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[Cromalic]

Everyone is always talking about if you attract the taint (come in contact with darkspawn blood) you will eventually go crazy and die. Becoming a grey warden requires you to drink the blood, and if you're naturally resilient to it you'll become a grey warden. If not, you'll die.

By the end of the campaign your companions have been covered in darkspawn blood at least a few dozen times, yet no one complains or even mention that it will one day kill them?

Well will it? Are they infected with the taint or what's the deal here? Is there even a taint? Did I miss something?

Someone please explain.

[David Gaider]

Maria Caliban wrote...
Or, it means that gameplay trumps lore.

This is essentially it.

Until rather late in the development process, we had a plan to take the possibility of party members developing the darkspawn taint. This would have possibly meant them facing the Joining at the Landsmeet... and while this might have been an interesting development it would also have been costly. Eventually we sadly put it aside, along with other things like lyrium addiction.

Insofar as getting the blight goes, it's never a guaranteed thing. Simply touching darkspawn blood does not automatically make you sick. You can get sick. In the case of your party members they just... don't. They're lucky. Not the ideal solution from a story standpoint, I know, but as is often the case when it comes to things such as gameplay and development cuts the lore is not always the deciding factor.

[David Gaider]

Taritu wrote...
if there's a DAO 2, I'd LOVE to see lyrium addiction.  I mean, the way I had Wynne and Morrigan swilling back lyrium...

So would I. The implementation we had was that, if the addiction developed, the use of lyrium had diminishing returns. You needed more and got less. The problem we encountered, as you point out, is that mages pretty much needed to drink lyrium potions. Addiction was practically guaranteed. So there needed to be some method of dealing with the addiction without rendering it pointless, and ideally some kind of story implication...

...and you can see why it suddenly became costly. If we could come up with some other implementation that was meaningful, I'd like to see return in the future -- it was something templar characters were meant to face as well as mages, after all. Suggestions would be welcome... though perhaps in another thread.

[David Gaider]

alexandros777 wrote...
And if lyrium is deadly to mages, why no lyrium tipped arrows?

Raw lyrium is deadly, not the refined lyrium you see in potions. If you could get raw lyrium, and somehow prevent the archer from being similarly affected by it, then yes -- that would be an effective weapon against a mage.

Unless it happens to be the wacky raw lyrium you encounter in one point of the game, which in fact restores a mage's mana rather than driving them insane. I think of that stuff as SPACE LYRIUM and try not to think about it.

[David Gaider]

Sandiel wrote...
I think you were on the right track, Mr. Gaider, with diminishing returns to an extent, but I'd cause it to lower your *natural* mana regen, eventually freezing it all together so you have to *rely* on lyrium to get your mana back. Basically, force the player to pace their lyrium use a little better in combination with their mana regen and risk 'addiction', when mana regen reaches zero and the mage becomes incapable of natural regen until 'camp'. Something like that. I think inhibiting the mages natural regeneration for the quick 'high' of lyrium is kinda thematic.

That's not a bad idea.