Dragon Age III: InquisitionFollow

I liked all the characters save Andjusticeformages. Man did his whining get on my nerves.

You know people that randomly scream out "MAGES!!!1111!11one!1"?

The trailer looks decent (though I'm less interests in monster designs than companions and their personalities), and obviously the team is excited and likely overpromising at this point. I'm worried it will still fall flat... but to be honest, I know I'll buy it anyway. The only question is if I'll buy it at release, or a year later during a sale. And right now I'm still leaning very much toward the second option

I thought the writing and characters were pretty poor in DA2. Or at least forgettable... in that I can barely remember a single thing about them in the portion of the game I played.

The Flemmeth bit was laughably stupid. "Hey, here's some kids I'll entrust my soul to and hope they don't just throw my bauble in a sock drawer or get eaten by bears along the way... in which case I sure would be mighty screwed."

I thought that, at its best, the characters and story in DA2 were equal to the original. That's no insult; I loved the original's story and characters. But I would rather see all of the original cast (except Oghren) than all of DA2's cast (except Varric) in a sequel.

I did notice I'm not mentioning DA:A, because I feel like that's a miniaturized version of DA:O. It was good, but short.

All that said, if the story and characters are equal to DA2, it'll be a success in my mind. Good gameplay is nice, but story/characters are better for me. I felt the same way about Mass Effect; ME1 was "meh" for gameplay but great for story, and just improved over time... excluding the color-coded ending of ME3, of course. This was driven home for me over the summer, when games like The Walking Dead rocketed to the top of my favorites list and hardly had ANY gameplay. If the devs do what they did in the previous games, I'll be happy. If the gameplay is improved, I'll buy it within the first week... which is saying something, since I haven't paid more than $30 for a game in the past 5+ years (hello, Bioshock Infinite*).

*Edit: Off-topic, but speaking of which, 1999 mode is kicking my ***. But... not as much as I thought it would; I don't hoard ammo like I thought I would need to, I just change weapon types more often. I have NO idea how I'll finish some battles that I barely survived on Easy later on, but I just got Shock Jockey in this playthrough and while I die from time to time, it's only when I run in willy-nilly. I am either better than I thought, or the game isn't as hard as advertised... or I'll hit a wall and splatter later on.

Edited, Aug 20th 2013 9:40pm by LockeColeMA

Meeting Anders generally happens really quickly, but I'm not sure it has to happen right away. If you saw the Flemeth scene, you met Merill. But there's a good chance you never met Isabela or Fenris? Possibly Sebastian, assuming you had access to him.



I don't think it's amazing storytelling, I just don't think it was bad for the reasons you're attributing to it. I think it was bad because it was more a shoe-horned cameo than anything else. But it seems unlikely, given the EU, that whether or not Hawke delivered the amulet was something Flemeth would have cared that much about.



She said that she put a tiny part of herself in the locket, and that she's not restricted from being in multiple places at once.



Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of DA:A. I enjoyed it, but it doesn't shine out as a fine gaming moment. They didn't flesh out the characters nearly as much as they should have, which is a serious shame because most of them had potential.

The campaign itself is also hard to follow from a gameplay perspective. Every decision feels like a shot in the dark, not an actual choice you need to think about. Even the Architect felt like six in one, half-dozen in another. Less so after reading The Calling (where he's the major antagonist), but still solid. And you shouldn't need to read an additional novel to care about the villain.

The absurd number of bugs obviously doesn't help



It's more that they went deeper with the characters, and brought them further into the central plot lines, then DAO did. DAO gave you a lot of background on the characters - the ability to explore their personalities and history. DA2 focused less on the history aspect and more on the personalities. I didn't learn Meril's entire biography, but I did get to actively see her exploring her identity as a Dalish, as a City Elf, as a Keeper and Blood Mage, as an Exile. It made for a really interesting character with a lot to find.

I don't think the characters themselves were better or worse in either game, but I think DA2 did a much better job digging into them. Seeing Fenris evolve over time, seeing his reactions to the Chantry, to the Qunari, to the City Elves, to Slaves, to different varieties of Mages, and different varieties of Templars, gave me a much stronger understanding of who he is. On the other hand, I have a much stronger understanding of where Zevran comes from.

If I had to choose one or the other, I choose the personality stuff.

Aveline is the guardsman who loses her husband in the opening prologue. She's pretty interesting, but she's not super emotive. Over the course of the game she becomes Captain of the Guard, gets married, and develops her own friendships and rivalries within the main cast. You'll also see her in the depths of social awkwardness, and being a badass with a sword. So there's not much more I'd ask from her, to be honest. I love her character, and it's not one that the genre typically lets females have.

Your sister exists the main cast by the end of Act 1, and will not join your party again.

Varric is the Dwarf with a crossbow, and he's awesome. He's a main character in the comic series, and is in the DAI trailer (look for the crossbow). He's playing the game of running the line between respectable businessman, underworld thug and mastermind, and information broker. He's also sarcastic, yet caring. Easily the best Dwarf character I've ever met in any medium.

Anders was the Mage who was also in DAA. His story is that he fused with Justice (the spirit that possesses the corpse in DAA) to give his friend a permanent home, and because Justice kept telling him he had to fight against the injustices dealt Mages. But their union corrupted Justice into a spirit of Vengeance, and they're one entity now. So Anders is Anders... and Justice/Vengeance. And that disparity forms the basis for most of his character development (and part of the game's core plot).

"Some dude" could have meant Sebastian Vael (the DLC character) or Fenris, the elf with glowing lyrium tattoos all over his body.

Merrill is the elf who conducts the ritual to release Flemeth from the locket.

Leliana gets retconned back to life, too.

On the one hand, the person in me who likes lore continuity hates that.

On the other hand, I accept that a certain number of these growing pains are to be expected when building a new franchise. I can look the other way as long as they make an attempt to ensure they don't happen from here on out.

Another thing I just thought of that I really like about DA2 is that there's a certain aspect to it that makes it more like fiction, and I adore it for that - the narration. DA2 is Varric's story, through and through. And Varric is definitely someone who I'd consider an unreliable narrator. And I love that.

I'm not going to pretend that I don't get why plenty of people would hate it, of course. But I found it refreshing for the genre. One of my favorite parts of the game is right at the beginning when Cassandra calls ******** on Varric's story when he talks about Flemeth saving the Hawke clan. And that's supposed to set the tone for the rest of the game. This is a story, and it's you looking into events that might not be entirely accurate. Even within the story, Varric telling exaggerated stories about you is brought up. And he tells you that some day he's going to tell your story (and the rest of that comment is affected by friendship/rivalry).

A really big part of this is the final battle - the climax of Varric's story. And you can just tell that these events are highly exaggerated by Varric. Or maybe not. We'll certainly see.

I don't want this to become Dragon Age's "thing," but I liked the style for DA2. I DON'T want DAI to be told that way, though. But I like the idea of each game doing its own thing with the storytelling, which seems to be a goal of theirs.

Yeah, she's retconned to life in DA2. You'll meet her while playing the game and she's in the ending. She's also a major character in the novel Asunder.

They set her up as a Seeker of the Truth in the personal service of the Divine. But it is possible for her to die off in DAO, if you defile the Urn of Sacred Ashes.

Though David Gaider made it clear that whatever happened in the chamber with the Urn happened. So it's not a retcon in the same way the Anders part is, where it's clearly stated he was dead. Whether or not that means you killed her, and she was somehow brought back, or you "killed" her and she inched her way up to the urn and used the last of its power to heal herself, or whatever, remains to be seen. Leliana is set to be a major player in DAI, so I expect they'll address that question there.

I doubt it'll be all that interesting, but if they do something worthwhile with the character I can accept it.

As for Anders, my understanding is that the only reason he was in the game was because he and Justicer were the fan favoritse from Awakening and it was part of their way of building on those characters, because they received so little screen time. But I can't find any specific information from David Gaider about it, and I don't know any of the other writers besides Hepler for a better google search. They also made Anders a character absolutely central to the plot line (he's not optional, like some others). So it wouldn't have worked to make him conditional. Maybe the better course of action would have been to remove him from the central plot and do so.

The other thing to consider here is that so few people played Awakening when DA2 was released that I'm sure part of this was getting the most out of their assets. Business reasons aren't sexy, but I'm sure it wasn't ignored.

Yeah. I kinda ended up sitting there thinking "Wait, what's the conflict here again?"

It's sort of a shame, because they fleshed out the Architect a lot more in the book. And he could have been a far more compelling antagonist, and the choice at the end more interesting. But it ended up being a sort of blind faith jump in both directions.

In the book, Spoilerthe Architect kidnaps the former Warden Commander of Orlais when he leaves Orzammar on his Calling. There, he speeds the Warden's transformation into a Darkspawn-Warden hybrid, and recruits the commander into his plan to release the blight upon all of the world. Those who survive (meaning, those who have the potential to be Wardens) would be assisted by his magics to become fully realized hybrids like the Commander. The idea being that the Blights would end, as the Darkspawn had no one left to fight.

Utha (that random Dwarf with the Architect in Awakening) is one of the team that goes to rescue/kill the Warden Commander when his sister, the new commander, has a dream about his captivity. Eventually, it's pretty much just King Maric, and Grey Wardens Duncan and Fiona (who is likely Alistair's real mother, and was an Elven Mage who became the First Enchanter of the Orlesian Circle) vs. the Architect.

They manage to stop the Architect's plan, obviously, but he escapes.

But it's also true, and clearly so, that his intention WAS to end the Blights... by any means necessary. And he was searching for the location of the Old Gods to kill them, so they could never rise again.

Of course, he ended up finding one and accidentally blighted it...

Still, give me more context there, and add more context on the trust side of the equation, and that decision becomes a lot more interesting. As it was, I kinda just sat there and thought "I don't care."

It was mostly a decision between "This may or may not be immoral, but I have little reason to care in this context, because this guy massacred my people" and "This may or may not be immoral, but I have little reason to care in this context, because either his survival won't mean anything, or it'll be bad for me."

/shrug

Now, looking back at it post-Corypheus (one of the first Darkspawn, a magister who invaded the Black City, who is released from his prison in DA2), letting the Architect live or killing him now has bigger implications... that you still have no way of predicting.

Harumph harumph... EA/Bioware gives kittens cancer with its dialogue wheels!


Nah, that's pretty cool.

Anders. Arrow through neck. Dead.

Edited, Aug 28th 2013 12:13pm by Jophiel

I'm just hoping for less awkward sex scenes.