Cho

I'm thinking on it, but I don't understand the real world correlation between minorities cutting themselves and gaining power.

Depends on the situation.

If you're referring to pic related, they're both idiots who need a good beating and some talking to.

Then why does Hawke not give one blueberry fuck about this fragile Veil?
And the super fragile dream walker mage gets one demon encounter once.

They're just dumbfucks who turn to a magic that kills them and replaces them with a demon. Instead of, oh I don't know.. THEIR FUCKING SPECIALITY GRAVITY MAGIC.

Oh, and apparently everyone knows that Kirkwall has this magical tear in it so they shove the mages into the point of the most psychic screams in the middle of the city instead of literally anywhere just outside the city walls. Get the mages to help building and make an academy.
But no, Operation:Tempting Fate it is.

And while I'm at it, blowing up the Chantry was a fucking stupid thing to do as well.
Why not blow up the Templar buildings? Why not assassinate Meridith? You could go full martyr and kamikaze her.
But instead he nukes the kindly pope and his dali lama chums so they can't make peace. And he was never on a time limit. He had fucking years to come up with a better plan.

Templars were the worst.
>"Mages are inherently dangerous therefore it is our sacred right and duty to treat them like shit, thereby ensuring they will lash out and thus justify even worse treatment of them."
Imagine the Templars as being anti-gun activists and the mages being gun-owners (albeit gun owners who are physically incapable of putting their guns down).
>The mages [gun owners] argue that most of them are perfectly normal people who actively oppose violence and never hurt anyone.
>MAGIC [guns] ARE EVIL! YOU HAVE MAGIC [guns] THEREFORE YOU ARE EVIL
>Maybe if you stopped treating us so badly we could work together to come up with creative solutions to the problem of a small number of violent mages [gun owners]?
>NO! MAGIC [guns] IS EVIL AND YOU MUST ALL BE IMPRISONED AND ABUSED FOR THE GREATER GOOD!
>Fine. If you won't listen to reason and grant us our basic rights then we'll fight for them.
>SEE! SEE! WE WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG! MAGIC USERS [gun owners] CAN'T BE TRUSTED! KILL THEM ALL! TAKE AWAY THE MAGIC [guns] FOR THE GREATER GOOD!

Anders was a much better character in Awakening. Why must Bioware ruin everything?

Nice strawman, too bad it doesn't make any sense. When a gun owner comes to your home, he can leave his gun at the door. A gun owner doesn't have a risk of randomly going psycho and killing a lot of people, because he got possessed by demons. Gun owners never tried to usurp God. There is no nation in the world run exclusively by gun owners, who LITERALLY enslave regular Joes.

Templars were right.

Because then there would've been three happy/snarky people to bring along, and that would have made DA2 too cheerful.

To be fair there's very little evidence of the Maker in game. It's likely the Black City was cursed and wretched before the Tevinters invaded it.

Don't need Demon possession to go nuts.

Because Bioware drank the Tumblr Koolaid, and they switched priorities from interesting stories to representing every possible kind of minority and the whiny bullshit that goes along with it. DA: Inquisition was the worst.
>Disproportionately high number of homosexuals
>A transgender who is not being slapped about the head and told to start acting like a woman.
>"Gay conversion therapy.... but with magic"
>ethnic minorities galore in a setting where most people never travel more than a few miles from where they were born.

> It's likely the Black City was cursed and wretched before the Tevinters invaded it.
The only real evidence we have is Cory, who specifically says "We were tricked, it was always Black".

True, maybe. But I'm pretty sure that magisters weren't darkspawn monstrosities before invading the Golden City.

He also says something along the lines of "I saw the throne of the gods, and it was empty". Unless it's some bullshit metaphor, this has some implications. Of course, Corypheus is absolutely bonkers, a serial liar and nothing he says should be taken without a grain of salt.

More likely, the magisters investigated the black citadel and we're corrupted by it.

I've never played it, but

>>"Gay conversion therapy.... but with magic"

What do you mean by this?

Dude, modern RPGs are made for a whole bunch of minorities that exist IRL.

Why wouldn't you include NPCs of all skin tones to cater to people?

Do you really want Blackmen the PC to be a special snowflake?

He's literally just a black guy.

>Of course, Corypheus is absolutely bonkers, a serial liar and nothing he says should be taken without a grain of salt.
It all kind of adds up. With what we know now, the Blight existed before the Magisters went to the City, because one of the elven gods went to the Void and fucked it up for everyone.

One of the gay characters subplots is that his father tried to use magic to make him straight and that's the big point of conflict between them, and you have to convince them to reconcile.
Gay conversion is stupid but when you're as much of a stereotype as this guy I can see why his father tried.

There's a Very Special Episode in the game, where your very, very gay companion tells you that his father tried to ungay him with blood magic - basically, the evilest, the corruptest form of magic that you need to consort with demons to know. You then either try to persuade Dorian to talk with his father and accept his apologies, or to break all ties with him.

It felt even weirder than this scene.

So, DA:II had a metric fuckton of flaws, and DA:I wasn't exactly spotless either.

Did Origins do anything wrong or is it objectively best game?

Origins is the best game, and I've replayed it numerous times. It has the best companions, the best main plot, the best quests, the best everything. Graphics and animations look kinda dated, but that's about it.

>Did Origins do anything wrong or is it objectively best game?
Origins has it's quirks, but it's the best system because it's far more open-ended. DA2/DAI do a few things right, but both make such massive steps back that it hurts.

If they wanted to include minorities then they should have included more travel to exotic locales. Considering that most of the game is set in not!England and not!France, there aren't that much opportunities for minorities to turn up without forcing them to be there for the sake of "muh diversity"

Maybe.

No.
/thread

>Orgins
>Best
DA series was never stellar. Every one of them is flawed. But since DA 2 was my first, I'm a bit bias though I acknowledge its flaws.

God that was so forced. I mean i know Bioware is on the progressive bandwagon, but did they have to make the god damn Qunari the most trans friendly race?

Speaking of France, Orlais seems fucking ridiculous to me. Everyone is wearing this incredibly cheesy masks, and everyone is openly a vile schemer and talking about it. It's comical.

If they wanted to feature a melting pot of different cultures, they should have set it in Not-Italy or Not-Turkey. Of course, that would require being able to model and texture things in a style that ISN'T boring and English.

Honestly, that whole conversation just seemed a little unnecessary. You've already had a chance to talk with Krem by that point, and Krem's status is just another thing. No hangups, no real need to go "look at this, look at this", it just is.

And later, they go and do that.

> There's no option to tell Krem that she should stop pretending to be a man.

Going to Orlais for the first time is like stepping out of "grim dark world that is suspiciously less grim dark than it was two games ago" and stepping into the monty python tour of French culture.

>Iron Bull Greatly Disapproves

In general, no, but there are exceptions to every generality. You can't reduce such a complex question to a 'yes' or a 'no' without considering all the factors, and even then you're going to have trouble unless you have a mind capable of, say, quantifying the value of a human life without that very quantification impacting your decision.

But they're playing the Game, user. Like this cunt.

> implying I care
During my second walkthrough, I've kept my inquisition pure of degeneracy. Only let Dorian, Vivienne and Blackwall join, the rest got the boot.

Unless you haven't noticed Anders is freaking dumbfuck. If pretty sure if he told anyone about his actual plans they would shank the fade out of him, even the mages.

>pure of degeneracy
>a homo, a black woman, and a liar
>pure

The idea Bioware was trying to hit there was "When you treat a group like criminals, they'll live down to your expectations." If a mage as good as Bethany gets treated like she's probably a blood mage then that's all anyone else is going to do.
It's like saying "What are you going to do, shoot me?" And being surprised when you actually get shot.

>Orlesians
>Tevinters
> pure of Degeneracy

>I've kept my inquisition pure of degeneracy
They why did you let daddy issues, dildo tester Dorian in?

>dildo tester dorian

Pity you have to let his plan go ahead. Instead of, I dont know.. "listen here you lil' shit, dont be coy with me. We've killed dragons and shit together and you've bitched every little problem you had. I've trusted you with my life as a healer and now you're hiding this super secret thing? You want me to distract a priest? What is this shit man?"
>"I want to blow the changtry and all the innocents inside to gain public approval for mage rights"
"You're a real fucking special one arent you. Sure that isn't a fade spirit of dumb fucking ideas squatting in you? We're not fucking doing that. Now help me kill more random street thugs."

You CAN not help Anders. He then does it by himself, apparently never needing your help at all, because DA2 is stupid.

That's still letting it go ahead in my mind, because you can't goddamn pry the information out of him ahead of time.

>Time to commit all of these crimes against humanity for the benefit of mankind

I mean it really depends on the extent in any case, as well as how delusional the person behind it is. "All I have to do is kill these 10,000 people and it will result in a utopia society" situations don't exactly come up...well ever.

It takes a certain level of what I would consider villainous arrogance to think that the ONLY way to create whatever this fantastical end goal is is to commit countless atrocities. And then if the "do evil for the sake of good" person is wrong? What if it turns out sacking the village to stave off the invasion didn't actually work, what if it was the plans of the real villains all along? What if there was another way all along but the person was so driven to perform the "pragmatic" choice that they didn't notice it?

It's really easy to say the ends justify the means if there's some kind of absolute certainty that the means will lead to the ends, but that's not really always the case.

The prophecy says that this child will grow up to be the greatest terror in the world. But are prophecy's always right? Surely if they are then you can't even kill the child, any attempts to would violate the prophecy and your blade would turn. If you could kill it then prophecy wasn't exactly set in stone so you killed a child for possibly no reason.

The folks that tout the "but its for the greater good" thing almost always make grand assumptions about what the greater good is and that these actions will necessarily lead to it.

And I mean it all depends on the situation. Sure there are plenty of times where the ends justify the means, but its a very slippery path to try and think like that all of the time.

Wasn't Anders Vengeance's bitch by then? I recall a Rivalry Hawke trying to get Anders to stop, only for Vengeance to tell him/her off.

He was already an abomination by the first act, and the road was already set.

That, or Bioware loves getting a hard-on for railroading the shit out of any plot. Like The Arrival DLC.

I'm not Vengeance's friend. I'll happily fuck that wanker up.
Straight up willing to have my Hawke fight Anders to beat the information out of him. Hell, I'll throw him to the Templars if that's what it'll take.

I'm okay with some sub par storytelling in my DLC. Not my climactic main storyline build up d ending

He wasn't necessarily vengance's bitch at that point, if I recall he could even have been "fixed" back to justice by that point in the story.

It was anders at the wheel for sure, looking back at the first two acts there are some hints that he's kind of awful. The biggest of which is when he approves of you returning fenris into slavery, you realize then that his whole freedom first and no oppressing mages shtick only applies to people he likes.

Oh yeah, what was even up with Merril's story? Something about a demon mirrors and then she kills her mentor and feels sad and that's it?

A Pride demon was fucking with her and convincing her to fix the eluvian so she could be possessed when she finished.
Then her mentor took the demon herself so she could be killed.

>There is no nation in the world run exclusively by gun owners, who LITERALLY enslave regular Joes

That's kind of what America was for a while

You mean apart from all this military junta's and tinpot dictatorships.

I seem to recall doing everything I could once to stop her building that damn mirror too, while hatefucking her as my reaver.
She still killed her mentor because she HAD to consort with demons to build a cursed mirror instead of literally anything else, ever.

At this point, I'm assuming that the Maker's gonna be another Elven god. I wouldn't mind as much, but it feels like most of the mysteries of this world have the answer of "elves lol".

See I always got the impression that both the mages and the templars in pretty much every game were supposed to be equal shades of fucking wrong.

Like they both have okay ideas but are absolute shit about implementing them, and both sides are full of crazy people and easily influenced by all sorts of evils.

> hatefucking Merril
Literally the only correct romance in the game.

If that end would be having that final fight with meredith then yea, cause it was fucking awesome. One of the best boss battles in vidya

Reaver was fun, too. Stacked haste enough that my Xbox started chopping due to Hawk's chopping.

Anders was just Alistair 2.0 in Awakening. Dragon Age 2 actually made him a unique character, even if he was a zealous idiot. And hell, the zealous idiot thing had justification.

I'd actually like the Maker to be genuinely divine if he's ever revealed.

The Templars are right to subjugate the Mages because a moderate lapse in judgement when dealing with demons is enough to turn any Mage into a town-destroying threat. However, they're wrong because every single Templar higher-up is a violent retard who thinks that lobotomizing anyone with a hint of magic in their blood is the only way to keep the civvies safe.

The Mages are right because, so long as they can keep themselves sane and wary of what's out for their sweet, sweet souls the chances of possession are miniscule. They're wrong because literally the only solution most Mages seem to find to avoid being oppressed by the big mean Templars is to go batshit insane and turn into town-destroying monsters.

Alistair was also a better character.

You mean, an excuse. They decided to make a completely different character, but with a face we'll recognize, so we won't hate him from the beginning. There was a moment or two when the original Anders suddenly emerged for a few seconds (like when he talked to Alistair), and it felt really strange.

Trust me, I genuinely want that. Just once in these kinds of games, I'd like something like the Maker to be a genuine deity.

>the Maker was not real
>the Chant of Light has made him real
>he is the Eternal Song of life and love
How bad a plot twist would this be?

Pretty bad, the old "belief makes things real" trope was good, but i find it pretty overused nowadays.

I get the feeling the Maker exists, but he really is just this sort of non-interventionist creation figure. He makes the world, and the things in it, but that's about as far as it goes.

Was she neutral?

Sometimes. Has to be pretty overwhelming though.

Supposedly, devs say they want to not confirm or deny the Maker is real.

Even her fans would call her chaotic neutral at best, I say neutral evil. How many people died because of her greed and stupidity?

I prefer hatefucking Merrill, then kicking her out of bed when she talks about love, then turning Isabela into a pureslut.
Gotta keep the Hawke blood human and all.

Chatoic neutral at. She did what she wanted. Sometimes she helped people, sometimes she didn't.
Like that time she purposefully caught an STD, to give it to a town official, to send him to Anders to get it cured on the promise that he stop trying to kick Fenris out of the mansion he was squatting in.

She did cause a whole lot of people to die (and nearly a whole hell of a lot more) for simple greed, and is pretty unrepentant about the whole thing.

If she's neutral she's a dark and irresponsible neutral.

>that fucking plan
And that's how we realised she was a PC

>literally the only solution most Mages seem to find to avoid being oppressed by the big mean Templars is to go batshit insane and turn into town-destroying monsters.

>go to the circle to save them
>effortlessly slaughtering wave after wave of Templars
>suddenly the first enchanter says fuck it and turns into a giant corpse Daemon for no fucking reason

Man this thread is making me look back and think.

Everyone in Dragon age II was an asshole. I mean with the exception of Varric and Aveline and like 1 of the templars everyone is an asshole. Bethany isn't I guess but she would have to be a character to be an asshole.

See though, she didn't steal the Tome to incite war.
She just wanted to sell it because ANOTHER pirate was telling her to get it or lose her head because she freed a ship of slaves. That's just greedy and focused on herself. Can't get more chaotic neutral than that.

Orsino was a dick. He knew about that psycho blood mage that killed your mother, and didn't say anything because he didn't want Templars being angry at him.

God that pissed me off so much.
Orsino is the archmage, the First Enchanter, the pinnacle of what good mages are able to accomplish.
What does he do? Turn himself into a giant daemon to fight the templars.
AND THEN IT DOESN'T EVEN FIGHT THE TEMPLARS AND I HAVE TO FUCKING TAKE CARE OF IT!

Yeah but I feel like if I had a chaotic neutral rogue who stole something which led to a war, then when later confronted about it basically went "not my problem yolo" and got upset at you for even implying that they should feel bad or maybe give the thing back I'd say that's at least a few ticks towards CE.

Why would a fantasy world have to conform to the direct real life counterparts? Why can't Orlais be the melting pot of foreign cultures?

Because from what we've seen of Orlais, either Bioware tried to do that and failed hilariously, or Bioware isn't even trying anymore and this fantasy world makes no sense.

Yeah, I seem to recall that Anders basically corrupted Justice with his angst and that DA2 writing completely ruins both of the characters.

Well, sure, that's fine, but a fantasy counterpart does not have to copy its real world counterpart exactly. Otherwise, you may as well just have it take place in a historical fiction setting.

Man, that part pissed me off so much. It was such a fucking retarded moment, it made no sense at all and it just felt like the game punished me for not joining the other retarded faction.

And if they live down to those expectations, they give the people who treated them that way in the first place justification to continue doing so, because now they're a legitimate threat. This also has the wonderful side effect of turning previous sympathizers against them as well.

The templars were pigeonholed into the rile of the "oppressive" authority, but considering how chill the mages were about demon summoning and human sacrifice and outright terrorism at times, it's hard to fault the templars for doing their jobs and trying to keep people safe.

Neither group was done particularly well, but between the two of them, the templars were closer to being good guys than the mages ever were. It's just too bad the mages were written as the "good" choice.

It was more that
>Oh man we made 2 bosses and want to show them both off
>Better contrive a way for you to fight both no matter which path you take.

Satan confirmed in liking hatefucking, which is something I can get behind.