The Blanketfort (crying and throwing up) - The Official Solas Thread [Spoilers]

Oh my goshi... I'm sorry. All the art I get is usually from Pinterest (and most the time there are no links to original source). I never use anyones art as my own since I'm drawing a little and I know how much it would piss me off if someone would stole my work.

Ir abelas.
(will try to find author of each another stuff before I post anything)

E-elfroot for peace?

Yes please and even more! '-' All artists are amazing and you dont know how much time i spend on searching stuff (just like now, instead of reading im scrolling arts and sighning or laughing too loud).

Will it be small art or will you expand it for something bigger?

From the balcony you say... so....

where is the mighty hat?!

Imagination going wild: Lavellan taking it off and throwing away from balcony.

@edit:
It also reminded me of one song (hope it's not re-post) that I accidentaly found during searching stuff about solavellan. And it fits too good...
Oh Land - Wolf & I
I know it's not from original singer (I couldn't found that on her page), but wanted to give the audio, not live. But live is also nice!

*sighs* How many nights I spend with this playing that the idea of Lavellan singing this born in my head...

Also, is the fan-theory still popular here or am I too late these few years?

I'm in love *_*
But don't let me mumbling to change your idea of art! D: (but that's what lavellan should do when she saw it on his head, hrhrhr)

So not a fan of DA2, no?

The seemingly never ending stream of enemies falling from the sky vs. the teleporting hinterlands bears.

Hmm. You know, I do like DAI more, but that's almost entirely due to Solas. Otherwise DAI and DA2 are pretty on par for me. 

I've always had two big issues with DA2. 1 - I don't like the companions as much. Most of them are just meh for me - Isabela, Merrill, and Sebastian are all alright, but never really got my attention. Anders and Fenris felt a bit like shallow mouthpieces for the whole mage/templar conflict, and then Aveline and Varric were the only ones I kind of liked but they didn't do much. Overall I'm hard pressed to care about any of the characters in the game. The Arishok was a neat villain, would've liked more of him. That's the highest praise I can drum up. 

And then 2 - the plot's just sort of a mess, isn't it? Act One drags on, and even if you fulfill all the requirements for the main quest, it still inexplicably bars you from progressing because you haven't done the "side" quests like Petrice's that are - surprise! - actually important. Act Two's pretty solid, at least, but then Act Three just goes by way too fast, by the time you realize the conflict's finally out in the open it's already at the climax. It also generally lacks motivation to give the player. If you like the characters and the companions, you might like the game. Otherwise you'll stop a lot and ask yourself "Okay, but why do I care?" Why do I care what Dumar wants me to do? Why do I care that Meredith and Orsino are at each other's throats? Why do I stay in the dumpster fire called Kirkwall when my family's all dead and there's nothing holding me here anymore? 

I know that old saying of "Well the devs can't just you let you leave the story." It assumes investment because it has to. Still, I feel it could've given stronger motivation. Or at least given me a character I really cared about.

Now Inquisition - I have to agree that it feels like you get more time with the characters in DA2 in contrast to Inquisition. So much attention is given to the various areas, and I like the environment variety and the exploration - but it's just a bit too much, and too little of it's relevant to the story. Hissing Wastes, Emerald Graves, Forbidden Oasis, Fallow Mire, Exalted Plains, Emprise du Lion, and Storm Cost all could've been cut without losing anything from the main quest - just move the various companion and recruitment quests somewhere else, because it's not like the location is vital for any of them. Crestwood and Western Approach were only important for the one main quest that took place there, and again, they easily could've been shuffled somewhere else. Only the Hinterlands and Arbor Wilds really mattered to the plot. 

The incredible devotion to these areas despite them being largely irrelevant to the main plot and characters left the game feeling very hollow to me. You'll spend looooong stretches of play time having little-to-no real interactions with anyone. It makes the main plot feel short and shallow, and all of your companions feel distant. It's probably the one issue that really drags Inquisition down for me. I can't help but feel if they had just pared it down a little, if they had just given us more time with the characters, it would've been so much better. I mean, they're nice characters! I'm fairly fond of a lot of them. But I never felt like I got to know them, most of them. So Inquisition ended up feeling like a very lonely game.

Trespasser was pretty good, imo. Linear, yes, but the setting always felt pertinent and it felt like the ratio of running around to plot and characters was much better balanced. If they had applied that structure to the rest of Inquisition, I think I would've liked it much better. Hopefully DA4's taking notes.

As for combat - I... honestly don't really care. I never really liked the combat in any of the Dragon Age games, but that's also the very last thing I consider in BioWare games. So long as it's not unplayable, I'm satisfied. 

^


At the beginning of the interview DG says: We knew the broad strokes of DAI before we even started DA2. The initial story we had planned was much longer. But when we started looking at what we actually intended to do, we kept hashing it out and hashing it out, and it was like, there's something that just feels weak. And I think at some point I was like, okay, wait. I just cut it in half. I was like, look at this arc here as a complete arc. How does that work? And they were like, yes.

Then at 4:47:
VGS: Were there any things, again, because you mentioned before that your original story plan for Inquisition was twice as long as what players ended up with...
Gaider: The length of the plot arc. It wasn't like we had twice as much content. The amount of ground we were going to cover with the story was twice as long. And the rest of that plot arc still exists. So, it's now in Patrick Weeks hands. Good luck, buddy! Good luck going the rest of the distance! And we'll see how he does that.

Can read a transcript of the interview here: fextralife.com/forums/t176684/bioware-interview-what-was-cut-from-dragon-age-inquisition/

I must admit the irrelevance of the majority of areas to the main story is one of the things that is odd about DAI. I know some people like exploring but it did seem to be harking back to the days of Baldurs Gate when I could go wandering off exploring areas just for the sake of it, when there was actually something quite important happening that needed to be dealt with. Yes, you ran into different factions who were linked to the main villain, and first run through this made me feel that I as going to discover something important about him, or a way to defeat him, but of course never did. That was all dealt with by Morrigan and the Well of Sorrows. It left a lot of unresolved questions as well, such as why did he have such a fixation with elven artefacts? Did he always intend trying to use the Well of Sorrows or did that only come about as Plan B after he failed to get to the Black City the first time? Why did he wait to go there until after killing Celene and raising a demon army? Since he had left henchmen to be responsible for these two enterprises, he could have headed there with his tame dragon and Red Templars/mages straight after dealing with the Inquisition at Haven. What was so important about the Forbidden Oasis that it merited its own section in the Keep? (I suppose that could be revealed next game but I was honestly expecting to find a bit more behind the last door). The Hissing Wastes in particular was a huge distraction from the urgency of the main plotline with absolutely no relevance to it beyond bumping into yet more Venatori who were similarly distracted from conquering the world.

From that point of view, I felt the side-quests in DAO were better integrated into the main plot line. For example, there was no real reason on the face of it to work with the Crows after their first lead but it transpired by the Landsmeet that there were definite benefits to doing so. However, I think the DLC in DAI had better reasons for you getting involved than DA2. The Legacy DLC made sense because you were being attacked personally but for the life of me I still don't know why Hawke would have bothered themselves with Tallis on such a slim recommendation as Varric gave. If it had definitely been fitted in before the Arishok went crazy, then at least you might have thought the "jewel" you were going to steal was the thing he was after but otherwise I couldn't understand the motivation.

As for antagonists, Loghain and the Arishok were to my mind much better developed than Corypheus and you could understand their motivations (although with Loghain you had to buy DLC in order do so). The main problem with DA2 was that after the Arishok had left the scene, Act 3 felt like a prolonged epilogue and you were not given enough insights into the two heads of the factions, particularly if you supported their rival. I guess part of the problem is that there was originally meant to be a DLC to follow and then it never did. What they did with Orsino if you supported the mages is still the stupidest boss fight ever in the way they showed the lead in to it, when with a little thought and rearranging of the sequence of the events, they could have made it make sense.

Of course, the reason that Corypheus felt under-developed is that he was never really the main danger at all. The real antagonist was Solas all along. From that point of view, he was very well developed and you do feel that you have got to know him, whether you romanced him, befriended him or hated his guts. Which is why it is going to feel a bit of a let down if he, or his followers, only play a limited part in the next game and why the character of the Inquisitor has such a personal involvement in being part of the continuing story. From the talk that PW et al gave about Trespasser at that games convention, it would seem they didn't appreciate this latter aspect of the Trespasser finale. They claimed that the aim of Trespasser was to finish off the Inquisitor's story. It completed their story in the role of "Inquisitor" but not their involvement in the story as a character.

It's true that I like a lot DA2 companions, so that probably has a lot to do with me enjoying a lot the game and making it worthwhile going through Hawke's story, but personally I don't find it that messy, or at least that messiness doesn't impact my experience that much. Yes, it's kind of arbitrary why some of the making money missions are needed to go on andd no others, but since, either I'm going the completionist route and I'm just doing everything or I'm aiming for a short pt and then I go directly to the 5 mandatory ones, I don't usually face the problem . I don't mind the third act racing faster to climax either. I'm happy with the structure, in general, even if it's not perfect

All in all, I tend to think of DA2 more as Hawke's story, s/he is just living her/his life in Kirkwal, while some interesting stuff happens there, and I do care about that stuff, which is a plus, but I think I care about Hawke and her friends enough to be be heavily invested in the game and enjoy even the more trivial and less related to the main plot side-quests. But I think I understand your problem because that's how I feel in DAI about the Inquisition itself, about which I care absolutely nothing. In fact, I find hard to justify why my Lavellan stuck with it for two years after killing Corypheus

And it's not that bad as if leading the Inquisiton was all there was, but there's a lot of content that is mostly about the Inquisition itself: expanding its influence, recruting agents, working to "restore order" etc. I sometimes wonder if I'd enjoy more all that side-content in DAI if I was more invested in the Inquisition as an organization, if I saw it as something important for my character, for the things she cares about. Though I suspect that I would still have trouble with the all the fetch quest that makes you travel such big distances for the most simple tasks, and with how little cutscenes and companion input you get in most of them. With every BW game I always have some minimalist pts, but with DAI I think I broke a record

But that's the bright side for me I guess: DAI is not all about the Inquisition and the exploration after all, and I like a lot the story line about chasing down Corypheus and the one about Solas, and I care about most of my companions, even if I feel they could have done more with them, and that's enough to keep me replaying the game a lot. It's just that there's not enough to keep me doing longer, completionist pts. The thing is that there's, I don't know, a 60-70%? of the game I don't enjoy enough to go through it very often, and well 

I agree that Trespasser is great and none of my possible complaints would apply to it etiher, btw

I thought Hissing Wastes was great. This started me thinking much harder about Dwarven history and was a great set up for Descent IMO. For me it was much like 'you really don't know the whole story!' similar to Elvhen reveals. I'm positive we've only got a taste of that and we'll get much more in the next game, especially if we go to Tevinter. Hopefully we will get a ton of new Tevinter and Dwarven lore.