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Anthony Davis leaving Obsidian

Captain Shrek

Guest
Krap said:
Mr. Davis, what does MCA think of his cult situated in here?
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Is that signature material really from Skyrim?
 
attackfighter

attackfighter

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Zomg said:
Essence of good grimdark is futility, that the problems have no ultimate solutions; even in the real world most people have optimistic views of the nature of reality so you have theologies like Whig progress and just-world theories where if a couple of nice things are done then nastiness will wane forever. Obviously no fiction can compete with reality for gore but you can't just put a set amount of dismemberment and what have you in something and it becomes grimdark all automatic.
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My mistake. Going by that definition DAO is definately grimdarker than reality (as is other so-called grimdark fiction). In DAO there's no awnser to the blood mage problem; Grey Wardens doom themselves to becoming darkspawn in order to fight darkspawn (and their sacrifice is only a temporary solution); the elf and werewolf quest must end in one of the sides being ahnialated; dwarves have rigid caste system which damns those of low standing to a life of squalor and abuse. Plenty of grimdark moments in it going by the proper definition. THe world seems much more bleak than real life, even real life in the middle ages.
 
Awor Szurkrarz

Awor Szurkrarz

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attackfighter said:
Aldebaran said:
Shannow said:
And Gaddafi was no brutal tyrant because he dressed funny, spouted nonsense all the time and depended on women as bodyguards. Made him some funny excentric, obviously...
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I realize it was not very clear (mostly because I deleted large portions of my post), but that ties into one of the main reasons that I don't consider DA:O grimdark: reality is routinely a worse offender, even in the era that DA:O was trying to emulate. You've got the black plague killing half of Europe's population, the Hundred Years' War (a slight misnomer), Timur the Lame executing 100,000 captives after the capture of a city (and repeating such spectacles quite often), and, slightly off date, you've got everyone's favourite crazies in Elizabeth Bathory and Vlad the Impaler. Maybe I am forgetting portions of the game, but what even compared to say, Timur the Lame creating thirty-ish piles of heads, of about two thousand heads each, after he massacred seventy thousand non combatants.

Are my examples cherry picked? Absolutely, but doing the same to DA:O I can't think of anything, and what is the point of the term grimdark if reality is worse?

It is an anecdote, but, while playing Dragon Age, I never thought to myself that this was a very grim game, or that there wasn't a hope for a better tomorrow, because in fact there was. In fact, the purpose of the game, whether you are good, evil, or something in between, is to stop the calamity that could have turned the game grimdark if it had been a permanent fixture. As it is, you stop the darkspawn before they accomplish much of anything. Maybe it is not a fair comparison, but that doesn't sound like the eternal war promised by the franchise which the term grimdark came from.

Between the significant focus on romances, the generally lighthearted and nonchalant companions (outside of Alistair, no one even seemed to really care about the darkspawn), the save the world story, and the general lack of menace provided by the primary antagonists, I just don't consider the game to be grimdark.

The lore may have been, but that is not what I saw represented in the game. You explore most of the world through dialogue with your companions, but you are also supposed to be learning about the characters through these conversations, so you end up with some mix of the world, good memories, sad memories, and Biowarean jokes.
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If you're going to compare DA with anything, you should at least compare it with something relevant. Like, other video games, or other fantasy settings in general. Comparing it to real life and then declaring it's atmosphere to be cheerful and easygoing relative to real life is completely arbitrary. By that logic you could say that no fictional setting is grimdark, because worse stuff always happens in real life. WH40K: yeah sure you got nameless space soldiers getting killed by colourful space aliens en masse, but in real life you have people being skinned alive by Mexican gangsters in order to intimidate others to stay out of the way of their cocaine smuggling. Therefore WH40K aint grimdark, even though it is supposedly the father of grimdarkness.
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What? No. Wh40k tops everything done in RL. You have whole fucking planets blown up, you have whole planetary populations murdered, you have fucking space marines and whole imperial guards regiment recruited from guys like they Mexican gangers, you have a race of sadistic torturers that can torture you even after death, etc.
 

Mozgoëbstvo

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I would have agreed with you some time ago, Awor. I LOVED Warhammer since I was a little kid. It was really rad. Simply reading lore on codexes was a fucking holiday.

But today... It seems somehow cheapened, overplayed, unpaced... it's an overload. And because there is a whole galaxy and not a single planet, sometimes writers lazily use the death of a planet as instatragedy.

I don't know, Awor. My love for Warhammer has been severely shaken. Please convince me it's still good.
 
attackfighter

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The thing about warhammer is that all the 'tragedies' in it are basically a bunch of statistics with a bit of context. Like "on this sad day the Tyranids killed 50 billion humans" or whatever. Even if you ignore the ridiculousness of the setting, it's not the kind of thing that you can feel sad about since it's just a bunch of numbers. It's sadder reading about some kid in Africa who was forced to be a child soldier, because the things he'd have gone through would be of a personal nature and therefore could invoke sympathy for him. So in terms of tragedy, while WH40K might be more grand in scale it stilll has nothing on shit that happens irl.
 
Awor Szurkrarz

Awor Szurkrarz

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Mozgoëbstvo said:
I would have agreed with you some time ago, Awor. I LOVED Warhammer since I was a little kid. It was really rad. Simply reading lore on codexes was a fucking holiday.

But today... It seems somehow cheapened, overplayed, unpaced... it's an overload. And because there is a whole galaxy and not a single planet, sometimes writers lazily use the death of a planet as instatragedy.

I don't know, Awor. My love for Warhammer has been severely shaken. Please convince me it's still good.
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I think it kinda went to shit when they stopped the time progression in 1999. Everything stopped and now they are just fleshing out local events and inventing new doom waiting over the corner.

attackfighter said:
The thing about warhammer is that all the 'tragedies' in it are basically a bunch of statistics with a bit of context. Like "on this sad day the Tyranids killed 50 billion humans" or whatever. Even if you ignore the ridiculousness of the setting, it's not the kind of thing that you can feel sad about since it's just a bunch of numbers. It's sadder reading about some kid in Africa who was forced to be a child soldier, because the things he'd have gone through would be of a personal nature and therefore could invoke sympathy for him. So in terms of tragedy, while WH40K might be more grand in scale it stilll has nothing on shit that happens irl.
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You forget about the fact that a lot of the fluff is written from up close. When they write about Tyranids killing a world, it includes several short stories from perspective of soldiers, locals, etc.
They are rather grim and hopeless.
 

Mozgoëbstvo

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And the fact that people like MATT FUCKING WARD are writing certain things doesn't help.

Remember when Chaos Gate came out, the Ultramarines were still cool and so forth?

BTW, that's a game GOG should fix and release. I think I'm not the only one stopped by the awful cultist bug.
:x
 
Aldebaran

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Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2
attackfighter said:
If you're going to compare DA with anything, you should at least compare it with something relevant. Like, other video games, or other fantasy settings in general. Comparing it to real life and then declaring it's atmosphere to be cheerful and easygoing relative to real life is completely arbitrary. By that logic you could say that no fictional setting is grimdark, because worse stuff always happens in real life. WH40K: yeah sure you got nameless space soldiers getting killed by colourful space aliens en masse, but in real life you have people being skinned alive by Mexican gangsters in order to intimidate others to stay out of the way of their cocaine smuggling. Therefore WH40K aint grimdark, even though it is supposedly the father of grimdarkness.
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I understand what you are saying, but I disagree with you that WH40K is not grimdark in comparison to real life. It is a setting where absolutely everything revolves upon nonstop war. The closest thing the setting had to a good guy was a human supremacist, who is now kept "alive" by sacrificing one thousand people every day. On top of that, the "afterlife" is now run by soul devouring monstrosities. The setting has nothing nice happening. It probably doesn't even have ice cream. It is just layers of alien genocide, on top of soul genocide, wrapped around regular, vanilla genocide.

And I do think the comparison to reality works with DA, if only because the game was clearly grabbing everything it could out of that era. You had the cut and paste Byzantines, French, English, Catholic Church, etc. It is not a completely arbitrary comparison. I don't doubt that Dragon Age's Lore might be grimdark, but what was shown within my play through (admittedly, I made mostly good choices, so my views may be skewed) certainly didn't seem so.

EDIT: Aw damn, I should have read past that post. It looks like this has already been covered, and I am an official member of the moran brigade.
 
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