The Dragon Age: Inquisition Thread

[Slow James]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SlutWalk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEMEN

Fair enough.

 

[Lhynn]

Irenaeus can settle this, is she a nigro?

 

[Irenaeus]

Yes.

 

[SarcasticUndertones]

They wanted to go darker, but the engine would not allow them to.

This strikes me as one of the most idiotic things I've ever heard of, said.

Is the engine racist? Are the coders racist? or just stupid, maybe?

They couldn't program the engine, they've been using for the last couple if years, for another shade..really?, especially as it would seem to be so obviously intrinsic to today's audiences' expectations that it would be a scandalous to misrepresent or not include for reasons of minority SJW vocalised 'integrity'?

That's just dumb.

 

[Slow James]

This strikes me as one of the most idiotic things I've ever heard of, said.

Is the engine racist? Are the coders racist? or just stupid, maybe?

They couldn't program the engine, they've been using for the last couple if years, for another shade..really?, especially as it would seem to be so obviously intrinsic to today's audiences' expectations that it would be a scandalous to misrepresent or not include for reasons of minority SJW vocalised 'integrity'?

That's just dumb.

Apparently when they tried to, the results were so dark, that they looked like THIS:

...which I'm sure they felt was more racist than making everyone they wish was black just tan instead.

EDIT: Also, it's worth noting that the engine used for DA:O and DA2 was the same root engine that they used for NWN. It was over a decade old and was held together with band aids and Elmer's glue. This wasn't anything new-out-of-the-box when DA came out.

 

[DalekFlay]

this is probably gonna be inflammatory to the conservanerds, but does anyone else see a really uncomfortable parallel between Vivienne's support for the Templars and the police violence situation in the US today? I know it can't've been intentional, with how long the game's been in development, but especially the fact that they made her black makes her seem like an Uncle Tomplar character. there are codex entries all over the game about templars burning chantries down, murdering kid mages just because and otherwise behaving like absolute monsters in a very "militarized police" kind of way, and Vivienne's attitude seems to be "well sometimes that's just what needs to happen to mages!"

it strikes me as very much akin to a wealthy black American saying "well Michael Brown was a young thug and that 13-year-old boy with a toy gun was a threat to the officer's life, they brought it on themselves"

I want to dismiss the comparison as absurd, but I can't get it out of my head. not least because I think I did all of her content and she never even began to justify her views. she was just happy to be rich and powerful and essentially beyond the reach of the templars, totally and smugly indifferent to the rural chantries getting purged. like, she doesn't even manage to express regret or show empathy. she seems totally content with the occasional localized genocide being an accepted part of the system. it'd still've been an uncomfortable parallel even if the character were white, of course, but having her be black makes it almost look deliberate in a really, really dark way.

I think it's actually quite nice they finally had a pro-circle mage in the party. That was severely lacking in DA2, and Wynne barely grazed that line of discussion in DA:O.

 

[Merlkir]

Yeah, somehow I think "blackness" is much more a thing of facial bone structure than skin tone, often times. Isabella looks like one of those black singers popular for having "white" faces.

 

[DalekFlay]

Mary Kirby, the writer who both wrote and actually created Isabella's appearance in DA:O, says she is black. Tan (or "Latino" as you put it) was the darkest skin tone available in DA:O or DA2. They wanted to go darker, but the engine would not allow them to.

EDIT: also, Duncan is half white and half black/Half Fereleden and half Rivain. Again, the writers confirmed the "blackness" of both characters.

Isn't the ambassador chick in Inquisition from the same area? She seems Italian, more than anything else.

Whatever, whole thing is a clusterfuck anyway.

 

[Slow James]

Isn't the ambassador chick in Inquisition from the same area? She seems Italian, more than anything else.

Whatever, whole thing is a clusterfuck anyway.

Josephine is Antivan, which is modeled after Italy. I don't know of any Rivanni in DA:I outside of Vivienne, but I haven't played the game.

EDIT: And agreed, just like everything Dragon Age (or Bioware, really) their overall lore and long term story telling consistency is shaky, at best.

 

[hell bovine]

It's not absurd, crawkill, and it's legitimate, even if it's made from Bio's "peculiar" writing style. But all the whine just makes me want to be a codexian blood mage, which is the next thing i'm going to do in Origins if I ever feel like going through that again.

Blood mages are a big fail in Origins, though. No one cares if your character is one and, to make it even more absurd, you can make that "blood magic is evil" healer a blood mage too.

 

[Morality Games]

It's not absurd, crawkill, and it's legitimate, even if it's made from Bio's "peculiar" writing style. But all the whine just makes me want to be a codexian blood mage, which is the next thing i'm going to do in Origins if I ever feel like going through that again.

Blood mages are a big fail in Origins, though. No one cares if your character is one and, to make it even more absurd, you can make that "blood magic is evil" healer a blood mage too.

I wish we were back to that kind of fail. Please, Bioware, go back to Origins fail.

 

[pippin]

It's not absurd, crawkill, and it's legitimate, even if it's made from Bio's "peculiar" writing style. But all the whine just makes me want to be a codexian blood mage, which is the next thing i'm going to do in Origins if I ever feel like going through that again.

Blood mages are a big fail in Origins, though. No one cares if your character is one and, to make it even more absurd, you can make that "blood magic is evil" healer a blood mage too.

It's more of a personal gratification of negating what Bio evidently wanted you to do in the first place. Never really used Wynne, though. It was enough with all those healing potions the game constantly threw at me.

 

[DalekFlay]

It's not absurd, crawkill, and it's legitimate, even if it's made from Bio's "peculiar" writing style. But all the whine just makes me want to be a codexian blood mage, which is the next thing i'm going to do in Origins if I ever feel like going through that again.

Blood mages are a big fail in Origins, though. No one cares if your character is one and, to make it even more absurd, you can make that "blood magic is evil" healer a blood mage too.

Mechanics overriding story is something I'd like to see more of in Bioware games, not less.

 

[set]

Mechanics and story should harmonize, ideally... It just means the story is stupid or your programmers aren't given enough time to account for everything in the story.

 

[Bleed the Man]

Mechanics and story should harmonize, ideally... It just means the story is stupid or your programmers aren't given enough time to account for everything in the story.

... or simply Bioware just don't care.

They have never seen gameplay as the "true" representation for the story, but as an "abstraction" of what's really happening. So, in DA2, when you're fighting against a bunch of dudes in front of a templar, while Hawke is a mage, you never performed, or your companions, any magic according to the story.

They narrate their stories from a purely cinematic perspective, which is not ideal in any case, but especially harmfull for RPGs (and I'm not much of a "simulationist" guy myself)

 

[Slow James]

Mechanics overriding story is something I'd like to see more of in Bioware games, not less.

Gameplay - story segregation.

It is a mother fucker.

 

[DalekFlay]

 

[Malpercio]

Sometimes I'd with I would care about fictional character races, it looks like you guys are having very stimulation discussions.

 

[Slow James]

Sometimes I'd with I would care about fictional character races, it looks like you guys are having very stimulation discussions.

Eh. Bioware does a good job of introducing interesting topics, like different nationalities, races, religions, etc. But then their execution is always shit.

Example: DA:I takes place in Orlais, which has the famous capital city of Val Royeaux, talked about in nearly every other game, expansion pack and book.

But DA:I has less area devoted to it than any other city in any DA game. Heck, a DLC for DA2 had more of the city than the game actually taking place in the country of Orlais did.

This kind of nonsense and lack of common sense is par for the course for DA/Bioware story-telling. Great for forum fodder, yet terrible actual in-game execution.

 

[Infinitron]

Sometimes I'd with I would care about fictional character races, it looks like you guys are having very stimulation discussions.

Eh. Bioware does a good job of introducing interesting topics, like different nationalities, races, religions, etc. But then their execution is always shit.

Example: DA:I takes place in Orlais, which has the famous capital city of Val Royeaux, talked about in nearly every other game, expansion pack and book.

But DA:I has less area devoted to it than any other city in any DA game. Heck, a DLC for DA2 had more of the city than the game actually taking place in the country of Orlais did.

This kind of nonsense and lack of common sense is par for the course for DA/Bioware story-telling. Great for forum fodder, yet terrible actual in-game execution.

There was no Val Royeux DLC for DA2. You're probably referring to the chateau in Mark of the Assassin, but that wasn't even in Orlais let alone in the capital city.

 

[Slow James]

There was no Val Royeux DLC for DA2. You're probably referring to the chateau in Mark of the Assassin, but that wasn't even in Orlais let alone in the capital city.

Ah, you are correct - I Grossly misremembered that.

Still, all my other comments still stand - for having a game set in Orlais, "Val Royeaux" is criminally under-represented.

 

[Roguey]

Save yourself 5 minutes, only quote you need from that video: "Best game in the series so far imo" - Yathzee "Refuses to review Wasteland 2/Divinity: Original Sin, bashes Might&Magic X and dislikes Planescape: Torment" Croshaw
Edit: "There's a lot to like". Also you're boring/some one's dad if you actually want to manage your equipment&party in a RPG.

Read about Yahtzee loving DAI, came in here to post about it. :D

Bioware did it. They finally made a RPG for people who hate RPGs.

Unrelated, but I also had a good laugh when I saw that DAI removed attack rolls altogether. Someone shoulda mentioned that to me sooner.

 

[Infinitron]

Save yourself 5 minutes, only quote you need from that video: "Best game in the series so far imo" - Yathzee "Refuses to review Wasteland 2/Divinity: Original Sin, bashes Might&Magic X and dislikes Planescape: Torment" Croshaw
Edit: "There's a lot to like". Also you're boring/some one's dad if you actually want to manage your equipment&party in a RPG.

Read about Yahtzee loving DAI, came in here to post about it. :D

Bioware did it. They finally made a RPG for people who hate RPGs.

Unrelated, but I also had a good laugh when I saw that DAI removed attack rolls altogether. Someone shoulda mentioned that to me sooner.

He didn't love it. The review is not positive. He just liked it more than the other two games.

 

[pippin]

Somebody send Patricia a copy of Rance then

 

[Roguey]

He didn't love it. The review is not positive. He just liked it more than the other two games.

He liked all three DA games, each more than the last. Of course he'll still have criticisms, it would be a boring video if he didn't.