even get a health bar ahahahahah it was hopeless XD

Other scattered thoughts: with the exception of the Wookiees (sorry, hair technology just wasn't far enough along yet for them), the graphics were gorgeous. I loved exploring the different areas, especially as I gained more skills and abilities, and collecting creature logs and Force echoes. Cal's psychometry skill is very, very cool and I loved it. And I adored the Origin Tree! WOW! Did anyone else get a King's Quest vibe from it? I mean, come on!

In the meantime, where's my Fallen Order people to yell at? I haven't played more than 20 minutes of Survivor so all I can say about that is Cal's new beard and TATTOO are pretty great, though I miss my poncho ;_; but if anyone wants to yell about the first game with me, I'm here!

[loopy777]

So im so glad i never succeeded in getting you into Dragon Age. If i had, you would have gotten into it just as it had it's batman and Robin and burned it's entire franchise to the ground.

Its bad. Really, really bad.

It basically did a soft reboot, by burning down half the setting's continent, to ashes by killing off all the places and cultures that the first 3 games explored OFFSCREEN with no fanfare or drama to it, in favor of the far more boring north that nobody cared about.

All so that if there was gonna be a DA 5, the series would not have to deal with the player's choices from the first 3 games(which has always been carry overs from game to game), and instead get to explore newer and fresher parts of thedas as opposed to the boring south we actually cared about.

It also killed off Varric Tethras, One of the most beloved video game characters of all time, all so it could have a boring "he was actually dead all along" twist.

And it ditched it's very dark but heroic fantasy story with hard, grey morality and tough choices, for the tone of a bland, boring, safe linear action story.

Also the series was once a relatively grounded if magical setting alike to Fullmetal alchemist or avatar, and it is now everyone might as well have superpowers, and everything is goofy.

Also, ALL the Lore and questions we ever had, short of wheter the Dragon Age God actually exists, was answered in the most boring, bland manner, with no sense of drama or stakes, and everything was spelled out.

And to top it all of, at the end, it's retconned that everything in the last 3 games were all set up by a secret evil cabal that controlled everything from the shadows, that were a very vague couple of factions from the previous, deep lore that has not been given any depth or exploration to such a point that either were particularily important, nor that they were one and the same(They seemed as far removed as humanly possible).

The game has been received about as well by Dragon Age's 14+ million fanbase as you could imagine, struggling to break even 1 million sales(it would need at least 4-5 million to break even much less make a profit).

Sorry to rant about this out of nowhere, im just glad you made the choice to NOT get involved with this franchise.

It's basically Attack on titan's ending all over again. The franchise's future is dead, all the mysteries were revealed in the stupidest ways, and nothing you did ever fucking mattered.

Huh. Well, I'm grateful you let me know about this, because it had not been on my radar at all, but I knew there was a lot of worry about this new entry given how coy the advertising was being about the actual content of the game. It's good to see how it all turns out, at least.

That said, I'm also not surprised. By now, Bioware surely can't be Bioware at all anymore, and while I bounced off KotOR pretty hard and never tried any of their other games, I know they had been a distinct brand with a built-in fanbase. EA can't just buy the name and keep people loyal while replacing the entire feel of the thing.

They should have waited for the original creators to fall from grace and ruin the feel of their own thing themselves, like Disney did with Star Wars after George Lucas already started devaluing it. XD

(Or maybe EA did? I know Mass Effect end in a way that killed off its fandom, but I don't know if the original Bioware made that one or if they were already a soulless puppet.)

But maybe EA will get lucky and some near-sighted grandmothers will buy this new DA as a Christmas present, thinking it's the new Baldur's Gate. I hear the kids really like that one.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Rediscoveries

I think it’s because I’m doing things in a slightly different order than I have previously, and a slightly different companion roster (Jallira!Hawke is about the only one of the roster of Archetyhpe Characters whose overall approach to things means that there’s a little less issue with taking Aveline along, since she actively tries not to do crimes ...and fails, but ... you know, Hawke), but I’m noticing things I just hadn’t picked up before.

Like, noticing I’d triggered The Final Straw before doing Merrill and Varric’s Act 3 quests, I did the whole Sundermount thing (and Jallira probably needed a lot of hugs after that one, because she tried to explain instead of taking responsibility and ... well, whoopsie. Yes, this is relevant in a moment) and then popped by the Hanged Man to trigger Creepy Shit in Bartrand’s Old Mansion. Two things:

The “Alistair loves cheese” thing is not just one throwaway line in Origins. That Talkative Man who wanders around the Hanged Man walked past me as I was leaving Varric’s rooms going, “I hear the King of Ferelden loves cheese. He is one of us! One of the chosen people!” So ... apparently there’s a cheese cult somewhere in Kirkwall. Which I guess beats the blood cults, but ... you know.

On the way properly out, wandered past that guy who spends his time in the Hanged Man making Hawke the subject of a lot of Chuck Norris meme, and got, “I hear the Champion went to Sundermount and killed every elf there! I heard the ground opened up and swallowed them!” Which ... has me imagining Varric looking up at Hawke and going, “At least I’m not as bad as this guy”.

And then earlier, got a bit of insight into the whole Isabela / Aveline friendship during a bit of chatter while heading off to rescue Fenris from Grace et al. The bit where Aveline was complaining that Isabela didn’t turn up to her dinner party and Isabela was all, “I’m not the person you want around your kids”. Tried to play it off with, “Imagine the questions! ‘Mummy, what’s a slattern?’“ And Aveline just going, “And I’ll just point at you and say, ‘That’s a slattern’.”The voice acting in this is really a lot better than it has any right to be for how rushed this game was, y’know. The tone was, “Yes, I know your reputation, I know you’re not going to change, and I am going to keep calling you whore and you will keep calling me Lady Man-Hands and that’s just how we are“. It really drove home that their relationship really is as sibling-ish as a mage-Hawke and Carver’s ever was - antagonistic, at least partly meant, but you still end up loving them. Which I guess is underlined mid-game when you get friendship points with Aveline for letting Isabela take the Tome of Koslun, despite how she swears about it later.

I still maintain that DA2 would have been better as an Inquisition-style open world game that took hears to make but gave us ample opportunities to fuck around in a much larger Kirkwall and Points Surrounding, and that Inquisition would have been better with smaller, more linear maps - maybe not quite as small and repetitive as DA2′s maps, but more like Origins’ maps - and a tighter focus on the story. The more I play DA2, the more I think that. I mean, come on. Act 1 alone would have been better if there’d been all sorts of little quests to do to get the coin needed for the expedition, sprawling all over a proper huge Kirkwall.

Anyway, it’s nice that even after all this time, I can rediscover this rushed little gem. Even if I do sit and mourn what could have been if EA hadn’t been so panicky over losing people’s interest after Origins’ runaway success and rushed something out on the relative cheap. I think a game that’s nearly twelve years old and still has people writing this much fanfic and doing this much fanart etc about it as much as they are doesn’t really have to worry about that kind of thing.

(Also, just went to double-check my dates - 14-16 months of development time?!? That was all Bioware were given? EA must have been out of their fucking minds.)

[icyschreviews]

A Review of Dragon Age: Inquisition

Part 1: Playing a Broken PC Port

This is part 1 of a multi-part review of Dragon Age: Inquisition. Click here for part 2 and part 3.

God, why do I keep doing this? I tell myself I’ll only play a game for fun and next thing you know I’m five pages and half a bottle of tequila down a review. It’s you, BioWare, isn’t it? We keep doing this with every other game you release. Andromeda was the reason I got into this futile hobby in the first place. Well shame on you, you and your nerdy DnD mechanics and your campy fantasy drama and your thirst traps you call companions. Yes, I’m going to trash Inquisition now. Consider yourselves responsible.

Where do I even begin with this game? It’s safe to say that I’m a fan of Origins through and throughout. There are many RPGs out there that call themselves old-school, but not one quite like Origins. Sure, I’m into action RPGs as well (I play Dark Souls just like any other hoe), but few games can match Origins’ juicy blend of stellar writing and complex combat.

So let’s not treasure that. Let’s piss all over it and burn it in a dumpster, eh EA? All the cool kids are doing open-worlds now, so we have to follow the trends. Cram as much content as you can in it. God forbid the next Assassin’s Creed has one more minute of gameplay than we do. Give us crafting. Can’t have a triple-A game without that. And bigger maps. I said bigger! Copy-paste the stuff we already have. More quest markers. So many quest markers that they overlap on the map. MOAR!

Oh dear, we got so worked up we forgot about the graphics. There’s no way we’re releasing this game if you can’t see every scale on a dragon’s ass. It’s called Dragon Age after all. Say what now, BioWare? Your engine can’t keep up with that level of detail? Hush baby, we’re not going to license someone else’s well documented and well tested engine. Mama’s got Unreal at home.

Goat’s blood all over you edifice, EA.

Listen, I don’t have anything against console players. People should play games wherever its the most convenient for them. I also have nothing against bringing games to more platforms. Sure, adapt Dragon Age for consoles. Why not make it available to a larger crowd? But why, oh why would you do that at the expense of the PC version? Tell me, BioWare, please.

I booted up Inquisition for the first time, took control after the initial cut-scene, pressed space on my keyboard and almost had a heart attack. Instead of pausing the game my character jumped. Jumped, I tell you! What is this blasphemy in my Dragon Age game? I quickly remapped the controls. Off with you, filthy jump button!

Next came pressing the tab button. Tab. Tab! Tab, goddamn, why is it not responding? Ok, back to the key bindings. How do I highlight items in the area? Right, by pressing the V key. Lets remap that real quick. Now press tab…

It echoed. The highlight is now an echo. Wha— Why? Why would you do that, BioWare? How is that more convenient than the way it was before? You used to hold down tab and all interactable items in the area would stay highlighted as long you had your finger on the button. The new echo only marks objects for a short while. You don’t even have enough time to make a full circle before the highlight starts fading. What am I supposed to do with this? If the highlight didn’t also flash on the mini-map, it’d be practically unusable.

I didn’t realize what caused this change until I switched over to a gamepad (spoiler alert). There the highlight is mapped to L3. Of course it fucking is. Who would want to hold down L3 for a prolonged period of time? Alright, BioWare, but why not have two separate implementations of this feature for different platforms? You can’t tell me the echo was the easier one to implement. At least it beeps differently when there aren’t any items around.

Ok, deep breaths. Remember what you learned in therapy. All of these are just minor inconveniences. I’m sure the rest of the game plays just fine. Look, what’s that item in the corner? Let’s check it out. Click on it. Click. Right click on it. Again. Click…

Oh my god, your character doesn’t automatically approach faraway items to interact with them any more. You have to walk over to them and then click. What’s worse the collision boxes went on a diet. Picking up a slim little elfroot requires a surgeon’s precision. I’d consistently walk over to one, only to overshoot it by a tiny bit. If this didn’t make me blow my brains out, nothing ever will.

Blasphemy!

And that’s not even half of it. The real war crimes were committed against the game’s combat. I can’t even begin to describe it. The combat was desecrated. Defiled. Abolished. Torn to pieces and processed through a meat grinder. The tactical mode is the stuff of which nightmares are made of. It feels finicky at best and rage inducing at worst.

I can’t believe Origins is the oldest Dragon Age game, yet the only one to have its shit together when it comes to the camera. Does regression count as some sort of progress? Dragon Age 2 trimmed the maximum zoom level, but Inquisition went one step further and let the camera clip into the ceiling. Visibility in closed spaces is miserable and it only gets worse in poorly lit dungeons.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the game randomly kicks you out of the tactical mode while adjusting the camera’s zoom level. There’s no pattern to this behavior. Sometimes it’ll do what it’s supposed to and sometimes it’ll slap you in the face and continue the action at top speed. And why don’t orders from the tactical mode carry over outside of it? Do I really have to keep smashing the attack button? Even when I go into the tactical mode and tell someone to do something, chances are they might just ignore me.

To go even further, when you hover over abilities in the quick bar nothing pops up. Am I seriously supposed to pause the game and open up the menu each time I want to check an ability’s description? Alright, Inquisition, I’ll do that. Just tell me, why are all of the UI elements flipping out? I can’t scroll down a simple list without the cursor losing its goddamn mind and jumping all over the place. Similarly there’s no information when you hover over your companions’ images, no health, no XP, no stats, no nothing. Status effect are presented as these small specks in the corner of your screen. I needed a magnifying glass to properly identify them.

Just checking for cobwebs up here.

But wait, humble reviewer, why are you using the tactical mode? Don’t you know it’s useless? No one plays Inquisition like that. Just get into the action and start smashing the buttons. Tactics - who needs them? I finished the game on Nightmare and only had to fire up like two brain cells. Trust me, you should forget about the tactical mode all toge—

No, you forget about the tactical mode! If I wanted to play an action RPG, I would have booted up The Witcher 3. I’m sick of triple-A games converging into this indistinguishable hodgepodge of recycled ideas. This is Dragon Age, goddammit. I won’t let EA trick me into believing this is where the franchise should be heading. I’ll get my share of tactical combat out of this game, so god help me!

…

Ok, but maybe I won’t be doing that with a mouse and keyboard. Once I realized my old approach wasn’t working any more, I decided to try my luck with a gamepad. Lo and behold things started falling into place. Suddenly I wasn’t playing a busted PC port, but a decent console exclusive.

Without a mouse and keyboard in my hands I wasn’t compelled to play the game the way I used to. The gamepad tricked my mind into approaching Inquisition with a fresh set of eyes. The menus started responding to my inputs. I wasn’t looking for overlays because I had nothing I could use for hovering. No more mouse, so no more futile clicking on objects in the distance. Just tilt the stick and press A. Feels good, don’t it?

If someone had told me I’d be playing a Dragon Age game with a gamepad, I would have urged them to take that filth elsewhere. Today if someone else were to put a gun to my head and order me to play Inquisition with a mouse and keyboard, I would tell them to shoot and end my misery. It’s like BioWare unironically developed a console exclusive and then smashed together a shabby port. To think this franchise was once home on the PC.

Well pardon me, but from now on I’ll be reviewing Dragon Age Inquisition, a spin-off from the main Dragon Age series. This time exclusively on consoles and totally not playable on PC. Don’t let Steam fool you, this thing don’t run with a mouse and keyboard.

You have to flip a switch and restart the game just to use a gamepad? Whaaat?

Once I was sure the simple act of picking up herbs wasn’t going to make me blow my brains out, I decided to give Inquisition another shot. The tactical mode was still waiting for me. Oh, you didn’t think I was done with it just because I switched over to a gamepad? Silly you.

The gamepad made me feel like I was playing a completely different game. In the PC version the tactical mode worked more or less the same way it did in the previous two games. Pardon me, it tried to work. In the console version time is stopped by default the moment you enter the tactical mode. You don’t press a button to unfreeze time, instead you hold down the trigger to make time move forward. The moment you release the trigger time stops again.

At first this didn’t seem like much of a change. You still issue commands the way you did before. However this gives an entirely new flavor to the combat. Applying different amounts of pressure on the trigger makes time move at different speeds. This means you can let little bits of time slip by if you want tight control over the combat, i.e. you can let it rip at top speed if you feel comfortable with the decisions you’ve made.

To boot some of the issues which were present in the PC version simply aren’t there any more. You don’t get thrown out of the tactical mode for changing the zoom level. Then why on earth was this a problem with a mouse and keyboard? I quickly grew accustomed to the new control scheme and was able to cruise through the tactical mode with ease. However the more time I spent with it, the more I realized just how many holes were drilled through the sides of this ship.

One of the first challenges was figuring out how to zoom in on a particular party member. When selecting the next person using the D-pad the game would reposition the camera onto that person. At least this is how it works outside of the tactical mode. Inside the mode the camera stays put regardless of your selection. This means switching over between ranged and melee units requires you to move the cursor back and forth across the battlefield. Or you could quickly exit the tactical mode, switch to the desired character and then dive back in. Talk about an ideal solution.

The problems don’t stop there. During combat you can open up a hot wheel with additional tactical options as well as access to potions. The potions work as you’d expect them to, but the special commands can only be applied to the entire party. Meaning if I wanted to move Sera to an advantageous position and tell her to stay put, that command would make the entire party stop dead in their tracks.

Orders that should be simple are thus a headache to execute—except, hold on a minute. It turns out you can tell only one party member to hold their ground. You just need to double tap the desired location. I’m going to give the game the benefit of a doubt and say I missed this information because I played the tutorial with a mouse and keyboard. Still, why does this command work differently when issued from the hot wheel?

At least telling your companions to smack someone on the head is easy enough. Have you seen that new warrior skill tree? It has an ability which lets you pull an enemy using a chain and then ceremoniously kick them in the face. Here, let me show you. Come on, Inquisitor, let it rattle. Wait… Why did my Inquisitor miss her shot? She turned 90 degrees away from her target and flipped the chain towards a rock. What a bizarre bug. Let’s try that one more time. It happened again! And again! Now Sera is also shooting at trees.

What’s going on here? My companions keep directing their shots in random directions at random times. Is it because they’re out of range? I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. Are obstacles a problem? No, my Inquisitor is able to chain-pull people through carts. Elevation maybe? No, then she flips her chain in the right direction, but it sinks through the terrain. What the heck then? Am I supposed to make peace with this as well? At lest the ability doesn’t go into cooldown when you miss.

Never mind, Cassandra, go defend that position. Cassandra? Where are you, girl? Why haven’t you moved at all? Are you stuck? Did someone apply some sort of status effect on you? Not that I’d know since the UI doesn’t tell me… Let me just exit the tactical mode and see if I can move you. Yes, I can. Another bizarre bug, I guess. Wait, why is my Inquisitor stuck now? And now Blackwall! And Bull! Stop it, it’s contagious!

Come to mama.

I remembered somewhere along the way that this was a Dragon Age game and that I didn’t have to manage every single breath a companion takes. So I rolled up my sleeves and opened up the menus looking for the tactical settings. Except there wasn’t much to play around with. The only behavior you can change is potion consumption and the auto-usage of specific abilities.

Where are the in-depth settings that were part of the previous games? Where are the fine-grained conditions? What about behavioral presets? How do my companions act by default? Are they aggressive? Are they defensive? Does this vary based on class? How would I even know?

During this search, I stumbled across a menu letting me tweak various aspects of the gameplay. Among those was an option to toggle friendly fire. Since I was dearly missing the feature in Dragon Age 2, I decided to turn it on. Immediately after Varric blasted me and Cassandra out of Thedas. It did not last long before I relented and turned the feature back off. Some abilities are just to unpredictable to use, chain lightning for example. I let Vivienne zap some poor bastard thinking he was well out of range, only to have the entire party light up like Christmas candles.

The next thing that came to my attention was the cursor and how busted it is. Inside the tactical mode you can move it using a stick. However it can’t go through obstacles. If there’s a log standing between you and your target, you need to circle around it. Why on earth would the cursor be affected by collisions?

Elevations create a new set of problems. You literally have to walk the cursor up the goddamn stairs. But what if there aren’t any stairs? What if my target is perched upon a cliff? There’s absolutely no way to reach them without exiting the tactical mode. The cursor also disappears on slopes. This problem is the most prominent in the desert maps. There’s no way to select a target if it’s standing on the steep sides of a dune.

And don’t even get me started on the cursor’s range. You can’t move it far away from the currently selected character. What if my party members are spread apart? Because of this I couldn’t command my ranged units to attack a target next to my melee ones. So what if they need to move in closer before firing? Make them do that automatically.

Not the stairs again.

Left to their own devices companions can usually find their way. Usually. This is handled rather well during exploration. Even if a companion gets stuck and left behind, the game will teleport them behind you when you’re not looking. This is simple and seamless.

The same magic trick does not work in combat. Once you press the button launching you into the tactical mode, your companions are left standing wherever they were before that. I once slid down a hill straight into combat and left Vivienne and Sera staring down at me from the top. I powered my way through the encounter out of sheer spite while the ladies must have spent their time bickering.

The very worst example of this is a cave up on the Storm Coast. It’s your usual case of spider infestation, but it was the level’s geometry and not the enemies that my companions could not get their heads around. The first time I entered the cave I engaged in combat only to realize I was alone. Upon closer inspection I found my party stuck outside trying to burrow their way in through a solid wall. The entrance of the cave was 5 feet to the side.

On the second go I made sure everyone was lined up in front of the entrance, but only Solas successfully made it in. He then proceeded to climb up a ladder on his own incentive. I switched over to him, wanting to bring Mr elven supremacy down to earth, only for the entire party to be teleported somewhere outside of the cave. My Inquisitor retained their default combat pose and slid down a hill.

Even when I managed to get all of them inside, they constantly kept getting stuck on walls. The camera was losing its mind and entering and exiting the tactical mode teleported me to random corners of the cave. It’s safe to say I never entered that dungeon again.

How the hell did you get in here?

You could say I was perplexed the first time I opened up the skill trees. Dragon Age 2 did a good job of tidying up Origins’ level-up system, but on first glance Inquisition went a bit too far. I counted 4 trees per class which was a downgrade from the 6 you had in DA2. Lots of abilities seemed to be missing. Mages only had 3 elemental skill trees and 1 you could call defensive. What happened to entropy? Or blood magic? How am I supposed to create different builds with all these ability points coming in?

The game just stayed quiet and chuckled until I reached Skyhold. After receiving my first Fade ability I opened up the level-up screen and—wait, what’s this? New skill trees? There was a new one per character. I repeat per character, not per class. Dragon Age, I could kiss you right now.

This is hands down the best level-up system in all three games. Not only is it tidy, not only is it measured, but it also guarantees unique builds across different characters. The first thing I did was re-spec the entire party. Now every member has a specific role to play. Blackwall is my indestructible tank, Cassandra is an expert for handling demons and Cole is my precious little glass canon. The only flaw is that those unique skill trees are the exact same ones used for your Inquisitor’s specialization. This means that depending on your class and play-style someone in your party might become redundant. Since I reveled in ripping people to shreds this ended up being Bull for me.

I also like how they handled your stats. The previous two games worked like most traditional RPGs. After a level-up, you’d get a certain amount of points you could invest in your attributes. However Inquisition doesn’t grant these types of points. Instead unlocking certain abilities automatically increases some of your attributes. This is brilliant because it ensures that your character’s stats stay consistent with your desired play-style. So if you want to be a defensive warrior, the defensive skills will pump up your constitution for you.

Besides the skills you’re already familiar with Inquisition introduces some new ones. I admit, I couldn’t immediately see the use for all of them. Varric is a prime example of this. His unique skill tree is all about setting traps, but to what end? You’re rarely ever in the position to lure someone in. Either you stumble upon a pack enemies or you raid their camp. So what am I supposed to do with bear traps?

The game helped me change my mind during the boss fight against the Grand Duchess Florianne. The damn woman kept jumping behind my squishies, sending them to the Maker’s side and then escaping onto a banister where the pathing system said I couldn’t touch her. That’s when I remembered Varric.

Previously I invested points into an ability that let him scatter a bunch of mines. The catch is that each mine applies random elemental damage to anyone who steps on it. At first I didn’t know what to do with it. Enemies usually have one elemental weakness and it’s that particular one you want to exploit. However it turns out you can go to town with this ability as long as an enemy isn’t immune to a particular element or if you’re trying to cover a wider area. Once I let Varric do his thing, I sat back and watched the Duchess destroy her own health bar just by pouncing around the place. It was like an early birthday present.

Inquisition frequently rewards you for playing around like this. During the last fight in Haven I was tasked with holding out against multiple waves of Red Templars. This was by far the most grueling challenge in the game up to that point. Scouring for options, I noticed a convenient bottleneck in the terrain. A giant trebuchet was occupying a corner of the battlements and Solas just so happened to have his ice wall ability. What ensued might be called cheesing by some. I blocked off one side of the trebuchet forcing the Templars to trickle in the other way around. This let me pick them off at my own leisure.

To list one more example, I often had to deal with shadow warriors and harlequins. Rogues have a cloaking ability which makes them invisible long enough to come slash your tendons. You can sort of make out their silhouette, but it’s much better to flush them out as early as possible. So for example, Vivienne can throw Chain Lightning on the closest visible enemy which will then bounce off hidden ones as well.

Smash his face in, Cassandra!

All of those abilities wouldn’t be as impressive if you couldn’t put them to use. Luckily Inquisition has got you covered. The enemy variety is excellent across the board. For a game of this size it’s remarkable that I only started getting bored of beating people up after the 100+ hour mark. Even then, I’d blame the lack of fun on needless repetition and not on diminishing quality.

There’s a bit of something for everyone. Human opponents come in all shapes and sizes. There are the standard swordsman. There are the bulkier ones with shields whom you have to flank as best you can. Archers are able to knock your head off if you leave them be for too long. Mages are of course as deadly as ever, spawning lethal mines, teleporting out of the way and all in all making your life miserable. Each of the Red Templar variations has something new to offer. Knights are tasked with charging up other units, but they’re sturdy and not so easily taken out. Horrors are dangerous on their own, but instantaneously fatal if you let them get buffed.

There’s also the usual assortment of beasts: wolves, bears, spiders and such. There are a bunch of mini bosses scattered around the world who, unlike regular enemies, are large enough for you to target their individual body parts. This allows for shrewd tactics like crippling a giant’s legs to get access to its head. Overall the enemy variety is so abundant that Inquisition only needs to mix things up a little to keep you engaged long term.

You might have noticed I listed a bunch of things, but still haven’t mentioned the most interesting addition to the combat - the Fade rifts. Not only are they important from a story perspective, but they’re also elegantly designed. Each Fade rift is a perfect combination of known and unknown factors.

A rift usually has two rounds (though I seem to remember encountering ones with three). The first round welcomes you on arrival. It’s a done deal with a set number of enemies. You can gauge the danger from a far and choose to engage of your own accord. The fun starts after you’ve beaten the first round. The rift gives you time for a breather before marking the spots where the next wave of enemies will spawn. It only tells you the number of enemies, but their type and level is up to you to deduce based on the composition of the first round. You only know for certain that the second one will be harder than the first. This allows you to think strategically while also spicing things up with a little bit of randomness.

The game also lets you be cheeky and dispel the demons before they spawn. Only certain abilities can do this, so Cassandra quickly became one of my most valued allies. If you can grasp the opportunity, you can even disrupt the rift to further hinder your foes. Moreover Fade rifts feature enemies you don’t usually encounter outside of them, giving the fights a whole new dimension. You’re already familiar with shades and rages demons, but you’ll soon get acquainted with terrors and despair demons. The former will jump over to knock you on the ground while the latter coats you with a barrage of ice.

Andraste’s tits, what is that thing?

If there’s one major thing I’d like to criticize about the enemies, it’s the spawning algorithm. I usually like to clean out an area and not worry about it any more. However the designers seemed worried that my goldfish brain would wander off if not constantly massaged with stimuli. Random enemies keep spawning around you all of the time. It’s unbearable.

Every map is affected by this disease. Amidst the Hinterlands, bands of mages and Templars spawn in front of your eyes. Yes, I get it, I need to take care of their respected camps, but could you chill for just a sec? On another occasion I was clearing out a Venatori hideout. I decided to peek inside the next room, with most of my party still behind me. The game thought this would be the perfect opportunity to repopulate the room I had just cleared out while everyone was still standing there. Meanwhile in the desert, bloody hyenas keep appearing behind your back.

And don’t even get me started on the bears. There’s one particular area in the Hinterlands where these bastards spawn. Upon entering it they swarm you like freaking barracudas. I decided to run away except they kept spawning in front of me even after I’ve escaped their designated area. I thought reloading would get me to safety, but the game chose this moment to bug out and overflow me with bears wherever I went.

I think I reached the peak of my frustration in the Emerald Graves. I had just discovered the stag mounts and was instantly in love with them. My Qunari Inquisitor looked ridiculous on regular horses, yet the majestic red stag was just my size. I thought I’d have my Princess Mononoke moment riding through the imposing trees of the ancient forest. Except the game had other plans. I didn’t even get past the first curve in the road before two squads of Freemen sprung up in front of me. Why, hello there. Were you getting lonely?

The only upside is that different enemies don’t tolerate one another. If they cross paths, they’ll waste no time jumping at each other’s throats. So Templars will be kind enough to clear out mages and giants might stomp Red Behemoths on your behalf. Though on one occasion I encountered a group of mercenaries relaxing near a Fade rift. Maybe they were enjoying some afternoon tea with the wisps. Who am I to judge?

Run wild, my precious.

Concerning bosses, fighting dragons has become sort of a tradition in the series (rather fittingly I guess). The way Inquisition introduces you to the first one in the game is undoubtedly memorable. You walk through a mysterious cave in the Hinterlands and emerge onto a hidden valley. What’s this pretty place? What sort of things are here to explore, I wonder? Oh look, is that a bird in the sky? No, wait… Five seconds later your whole party is running ablaze, wailing in agony.

I love it when games mess with you like this. The things is, there isn’t just one or two dragons in the game. There are ten of these mother fuckers in Inquisition! This is not even counting the two tied to the main quest and the two found in the DLCs. Emprise du Lion (the second worst map in the game btw) has three, I repeat, THREE of them chained together in one corner of the map. Why on earth!?

This wouldn’t be a problem if each dragon wasn’t more of the same. It’s fine if you fight them once or twice, but it quickly starts loosing its charm after that. Their behavior consists of a couple of things. First, they have a phase where they fly over you and bombard you with their designated elemental attack. Second, they can spew out the same elemental attack while on the ground. Third, they have a couple of melee attacks, none too perilous considering you’re up against a dragon. Forth (now this one is interesting), they have a wing flapping attack.

If you’ve fought the dragons in the previous two games, you’ll know the best tactic is to hit them from a afar. Andraste’s dragon becomes a scared little salamander once you’ve spread out your archers and started harassing it from a distance. Inquisition thought of a neat counter to this strategy.

Once in a while the beast will flap its wings sucking in everyone who isn’t already glued to its ass, all the while doing damage with each flap. As far as I could tell this does nothing to the units at its feet, but it rains havoc on your squishies who thought they were safe at a distance. Running away does not work, so ironically the best strategy is to run towards it and then run back out once it finishes. It’s a good dynamic to break up the otherwise monotone fight against a bullet sponge.

The other notable exception are the electrical dragons. Most of the dragons’ elemental attack are easy enough to dodge. These bastards however have a static cage which they can use to infect everyone in your party no matter where they are standing. This thing will wreck your day. The first electrical dragon I came across was 4 levels bellow me and it still ended up being one of the trickiest fights I had in the game. My poor mage had to keep throwing a barrier over us to try to absorb as much damage as possible.

Hm, do I need a pet lizard?

Considering it regards itself as an open-world game, Inquisition's exploration left me somewhat polarized. There are a dozen of maps for you to explore, ranging from small to absolutely humongous (looking at you Hinterlands). The sheer number of maps is frankly overwhelming. The game sections off most of them until you’ve reached Skyhold, but just glancing at them on the war table made me sweat pin balls.

What’s surprising is that despite their quantity each map has its own thing going on. Crestwood is centered around the submerged settlement, the Fallow Mire’s shtick are its endless waves of undead and the Forbidden Oasis is a maze of arches and hidden passageways. Even the Hinterlands, being the default fantasy map, have a story to tell about the conflict between the mages and the Templar taking over the farmlands.

Despite the fact that each map was conceived with a good premise, some are spread out thinner than the rest. The best example of this might be the Exalted Plains. It’s a map of stark contradictions. The theme of the map is pretty simple: plains that suffered pogroms in the past are once again engulfed in war. Compelling, right?

Well, things get complicated once you start roaming about the place. The Plains’ main highlights are the leftover trenches infested with undead. The army losses were so great that their own fortifications got overrun by corpses of their fallen allies. They present quite a decent challenge and once cleared out are again populated with Orlesian troops. Except… These trenches are huge. There are three on them in the Plains and each takes up a sizeable chunk of the map. Once you’ve cleared them out, they’re teeming with NPCs, none of which you can interact with. They’re just a bunch of fancily dressed props.

The Exalted Plains have the potential to tell a gut wrenching story of war and anguish, but the game barely even tries. If it weren’t for mentions of the civil war in Halamshiral, I would have no idea what’s going on. Imagine coming here before doing the mission at the Winter Palace (although that seems to be the desired order of things). What’s going on in this map? Who’s fighting exactly? Were are these forces stationed? Ok, this guy Gaspard is holding the east bank of the river, but why are his trenches facing one another? Sure, the bridge across the river leading to the opposing force has been destroyed, but is no one guarding that crossing?

What about the local population? There are all these codex entries detailing how the Chantry purified the Plains from the heretic elves. What do these people think of the Orlesians once again torching their land? Where are they even? I came across burned villages, but no refugees scurrying about. There’s only one Dalish camp to the side and they’re chilling in their own bubble as if the war was not raging around them.

It’s even worse when you start filling in the gaps on the map. The designers must have been worried about leaving vast stretches of open terrain, so they copy-pasted the same rocky formation all over the Plains. Over and over and over again. It’s hard to imagine that this is the same map which tucked away ancient elven ruins covered in mist on one side and an abandoned citadel scorched by the literal eye of Sauron on the other.

So nice making all of your acquaintance.

God, I don’t want to do this, but I guess I have to. Spending time in the Exalted Plains just made me think of how much better The Witcher 3 did it. Velen is to The Witcher 3 what the Exalted Plains are to Inquisition - a land torn apart by war. Yet Velen breaths so much life it seems absurd comparing it to the Exalted Plains in the first place.

In Velen villages are filled with hungry and desperate people. Houses are burning or abandoned. The two opposing forces are clearly camped out on other sides of the Pontar river. Refuges are curled up next to army strongholds. Bandits are roaming around taking advantage of the chaos. A monster infestation is breaking out because of the increased number of corpses. You can speak to a whole bunch of people across the land. You can get involved in the little details that make up their day to day struggles. Famine, missing persons, war crimes - you name it. It’s an incredibly potent mix.

Inquisition is so lucky it came out a few months before The Witcher 3. The quality of the The Witcher 3’s open world is so vastly superior to any of its predecessor (and even most games that came after it) that it makes Inquisition feel like it came out of a different era. It’s hard not comparing it to its contemporary competitor and seeing the huge gap that exists in between. The Witcher 3 has quest markers, but it relies mainly on a form of natural exploration. It drops you onto a hill and then lets you guide yourself across the map using nothing by prominent landmarks. It never repeats itself, each small section of the map feels unique and every crossroad a familiarity I could maneuver around with certainty.

Inquisition on the other hand has its hits and misses. I could navigate the aforementioned Exalted Plains with ease, but I could not for the life of me find my way through the Storm Coast. The backbone of that map is a mountainous region covered in forests. There are hills, ravines, more trees and absolutely nothing in sight which could help you figure out your own location. It’s nice of the game to draw out the path you’ve taken across the map. Otherwise the Inquisitor might have forever been lost in the woods.

Come to think of it, Inquisition does have a lot of problems with the design of its terrain. I feel like one team of designers went into the level editor, imported a flat plain and then rustled it up a bit until it resembled mountains and hills and what not. The results often feel like they’re devoid of any real sense of topography. Then another team of designers would come in and try their best populating the maps with content. I imagine this is how you end up with dozens of castles out in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no roads leading up to them.

Where the fuck to now?

When you start counting up the tally it’s up and downs across all of the maps, though the good to bad ratio can vary drastically. For example, the Hinterlands is a hodgepodge of a bunch of different things. Its central area, where the mages and Templars clash on repeat, is a good core premise. I won’t forget the first time I went through the creepy tunnel connecting the Crossroads to the demolished village where the mages and the Templars were dueling it out. You step into this thing overgrown with ferns, cloaked in mist and silence, wondering where it will take you, only to emerge onto a hellish battlefield where everyone’s shooting at you from all sides.

Contrary to that I found a castle crammed in the corner of the map, almost as an afterthought. There’s absolutely nothing leading up to it or anything else of interest in the vicinity. You find a group of apostates held up inside. This particular group believes the apocalypse is nigh, so they’re just waiting for it to happen. There’s only one dude you can talk to in the entire keep. His girlfriend just died, but he’s mostly upset they couldn’t go out in a blaze together. For some reason you offer him to join the Inquisition and he says yes. Pardon me, he says yes? The guy who was determined to die a second ago changed his mind on a whim. This was before I gained the group’s trust by closing the breach in their backyard.

To view the glass as half-full again, you’ll see the remains of a decrepit castle perched upon a hill just outside of the Crossroads. You’ll find your way up to it and then beyond a lush lake hidden away from the atrocities of civil war. There are deer jumping around, a small waterfall overflowing into the valley where the mages and Templars are fighting bellow. Suddenly I noticed a red deer hopping through the forest. This one was nothing like the ones I’ve seen before. I chase it after. It must be some special breed, I think to myself. I catch up to it and strike. It turned into a rage demon. Lol, I did insist, didn’t I?

But again, contrary to that the game tasks you with finding a horse master to cater to the Inquisition’s need. I find the guy and his little commune peacefully going about their lives while the FREAKING TEMPLARS ARE BASHING EACH OTHER’S HEADS JUST ACROSS THE RIVER. Pardon me, I didn’t mean to shout. What were you saying, master Dennet? You want me to clear out some wolves for you? What, the angry Templars don’t bother you? You’re also cool with the Fade rift sitting in your backyard? Does it help the crops grow? Oh, I see you’ve got a copy of Hard in Hightown in your attic. Forgive my interruption. Do continue, sir.

The contradictions go on and on and on like this. It all culminates with the worst two maps in the game: Emprise du Lion and the Hissing Wastes. The former is meant to function as an endgame gauntlet. You’re supposed to fight your way up a mountain towards an abandoned castle on the top. The problem is the climb has no business being as long as it is. The aforementioned Suledin Keep is by far the largest fortification in the game, stretching room after room into infinity. The game quickly runs out of ideas, so it keeps throwing the same detachments of Red Templars at you. This is enough to make a woman go mad.

The latter map, Hissing Wastes, is best described by scout Harding’s words: “This space has nothing but… space.” It’s quite literally a desert wasteland. Nothing but vast unending dunes in sight. Playing through it felt like being smothered with a pillow. It was the first time in the game I had to unironically use my mount. Getting from point A to point B would have otherwise been excruciating.

Good boy, Roach.

All of this makes it seem like I hated Inquisition’s exploration down to its rotten core. It might then surprise you that its highlights were enough to push me through the questionable parts. Most of the time I was led through exploration by genuine curiosity and not some forced sense of obligation (except those last two maps). For all of the things it failed to put into place, Inquisition always had something cool tucked away for me to discover.

Quantity definitely ended up being its Achilles’ heel. I was satiated somewhere around the 100 hour mark and everything after that felt like I was stuffing myself with dessert just so it wouldn’t go to waste. Spoiler alert: I clocked around 140 hours for the base game alone. Inquisition is obscenely long in retrospect, souring up your experience the more you’re forced to spend time with it. It would have been miles better if it cut out half of its content and focused on enriching the essential stuff.

To give you an example, I thought all of the game’s dungeons were excellent. Valammar, Coracavus, Dirthamen, you name it. Coming across these places and realizing they’re completely unique content always put a smile on my face. Although I did stumble upon Valammar way, way before Varric’s loyalty mission became available. Varric, don’t tell poor Bianca we’ve been here before. She’s so keen on showing us around the place, we have to make her believe it’s our first time down here. Oh dear, I’ve even glitched through the secret door she was supposed to unlock for the quest.

While we’re on the subject, Inquisition spent no time at all thinking about progression. Sure, it locks out most maps until you’ve reached Shyhold, but after that it doesn’t bother telling you in what order to approach them or even the minimum level requirement. Unfortunately for the game I had enough points to unlock all of maps at once as soon as I got to Skyhold (the inevitable consequence of being diagnosed as a completionist).

Since the game gave me no guidance I picked a map at random. I went for the Hissing Wastes which, I soon discovered, contained end game content. Since I was clearly over my head I decided to try my luck with something else. That something else ended up being the Deep Roads mission which, even worse, is DLC. So I resorted to Google instead. It’s negligence like this that makes the game look stupid for trying to show me around Valammar. Of course I’ve already been here before - it’s right next to where I recruited Blackwall!

You could say the game directs you to some of the maps through the main quest, like telling you to go to Crestwood to investigate the Wardens, but it does no such thing for most. How are you supposed to know when to investigate the Fallow Mire or the Forbidden Oasis or the Exalted Plains for that matter? I went to the Plains after finishing Halamshiral because nothing else directed me to that area sooner. Upon entering the map I was greeted by level 11 tugs. I was level 18. Guess how that turned out for them.

What’s worse is that you don’t gain any XP by fighting enemies which are 3 or more levels beneath you. This made the entirety of the Exalted Plains a futile venture. The only tangible thing I got out of them are the companions’ quests. If I had been there sooner, I might have utilized the area better. Then again that might have made me over-leveled in some other map. Funny, it’s as if the game has too much content.

Say, Solas, what does that statue represent exactly?

This is part 1 of a multi-part review of Dragon Age: Inquisition. Click here for part 2 and part 3.

[thefloatingstone]

(While we don't cross the line) 1: Final Fantasy 9 PS1 ISO and emulator - free Steam - $20 Classic JRPG with a upbeat and optimistic adventure to overthrow corrupt monarchy with deeper themes of self identity, death, and life affirmation.

2: Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 6 Steam - $20 each Open world Action Beat 'em up.... TECHNICALLY. Yakuza games are about the extra content. From Rhythm game karaoke, to slot car racing, to hostess bar management sim, to dating sim, to Idol manager sim, the list is endless. Yakuza 0 follows Kazuma Kiryu as he enters the world of Japanese organized crime focused on a singular district in 1980s Japan. It's a heavy crime drama that will swing from comedy in one mission to hard hitting gritty emotions the next. Yakuza 6 sees the end of Kazuma Kiryu's involvement with the Yakuza in the same district, now in modern day, as he tries to free himself from his past and live out his future with his adopted daughter. Playing 0 and 6 back to back creates a very melancholic feeling as you can feel the age of the district as it goes from the neon filled, dirty seedy "bad part of Tokyo" into a sleek, clean, modern metropolis.

3: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Steam - $10 Despite being a Star Wars game, KOTOR plays more like the older Neverwinter Nights games with its combat, relying on "select type of attack" and "click enemy target" type controls. (As opposed to an action game requiring quick reflexes from the player). Developed by Bioware before they went on to make Mass Effect and Dragon Age, WAY before being bought by EA, KOTOR is considered one of the best non-movie stories in the Star Wars universe, full of grey morality, complex characters with well written motivations, a morality system that's more complex than just "super hero or baby killer" and an in depth look into the deeper workings of the Star Wars universe post Prequels but pre original Trilogy. (the sequel which is even better is also on Steam for $10) I am unsure if the GOG version is better or not but it's the same price)

4: 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (Currently $30 on PS4) I still need to get 13 Sentinels and everyone who has played it has told me to go in knowing as little as possible. All I have been told is "It's Sci fi. ALL sci fi. Every sci fi trope in one game" It plays like a tactical game but I have also been told "if the look of the gameplay turns you off please don't let it! Just play it!" So there's that.

5: Grandia PS1 ISO and Emulator - free Steam - $10 +- Another Classic JRPG from the 90s, the Emulated ISO version has an "undub" that removes the poor quality english dub and re-instates the original Japanese voices but keeps all the english text. Grandia is another upbeat, positive adventure story following 3 kids, Justin, Feena and Sue as they leave their hometown to go see if there's anything beyond the Great Wall which circles the whole world, in the process uncovering political corruption, ancient civilizations, unknown countries and cultures, and long gone ancient technologies. If you like the Ghibli movie "Castle in the Sky" you'll like Grandia. I do not recommend the steam version which has an ugly filter over all of the graphics and the presentation in widescreen breaks a lot of the battles

I tried to add more images after this but tumblr kept breaking the post and after like 6 tries fuck it.

6: Atelier Escha & Logy: Alchemists of the Dusk Sky DX Steam - (unsure, Steam's price is coming up weird for me in $) Part classic JRPG, part time management, part recipe game, Escha & Logy is one of the better instalments in the Atelier game series where you play as an alchemist who needs to gather ingredients, develop potions, poisons and weapons for clients, and fulfil their orders within a certain time limit. Despite the Time Limit, the Atelier games are consistently described as calming and "feel good". Ryza is the latest in the series but I'm recommending Escha and Logy due to its setting. The Dusk trilogy (don't worry each game is for the most part completely stand alone) takes place in a world thousands of years after the fall of a great civilization, and the natural world is slowly dying due to unknown reasons. So of curse part of the story is to find out why this is happening... but for the most part you're just playing as a duo of alchemists trying to do your best.

7: Drakengard PS2 ISO and Emulator - free

The game where you ride a dragon in aerial battles, fight mass armies on the ground a bit like Dynasty Warriors... and where EVERY SINGLE ENDING is a "bad ending". The game with no happy endings and every character in your party is objectively a horrible person for different reasons. literally ALL the triggers for this game. But if you want a game that's going to horrify you and make you supremely uncomfortable without it actually being a horror game.... this is the one.

Also one of its endings is what starts the NieR timeline which includes NieR Automata.

It sucks! I recommend it!

8: Hylics 2 Steam - $15 I have no idea how to describe Hylics 2.It KIND OF plays like a JRPG in that the fight sequences are turn based combat... but there's no leveling system. Also it looks like this.

Just play it. You don't need to play Hylics 1 to play 2. 9: Mother 3 GBA ROM and Emulator - free Just because Nintendo refuses to translate it doesn't mean there isn't an extensive fan translation of Mother 3 for YEARS no to the point of it being available as a hard cartridge on Etsy. One of the big inspirations for Undertale, Mother 3 uses a similar but not completely the same battle system as Earthbound (also similar to Undertale's Battle system minus the bullet hell) but with a rhtythm aspect in it as well. Anyway Mother 3 is renowned to completely shatter your heart into a million pieces and make you cry so also highly recommended.

10: Disco Elysium Steam - $25 I haven't played it yet (I'm going to maybe this week) but everyone says it has some of the best writing ever in a game. I'll have to see what I think about that. However I hear it can be pretty grim. So just be aware of that.

[merrilldidnothingwrong]

honestlyi feel like. call me crazy but i feel like mages (the rebels in particular) are Insanely infantilized and belittled all throughout dai. cassandra's conversation with the rebel mage when you go talk to her, the way vivienne speaks to fiona, the way fiona herself is portrayed even though from what i know she's really like, not supposed to be like that, and don't even get me Started on varric and bull. it all seems deliberately presented in the most unlikable, "whiny" way possible

oh nope youre 100% correct. inquisition is just FILLED with bullshit “both sides” agenda, and after dragon age 2, i just cant believe they had the balls to pull this. because of......... a practically empty chantry?? lol they demonize the mages at every turn. make their bias very clear for the templars/chantry from the start.

yeah the right/left hand of the divine start the inquisition, and they help close the breach, and save the world..... but cassandra disapproves if you arent andrastian, knowing full well that they are coloniziers. lelianas good but she’s lost her faith. dont get me started on cullen. why’s he there? oh right. anti mage bias. the man helped meredith for ~10 years. he still sings her praises after the inquisition has been going for a year or two. but “hes not a templar anymore”. lmao.

varric was IN KIRKWALL FOR 10 YEARS AND SAW THE ABUSES MAGES WENT THROUGH FIRST HAND AND DOES NOTHING BUT BAD MOUTH ANDERS THE ENTIRE TIME. and i dont account that to bad writing, thats just varric being varric. he’s kicked out of his home now, hes being forced to fight mages vs templars, hes selfish, he doesn’t care about the war. he just wants to go home and be cozy.

getting back to it, the chantry? who doesn’t back the inquisition? is invited to haven and skyhold? and preach there 24/7? theres templar banners right outside the inquisitors quarters??? why????? mother giselle gets to judge dorian before his his personal quest??? why????? 

everyone believes the inquisitor is the herald of andraste BUT THEY CANT ACTUALLY DO ANYTHING ABOUT THE CHANTRY??? are you f*king kidding me????

ahem. my point is..... inquisitor has all this power. but cant tell anybody to shut the f*ck up about the mages?? i mean, we dont know if any of the mages are from kirkwall? we dont get to talk to them? we just outright ATTACK THEM???? the divine wanted to sit down and talk to them BUT WE’RE JUST GONNA KILL THEM IMMEDIATELY???

oh right. bioware was going through some shit when it was being written. its EA’s fault. but still. that was some shitty ass writing.

ive never read the books but i hear fiona was a badass. like. she canon says “fuck the divine”. and she goes and makes a deal with........ tevinter........??????

if they had more time, or you know, a better villain LMAO, the beginning should have had an actual sit down meeting with the mages and templars, and then we would have seen how useless that meeting was, and yeah it probably would have ended in a fight, AGAIN. and then introduce a villain. probably another templar mad with power. like the dragon age series has always shown them to be.

[the-desolated-quill]

Quill’s Swill - The Worst Of 2019

Congratulations! You’ve made it through another year! You’ve faced many obstacles and overcome many adversaries to arrive here, at the dawn of a new decade. So as we prepare to leave the 2010s and make our way into the 2020s, lets take a look back at the challenges and hardships of 2019. And by challenges and hardships, I of course mean shitty fiction and media.

Yes, it’s time for yet another edition of Quill’s Swill, where we mark the absolute worst stories that the industry had to offer over the past year and proceed to tear them to shreds. Think of it as like voiding your bowels before the New Year.

As always remember that this is my personal, subjective opinion. If you happen to like any of the things on this list, that’s fine. More power to you. Go make your own list. Also bear in mind I haven’t seen everything 2019 has to offer due to various other commitments. So as much as I really, really want to, I can’t put Avengers Endgame on here. I know what happens. It sounds fucking terrible, but I haven’t seen the film, so it wouldn’t be fair of me to put it on the list, even though it would most definitely deserve it.

...

Seriously, read the synopsis of Endgame on Wikipedia some time. It’s like fanfic written by a nine year old. It’s truly shocking. And now it’s the highest grossing movie of all time? Give me strength.

All In A Row

Don’t you just hate it when you’re expected to parent your autistic child? Like actually show love and care and consideration to your offspring. Look at him, expecting you to treat him like a human being. Selfish bastard! If only there was a play that explored the horrors of having to be a decent person to your own flesh and blood and how objectively awful it is. If you’re one of those people, then the play All In A Row will be right up your street.

Premiering on the 14th February at Southwark Playhouse in London, All In A Row was a total shitshow to say the least. The playwright, Alex Oates, claimed to have ten years of experience working with autistic children, which you wouldn’t have believed if you saw the play as the autistic child at the centre of the play, Lawrence, seemed more like a wild animal than a person. In fact two of the main characters compare him to a dog. And if you thought this wasn’t dehumanising enough, Lawrence isn’t even a child. He’s a puppet. Yes, it’s as bad as it sounds.

All In A Row seems to place all of the blame for the family’s predicament on the autistic child, who’s presented as barely functional, bordering on bestial. There’s no effort to really make an emotional connection with Lawrence (how can you? He’s a puppet!) as the play instead focuses on how this kid has effectively ruined this family’s life because of his autism and aggressive behaviour. Speaking as someone on the autism spectrum, I can say quite confidently that this play is fucking despicable. Badly written, badly conceived, insulting and downright mean spirited. I wouldn’t want Oates looking after my autistic children, that’s for damn sure.

Anthem

EA is back and this time they’re dragging the critical darling that is BioWare down with them.

Anthem was a desperate attempt to jump aboard the ‘live service’ bandwagon, trying to replicate the success of other video games like Overwatch, Destiny and Warframe. They failed spectacularly. The game itself had more bugs than A Bug’s Life, loot drops were often stingy and unrewarding, loading times were farcically long, and the story and worldbuilding was fucking pitiful. Oh yeah, and if you played it on PS4, there was a good chance it could permanently damage it. Thankfully I have a uni friend with an Xbox One and they allowed me to play the game on that. It was a crushing disappointment, especially coming fresh off the heels of Mass Effect Andromeda, which didn’t exactly set the world on fire back in 2017.

It didn’t help that EA’s reputation was in tatters thanks to the lootbox controversy of Star Wars Battlefront II and having to try and win back the trust of fans, but worse still reports began to service of what went on behind the scenes at BioWare during the game’s development. Apparently the game’s story and mechanics kept changing every other day as the creative directors and writers didn’t have the faintest idea what kind of game they wanted to make, and the developers were often forced to work obscenely long work hours in abusive crunch periods to get the game finished for launch. It got so bad that, according to an article on Kotaku, some members of the team had to leave for weeks or even months at a time to recover from ‘stress casualties.’ 

To think this was the same company that gave us Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Knights Of The Old Republic. Thank God that Obsidian Entertainment is there to pick up the slack on the RPG front because I think it’s safe to assume that BioWare won’t be around for much longer at this rate.

The Lion King (2019 remake)

Here we go. Yet another live action remake of a Disney classic. Excpet it’s not live action, is it? Well... it’s live action in the sense that Dinosaur was live action (remember that film? Don’t worry if you don’t. No one does). Real locations but CGI characters. Millions of dollars spent on cutting edge tech to create photo realistic animals... and the film ends up duller than a bowl of porridge that really likes trainspotting.

It’s not just the fact that The Lion King remake is yet another soulless cash grab from the House of Mouse, it’s also the fact that it’s done really badly that upsets me. The Lion King works as an animated film. Bright colourful images, over the top song and dance sequences and vibrant character designs. As a ‘live action’ film, it just looks awkward and stilted. None of the animals are very expressive, leaving it up to the poor voice actors to carry the film, and to cap it all off the CGI isn’t even all that convincing in my opinion. At no point did I look at Simba and go ‘oh yeah, he looks like a real lion.’ It’s so obviously fake. In fact it reminds me of those early 00s movies like Cats & Dogs or Stuart Little where you see the jaws of the talking animals moving up and down like some messed up ventriloquist act or something. And here’s me thinking cinema has evolved past this.

BBC’s The War Of The Worlds

Remember Peter Harness? That guy who wrote that Doctor Who episode about the moon being an egg? Yeah, he’s back and he’s doing an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War Of The Worlds. And guess what! It’s fucking ghastly! :D

The three part BBC mini-series was without a doubt some of the worst telly I think I’ve ever seen. It’s staggering how clueless Harness is as a writer. For starters he managed to achieve the impossible and somehow made a Martian invasion of Earth boring. I didn’t even think it was possible, but somehow he pulled it off. Then he sucks all tension out of the story by revealing the ultimate fate of the Martians at the beginning of the second episode, so now any threat or danger has been chucked out of the window because we know that the main female protagonist Amy at least would survive. And then finally he takes a massive dump over the source material by having humanity weaponise typhoid to kill the red weed rather than just having the Martians die of the common cold like in the book. Because God forbid us Brits should be presented as anything other than heroic and dignified.

So what we’re left with is a poorly realised allegory with ineffectual horror tropes full of OTT progressive posturing in a pathetic attempt to make Harness and the BBC look more liberal than they actually are. There’s no effort to really explore the themes of imperialism and colonialism outside of casual lip service, and we barely get a glimpse of the dark side of humanity. Everyone is presented as flawed, but basically awesome or, in the case of Rafe Spall’s character, utterly gormless. Our TV license fees help fund this shit, you know?!

And if you think this was bad, just wait till New Year’s Day where we’ll get to see Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ butcher Dracula. Can we stop giving these beloved literary icons to these hacks please?

Glass

I liked Split. It wasn’t an amazing movie, but it was entertaining with some good ideas, a great performance from James McAvoy and was a true return to form for M Night Shyamalan. That being said, I wasn’t keen on the idea of it taking place in the same universe as Unbreakable. I feared it would be a step too far and we’d end up having something like... well, something like Glass.

On paper, Glass isn’t a bad idea. The idea of superpowers being a delusion is legitimately intriguing and could have been a great post-modern deconstruction of the superhero genre. Except Shyamalan never actually does anything with it. The first act drags on and on with absolutely nothing happening, none of the characters really grow or change over the course of the film, Bruce Willis in particular is basically only here for an extended cameo as his character does pretty much nothing for the majority of the film, and then the entire film is undermined by that stupid Shyamalan twist. Turns out superhumans are real and there’s a big cover up. Oh great! So not only does it render the entire film pointless, it also undoes what made Unbreakable and Split so good. They’re no longer people capable of extraordinary feats via rational means. They’re just superhuman. They can do anything. Sigh.

Shyamalan... maybe it’s time to give up the director’s chair, yeah?

Cats

Oh come on! Don’t act surprised! Did you honestly think I wouldn’t put Cats on this list?!

Cats, without a doubt, is the worst film of the decade and, yes, the CGI is terrible. Not only are there these sub-human cat mutants running around, we also have mice and cockroaches with child faces, James Corden coughing up furballs, Taylor Swift trying to give the furries in the audience boners, Idris Elba looking disturbingly underdressed and Rebel Wilson being... well... Rebel Wilson. It’s a disaster of a film. And really, should we even be surprised? We all knew this was going to suck. And no it’s not because of the CGI. I thought the CGI in Pokemon: Detective Pikachu was creepy as well, but at least it had a decent script and good performances to back it up. No the reason why Cats sucked is because... it’s Cats. It’s always been that bad. No amount of ‘advanced fur technology’ was going to change that. It was still going to be a confused, plotless mess with one dimensional characters and bad songs.

The only consolation I had was that I didn’t waste money buying a ticket. A friend of mine snuck me into the premiere and we watched it in the projector room. The plan was to make fun of it and have a laugh, but we didn’t even do that because honestly there’s nothing to really make fun. There’s only so many times you can take the piss out of the CGI and honestly the film was just boring more than anything else. It doesn’t even have the distinction of being so bad it’s good like Sharknado or Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. It’s just bad, period.

I just hope we don’t see something similar happen to Starlight Express. Just think. Anthropomorphic, singing trains on roller skates. Shudder.

Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker

Finally we have yet another cynical cash grab from Disney.

I confess I didn’t exactly go into The Rise Of Skywalker with an open mind. I was never all that keen on a sequel trilogy in the first place, and neither The Force Awakens nor The Last Jedi ever convinced me otherwise. Admittedly they weren’t bad movies. Just derivative and painfully uninspired, and I was expecting more of the same for Episode IX. What I got instead was quite possibly the worst Star Wars film since Attack Of The Clones. Yes, it’s that bad.

This film is very poorly made, filled with plot contrivances and logic holes galore. I lost count of the number of times the protagonists got into a dangerous situation because of Rey constantly wandering off like a confused toddler lost in a shopping mall. Oh and we finally find out who her parents were and it was quite a twist, but only because it was really stupid. Of course we didn’t see it coming because nobody would have guessed it would be something that moronic. I feel JJ Abrams’ stupid ‘mystery box’ philosophy is to blame for this. It’s derailed countless franchises before such as Lost and Cloverfield, and now Abrams has fucked up Star Wars because he’s obsessed with mystery for the sake of mystery and Disney are so lazy that they couldn’t be bothered to plan an actual trilogy out properly beforehand. Instead they just wing it, making it up as they go along, which led to Rian Johnson ‘subverting our expectations’ and left Abrams desperately trying to pick up the pieces. 

In fact a lot of The Rise Of Skywalker seemed designed specifically to appease people of both sides of the wide chasm The Last Jedi had created. The roles of characters of colour like Finn and Rose were significantly reduced, Poe and Finn don’t end up together because of homophobia, but we do see two women kiss in the background of one two second shot that could easily be cut out when they release the film in China, Kylo Ren gets his stupid redemption even though he hasn’t fucking earned it, Lando Calrissian shows up for no fucking reason, Rey is given ‘flaws’ relating to her parentage in order to combat those accusing her of being a Mary Sue, but they’re the boring kind of flaws that don’t have any real impact on her character, and that ghastly ship Reylo is made canon even though it makes no sodding sense in the context of this movie, let alone the whole trilogy. They even go to the trouble of baiting us with a FinnRey romance before pulling the rug out from under us. Then, just to add insult to injury, the film retroactively ends up making the entire original trilogy completely pointless. All because Disney wanted more dollars to put in their Scrooge McDuck money bin.

The Rise Of Skywalker, and indeed the entire sequel trilogy, should serve as a cautionary tale against the dangers of hype and nostalgia. The reason The Force Awakens was successful wasn’t because it was a good movie (because lets be brutally honest here, it really fucking wasn’t). It was because it gave gullible Star Wars fans warm fuzzies because it reminded them of A New Hope whilst tempting them with the vague promise that things might get more interesting later on. And when that didn’t materialise, quelle surprise, the fanbase didn’t take it very well. I would love to think that this will serve as an important lesson for the future when people go and see Disney movies, but who am I kidding? I guarantee at some point we’re going to get Episodes X, XI and XII and we’ll have to go through this sorry process all over again.

So there we have it. The worst of 2019. May they rot forever in Satan’s rectum or wherever it is stories go to die. Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the other end of the spectrum. Yes it’s the Quill Seal Of Approval Awards! The best of the best! Who shall win? The suspense is killing me! Ooooh, I can’t wait! You’ll be there tomorrow, won’t you? Of course you will. How could you not?

[expertmakodriver]

Are you FUCKING KIDDING me... Listen i'm glad for the ME fans out there who want a remake but Bioware should really leave ME alone. Theres no way i'm spending my money on me3 lmao fuck that

I'm with you, anon. I want to give the remaster a chance but 1) it's EA, 2) BioWare is kind of in shambles and this just seems like a cash grab to save its ass at least somewhat, and 3) the dated graphics of ME1 and ME2 are charming

Also, I know mods can only do so much, especially with a game like ME1, but with all of the texture and graphics mods out there, is it really worth an HD remaster?

The only way I would even look at this remaster would be if they redid the third game. I'm not just talking about fixing the ending, either. The whole game was bad and it wouldn't be fixed by just changing a few things.

[vespertine-legacy]

Imperial Agent Breakdown Part 8

Continuation of my Thoughts on the IA storyline.

This time it’s the abusive likely predator we all love to hate. Warning for EA/BioWare giving players the option to be transphobic.

On Hunter:

Hunter gets their own section separate from the rest of Ardun’s shitass group. From the second Hunter was introduced, Raz and I both felt uncomfortable. The sleaze was laid on so thick, it oozed off. Hunter wasn’t the most casual about using Raz’s programming against her, but did use it a lot on Quesh (I think Chance still wins for most assholeish/aggressive use of the codeword thanks to using it while she was trying to help him on Taris and admitting that he knew it was wrong), but did say several times that they wished Raz had kept her programming, basically because then they could keep her. Like personally keep her. It is revealed that Hunter is actually female and that the male persona is a disguise. Hunter expresses jealousy that Raz got to keep her face as an Agent. You have the option to call Hunter a “freak,” and I’m appalled that’s even an option, because there’s at least some indication/implication/possible interpretation that Hunter is trans and that the Agent is disgusted by that. Yes, Raz is absolutely sickened by Hunter, but that’s because the Hunter that Raz has known is womanizing, abusive, manipulative, and has physically and mentally tortured her. Hunter isn’t a “freak,” he’s a goddamn asshole. But the person in front of her at the end of the fight is weak, bleeding out, suddenly terrified of dying, and completely alone in the galaxy. Raz was just done, and told Hunter, “you don’t get to compare yourself to me anymore,” and finally shot Hunter in the fucking face like she’d been wanting to do for months. Vector disapproved, and it earned Raz a hefty chunk of dark side points, but are you kidding me? After everything that Hunter did to Raz and Watcher Two? Raz promised herself that’s how it was going to end, and she keeps her goddamn promises.

Part 1: General Character Thoughts

Part 2: Watcher Two

Part 3: Programming

Part 4: Watcher X

Part 5: The Sith

Part 7: Corellia

Part 8: Hunter

Part 9: Companions

[blessuswithblogs]

Video Games are a God Damned Mess: Bad Business Practices, Unsustainability, and the Fidelity Plateau

(shoutouts to the anon rando in my inbox for telling me about the read more button you were kind of rude about it but i don’t use this website so i legit didn’t know)

The video game industry has always been a bit wild and wooly compared to its older contemporaries. The emergence of a new medium is always rife with upheaval as paradigms shift and people discover that the old rules don't necessarily apply all of the time. That said, the past three months have been filled with what I can really only describe as catastrophes for many disparate publishers and development studios.

 You may recall I talked a bit about this during my game of the year list and Fallout 76 analysis, but to recap: with Telltale shutting its doors and shafting its workers, the writing was on the wall for the same thing to happen again as the intrinsically unsustainable boom and bust cycle began the less glamorous stage. It turns out I was correct in my predictions but congratulating myself for seeing this coming is not unlike congratulating myself for accurately predicting that tomorrow will be Tuesday. Or. Whatever day it will be when I post this. fuck i dated the lp thread ruined LOOK the point is that this was really obviously going to happen and that nobody felt the need to prepare for it or try to stop it before 10% of Activision-Blizzard's workforce got canned is a major failure of the industry at large.

So let's talk a bit about what's happened since then. There's been a lot, so forgive me if I miss your favorite corporate implosion. First, at Blizzcon, Diablo Immortal was revealed to what actually might have been the most actively hostile reception of a game in history. This has less to do with the more financial aspects of the ongoing Videocon Crisis and more just kind of served as an ill omen and an example of Blizzard's worrying descent into... wherever it is they're going. If gross incompetence was a place, they would be descending into it. On paper, a Diablo mobile game is a money-printing proposition. When all is said and done Immortal will still probably make them gobs of cash. In practice, however, they fucked the landing so hard they probably lost potential sales. The kind of folks who go to Blizzcon and get omegahype for a new diablo game are not the kind of folks who play mobile games. Mobile games have a Stigma among the hardcore crowd, and also the Ethical Business Practices in Video Games crowd (which as of this writing appears to be me, Jim Sterling, and the Warframe devteam). For a lot of braindead gamerbros, mobile games are synonymous with things like Candy Crush and Peggle, which are perfectly fine games honestly but they're For Girls or some shit so mobile games are bad and for casuals. More pertinently, mobile games are also a ferocious jungle of microtransactions, pay2win mechanics, and generally shoddy design. Command and Conquer and Dungeon Keeper, beloved franchises that have been ripe for revisiting for years now, both found mobile games and they were both utterly terrible. These games make a great deal of their money by exploiting "whales", or in actual human being language, vulnerable people with disposable income and difficulties with impulse control or addictive personalities. Or kids who know their mom's creditcard number. Kids play video games. Now that we are no longer kids (theoretically, anyway) it can be easy to forget that. I'm not the pearl-clutching type, but I think that stigmatizing a genre of games that proudly touts an exploitative-of-children business model is probably okay.

So there are lots of reasons to be skeptical of Diablo Immortal right out of the gate, and quite frankly whoever thought that just pushing that out there with literally no other Diablo related news items (like any whispers of the long coveted hd remaster of diablo the second) was either transferred in from another company the day before or had some kind of unspeakable grudge against the scheduled presenters, to whom my heart goes out to. There is also some undeniable precedent that Blizzard-Activision will, in all likelihood, monetize the everloving daylights out of it. Both Hearthstone and Overwatch have more or less become nicely polished vehicles with which to deliver lootboxes to players for a nominal fee. If this hadn't been followed by a seemingly unceasing calvacade of disasters, the whole debacle would have been really funny to point and laugh at. It's still pretty funny to point and laugh at, but it also has some less amusing implications. Blizzard in particular has been up to a lot of no good lately. Let's talk a little bit about their recent one-two punch.

First up, we have the complete and sudden abandonment of competitive support for Heroes of the Storm. Heroes of the Storm was essentially Blizzard's seething regret and resentment for letting Valve snatch up the whole Defense of the Ancients thing put into code and unleashed upon an unwitting populace. It had actually been gaining some renewed interest over the past year or so due to the developers putting in some elbow grease and making the game both more accessible and just. More better. HotS has also had a modest but respectable eSports scene since the game's launch, with a variety of professional players, shoutcasters, tournament organizers and emergency bugfixers employed. Many of them were anxious about their jobs for months in advance with no word from the higher ups about who would still be employed by 2019. Sometimes, companies have to make difficult decisions and let people go to keep operating. Even my communist ass reluctantly accepts this as a reality of the system we live in. However, there is a protocol about this kind of thing. Giving notice. Giving, you know, severance pay. Stuff like that. And of course this presupposes that this sort of cut to the workforce is actually necessary in the first place. Given that AB subsequently reported record profits for the year of 2018, I have some doubts. Completely dropping support for a game out of the blue is a scummy thing to do to your playerbase. When it is also directly impacting the livelihood of hundreds of people in your employ, it goes beyond scummy and turns right into Unacceptable.

But "unacceptable" is Bobby Kotick's favorite word in the English language so while shoving hundred dollar bills from his latest corporate bonus up his butt he and his friends in the boardroom decided that the HotS esports people might get lonely, so they had better go and fire another 10% of the workforce too. Just because. Like literally just because. His company is doing fine - better than fine! They are at record levels of better than fine. But the shareholders demand more and more exponential growth, so to cut costs that really didn't need cutting, away goes 10%. Will game quality suffer because of this? Undoubtedly. More work being piled on fewer people who are also living in mortal fear of losing their jobs Just Because is not a recipe for success. People are mad about this, much like people were/are mad about Fallout 76 - players of games, industry wonks, and iconic voice actresses alike are no longer tolerating this kind of thing in Two Thousand and Nineteen, Common Era. Nor should they!

Elsewhere in the Game-o-sphere, similar developments are brewing. ArenaNet, the folks wot do Guildwars, went through another round of mass layoffs. EA's stocks have plummeted and Battlefield V "failed to meet expectations" because it only sold A Ton and not A Fuckin Shit Ton, and Anthem is not really lighting the world on fire. After Mass Effect Andromeda's... curious debut, Bioware has probably been feeling the heat and a lot of people are concerned that it too will suffer the ultimate fate of all studios acquired by Electronic Arts: joining Visceral Games in a broken heap at the bottom of the garbage chute. Bring back Dead Space you motherfuckers. Bethesda continues to, improbably, suffer through PR disaster after PR disaster with Fallout 76, a game that seemingly cannot stop fucking up. Ubisoft has received some positive attention for vowing to NOT lay off hundreds of employees for no discernible reason, which leads me to believe that our standards for praiseworthy behavior have dropped alarmingly low. Even 2K Games in all of its monolithic glory seems to be feeling a bit of a Stock Price Squeeze. Honestly by the time I get this done and posted it's entirely possible that somebody else will fuck something up. I'm still kind of waiting on the fallout from Randy Pitchford's porn thumbdrive, but I'm also a little bit pleased that Actual Money Crimes are getting more traction in the news cycle.

So, returning to the main point: the industry is in a bad situation of its own making. It's a scene that's almost always been defined by trend-chasing. For a while, that meant that we would just have to suffer through an endless glut of EXTREME SPORTS GAMES SPONSORED BY A DUDE or a barrage of samey console shooters desperately trying to be Halo every once in a while. Unfortunately, the trend-chasing now extends not only to the games themselves, but to the methods by which they are monetized. Ever since DLC became a mainstream thing, the brightest minds of the boardrooms have been working tirelessly to deduce which method of fleecing players will scientifically speaking get them the most money. Inevitably, when some enterprising little weasel develops a new and improved monetization scheme, the rest of the little weasels will immediately latch on to that scheme and that's how you end up with Battlefront 2's ridiculous lootbox grind and Shadow of War's ludicrous inclusion of randomized lootboxes in a singleplayer action-adventure game. While I'm certain that the platonic ideal of the lootbox has existed in some form or another for decades now, I think that we can squarely lay the blame for the Great Lootbox Plague of the Twenty-Tens at the feet of Valve.

Valve has been known for questionable business practices for a while now (albeit in a more lowkey way than We Fired 800 People So Bobby Kotick Could Buy a New Yacht), largely getting away with it because Steam has been more or less unchallenged as the premier digital distribution service for video games. This might be changing soon, as Epic Games is going straight for the jugular with a number of aggressive moves with its own fledgling platform, but historically, Valve has faced very few consequences for just kind of being petulantly antagonistic towards its userbase because said userbase is easily mollified by steam sales and Gaben memes. When people think lootboxes in 2019, they probably think of games like Overwatch or Battlefront 2 or basically any contemporary multiplayer game. I certainly do, but a bit of fact finding allowed me to remember that Valve has been doing this shit since Counterstrike and Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2's byzantine cosmetics market can't be overlooked either. All three of these games are or were at one point genre leaders and made Valve so much money they basically decided that they didn't really need to make games anymore. A reasonable conclusion to draw, given the fact all three of these games are inextricably linked to their history as very popular mods. Valve just outsources a great deal of its labor to dedicated, naive fans and gives them a pittance of the huge mounds of dollars they make from their hard work. It's a good racket, but it has set an alarmingly poor example to the rest of the gaming world.

Games as a service, in concept, is fine for games that lend themselves well to the idea. MMOs have been using a variation of the model for decades now and that genre is actually like, Perplexingly Healthy. Free to play games like League of Legends and Warframe have also had success with a service model. The problem comes from the AAA Game industry's pathological insistence on shoving square pegs into things that don't even have holes to begin with. Shadow of War, or Assassin's Creed, or any other major singleplayer offering, has no business whatsoever being a Live Service. They are finite experiences by design and that's completely fucking fine and normal. Appending microtransactions and lootboxes to them is a transparent attempt to just suck up a little bit more money from players in the most unsustainable way possible. Here is a small hint if some WB Games bigwig stumbles upon this: first of all, I'm building a guillotine, so you better watch your ass. Second, how dare you fucking make Shelob a sexy lady. Third, (this is the one that is probably most relevant): People are willing to pay as they go for cosmetics and timesavers for games that they like and want to support. I've dumped a lot of money into League over the years because there was a period of time where I was playing it nonstop and having a wonderful time for quite literally no cost to myself, so I felt like buying the cute Panda Annie Skin was a good compromise. Regrettably I would later learn that there are aspects of Riot Games I'm not super okay with giving money to but at the time they seemed agreeable and my friends who work there gotta get payed somehow. This whole dynamic of wanting to support a video game goes out the damn window when you are already charging a $60 entry fee, plus whatever highway robbery pricing you put on the inevitable DLC. In this case, the onus is squarely upon the publisher to provide an experience and content one would reasonably expect of the pricetag. Putting in microtransactions for cosmetics is galling. Putting in microtransactions for actual game progression, like in Battlefront 2 or Shadow of War, is outright insulting.

Many will leap to the defense of these publishers and developers, saying that these measures are necessary to make these ludicrously expensive and lavish AAA games that all look suspiciously like one another. For the time being, let's accept this as a true statement. If this is, in fact, the state of affairs in the industry, then the industry needs to change to a more sustainable business model. When playing Destiny 2, during a big space cutscene, the cute pilot lady ferrying me to The Large Molerat Man's Murderboat had beautifully rendered skin where you could see the pores and the little wispy cheek hairs that swayed to the momentum of the space plane's movements. It was very nice but then the next year or so I heard nothing but people pointing out "hey this game has no content you dipshits" or "the devteam is actually scamming people with the experience system to wring more playtime out of them". The cheek hairs affair succeeded in making me want the pilot to buy me dinner and regail me with stories of her space adventures as I batted my lashes at her in romantic admiration, but also: stop it. You do not need to do this. This is strictly unnecessary. The graphics arms race of yesteryear is over. Nobody cares anymore. Fidelity is plateauing harder and harder, to the point where games running properly on console without having to settle for 30FPS is becoming very difficult. There is an Earth B somewhere out there where Bloodborne was not a sony exclusive and got a PC release with 60FPS support and loading times for humans and on Earth B I am still playing that game for the forseeable future because it is the best game ever. We are far past the paradigm where we are making Tremendous Graphical Leaps with each successive generation. Right now, as of this writing, games look jawdroppingly good. Just ludicrously pretty and grandiose. Continuing to push the graphical envelope for Every Damn Annual Release is a waste of resources: monetary resources, labor resources, system resources. As of March, 2019, what people really want is stability and functionality. Something that runs nice and smooth at 60FPS and doesn't turn its characters randomly into nightmare inverse-Rayman beasts. I think the huge success of the Nintendo Switch, a console with relatively modest hardware but superb functionality, portability, and a surprisingly full featured library of both massive first party titles, like Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey (which honestly look better than a lot of games on more robust hardware because of wonderful art direction) and smaller indie games, is testament to this line of thinking.

Maybe that's too bold of a statement. Maybe there's this huge swath of the gaming public that is just clamoring for more cheek hairs. If there are I think they're fucking out of their minds but who am I to judge. As long as games like that werewolf game The Order exist, where the universal reaction is "this is so pretty!!! ...wait there's nothing in here." I think that there is a serious responsibility to push back against that because evidently it's bankrupting the game industry and forcing them to violate international gambling laws to stay afloat. Except it's fucking not, actually. Many publishers are claiming record profits, upward trends, and are in a spot to have the raw nerve to say "well this game that sold 7 million copies didn't sell 8 million copies so it failed to meet expectations". They are doing ludicrously well for themselves in terms of generating revenue from sales. Where these highly successful corporations are running into problems is satisfying the almighty Shareholders. Shareholders are sort of like. Imagine if you got a job where you had to keep a large committee of actual babies happy, except the babies don't know shit about fuck about anything and demand that you routinely break all reasonable laws of sustainability and keep bringing in exponentially higher profits or they will take their ball and go home. There is still, evidently, money enough to give newly hired executives million dollar signing bonuses, but when it comes to just making a game that doesn't fall back on exploiting people with gambling addictions, we're suddenly dealing with an outfit of noble, longsuffering churchmice just trying to make ends meet. People are rapidly getting fed up with this blatant hypocrisy and dishonesty. Sales from Hearthstone card packs alone could fund a robust HotS esports scene for eternity if properly apportioned. This money is not properly apportioned. It is thrown into a gigantic incinerator so Kotick can get high on the fumes.

You might be wondering what this girls' deal is with Blizzard. Surely there are more egregious offenders? Firstly, Blizzard is very relevant at the moment because they are one of the highest profile publishers to recently Do A Business Oopsie. Secondly, I live in Irvine, California. Blizzard HQ is a ten minute drive from where I live. It's a local company to me, and it's legitimately kind of hard to see it continue to go down this path because I've had friends and neighbors who have worked there and enthusiastically described the experience right up until the very moment they get canned for no reason. My alma mater, UC Irvine, is one of the leading schools in the nation on adopting eSports into their collegiate athlete program. I understand, to a lot of people, Electronic Sports (please support them) are a big joke silly thing, but to me and my family who work in the UC system, they're actually like a huge and pertinent part of professional life. I'm literally being consulted by my mom's co-workers for advice and insight on how to minimize the abusive and toxic behavior that has become synonymous with streaming and professional gaming because campus now has a huge eSports center with rows on rows of gaming computers for students to use. Games Are Big. They are a powerful cultural and economic force in the lives of millions of people and denying that because of "haha nerds" is the same shortsighted, utterly-lacking-in-self-awareness wanking that resulted in the stupendously destructive "its just the internet, it doesnt matter lol" attitude that has caused the world so much grief. That said Bart Simpson becoming an esports legend sponsored by Riot Games is still pretty lame don't @ me.

What it comes down to is this: the games industry has grown into a hugely influential and powerful institution that affects the lives of more and more people every day. However, the appropriate growth in regulation, oversight, and worker protection has not occurred and has honestly shrunk. People love to talk up Satoru Iwata because when the Wii U was floundering he took a massive pay cut and refused to lay off any staff, reasoning that "it will be very difficult for our teams to create software that will impress the world when they are constantly worrying about losing their jobs." It's a little incredible that The Baseline Reasonable Thing To Do has elicited such effusive praise, but that's the world we live in and Iwata-san was pretty alright so I'm okay with it. Both his conduct and reasoning are both solidly above reproach in this case: it is really hard to be creative when the Sword of Damocles is hanging over your head! That’s 500% true! This goes for game developers, community managers, eSports staff, support staff, literally every part of the process that matters, even the totally unrelated clerks and communications people who are still completely necessary for creating games. The only people who don't suffer are the dipshits on top who don't actually contribute to the creation of games in any way. They're still fine. Better than fine, really. That's why people are mad. That's why people SHOULD be mad. Don't stand for this anymore.

[loghainmactir]

i will say about your post though is other companies have been caught under fire for mistreatment and it seems bioware is getting a lot more publicity about this in comparison. i think it's less about demonizing bioware and more about calling out the industry for being shit to their workers because most AAA companies are. not saying you can't call out bioware or be angry at what they are doing but i wish more people looked at is as an industry issue.

So, like, you’re right. It 100% is an industry issue.

But the thing is, I’ve seen this same point come from people who seem to be otherwise brushing this off entirely. Like, you’re right, you know who else does it? Rockstar. Naughty Dog. Ubisoft. They ALL do it.

But mentioning it right now legitimately feels like a “B-b-but... other companies...” and it’s kind of not the place or the time to be saying, “Um, why aren’t you also calling out other people? :/“. People have been yelling at other companies about their abysmal crunch and business practices— Telltale got fucking HAMMERED for their closing circumstances (and good riddance— I’ve been pretty vocal each time something like this has come up). But right now we need to be focusing on actually uplifting dev voices and supporting them because pointing the finger at other companies does nothing to help the situation.

You’re also right about Bioware getting more public attention over this. It’s certainly a lot more than when Rockstar employees came out about RDR2’s atrocious crunch. Or TLOU’s horrific development period.

Lemme give you My Opinion as to why people r more up in arms about this (and, of course, it wouldn’t apply to everyone. This rlly is just IMO): Bioware now have three games (technically four if you count the initial reception to ME3’s clusterfuck ending) that have had really bad launches. Like, really bad.

I think people forget JUST how bad ME:A was at launch (even if we/I adore it now). I think people don’t realize just how janky and awful Anthem is on this site because 90% of people here don’t play it or don’t play other games of its’ kind, lmao. Anthem is in a REALLY bad state for a AAA $80AUD game (that also has expensive-ass skins in it as a part of the gameplay loop to boot).

Now, are these games as bad as, say, No Man’s Sky at launch? As bad as the borderline hilarious shitfest that is Fallout 76? No. They’re.... eh. I mean, Andromeda’s fine NOW, it wasn’t at launch (it really wasn’t at launch and I feel like people were quick to forget that). Anthem was literally killing people’s $400 consoles. But they’re certainly bad compared to past Bioware games: knowing people suffered for these games when they’re Ok, At Best is like rubbing salt in the wound.

That’s a part of the issue too, isn’t it, though? A LOT of fans are willing to look past people suffering for “good” games. That’s not good. That SHOULDN’T be how things are.

Personally? This is upsetting me a lot because I know what it’s like to feel so much anxiety and depression re: your work that you have to quit. I’m kind of going through it right now. And knowing Bioware are causing it (NOT EA, though they have a hand in it, it’s largely Bioware’s shitty management) is really upsetting! Like, I used to want to work for them as a kid. I used to quite literally dream of it.

Anyway: fuck Bioware, fuck EA, fuck the triple aAaAaAaA industry, and:

i’ll stop talking about it now lmao.

[reasonandempathy]

Mass Effect is turning 10

So BioWare is having a merch sale.  Which is fine, and I open up my email, because, being me, I fucking love Mass Effect.  It’s going to be my second tattoo, an N7 on my left shoulder, after i finish my first marathon (because you have to earn it.)

And what are they selling?

Generic 10th anniversary tee.  Alright.  I considered it, just because I already have the hoodie and a couple pairs of sweats.  So I click the link and I kept scrolling.

I shouldn’t have.

and, last of all:

Nothing Mass Effect Trilogy related.  No reapers.  Neither Shepard.  No Jack Tattoo Sleeve.  No Normandy figurines.  No Citadels or concept art or...anything.  The only thing Trilogy-related is fucking tiki mugs, three of them, which you buy with 3 Andromeda mugs too.

What the fuck are you doing, BioWare/EA?  Andromeda is literally the thing that killed the franchise, even moreso than the Take Back ME3 movement.

I wanted to buy something.  I got paid last week, I’ve got plenty of money leftover.  I love Mass Effect.  I converted my brother and cousin (just like the Witcher), I pumped over 1,200 hours into Mass Effect 3.  Over 300 hours into ME2.  Over a hundred into ME1.  I am going to have kids, wait until they’re teens, and then force them to play the original Mass Effect Trilogy.  That series is arguably the best trilogy of games ever made.

And you...

You just suck.  You’re even bad at making money.

Oh, and for the record?

[nightingaletrash]

I'm just being nosy and bored so don't mine me but tell me about your latest OC's! Where did they come from? What do you like most about them? Where do you see them going in the future, physically and mentally? (don't feel like you are obliged to answer this tho!)

I like it when people are nosy about my ocs :D

My newest baby who I have spoken about a little, Sara Ryder (after the last one fucked off into non-existence -_-)

Sara mostly leans towards a mix of logical and casual in personality, though recently she’s started to use emotional as well when speaking with the rest of the Tempest Crew. She doesn’t actually have a twin (so long as Scott continues to refuse existence) so Alec survives Habitat 7, ends up in a coma and takes up Scott’s role instead.

And speaking of family, she does have older half siblings. A fact she’s not aware of until she’s unlocking SAM’s memory array :) that was a fun conversation topic when Alec woke up.

What I like about Sara is that she does care about people but is an awkward nerd and sometimes just comes off as being super tactless when she’s really just trying to help. She’s a bit of a mess when it comes to emotions and doesn’t really know how to respond to them, and gets a bit stuck when it comes to knowing what to say when someone is upset. She takes a logical approach to things and isn’t fantastic at expressing herself without coming off as rude or cold, which is something I definitely have problems with. A lot of my OCs get some factors of my own personality, so this was what Sara got. Sorry Sara.

As for the future, it depends on where Mass Effect goes next, seeing as we’re not getting any single player dlc, and it’s not clear if Andromeda will get a sequel and yes I’m still incredibly salty about that Bioware and EA, you cowards.

Then there is a the new kid who I haven’t spoken about because I’ve only just started working on him, Nathan Shepard. He’s Nat’s twin brother and a biotic (namely an Adept). Like I said, I’ve only just started working on him so I don’t have a lot to share about him just yet, but when I have more to share, I will ^^