Will or should DA4 return to the darker roots that DAO had?

"Not dark enough" is such vague and pointless feedback that BioWare can't do anything with it anyway.

Apparently brothels are the most important thing when it comes to dark fantasy.

This kind of darkness?:

it'll help pass the time until DA 4. 

This thread is so old I have no idea if I've posted in it....

Anyway yes. The end. closes thread


Honestly I just want the racism back. For the moral values to be once again set in a fantasy place, on a fantasy scale. Not 2018 twitter values in a medieval world. (For example, a random NPC asking on the Nexus, in MEA, what pronouns asari used. )

We used to have all that elf hate and qunari suspicion, but with DAI we have to 'understand the motives and special speciallness of the Qun and how enlightened they are and shit'.
Nope. I liked disliking them. I liked how simple they were in DA2. I enjoyed being an elf racist in DAO and my character having his ass handed to him by a bunch of fed up, sarcastic elves who were having none of it. It helped in my RP decision to knock him off at the end too

But there's a concept these days that having racism in a game, is racist itself. It isn't. It's the opposite. It helps people learn about it in a safe space, and perhaps change their perceptions. Plus it was realistic and grubby and I liked that. *shrugs*

Liara explains it in ME1: Since asari have a single gender, the entire concept of "male" and female" is meaningless to them. I doubt they'd have pronouns of any kind in their language to describe them. Terms like "mother" and "father" wouldn't have gender connotation to them. Referring to asari as female is a perspective of outside races looking in. It would be like if a race of aliens that could have multiple heads used their own pronoun for "one headed person" to describe humans. Such a term would be pointless to us because we don't have two or more heads. It would literally describe everybody!

So, uh, darker roots. Yeah, Bioware seems afraid to allow players to partake in anything bad. Once upon a time, playing "dark side" was a thing.Now even the Qun is considered just another political force which is totally open-minded and progressive.

Perhaps that NPC just happened to be a xenolinguist? 

I think the problem with this kind of an argument is that:

1) it assumes that there exists just one monolithic Asari culture with one shared and unchanging language that everybody uses. Our earth has roughly 6 500 different languages which cause their speakers to perceive the world around us in wildly different ways. My native tongue is classified as a genderless language, as there are no gendered pronouns or words with grammatical gender in it. If us humans are born biologically as either male or female (with some intersex people mixed in), shouldn't all languages have developed a system of having words fall into one of two different genders (masculine or feminine) and to make a distinction between masculine and feminine groups (for example French uses two different third person plural pronouns 'they', ils (all male or mixed group) and elles (all female group)) and have, like German and Russian, two first person singular pronouns (er, он (he) and sie, она (she)) for when referring to humans. Instead there are even languages with more than three genders. How did they come up with that? So clearly languages don't and don't need to reflect the world with 20/20 accuracy. If the word for a person in some alien language literally meant 'one with multiple heads' and was used for all sentient people regardless of the number of heads they had, I still wouldn't consider it something unusual. 

Also, pronouns (that is: I, you (singular), he, she, it, we, you (plural), they, and their conjugated variants) being gendered isn't the only reason what causes a language to have several different personal pronouns for one to choose from. There's dialect: besides the standard word for 'I', my native language has four others which are used in different parts of the country. Me and my parents each grew up using a different 'I' word. Then there are social hierarchies: Japanese and Korean use different first person singular pronouns depending whether they speak to a social superior, a stranger, or a person belonging to one's inner circle. In ME2 we visited an Asari planet where slavery was legal and accepted: I wouldn't be surprised if some native languages there had had rules how an unfree person could address a free one. Moving on: in some languages old people and children have different first person pronouns they use, and by which first person singular pronoun a Japanese person chooses to refer to themselves also gives me an inkling on how masculine or feminine they consider themselves to be. Thirdly, as anyone who was forced to read authentic John Milton (1608-74) or Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) for an exam can attest, languages are continuously changing. So if one Asari language didn't originally have pronouns or other words for two or more genders, that doesn't mean they couldn't have created new ones. The period of romantic nationalism in 19th century led to several European countries to update and add new words to their vocabulary. Japanese (again )  only created words kare (he) and kanojo (she) after the country's isolation policy ended in 1867 and translators came into contact with English and other European texts. Also Chinese has gone from originally having non-gendered pronouns to having some gendered pronouns (words for he and she are both pronounced [tā], but nowadays written 他 and 她).

2) it assumes that all the animal and plant species in Asari homeword reproduce in the manner the Asari do. So even if Asari don't need penis-in-vagina sex to make Asari babies, I'd assume there are Thessian(?) animals that do and the concept would familiar through them: in many languages third person singular pronoun it is used to refer to animals, maybe some Asari languages would reflect that by having their version of the word be gendered. (Though I imagine learning that some Asari language had repurposed gender pronouns for animals to better discuss human gender could raise some hackles.) Asari scifi writers pre-space flight, too, should have dabbled with stories featuring multiple genders. If someone similarly argued that before meeting the Asari in the Citadel, Salarians with their cloacas were totally unfamiliar with the concept of some species having separate urinary, digestive, and reproductive tracts, they'd certainly receive some bewildered looks.

It’s been a while since I heard the line, but if I recall correctly Aria had some dialogue about honouring Patriarch with a word/name that doesn’t exist for her people?

Gotta say, going from that to Angaran/Asari debates about how to address the blue’s did confuse the hell out of me.

Yeah, ultimately all the speculation about the biological and sociological implications of a monogendered species strikes me as the writers' desperate attempts to distract from the fact they just wanted Blue Space Babes in their hodgepodge of sci fi tropes. It's almost like the brothel thing again. What some generously interpret as an attempt to tackle serious issues is little more than silly fanservice in practice.

I mean, they already did that with Tallis in DA2. (I would argue that Sten does the same thing perfectly adequately, for that matter, but Tallis and Bull are definitely more able to express their feelings in ways that non-Qun followers get.)

Moreover, if you don't actively encourage Bull to leave the Qun, he turns on you and you have to kill him even if you (or poor Dorian) are romancing him. He dismisses any relationship you have with him with 'nothing personal, bas.' Which is easily one of the darkest things that has ever happened in a Dragon Age game, and doesn't exactly make the Qun look like a soft and fluffy philosophy.

IIRC, I think one of the "darkest" things you can do in DAI is sentencing a mage to be made tranquil. Cant remember who though.

I guess being able to make morally reprehensible choices (based on our or the game settings morals) would be fine. However, for me, "dark" also has a lot to do with ambiance and aesthetics. It goes back to that one post I made here about that Annihilation movie. Theres a eeriness and horror to it all that makes the situation feel oppressive. That everything could come "crashing down" at any moment; to horrid consequences.

Morally grey, or even - in the moment - morally good, choices also have the capacity to lead to some pretty dark outcomes. In AC: Odyssey, saving the family in the plague infested area from the priests and his guards spares their lives. However, the consequence of that is that the whole island becomes infected with the plague they're carrying.

I'm gonna need you to go into more detail on that front. That you read Iron Bull as an attempt to humanise the Qun is utterly baffling to me.

It's made pretty clear through the course of his story that aspects of Iron Bull that might be read as his "humanity" (his loyalty to his mercenary band, his affection for the Inquisitor if romanced) conflict massively with the rigid, uncompromising philosophy of the Qun. That you experience Iron Bull's story and come away with "BioWare is trying to make the Qun seem good" is legitimately astonishing. It demonstrates that individual Qunari can be sympathetic which, frankly, should have been obvious from the start. The Qun is an oppressive system and its members are victims, not mindless orcs who exist only to kill.

Also, I know your side of the debate has abused these terms into utter meaninglessness, but since when does "dark/grey/mature" mean making one side of a conflict irredeemably, cartoonishly evil? I thought all you guys praised DAO to the high heavens for making Loghain so complex and sympathetic and 'not just another villain' blah blah blah.

Now I wonder, is Loghain *actually* that complex, or are some people just more willing to accept excuses/rationalisation from a white, male ultranationalist than from a grey-skinned, horned ultranationalist.