Schmooples' Den! The DA News Discussion Thread

Yeah it's pretty much the same design as that concept art of The Inquisition seeking him out in a cave (I don't 100% know the context actually, but gotta wonder if he was a Warden option - if Hawke didn't kill him - to leave in the Fade!)

AMD is pretty safe overall and I think it's in general a better choice, but that's just my opinion.
Other than that, I don't know... sorry, it's been many years since I've had an Intel-something CPU.

You know... that might be an interesting point.
At least... I can play a broken game, with bugs and glitches and a lot of problems as long as I like the story.
And maybe that's why I like DA2 so much.
Or... if there's room for me to build a story that I like... and that would be the case with DAI, I played that game (and replayed and replayed so many times) filling all the void with stories and plots that made sense to me.).
But The Veilguard? Yes, it's stable. Yes, it looks nice... but... I just can't go on and play. I've stopped. I just don't like it.

Old God Baby plot was a mess. At the end of DAO Morrigan won’t tell the Warden why she wants to do this but makes it sound ominous. The other choice is the death of the main character or another grey warden.

Then in Inquisition it is suddenly instead about how motherhood changed Morrigan? What were her initial plans? Why was it a big choice between that or a major character’s death?

It adds a lot if decisions and characters can be carried forward to the next game in a meaningful way. However, I prefer having a self-contained game to carrying forward choices, plots, and characters in a way that makes no sense. What they write has to make sense as a plot and not only be a good performance from the voice actor.

Yeah I can pla ygames wit hbug sand glitches. Andromeda is proof of that because despite the bugs an dglitches there I was enjoying the story and gameplay of tha tenoug ht opush through them. I tis erfershin gthough t osee a game without  too man ybugs though. I will say that. But I didn' tfind to oman ywit hDAI either other than when playing a melee character wher sometimes when clickin gon a power you rcharacte doesn't execute. That's abou tthe onl ybu gtha tannoys me with Inquisition. It's on eo fthe other reasons wh yI d oten dt opla ya lo to f  ranged characters lik emages o rarchers rath retha ndual wielders an dwarriors. I'm no tsaying that's goin gt ohappen wi hVeilguard as I haven' tplayed a rogu eo rwarrio ryet.I do have a warrio rand 2 rogues planned in my firs twave o fRooks. I jus thaven' tgo tround t oplaying them yet.

What is this rumor of anders in dai? They should have killed off the warden in dai. Morrigan could have said she/he passed away and just add a grave. Ends the story once and for all. Just like they did for the old god baby and Conner (Conner shows up in dai) so resources were spent for a character that nobody expected and only a few even know about. Awakening and those other expansions should have been closed off by now as 2 world ending events have happened and the heroes aren’t interested? Veilguard add a blurb that xyz people died etc

I give a pass to both!

Unlike No Mutants Allowed users, you don’t posses double standards.

100% I didn't mean to say that a broken game is a good game. If I had to play Vampire Bloodlines on release I probably would've hated it and would have thought it's the worse game ever.

Same is true for New Vegas.

However, the really good games get dedicated fans to fix them. While this practice is not great because it taught developers to not do enough optimization, me as someone who plays these games some time after release doesn't really mind all the drama of the release and I just enjoy.

So sure, on release new Vegas was vastly inferior to fallout 3. But now, if you can get it to work properly (and from personal experience, you can) I think it is better

David Gaider @davidgaider.bsky.social
CHARACTERS - DAY THREE: Flemeth

I have a type. I admit it. There are certain wells I can return to repeatedly and always find something new to explore.

One of them is older female characters. Mike used to rib me about it. Consider Wynne. Meredith. Genevieve. And, of course, the biggie: Flemeth.

Why are they a type? I... don't know, honestly.

I guess I have a feeling that older men fade, they strive to regain their youth or establish a legacy and we've seen that story a thousand times, but older women? They become free to become something new. I guess I see so many possibilities in that.

I had a conception of who Flemeth was, and why, right from the very start. Her creation went hand in hand with Morrigan, as a being whose thirst for retribution hundreds of years ago attracted an entity (slight confession: I didn't know Mythal specifically, at the time, "an elven god" was enough).

I also knew where Morrigan was right and very wrong about her. Misconceptions of the truth are built into DA's foundation, and they were fundamental to this mother-daughter relationship I was building.

Like many seeds I'd put in the world, however, I had no idea whether I'd ever get to explore it.

Knowing that she was a character of possible future importance, if not a major player in DAO, I wasn't much surprised when she was one of the first cuts the art team made in terms of getting a unique appearance. Thus the "batty old woman" players met in DAO. Not as hard a cut as the Qunari, though.

Going into DA2, I wanted both Morrigan and Flemeth, but we could only have one. So I picked Flemeth. This was the game where she really got to come into her own.

I remember the art team coming and asking if it was OK if she got a new model, as it'd be a retcon of sorts. I didn't care. I wanted it.

I honestly don't remember whether Kate Mulgrew was cast before or after Claudia. After, I think? All I recall is that Cab came into my office one day and asked if Kate might be a good fit.

Asked me, the dyed-in-the-wool Trekkie who had stuck with Voyager even through the admittedly lean years?

The squeal I made was un-manly. Cab took that as a "yes". 😅

I didn't get to talk to Kate until DA2, however. Schedules being what they were, we had a tight window to record Flemeth... so I had to write all her scenes before almost anything else in DA2 was written, before I even had a team! Ack!

It was OK, though, for the most part. I knew where I wanted to take her, and a big part of it was going to explain her transition - to set her up for the future. So I whipped up a script in, like, two days and off we went. Kate was a marvel in the booth. She adored Flemeth and you could really tell.

I didn't get to meet Kate in person, however, until DAI. This came pretty late in its development, compared to when we recorded her for DA2, and we flew down to Virginia (to accommodate her schedule - she was writing her memoir at the time, I think) for a single session. It was going to be *tight*.

I was a mess. I was finally going to meet Captain Janeway... and yes yes, I know she's also more than that. But come ON.

When we sat down, I figured I'd have to talk her through the character all over again. It'd been years since that one session at the start of DA2, right? And even more since DAO.

But, no. Kate remembered Flemeth perfectly.

I remember sitting there as she told me how much she loved the character, how rare it was to get one with so much texture and possibility. She called out my writing - my writing! - and waxed poetic about how she viewed Flemeth's arc. I... I was floored. 🫠

Then we began recording. One issue that quickly reared its head was how Caroline had to speed through the lines if we hoped to finish. Kate was a trooper, and most takes she'd get it in one (which is rare), but I was alarmed because we weren't giving Kate time to read the VO comments on each line.

I brought it up, as there were some lines (so much sarcasm) that required nuance - Kate was getting them, oddly, but I was worried.

"Oh, it's fine," Kate said. "I read the comments as we go."
"How could you? We're going so fast!"
"I'm a speed reader."

Oh. OK, then. That certainly explained it. 😁

We got to the confrontation scene with Morrigan and she nailed it. Over and over. More than once, Caroline would make a call and, before I could even interject and say "no, Kate had it right, actually" Kate would explain exactly why she did it that way and why it worked for Flemeth. I was in love.

She did the "I will see her avenged!" section all in one go. I got chills. Then we got to the final scene.

You know the one. With Solas.

It was this beautiful moment. She took it somewhere quiet and sad... and when she got to that last line, we all felt it: Flemeth was dead. Everyone was in tears.

I suppose I could talk more about the process. How she started off aligned with Morrigan's original Delirium inspiration, but I didn't pull back her loopy way of talking as much (bet you wondered).

I still don't know why it was so easy to slip into her voice, but I'm grateful I got the chance. ❤️

This is the problem DATV has as well and i think it is the reason the game is as it is.

This doesn't work every time as we see with Joplin.