I'll admit, I find tranquility abhorrent and wouldn't (until this playthrough) force it upon anyone, but Erimond... this guy just annoyed the living hell out of me. Everything about Erimond annoys me, his voice, his appearance, his attitude *sigh*. And he also has the gall to taunt me as I'm judging him? F*ck morality and brand this guy, petty of me I know but his reaction was priceless, I could even predict a brown stain on his butt as he was being dragged away... now Josephine, undo this PR mess on the Inquisition's reputation, it's your job after all. As for the companions... Dorian, let's go kill some Venatori togheter and forget all about this! Blackwall, what did you think about that Grey Warden's artifact I brought from the Exalted Plains, shiny no? Cole, well since you can see things in our world to get ideas for your easter eggs, go haunt BioWare demanding a MMO-like approval quest so I can make you happy too =P.

The only thing I'm sad about this outcome is that you need to go chasing collectibles to get it... really BioWare? Collectibles quest so you can achieve an "optimal" resolution? ****** collectible halla statues which most gamers tend to dismiss as useless?(because in most games, plot wise, they generally are).

Okay, so I've gotten a new rig which is able to run Inquisition on Ultra.. this is how Syra Lavellan (posted before) looks like in a GTX 970:

Wait.. there is no Elven throne? (Haven't really browsed the thrones yet)

Spoiler

Anyone else found it highly interesting that apparently dragon form was reserved for the gods and their chosen? I wonder what relation the current high dragons have to the elven gods. Flemeth was apparently very keen on waking them all up, acccording to the comics. The dragon-form thing actually makes me fairly sure that the Old Gods of Tevinter are actually the forgotten ones of the elven pantheon. They apparently liked to dwell underground too, if you read the various ancient elven codex pieces. This theory actually makes sense of how Tevinter, an upstart human nation, was suddenly  able to catch up with the elves in terms of raw magical power. The Old Gods knew their ancient enemies were gone, taught the humans magic and sent them after the renmants of the elven empire as a final vengance on their enemies. They too went silent after a time, which i suspect is Sola's doing. He, too, apparently slept for a long time and i suspect that he was caught in his own trap.

 

Out of curiosity, how do you all get your screenshots? If you're PC gamers, do you Print Screen it? (Because mine doesn't work. I can successfully PrtSc anything, but when I tried with DA:O nothing happened, and when I tried with Inquisition it just pasted a black screen.) Does the game automatically take screenshots like DA:O did, upload it onto your Origin/EA account, then you access it that way?

 

I really want to share one picture, but so far haven't been able to. =(

 

Borderless Window works with the Print Screen key =)

Yeah, it does, but she doesn't match the look on her tarot card. I really like her tarot card.

Yeah, I hear you. MP tarot cards don't really seem to match the character models though.

If only the Keeper looked like that in DA MP.......

 

Actually.. the second image kinda resembles her fresh, default, look.

I did indeed include yours in my question ( ), but I didn't really mean the mental model to try to base your character on (I got plenty of real life examples too, don't you worry  ), I meant more like the actual fiddling of the sliders and toggles within the game to make the proportions of the eyes, nose, mouth, jaw, chin, overall face, etc look good. No matter how hard I try, something is always off. The eyes look terrible, the cheeks look terrible, the chin looks terrible; some individual aspects of the face look good but they look bad all together, I can't get the proportions right, etc.

 

Then I see other people's characters and, even without a mod, they manage to produce model perfect PCs; meanwhile mine are on the "meh" side of pretty. I know it sounds shallow, but if I have to stare at this character for dozens of hours, I'd like it to be one I like to look at, you know? 

 

Oh... just to complete my weirdness, I actually have a transparent film I attach to my PC monitor so I can measure face proportions and make pen marks where facial features should be in order to keep proportion (same thing I did when I worked with CGI), than I fight my way with the CC... I mean, proceed to draw the character in the CC. Needless to say, I spent a good deal of hours(which was a bit frustrating this time around with Inquisition constantly crashing on my PC) in this process, but I manage it =)

Is this really the BSN? The first time I see a thread here being derailed towards positive discussion, not that I’m complaining.

Hope you guys don’t mind me jumping in the middle of the conversation but what you both @Former_Fiend and @StreetMagic is something I can relate. You see, I love both books and games, albeit for different reasons. The former for the joy of digesting a good story in my own personal way, I’m free to picture characters/scenes the way I want. The latter for giving me the possibility of actually be on the story, to play a part in it instead being a passive observer, sometimes I don’t even care if the story isn’t particularly mind blowing, as long as I feel I’m part of it it, all is good. In this case I will even say that that I’m slightly biased towards games, and in them I tend to prefer games that are choice based and/or offer me the possibility of customizing the main character. I don’t really see much replay value in games that have a set plot and protagonist, I would be experiencing the exact same story again, which for me is just meh (I’m not one to reread/rewatch novels/films). Choice based games, even if said choices don’t particularly matter, at least make me feel as if the story is different on each. Don’t know why I said all this, maybe I just got a little inspired =P.

More on topic, the above paragraph is likely the reason why I think that gaming franchises should stick to being just that: gaming franchises. As much as I enjoy BioWare (or any developer really) enriching their franchise with external media like novels/films/comics/etc, the way they are tying all that is introduced in said external media into their core product – the games – is just unsatisfying.. to me anyway.

How do you guys make your Elven Inquisitors look so good? I just got this game, and have been pouring hours into character creation, but cannot seem to make my Inquisitor look halfway decent. ><

 

EDIT: Never mind. After a lot of fiddling I found one appearance that might work. It's just the nose I can't stand. Inquisition's noses suck, and no amount of tweaking has worked for me so far.

 

Don't know if you included my Elf Quizzie there but.. well, for my female characters I take measurements of some girly buddies I have IRL that I find attractive (creepy and I'm totally a freak.. I know) and then try to redesign their proportions in CC (or in modded presets). This game has seen success in that the default CC has just so much many sliders that I didn't need to mod (not that Frostbite would allow me to anyway).

They should have let you battle it for a while before the choice appeared, so we could feel how powerful it was then see the need for a sacrifice.

This.

Honestly, as much as I enjoy a good read and have the lore enriched, I hope BioWare puts a stop on making novels for their games, or any external media whatsoever. It’s just not working, and don’t believe it will ever do, they introduce interesting parallel plots and characters then fail at tying them to the plot in a satisfactory manner. Thus they end up with both lacking, which IMO is a disservice to the very lore they created in the first place. It’s something I think it’s born from the necessity of not alienating the fans who didn’t read the books/comics, they can’t assume all their players read them but have to slap those plots/characters in there since they literally went out of their way to introduce them, it’s tricky...

In ME we had Kai Leng and Kahlee Sanders, both are major characters in external media, but their representations in game are just… lacking, from the perspective of someone who didn’t read any external media until after playing ME 3 I had little reason to care for the recently introduced girlfriend of Anderson and also had a hard time figuring out why that over the top ninja assassin was suddenly my Shepard’s most bitter rival, or how I as a player was supposed to regard him as anything more than the almost forgettable(almost… he did kill Thane after all) Cerberus sub boss I would have to eventually face.

In Dragon Age I expected something similar, but with some improvements(one can hope right?) … but then came the ball at Halamshiral… just… lacking… again. Seriously on my first playthrough, which I was roleplaying a Qunari Inquisitor with a neutral stance on the whole matter, I had little reason to bother with anything else other than doing what I went there for: save Celene’s life. None of the three sides made a compelling case for themselves so I just went with was least likely to result in more chaos, which was just… bad, the whole thing felt like “hey I hope you read the novel, because we don’t have time to go in depth with the characters and their motivations”. Also, one has to go out of their way to see the civil war in its fronts, not to mention the completely forgotten Eluvian network or Felassan’s master and “clan”, again, lacking.

Having said that, the only way this could work is have any external media set in a very distant past or a very distant land, featuring characters that we’ll never be able to interact with, The Last Flight seems like a step on this direction so I may have to take back the bit I said in the first paragraph about this never working, but given recent history, I’m not exactly holding my breath.

You know, Vivienne could easily be in her late forties to early fifties, a lot of people appear a lot younger than they are. My mom for one is constantly mistaken for a woman in her early forties when she is in fact in her early fifties. In Viv's case one might also want to consider that her baldness may mask some aging signs like, say, greying hair.

ME3 wasn't really plotholed, it was just.. unexpected.. And certainly not what people wanted. I didn't care much, firstly since the rest of the game had been awesome, and secondly because it fit quite nicely into what I had speculated the Reapers were since ME1.

However, it wasn't the happy ending people had wished for, which resulted in the backlash.

It was however, still miles beyond the last mission in DA:I, which, as I said, was utterly pathetic.

Wasn't plot holed? lol? You get hit by a Reaper's cannon, you know, one that is "a stream of molten metal accelerated by a fraction of the speed of light", a thing that essentially shoots lightspeed lava at you meat and flesh creature.. and you survive with a stomach bleed, super duper consistent right... things just went downhill from there, but I'm sure there are people here who would be more than happy to point other plot holes. The themes dealt in the ending weren't bad, neither the idea behind the Reapers, but execution was just downright awful.

And, no offense, but since you're dropping the "it wasn't happy hence people hated it" card I'm not going further than this post in discussion with you(had enough of it 2 years ago).

The ending sequence actually begins at the Arbor Wilds. The final march, the speech you give to the advisors, which army you sift through to get to the objective(the Red Templars or the Venatori), which armies are fighting by your side(Mages or Templars, Celene's or Gaspard's army). Perhaps there would be less frustration if the devs moved the warning "game is about to end" to this mission and tied the final battle bit to right after you deal with Flemeth.. because all these things you mentioned are there OP, just not tied with the final mission label on them.

Also the original ending in ME 3 was better? Is there a starchild this time around? Or maybe Fadechild? If so, does this time he skips introductions and jumps straight to the RGB choices? I see how that can be worse..
(Sorry for the sarcasm, but it's kinda of a LONG stretch if you are putting DA I's ending on a lower standard than the vague and plot holed mess that ME 3's was.)

Considering how we have no other source, we sort of have to take Solas at his word. Roamingmachine does raise multiple good points on that regard, though. And yeah, I pretty much said that about the vallaslin in my post too.

tbh, there was a lot of people talking/complaining about stuff like that, so it wasn't really restricted to the trolls. At the very least we got to see the Chantry completely flip out and almost fall apart. Shame we couldn't just let it crumble.

Though, in all reality, that was mostly complaints about DA:I itself, not any particular faction. But then, people just love jumping to conclusions.

You know, in a sense the Chantry did crumble. In the end, it felt more like a new version of the Chantry is rising on the foundations of the old one, and 2 out of 3 options for Divine succession have at their core things that wouldn’t be allowed in the “original” Chantry (like a mage as the Divine or the Circles being disbanded). But I digress, talking about the Chantry isn’t the point of this thread.

As for Solas though, he kinda rubbed me off the wrong way with his whole “spirtz are goodiez, mortals are ebulz” vibe so I admit to be at least a little biased towards not trusting him. But having said that, I second what Roamingmachine said, some of these “slaves” may had willingly given themselves in servitude.

Yeah, I wasn't exactly glad to hear that from Solas either. All BW did was give the trolls more ammuntion.

As for the removing/keeping the vallaslin, what I did was think about how regardless of what the original meaning behind the vallaslin was, the meaning is different now and part of who my Inquisitor is as a person. I was tempted to let Solas remove the vallaslin, but the vallaslin is one of the defining characteristics of the Dalish. If my Inquisitor lost that, she'd have less of a connection to her clan and her past life.

I have no idea if it was mentioned in Masked Empire, but if it was, I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't have just been the trolls that said that Arlathan was a slavery empire.

Honestly, the same could be said about the Dalish- and often has. Just like the vallaslin revelation, it just gives the trolls more ammuntion.

And that's weird. They didn't call my Inquisitor shem'len. How did you go about moving through the Temple? I wouldn't be surprised if that had a hand in it.

I decided to do the rituals, despite Sera's whining about rituals being 'bad' and Blackwall saying that we needed to hurry because the Inquisition soldiers were fighting and dying. I was also fairly polite to Abelas.

I’d like to note again, Solas/Fen’Harel is hardly an unbiased source, being the god of rebellion and all. Taking him at face value on everything it’s pretty much like believing that a libertarian point of view of the Circle of Magi as the absolute truth. Besides, what the blood writing was in the Ancient days doesn’t change what it is today: a symbol of defiance, cultural identity, pride in heritage and perseverance in keeping a lore long forgotten.

As for the trolls, Gamer, I think it went both ways. BioWare has given us plenty ammunition too in regards of the Chantry, I mean… there were some common statements that certain trolls preached (not citing names, If you’re curious PM me) in pre-release talks:

1. The Inquisition is not going to be independent from the Chantry, as the latter is “funding the bloody thing”.

2. The game is not going to allow radical change, the end to the Mage-Templar will be regional, neither institution will likely be disbanded, regardless of who you side with.

3. Lord Seeker Lambert was the only sane person in Asunder (lol, can’t keep myself from laughing at this one). Trying to keep the cure from Tranquility from leaking in such a volatile situation.

4. The Inquisition is a specialized order, and like many of those, is going to be disbanded once the problem is solved.

Yet, what we have:

1. The Inquisition(mostly, if you disconsider noble donations) funds itself. Which is evident in the constant “Gather Coin” operations in the War Table. In fact, during the whole plot of the game, the Chantry is going on a steady downhill. Without a clear sucession it’s deadlocked, and this deadlock is crumbling the organization, if it wasn’t for the Inquisition supporting a Divine candidate, the Chantry would probably wouldn’t survive, schisms would have been inevitable. In this situation the Chantry is not in any state about funding a paramilitary organization, they are too preoccupied pulling themselves back togheter.

2. If you side with the mages, between the Templars who join Corypheus and are crushed in the Arbor Wilds, the Seekers who follow Lucius in joining the crazy nihilistic cult and the sane ones who drop their flags and join the Inquisition… I think its pretty safe to assume that in this scenario the Templar Order and the Seekers of Truth as we knew them are gone. Comb that with a Leliana who was made Divine, and the Circle of Magi, as we knew it, is also dissolved. I have to admit that I rather like that outcome, let’s try things in a different way, let the Inquisition remain as the much needed secular organization responsible for dealing with magical problems.

3. After doing Cassandra’s personal quest: turns out that Lambert was acting with his own motivations all along, keeping the cure a secret was more in line with preserving the Seekers dirty secret than any political backlash that could have resulted from revealing it to the Mages, this was just so delicious that I felt an urge to break out fom my media blackout just to make a troll thread on this, sadly, I’m too polite for that. Also, in this same quest, it was also refreshing to see that even the supposed incorruptible Seekers sell their own to demons and go off to join crazy cults, glad to see that one doesn’t need a staff and a robe for that.

4. If the narrated epilogue by Morrigan doesn’t end up retconned like the ones in Origins/Awakening than at the end of the game the Inquisition is among the most powerful and influential players in Southern Thedas, hardly disbanding.

Seeing this for me was so good that I can live with the ancient elves being potentially jerks.

A new perspective on a few things...

Spoiler

So i played the temple again and noticed a few things i hadn't before....
The priests all wear vallaslin. The supposed slave mark. Yet no chains, no masters and all are armed to the teeth. With our knowledge of the well, i think that the 'slavery' is not what we think it is.
I don't think people were bought or sold because what need do beings who are magic manifest for mass physical labor? I think what we have here is that the 'slavery' refers to the bond the elven gods forged with their priesthood that makes them literal instruments of their gods. Whether or not they gave themselves willingly (which i believe based on what Abelas says about duty. Also: actual, undeniable gods. Don't think it was viewed as much of a slavery) or were forced in to it, we do not know. What Solas says makes perfect sense regardless because of what he is and what he believes in. Food for thought

And as a happy sidenote, i noticed two elves talking about the temple in Skyhold (just down the stairs when you exit the main keep). An andrastian elf in a cool armor and a Dalish elf. One of them has their position seriously shaken and the other is excited about the discoveries. And the Dalish is not the one whose position is shaken

Just started my second playthrough and here she is:

 

 

Syra Lavellan (formely Syra Suranna), First to Clan Lavellan and presumed dead twin sister of the Hero of Ferelden.

@gay_wardens

I normally don’t bother entering in a discussion of this kind but you have somewhat inspired me. Seriously, is it so hard for you to grasp that different people have different tastes? That it’s perfectly fine if you dislike DA: I’s combat for whatever reasons you see fit, it’s not fine however to try and impose your own tastes and opinions over others, to demand that everyone share your passionate hatred for the combat aspect of DA: I. You mentioned that your point is to get the message across that BioWare screwed combat, tatics and level progression over… fine.. mission accomplished we get the message, we just don’t happen to agree with it (in my case not entirely at least) so please, for the sake of civility, don’t get so “stick up the butt” with this fact, will you? Show some respect to those who don’t share your opinion, no offense, but the way you are reacting and responding to people here.. it’s kinda hard not to imagine you a spoiled and entitled person.. or a fanboy.

Also, if we hate Origins, by what miracle we bought DA: I then? Does that even make any remote sense? Are we masochists? We must be, investing money and time in a franchise which it’s first title we hated lol.

Now regarding the lore. Of course Origins “has more lore” than 2 or Inquisition, as it will always have when compared to any sequel that is yet to come. As the first contact we have with the franchise (in most cases) it’s part of it’s friggin job to “have more lore” than it’s sequels, being the first in a planned franchise means that the game will be concerned with introducing us to as many elements of the lore as it can, a big showcase designed to captivate us into the big world they crafted for the franchise. Besides, if you admittedly didn’t get very far in the game, how in the friggin hell do you know if a game “has more lore” than another? I know I said the first entry is usually the one with the “most lore” , but sequels ofthen enrich aspects of the lore, and in this regard DA: I has done so impeccably.

All my characters are based in a core aspect of my own personality. They are, in a sense, all me while still being their own persons. This was a nice middle ground I've between roleplay and self insert.

Syra, which means acid in swedish. A testament to her acidic tongue an sarcastic responses to others, tried to find an elven name for her but didn't find something that felt particularly right to pronounce.

Not me, at least once Advanced Tactics Mod came out, then I rarely had to micromanage.

You know... it's not exactly fair to compare a game working with a mod to a game that isn't right? Tatically speaking, the vanilla version of Origins required its fair share of micromanagement.

No, just no.