Two things:
1.) Posting here will be slow-to-nonexistent this week. However, I'm excited to announce that it's because I will be doing some guest-posting at Alyssa Rosenberg's blog, Tuesday through Friday. I've got one or two ideas brewing / drafts a-going already but if you've got something you'd love to see me take to her audience, speak up. :) (Oh, also, hello new readers! Welcome.)
2.) Your Critic has a voice! And although I am of course sure it sounds nothing like me, in actuality I suspect it rather does. You can hear me and several brilliant writers and editors of The Border House in the inaugural episode of their podcast! This episode focuses on romantic arcs and diversity issues in BioWare's Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises. To have a listen, clicky clicky.
Looking forward to your posts there. Congrats.
ReplyDeleteI would have suggested the topic of the podcast.
I am so listening to that podcast after the little one goes to sleep!
ReplyDeleteWill you be posting links to your guest entries here? Just curious because that's how I tend to remember--you know, by having someone else do it for me. ;)
I'll probably do a single round-up of them all over the weekend or at the beginning of next week. :)
ReplyDeleteThis guy. I don't have the hots for Tali. She reminds me of my niece, who is four.
ReplyDeleteYeah, something about the very deliberate ingenue with which she's written is a huge turn-off as far as I'm concerned. Although in ME1 (definitely not ME2) I thought the same about Liara.
ReplyDeleteI do plan on listening to the other 50 minutes of the show ASAP. But I've heard enough to say you have a lovely voice. Also, I remember that really weird moment when Red Jenny Shepard asked Liara and the human dude in ME1 "Wait, can't I just bang both of you?" with a weird sleazy/cheesy expression. That was weird.
ReplyDelete(I don't remember why that was an option)
ReplyDeleteProbably unnecessary, but I like that game so why not answer: Because his rival to the throne, should you put her there, is much more ruthless than Alistair and doesn't want a problem 5,10,etc years down the road.
Alternative answer: Because Bioware is mean.
Oh that's right. I thought maybe because he got too mouthy about bringing Logain on board. Anyway, hard to believe he didn't see it coming when I was 1. evil and 2. dating Ms. Evil.
ReplyDeleteInteresting FWIW, I'm pretty sure Alistair-as-king won't let you kill Anora.
ReplyDeleteWhy would anyone want to kill Anora? She's not Alistair. She's not even Oghren.
ReplyDeleteIf you want a malleable king without someone hanging around who is virtually guaranteed to start some shit later. Let's say you are Dwarven Noble. You kill Bhelan, leaving the old guy on the dwarven throne. He's not gonna last long, and when you personally kill the Archdemon and survive - like no other Grey Warden has ever done because you had a little fun w/ Morrigan the night before - you get yourself reinstated into Dwarven society as a living Paragon. Old Guy decides its time to retire early (with or without encouragement from you) and you take over the Dwarven Kingdom. Meanwhile, your BFF who is used to taking orders from you is running things above ground in Fereldan.
ReplyDelete...and if Bioware could find a way to make this work it would be awesome.
Ha! That's exactly what my Warden tried to pull! Well, at the very least, I assume my bastard son will take over the Dwarven throne down the line. (The one who's not a demonspawn, that is.) Only problem with this plan is that Arl Eamon will be fighting you for the privilege of holding the puppet strings.
ReplyDeleteI think Eamon is by and large an honorable man, which is exactly the kind of person one looks for in a political rival.
ReplyDeletePoint taken, and pithiness admired!
ReplyDeleteIt's really too bad that neither of the DA games let you do stuff like this. I mean, I suppose your character's internal motivations can be whatever they like, but if you don't get to interact with the consequences of your decision, what's the point? Which, btw, is the biggest failure - or perhaps biggest missed opportunity - of DA2's time-frame.
ReplyDeleteWell, I think it's a genuinely difficult programming problem, for the very reason that you can't always detect a character's internal motivations. I think Bioware wants to do this, as evidenced by DA2 and the Mass Effect series, but it's just very, very hard to do well if you're depending on a finite set of story flags. Accounting for a variety of character strategies can lead to exponential growth in variables to keep track of, and that almost inevitably leads to bugs and weird behavior. I don't believe we'll see a major leap forward in this regard until people figure out how to simulate aspects of the storyline in a meaningful way.
ReplyDeleteOh absolutely. But I think if they start from the ground up planning something like Act 1; Act2a & Act2b; Act3i ... vi; they could make it work if they wanted. The dialogue/follower system they developed for DA2 makes me think they can handle it. The way to handle geometric progression is to have fewer flags. More meaningless flags doesn't do anything. Or rather, doesn't do anything I find interesting.
ReplyDeleteI think we'll have a better idea of the possibilities of something like this after ME3. There's no need to do a sequel (or 2), so in theory they could have many, many different kinds of consequences. I hope it's more than the just DA:O's army recruitment version 2.