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

No caves either.  

Pulling down a wall sconce to enter the secret passageway leading to our base?  Hehehe...I could have fun with that.

I'll be OK with a tent... provided that it's this kind of tent



Otherwise, I think I'd be satisfied with a little cottage house that has, like, hidden Underground Skyhold or something xD Which, you know, with all the dwarven ruins everywhere is actually not that far-fetched in Thedas...

Here's a good explanation for that. Comes from an article David Gaider wrote recently: www.polygon.com/2016/8/15/12455728/how-to-get-a-job-writing-games-maybe

"And then there’s the rest of your job which is what comes after you’ve done all the collaborating — and that’s the implementation. That is 80 percent of your job. Figuring out how to make the story work inside a video game.

That level you wrote? You will re-write it at least three times, trying to make it suck a little less each time. That other level? It got cut because, even though it was really fun, the art team is behind schedule and the level it was in now doesn’t exist … and it falls on you to fix the surrounding story now that the middle piece isn’t there any longer. The reason this is 80 percent of your job is because you will spend the majority of your time fixing shit.

And you will do it with a smile, because it’s your job to make it all come together like it was meant to be that way from the beginning and not be a princess about it because the story you pitched in pre-production and which everybody liked is now half the size and parts of it don’t really make sense and let’s not even talk about that ending level and someone’s going to write a blog about how you’re a crappy writer because who would ever write a story like that intentionally? If any of that’s a problem for you, then go write a novel and be happy."

I don't think we truly realize how hard it is to design or write a game with branching storyline. Stuff WILL be missing. Mistakes will be made. Dialogue will be cut and cutscenes will be unfinished and stuff will be shuffled around and linked with pieces of strings, because they didn't have time for anything else and so on.

But it doesn't seem like a writer's attempt to make the best with what they had - Orsino was a writer's attempt to make the best with what they had. Solas' missing dialogue was more like it was just... unfinished. Like Weekes' printer ran out of ink halfway through printing the script. All we would've needed is a single line from Solas going "Morrigan's power-hungry, but I'd rather risk her over you." and boom, done. 

Maybe they were going to fix it and just ran out of time. But Weekes said it was a writing goof, so obviously that's not the initial cause. 

Also, hey, I actually have dabbled in writing branching narratives. Haven't done it for a high-production studio like BioWare, which I imagine is a very different beast from writing indie games and Twine novels, but still.

For me this doesn't seem to be "unfinished writing" - it may as well not be a problem in writing per se, but an oversight when implementing dialogue strings into the game, way after the game has been written and voiced. The "writing goof" might have happened simply because during the finaling frenzy nobody really checked the dialogue during test playthroughs or suffered a severe writer's/editor's fatigue and didn't notice it. It IS a huge game after all.

Or, it could have been that they've left it intentionally, in a sense that it wasn't that much of a serious gameplay or continuity bug compared to others which had much higher priority. Or the dialogue might have been structured differently, as was the scene, but they've made last-moment edits and had to cut some dialogue to add a more important information somewhere else without compromising word budget. When reading articles about game development or listen to interviews you can hear how many of such compromises have to be made during game production. It's insane.

There are simply so many things to go wrong during development, it's so complicated I think it's simply unfair to chuck whole of the responsibility on writers, or assume that they're lazy enough they butchered the dialogue during scripting. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if voiced dialogue would still be somewhere there in the game, hidden among thousands of voice files, like many other things people have found that we simply never heard in the game.

Well, if it's THAT cave    

Art post!

Nipuni lives in an epic adventure tale, protecting her morally questionable elf god from hate and mischaracterization while looking impossibly dashing for the setting by Varric Tethras.
Source: nipuni.tumblr.com/post/149213723760/you-live-in-an-epic-adventure-tale

Beautiful artwork of Solas and Lavellan hugging.
Source: lilenart.tumblr.com/post/149229173582/solas-and-my-inquisitor-nival%C3%BFn-d-finally-i-made

Gorgeous traditional sketch of Trespasser!Solas.
Source: pear-glace19.tumblr.com/post/149215404263/wanted-to-draw-solas-in-his-dlc-outfit

I'm sorry, but that's like saying that the whole of Temple Of Mythal isn't going to play any vital role, just because someone didn't check of the Dalish Inquisitor not asking who's Mythal :/

It was either an oversight, or, as you said, it might have been too late to fix it. Or, like I said earlier, there were bigger issues to pay attention to, gamebreaking to the point of unplayability. Solas may be an important character, but at that point in story he was an optional companion out of 9 available - and unless you're his friend (and likely a great deal of player didn't really succeed in befriending him) it's a dialogue option that wouldn't trigger.... in fact, it might be why they got rid of some dialogue options in the first place. They were just casting too much suspicion on him: most of companions would react the way they do and Solas suddenly begging for you not to do that? (not to mention that it'd mess with player's uncertainty towards who is supposed to drink from the Well). There's enough in ToM to already sort of makes his mask slip and audience go 'hmmm' (comments across ToM or talk with Abelas) and this might have simply been too much of a red flag.

Problem might have been that at that time all of the VO were done and nothing could be done to tone it down, other than cutting it and leave only dialogues that make it seem as if Solas doesn't want either to drink the Well, for whatever reasons. Hence the 'goof' - they might have checked the game and noticed the mistake, but at that time there was little to be done (PW also said comments in similar tone about the whole "Dalish Inquisitor loses whole clan and there's practically no reaction", where he says that there's none, because most War Table missions were written after all the voice work's been done).

Even if they didn't have time to put something in at the temple, they still could have taken out his later line so it doesn't make the player go, "WTF are you talking about?" Although it does lead to some funny headcanon....

Like Solas went on this entire rant about why you shouldn't drink from the Well and it was really eloquent and convincing and angels wept at its beauty, and he may have ended it with the revelation about his identity b/c it was just THAT important to him that you didn't sacrifice your very self to the will of another.... Only for him to realize after you drink that he never actually said any of it out loud?

Taking out the later dialogue would have made sense. Saying that you can't include the one at the Temple of Mythal because Solas may not be in your party and then have him maintain he warned you against drinking if you did, is the issue. So then you would get the same dialogue with Solas regardless of whether he was in your party or not, namely "what do you intend doing with the knowledge of the Well?" Even that made little sense if you didn't drink. I wanted to say to him "Go ask Morrigan, she's the one who drank." That whole dialogue seemed superfluous because you would have no control over how the knowledge of the well was used. It was obvious that if Morrigan didn't want to share, she wouldn't, and that if she left the Inquisition after defeating Corypheus, which is what she did, then the knowledge would go with her. That essentially would be the reason you would risk drinking yourself, because you realise Morrigan is working to her own agenda and want to ensure the knowledge is more widely available.

As for Solas revealing himself, I think that was pretty categorically the case when he starts chatting to Abelas and the latter acknowledges him as one of his own. This is particularly noticeable if you are an elf yourself. Right from when they first revealed Solas before the game, I thought the idea of him being some simple apostate from a remote village was not going to be true and he was likely from the same group as Felassan. I suspected they were both going to be from some enclave of elves that traced directly to pre-Tevinter days, so effectively ancient elves. So when that dialogue took place with Abelas I thought I had been proved correct. Then whilst I was not allowed to directly ask him about this, because my first run I was in a romance with him, I was taken off and he seemed about to confess. Instead he dumped me. Then he said he would reveal all after Corypheus was defeated. Actually he did keep his promise, it just took him two years to do so. So the only thing that was a shock to my character (and me) was the realisation he was Fen'Harel.

What I do find annoying is that there is so much less revealed to a friend in the main game. You never get told about the vallaslin, although if the battle with Corypheus takes long enough he gets around to taunting you with it (except why would you take anything he says seriously?) Otherwise you miss out on that information altogether. Also, since you don't get taken off for an intimate chat when you go to see him after the Temple of Mythal, you are left with the frustration of wanting to ask him about the things Abelas said but not being allowed to do so. It did make for a different reaction between my male and female Lavallen when he went off at the end of DAI. She was more upset and puzzled why he had done so without the promised explanation, he was just frustrated and angry that Solas hadn't been more forthcoming with someone he claimed he respected.

Honestly, I think it's both - that the Evanuris wanted to eradicate Mythal's worship after they killed her, and that Mythal's legacy would be in danger once again, if the Veil ultimately failed to restrain them. Thus, for millennia, Abelas and the other sentinels were prepared to die to protect it.

I have to wonder that if the Inquisitor is friendly towards the sentinel elves, whether Mythal influenced Abelas to let the well go. She could tell who drank from the well, while Solas said that all actions made by a well-drinker are for Mythal whether they know it or not, and it's heavily implied that Abelas was bound the same way.

It's all very curious and vaguely explained.