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[Foolsfolly]

My.
God.

It's just as the Prophesies foretold!

[Sidney]

Foolsfolly wrote...

True but you're looking at it backwards. Archery was much the same, use in high volume to increase the odds of hitting something. Fire them over walls and into defenders behind lines, get them up on hills and have them rain arrows on enemy formations. So firearms wouldn't be looked down on because you'd use them in volume.

So you're looking at the early guns all wrong. They also punctured armor back then for a while. The term bullet-proof comes from blacksmiths who would make their armor and then shoot it with a pistol. The dent (but not break) would prove that it had been bullet-proofed.

You can still have guns appear in the setting and it not change everything over night. Progress was slow back then. Measured in hundreds of years. Progress today is measured in hours. I love being alive at this era in our history. It's so exciting! I'll die in a world vastly different to the one I was born in. That's not true for many people in history.

But that's off topic.

On topic, I can understand not wanting to have firearms and the like in the game. This is a swords and socery game and guns signal the coming of a new age. I guess Bianca's supposed to be that too since its a high-tech repeating crossbow (in a game without crossbows, but they were present in Ferelden). But I don't see it as that high-tech. Sun Tsu had repeating crossbows. Bianca's interesting, however, in the fact that I have no idea how you load her.

But there are other technologies they could explore without getting too far into gunpowder (although I want to see a qunari canon used against Thedas the next time the Qunari go to war). There was a Mythbusters episode where they built a Roman era repeating scorpion that was really accurate and its fire-rate would have been blindingly fast for its era.

I really want to see technology in Dragon Age move forward. I'd like to see some synergy with magic and science. I have many problems with the Fable games but I find their Industrial Revolution a little too familiar for a setting with magic and science.

I was trying to make a distinction about a player character wielding a "gun" of a very primitive kind. There accuracy matters because it would be used solo and not in mass. Bows were used in mass but they also could be accurate at an individual level so they have some utility in the small party size you have in DA*. A gun would be a loud noisemaker by comparison.  Guns also had very little, at any range, over arrows and bolts in terms of armor penetration because the rounds fired were very low velocity also soft round lead and not tempered iron and steel points. While armor was proofed vs bullets that wasn't because bullets were more dangerous than other projectiles it was just that by the time proofing was done firearms were common.


The utility of firearms to masses is obvious, the use by one ksilled warrior isn't obvious. I think you are right that a gun doesn't change everything. I think the timeline people forget is that the best technological era
to DA* to be set in isn't the middle ages of Richard the Lionheart but
really a late Middle Ages/Early Reniassance (14th-15th c)  period based on the elaborate armor and that period coincides historically with the development of firearms. I think having a Qunari with guns would work - a powerful leader with a bodyguard with guns would work because while the firearms might not be effective they are a major status sysmbol (the Qunari take great pride in their Gatlock).

At this point, no pun intended, gunpowder and firearms have become a Checkov Gun for this series where they've mentioned it now something should come of it.

[Foolsfolly]

I was trying to make a distinction about a player character wielding a "gun" of a very primitive kind. There accuracy matters because it would be used solo and not in mass.

In gameplay? You're over thinking it. The hidden gun in Assassin's Creed 2, the muskets, rifles, and blunderbus's in Fable 2, and even dwarven rifles in WarCraft are all just ranged weapons. The accuracy doesn't matter. You honestly think if they came up with a gun it would have terrible accuracy? There's no accuracy in either Dragon Age game. You aim at your enemy and fire.

It'd likely do a lot of damage and take longer to reload while bows will do less damage and take less time to reload.

[RagingCyclone]

Bumping because after playing MotA it seems there might already be firearms in Thedas. Some of the ghasts carry what look like arquebus' and the Duke even mentions he was expecting gunpowder from the Qunari. Not explosive powder...he says gunpowder which I thought was very interesting.

[Foolsfolly]

Well, we knew they had gunpowder. They have cannons.