"No Brothels to be in DA4" as per Mark Darrah Tweet.

I feel that people rely way too much on Youtubers now. Most of them aren't really that well informed and rely on emotion. Unfortunately, I often find them more reliable than games "media."

I'm quite certain you've just pulled this thought bubble straight from your arse. Especially considering there's a correlation observed between reading comprehension in a person and listening comprehension in a person, that those who understands written material well also understands listening material well, which would lead people to the exact same conclusions regardless of how that material was presented. There is a reason why audiobooks are booming. Possibly you see more people swayed by a video than in a piece of text media which says the same thing, but it's also possible that many of those watching the video would have never have read it in text form which may account for the disparity in numbers. 

But that doesn't really matter. What does matter is I've seen nothing to suggest anywhere that people are more easily swayed by video than text. 

Only nobody has brought Biofan into this, while you're trying to use the voice of a fan with some following as a crutch for your argument.

And no - there was no 'obvious tone shift' from DAO to DAI, or at least theyr'e neither drastic or ones that can support your conspiracy theory about Bioware. The tone follows the theme and story of each installment, and each installment of DA happens to tell a somewhat different story with a different aim.

You've accurately described one of the ways in which Inquisition isn't as dark as its predecessors. It doesn't matter whether the world itself has dark things going on, it matters what and how this is presented to the reader. Dark stories may not necessarily take place in darker worlds than our own but an atmosphere is built through what is shown to the audience that builds a dark atmosphere.

It doesn't matter that there are "dark moments" in Inquisition if those moments are glossed over and not examined in detail. In Origins those moments are shown and detailed far more than in Inquisition and that's one of the ways Origin managed to present a darker atmosphere. Spot on

Tone and mood definitely shift from game to game, but that is hardly a Dragon Age only thing. Mass Effect has the same problem, if you want to call it that. Even The Series which Shall Not Be Named has some pretty significant tonal shifts throughout. Making games is a long and expensive process which involves many people, and many changes in the service of gameplay and other practical matters.

I am somewhat of a Romantic myself, so I do miss the moodiness and melancholy of Origins. Just seeing the main menu and listening to the theme song makes me want to play the game again. Even so, I dislike to describe its tone as "dark" because that word has been co-opted by the whole grimdark movement in fantasy, which as I believe I've said elsewhere strikes me as so much adolescent posturing.

Anyone else remember the marketing for DAO and how Bioware was all about the blooood? The big puddles of blood. No serious. Every article I remember reading, previewing the game, talked about how NPCs would react to you differently if you were bathed in blood from a previous encounter. What happened to that?

I'd say Dragon Age Origins was a pretty dark fantasy for those young enough to have played it when it first came out and hadn't experience anything like it before. It could be about the sex, the general mood, the blooooood in the game, but I'm thinking it was more than that. I was going to compare it to the LotR movies by arguing that LotR isn't dark, but I'd say the LotR has dark themes, they're just different. LotR was a baseline for a lot of us. It was a PG13 affair. It had violence and a somber mood because war, but sex was never explored and violence was always treated as almost IMPERSONAL and necessity of war to conquer evil. I'm sure someone who has thought about LotR a lot more than I have will type a half page response how I got the series all wrong. Save your keystrokes. I can't say I'm interested and I read a few articles at one point of another about Tolkien experience in WWI and how it inspired his fantasy world.

Again the important part of all this is that the LotR movies acted as a baseline for us yungings expectations of fantasy, so when we booted up Dragon Age Origins and we experienced the dark PERSONAL themes of the game it surprised us, which is why we associate it with it being DARK fantasy. Is it juvenile? Sure. Somewhat. Sex is there. Sex isn't in LotR. Brothels are there. No brothels in LotR (that I know of). Characters walk around covered in blood, I don't remember blood in LotR besides maybe a mouth trickle, most of it was black gloop. There is disease in Dragon Age Origins, where you can be infected and killed by coming into contact with Dark Spawn blood, I don't recall anything wide spreading in LotR. And then there is player choice. You can be a total asshole. You can make decisions that go against the hero trope that has been beaten into our brains (those who grew up watching LotR) through swaths of media. You can let an elf get raped, you can let a slaver keep a bunch of slaves, you can betray your companions, you can decide not to save villagers from a demon attack, you can let a demon posses children. Those are some personal DARK themes that you can't find LotR or most fantasy literature centered around playing to the goody-goody tropes.

To make it clear I'm not arguing why Dragon Age Origins is better than LotR.

And likewise you can't really make those decisions in Inquisition or DAII. Sure. They have dark themes, like LotR, but not PERSONAL dark themes.

So that's why I think some of us associate Dragon Age Origins as dark fantasy because when we first played it, we were comparing it to LotR. And yeah. I'm older now. I've read some pretty abbhorrent dark fantasy that makes Dragon Age Origins look like puppies and blueberry pie. I guess it's an important note that "dark fantasy" can be somewhat subjective when considering an individual's experience.

FINALLY. It's kind of a letdown that there won't be brothels in DA4. NotthatIwouldeverdouseoneinavideogamebecauseihavestandardsands It stands as just another warning that the game will lack some of those more polarizing choices that were in DAO that made the game such a fun RPing experience.

pot, meet kettle.

Is this in response to me?

If it was specifically you, I would have quoted you ... it's directed at all 'pseudo' Bioware fans who search every tiny bits they can find to tell ad libidum how bad Bioware's games are. It's boring and tiring, and prevent all serious discussions about the game.

Assuming this is directed at me and others who voice criticism of franchises we enjoy. What you should try to understand is that blind fanatacism is not healthy for anyone. Any artist or writer out there will tell you they welcome criticism because it pushes them to make better works and not fall into routines. Fanboyism is actually more annoying to them than people who voice logical criticism.

I like the Dragon Age franchise for the world building you can do across the series. That is why I continue to play it. But I'm not such a sucker for it that I can't see the flaws and demand better from the people I'm supporting financially. It is becuase I enjoy the series that I want it to do better.

So you might consider that before you reach for your jar of fanatical loyalty.

We don't even know whether DA4 will feature a city, much less whether we'll see all of it (Minrathous is the biggest city on Thedas with a million people living there. Even if they do some scaling trickery, it's unlikely we're going to see all of it), so why are we even discussing 'reasons for it omission'? We don't even know why or what is going to be omitted or implemented yet, and the reasons for it could be story-related. We are, after all, gearing towards travelling to an already unstable Imperium with Qunari invasion looming on the horizon and who knows what else.
The whole theme of Inquisition was how much we sacrifice when we're trying to rouse people around an organization that is the last hope of restoring order. This isn't just about easily understandable personal sacrifices on the battlefield, but sacrifice of identity, principles, lives of people we lead and - eventually or potentially - loss of direction, and ultimately - Inquisitor laying everything he/she has to try and save the world, actually saving it, only the world to start forgetting their contributions in meager years.
... ah yes, the 'scary glowing hand' that has enabled Inquisitor attain their illustrious position in the first place. Never mind that it's about so much more than this. The whole DLC was about way more than this.
Yes, no terrifying events at all. It's not like they survived devastating explosion that has wiped all of the Conclave, coincidentally obtained unknown power that is eating them from inside, only to have it symbolically erase everything else they ever were before, yanked at the position of power and hoisted a ginormous responsibility on their back, where they didn't even know where and how to start fixing that mess, because Thedas has never experienced stuff like this before.

And all that while knowing, 100%, that if they fail at any step of the way, Corypheus may not yet become god, but will destroy the world nonetheless, while people are expecting for them to sacrifice everything they are, even though they didn't, ultimately, were even given any opportunity to choose, go through any ritual or swear an oath. And after that, when they managed to actually save the world, the world just keeps demanding more of them, while at the same time robbing them of their power, their hand, their position and put in the situation that they have to scramble to save the world... again.