Dragon Age News Thread

This is a good point. But the whole scene was pretty horrific. There are quite a few horrific scenes and scenarios in DAI, but for some reason, because of the shiny graphics, it gets labeled as a lighter game.

*direct shot of Cory's face melting"
*direct shot of Warden's body disintegrating and Cory appearing*
*direct shot of people being killed, dismembered or turned into horrific monsters*

Bah, look at the Disneyification of Bioware!

Haile Buckius‏ @haibear16
@patrickweekes I just romanced Solas for the first time and I just... Who hurt you?

i.imgur.com/nqrRukQ.gif

Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes

i.imgur.com/64shCcZ.gif

Cori Nicole‏ @genevrael
Voice over: "He wasn't sorry."

Karin Weekes‏ @karinweekes
DON'T LIE YOU ARE SO NOT SORRY

Mary Kirby‏ @biomarykirby
We all know that sad, dramatic rain is fake.

David Gaider @davidgaider
YOU FOUGHT ME TO KEEP IT IN THERE.

Eh, I think it just depends on the personal perspective of the player. To me, the lore seems weaker because you can't point to something and say, "This is how it is."

Every single argument and discussion about the lore can come down to "So-and-so is an unreliable narrator, so your view is wrong," or, "The Codex is written by an unreliable narrator, so Bioware is fit to change anything they want, for whatever reason they want (read: deus ex machina to make a plot work), whenever they deem it necessary."

I saw that used enough times in discussions about DA2, enough to drive me away from discussions about that game and the things in it. Varric is an unreliable narrator, so everything in DA2 is free to be discounted. You can't pick and choose with these things. Either everything in the game that we see and hear in our playing of Hawke is true, or it isn't. I played DA2 over a dozen times; I like it well enough. But this is my most disliked aspect of the game, and part of that has to do with how the fandom treats it.

The fandom has ruined enjoyment of DA lore for me because I can't just enjoy it as it is.

I dislike that uncertainty. I think it can be fun and interesting for some things, but not for everything.

I don't approve of it being a lazy tool, but I like the idea of finding multiple perspectives of history, different pieces I can study and look at, hinting at something else I may discover later.

And I'm with you, I wasn't a fan of those DA2 conversations either. I mean, if you want to headcanon that Varric was wrong or lying, sure, but don't use it as an excuse to ignore stuff from the game.

I didn't like them besmirching the Shaperate of the Dwarves. The dwarves write important visits down in lyrium (I think) but somehow found it necessary to wipe away the existence of the Titans. So much so that there weren't even hints of titans in DAO or DA2. Unless the Titans are secretly evil, or the modern day dwarven descendents rebels against their benign creators, why the heck would they wipe such a major thing from their history? And wipe it so clean there weren't even myths? Or were Titans made up just for DAI DLC and that's why there isn't a hint of them anywhere else?

I don't find that to be "a different perspective." I find it irritating.

Anna Ch.‏ @annachernob
@patrickweekes I'm curious why there are no children in DAI (or MEA but mostly DAI). Time issue or some other reason?
I just felt that kids in DAO and that one in ME were a great tool to play with our emotions.

Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes
1) Requires unique art. Getting kid model might have cost us Qunari, for example.
2) letting player hurt children (or even showing violence to children happening) would get us taken off shelves in some countries.
2.5) Even if some random hack/bug allowed a kid to get killed, would hurt us legally. Safest course is to not have kids onscreen.
3) Because of (2), we don't often involve kids in our plots. As a result, not much call for them except as ambients, which are low priority.
4) We did have Morrigan's son, depending on your keep state.

Er, okay. But there's already political problems and war problems with the Shaperate - it's never presented as some perfect unassailable capture of history. The Hero of Fereldan has to actually help iron out some history with the Legion of the Dead and we unearth more lost details about the golems and their creation. There are also examples of history that's removed from the Shaperate... like houses that commit crimes (and their caste status) or King's that don't want embarrassments preserved. This is completely understandable, the dwarven kingdoms have been under assault by darkspawn for a very long time. In DA2, there's evidence of dwarven history (where we find the red lyrium idol) not in the Shaperate and then we go further into areas of lost history with the Titans and the above-ground dwarven kingdom remains in the Hissing Waste. 

I feel that this is one of the truths we'll get to eventually. It was introduced in the DAI DLC, but obviously has a big role to play still in future games.

There isn't a hint of them anywhere else...?

What do you think lyrium is? Do you think that DA devs have this crucial piece of lore and then just made up important parts of it in DAI on a whim?

That's not how world-building works.

Besides, the same could be said of the Veil, or rather lack of it in ancient world or who created it - there are hardly any hints of it, or they become obvious only after the reveal.

So there are tons of mysteries that the people seem to have forgotten - and given that we know of beings who can erase memories (there are even hints that something or someone made Titans forget how to wake up, hence they don't) there's no way of telling who or why and to what extent has more or less actively prevented people from finding out the truth.

But lyrium ISN'T a "magic rock with no secret plot meaning".

Its properties and importance have been made clear to us since DAO and it's been in DA2 when it was first suggested that the metal is alive and yes, just like the Veil there is lore on lyrium in major religions in Thedas - after all, the Chantry believes lyrium is the very stuff of creation itself.  We know its effects on living things, we know how it effects templars and so on, we know lyrium is a peculiar bridge between reality and Fade.

The fact that the Shaperate doesn't remember Titans doesn't mean that they indirectly don't remember things that are directly tied to it - first, there's lyrium. Then there's the Stone, which Titans have a direct connection to, to a point of being suggested that they may be one and the same. There are lyrium-addled dwarves that exhibit great bouts of creativity. There's Sandal, who - like Valta - seems to be able to use magic. There are whole sections of Deep Roads that are untouched by darkspawn and they have been present in the story at least since The Calling.

So... total gap? Yeah, not really. Maybe a gap in your knowledge of the lore, but not really the gap in the story per se. And my prediction is that the further we delve into the story, the more we realize the answer was right there under our noses. It's not the first time Bioware would do that.

Ugh -- for the upteemeth time, learning something new about history that you didn't know before =/= retconning or "changing" the lore. That's like saying real life history was "changed" or "retconned" when historians discovered that the Vikings encountered the new world before Christopher Columbus.

And as someone pointed out above -- there are numerous examples prior to DA:I of the dwarves outright deleting things from the Shaperate -- not just finding lost history. The dwarves meddle with their history in the Shaperate for political reasons all the time. You literally have an option to do it in the dwarf noble origin in DA:O.

The way Bioware presents in-game history is realistic.