Schmooples' Den! The DA News Discussion Thread

Imperator Furiåsa @devilkitten

I played some Dragon Age Awakening and got so pissed at the brood mother that I had to write about it. Men’s fear of women’s sexuality is mind boggling at times.

Ugh. Never dive deep into problematic enemies in your favorite games because man did I find issues with the broodmother and the banshee.

Okay. So the Banshee from ME3. Lets take a look at the origins for that. Banshees are made from Asari, a mono gendered race of aliens basically on the lookout for other species (we all know it’s a race aimed towards human men, okay?) to knock them up. Asari breeding with Asari ->

-> we know is a bit of a taboo. That’s established in the first game of you talk long enough with Liara. If an Asari does have children with another Asari this results in a pure blood. Pure bloods are sort of taboo because pure bloods can become Ardat-Yakshi. Ardat-Yakshi are ->

-> more or less Asari whose sexuality is unrestrained and it will kill you if you have sex with them. The only _acceptable_ Ardat-Yakshi are those who renounce sexuality and become celibate. Can you see where I’m going with this? Okay. And lo and behold, Ardat-Yakshi is what ->

-> the reapers use to create Banshees, thus turning the Madonna back into a murderous whore. I think I would have been less upset about this if there had been just ONE male enemy in ANY BioWare game (tips are welcome!) that used the same level of care and utter horror ->

-> to introduce them to the player, but the two enemies I’ve found that play on both sexuality, procreation and body horror in a BioWare game are both originally women (or coded as women). This only goes to show you should never start thinking too much about the games you love.

(I’m of course talking about the broodmother and the banshee with regards to the two enemies mentioned.)

Not quite exactly right. It's mostly about saving development time instead of integrating new things. Those tools would have worked before, it's importing the things made in those tools into the game final packaging that is complex. LLVM remove that complexity form the day-to-day developer work slate (it still exist for whomever maintains the LLVM architecture though).

So it's more about optimizing a given coding language? My apologies if my questioning sounds low-level. I have some coding experience through Matlab, but nothing significantly extensive.

Jon Renish @jonrenish
Don't want to alarm anyone, but I'm starting to think 'Dragon Age' games might be a bit randy.

Hopefully not all of it.

Karin Weekes @karinweekes
I was really relieved to learn in an afternoon meeting that @biomarkdarrah stands fully in support of accurate and multifaceted representations of tea-consumption porcelain and mugware in our games. ☕️

Charlie Cordes aka. Sylien #FreeChelseaManning @sylien_
A new kind of character customisation: choosing the design of the characters favourite mug.

Mark Darrah @biomarkdarrah
Feedback noted