269 réponses à ce sujet

[joacho]

As speculation about DA3 grows, I would like to add my experiences to the fold.
My qualms with the Mage Templar war portrayal is that it is still too black and white. Mages want freedom whilst Templars use religous ideology to suppress them. This would naturally lead to the mages revolting, the whole theme of DA2. My problem was, both in DA2 and Origins, that I could not make myself to support the templars when such conflicts arose without completely overiding my moral conscience's attempts to choose the opposite faction. And even after choosing the templar option, I could not decieve myself into thinking that I made the right choice.

Unless Bioware wanted this moral unambiguity on purpose (events of DA2 such as 'All that remains' questline and 2nd to last boss fight suggest otherwise), I would suggest that the writers should spend good time in developing this moral undilemma into a dilemma.

Until now we haven't seen the nature of magic that everyone fears. The Circle quest in Origins left little impression on me for some reason (possibly to do with the small number of antagonists and the lack of personable loss). What I would like to see is perhaps:

• Susceptibility of mages (even good, well meaning ones) to demons without any confrontations
• A sense of the potential for widespread disaster through use of magic (accidental or otherwise)
• More believable (and hence relatable) antagonist mages who haven't lost their minds or are crazy
• More personal losses (or betrayals) as a result of magical accidents or misuse
• An effectively communicated fear of magic in the commonfolk
• More encounters with templars who have nothing against mages and in fact want to better everyones lot through cooperation  

DA2 took little steps in the right direction, but it still wasn't enough. Mr Gaider in Asunder took considerable steps to solving this problem. What I would like to see is strong justifcation for the circle (not the Templar oppression) in DA3 which would leave the player willing to give up their love and right of freedom in order to serve the greater good.

Further thoughts on the Templar Mage morality are welcome. 

[Takamori The Templar]

Sorry DA2 failed really hard in that aspect.
It was a constant propaganda of how the Templars are the medieval ****s and we would call the final solution*cough* right of annulment.

They need to work both sides. as mages are living beings, templars too, so they are susceptible to emotions and decisions too.

[esper]

There is no moral dilemma for me. It all boils down to if you can surpress a minority so that the majority can gain a sense of security.

The answer to that question is undoubtley: 'No!' for me and no matter what bioware does and how the mages is portrayed it will not change.

[joacho]

Takamori - I agree with your second point which is the need 'to work both sides'. However I do believe that DA2, along with a lot of templar propaganda of right of annulment (which incidentally was the view of the Knight Commander and one or two of her officers) it did not eclipse the fact that there were people like Thrask and Cullen who did not share in this propaganda whole heartedly. In Origins there was just the Circle quest which provided insight and the general templar view was annulment. My viewpoint is that DA2 attempted to provide arguments for and against circles but these arguments were not convincing enough to override a persons love of individual freedom.

esper wrote...

There is no moral dilemma for me. It all boils down to if you can surpress a minority so that the majority can gain a sense of security.

The answer to that question is undoubtley: 'No!' for me and no matter what bioware does and how the mages is portrayed it will not change.

Fair enough. However I would like your honest answer to this: consider that in a town of 1000 folks there is 1 person who has some dangerous knowledge (e.g. how to construct a bomb, biological weapon, location of some item of universal desire). You, the mayor or leader, know that there is at least one person in the town intent on getting this knowledge for mischief and personal gain. You also do not know the intent of the knowledable person. Are they good, strong willed, able to resist torture, opportuinistic, selfish? How would you respond to this?

To my mind there are 3 options:
a) let them be, risking the lives of 998 potentially innocent people;
place the knowledgable person under house arrest (i.e. keep them within your eyesight at all times- Templar routine)
- minimising risk of town being destroyed 
c) kill the person and thus ensure the safety of the town

Obviously this example is not watertight, for example in DA the bomb/weapon is not an independent object from the mage, it is the mage.  

[coles4971]

I think if Bioware perhaps made use of some of the lore regarding the mage fraternities in DA2, and perhaps allowed the player to come across some isolationists who maybe had somehow made their way to Kirkwall or the surrounding area and were trying to live a normal life and weren't using their magic it would be pretty cool. Then maybe at some point some isolationists get arrested, so this would be 1-0 to the mages, but then there could even be another moment where Hawke & co. are travelling wherever and you're stopped by a bunch of templars who are able to identify you as a mage (and any other mages in your party), but you just happened to come across some more lenient guys in the order, so by some miracle they promised not to report you as long as you don't cause trouble in ... wherever. So then that would be 1-1 to both sides.

And then of course you'll get crazies and extremists, and then some neutrals in between, but it would have been great if by the end of the game we'd seen a mixture of kindness, neutrality and craziness which both made us feel for the plight of the mages but at the same time not want to burn the templar order to the ground because from what we've seen, it's shown that they're actually needed to keep the order of things, so when things spiral out of control at the end of Act 3, it would be like damn, who do I choose? Rather than how I felt which was just "oh my God why can't I just leave this place everyone is insane".

There were a few quests which definitely did achieve this (best served cold was great, mages and templars working together, but then you end up just having to obliterate the entire thing going on ...), but that balance between good, crazy and neutrality wasn't hit in DA2 so I just left it finding everyone crazy.

[LolaLei]

It would have been nice to get a better sense of where the Templars were coming from because I found it difficult to sympathise with them when all you hear in the Gallows is how the mages were being raped and abused etc. The Templars would go on about how mages were dangerous etc but you only ever saw these mages resorting to blood magic etc as a direct result of being squeezed too tightly or being abused.

The ratio of sympathetic Templar characters were greatly out numbered by the amount of sympathetic mage characters. The only real ****ty thing a mage done that made me question siding with the mages was when Hawke's mother was killed by one, but even he was sympathetic because he had been driven mad due to the loss of his love, so you can kinda see the motivations even if you don't agree with it.

[Huntress]

What many do not undestand is that every dagger has two side.
1) Mages are susceptible to demons, they are always under attack by them, some learn how to block them out for a while others use demons as alies or if too weak it get killed and turned to a demon. Mages can heal people, create salves and in war they are a formidable force at long range. demons can possess dead bodies, animals and trees.

2) Since people start thinking about the future dooms day was BORN, Tevinter mages has been without templars for many years more than 800 years they have been using blood magic and yet the world has not being consume by demons or their live hasnt ended, at the contrary, they still use blood magic, consort with all type of demon and more importantly they are 1 of the causes of why the qunari haven't taken over Thedas.

3) "Mages of old were probably the cause for the darkspawn".. I have a problem with this
When did the mages of old enter the golden city? For how long have the dwarves fought the Darkspawn and where did the darspawn first appear? when did Andraste heard the Maker voice? ( I thought she was a child when she first heard His voice) Did she heard the maker voice before or after the dwarves started to lose thaigs?
This things are all out of Order so pin pointing the order of this things is impossible why? It is said that the Dwarves impire was respected by it size and because their people are formidable in battle, so sharing information about their tunnels or what ever was going on down there was out of the question. mean: we will never know if the dawrves were fighting darspawn before or after the tevinter mages used the mirror. Even if a message was writen in the wall of the exact time and date of that first encounter many of today's dwarves wouldn't be able to undestand exemple: bartren not knowing the meaning of the marking in the wall in the deeproad.

3) Magic is dangerous even for older mages so accidents will happen, is pron to occuer more often within the Youth and inexperienced.

4) more betrayel? What for? My Hawke couldn't kill Sebastian for leaving the group before the battle, she was in charge and she let him go? right.. next! Loosing sibling at the start of the game was bad, losing a parent in the middle of the game was worst, why do some people make it to be Hero's? they are the ones able to stop the final blow, stop the killers before it finished his plans and would have slaped,kicked and bitten the Divine until she got some sense in her head, most importantly Sebastian wouldn't have left, a dagger would have being in his brain the moment it turned his back to my hawke if rogue/warrior, crushing prison would had made an appearance if mage.

5) people fear what they don't understand: it will be very difficult to explain to a person from the year 400 BC that a television set is not a magical device and the radio is not god's voice. If you are not use to work with this elements to you they'll seem unnatural and "something terrible is going to happen because of it." And is true, the televion could explode and kill anyone in the room, anyone using a radio can spread fear and could be the cause of WW3.

More encounter with less crazoids? I agree, for real why only 99% of the mages are crazy and only 2 templars? come on balance people, balance..

[GodWood]

esper wrote...
There is no moral dilemma for me. It all boils down to if you can surpress a minority so that the majority can gain a sense of security.

The answer to that question is undoubtley: 'No!' for me and no matter what bioware does and how the mages is portrayed it will not change.

QFT

If a small group of people have a deadly virus that can spread to other members of the community you don't quarantine them, you let them infect everyone else.

Egalitarianism!

[the_one_54321]

joacho wrote...
Mages want freedom whilst Templars use religous ideology to suppress them.

Yeah well...

This issue is black and white. Or rather, black and black. It is a matter of only choosing sides. Each side is dangerous to the other by definition and outright conflict is inevitable unless both sides are willing to cooperate. Which, it would seem that many of the mages would rather die than cooperate.

There is no reason for either side consider any need of the other side, except as a means of avoiding conflict. Mages are significantly dangerous to the rest of the population if not supervised in their studies. The Chantry does force them into concentration camps for the safety of the general populace.

[GodWood]

Concentration camps where they're fed, sheltered, educated, able to work, make friends, practice their abilities and eventually aquire prestigious positions.

Certainly a better living than the majority of the population of Thedas.

[esper]

GodWood wrote...

esper wrote...
There is no moral dilemma for me. It all boils down to if you can surpress a minority so that the majority can gain a sense of security.

The answer to that question is undoubtley: 'No!' for me and no matter what bioware does and how the mages is portrayed it will not change.

QFT

If a small group of people have a deadly virus that can spread to other members of the community you don't quarantine them, you let them infect everyone else.

Egalitarianism!

It is not a virus, not even a sickness,. If someone came down with a deadly virus, we would qurentine them, but we would also have doctors working on a cure 24/7.

Magic is not a sickness, it is a gene that makes you different, it is not a crime and does not rob your of your free will, nor spread to none mages.

[the_one_54321]

Arguably, possession very definitively robs you of your free will. And has been specifically described to actively seek to spread to other mages. It's in the codex.

[esper]

joacho wrote...

Takamori - I agree with your second point which is the need 'to work both sides'. However I do believe that DA2, along with a lot of templar propaganda of right of annulment (which incidentally was the view of the Knight Commander and one or two of her officers) it did not eclipse the fact that there were people like Thrask and Cullen who did not share in this propaganda whole heartedly. In Origins there was just the Circle quest which provided insight and the general templar view was annulment. My viewpoint is that DA2 attempted to provide arguments for and against circles but these arguments were not convincing enough to override a persons love of individual freedom.

esper wrote...

There is no moral dilemma for me. It all boils down to if you can surpress a minority so that the majority can gain a sense of security.

The answer to that question is undoubtley: 'No!' for me and no matter what bioware does and how the mages is portrayed it will not change.

Fair enough. However I would like your honest answer to this: consider that in a town of 1000 folks there is 1 person who has some dangerous knowledge (e.g. how to construct a bomb, biological weapon, location of some item of universal desire). You, the mayor or leader, know that there is at least one person in the town intent on getting this knowledge for mischief and personal gain. You also do not know the intent of the knowledable person. Are they good, strong willed, able to resist torture, opportuinistic, selfish? How would you respond to this?

To my mind there are 3 options:
a) let them be, risking the lives of 998 potentially innocent people;
place the knowledgable person under house arrest (i.e. keep them within your eyesight at all times- Templar routine)
- minimising risk of town being destroyed 
c) kill the person and thus ensure the safety of the town

Obviously this example is not watertight, for example in DA the bomb/weapon is not an independent object from the mage, it is the mage.  

A. The person with then knowlegde have not done anything (and we don't even know whó they are). I would keep a close eye on the person intent on misusing the knowlegde, they are the criminal not the person with the knowlegde. 

[GodWood]

esper wrote...
It is not a virus, not even a sickness.

That was a seperate scenario that followed the exact same logic you were promoting. 

Magic is not a sickness, it is a gene that makes you different.

It makes you different in such a way that you're always susceptible to demonic possession (whether they like it or not) which can result in the deaths of a whole town (See Connor) and it can be exploited in a multitude of ways from blood magiking someone's wife to sleep with you to blowing up hundreds of people.

[esper]

the_one_54321 wrote...

Arguably, possession very definitively robs you of your free will. And has been specifically described to actively seek to spread to other mages. It's in the codex.

But mages are not possessed by automatic.

[the_one_54321]

esper wrote...
But mages are not possessed by automatic.

Doesn't matter.

This isn't a real life issue, wherein all humans are equal. The setting is literally such that being a mage makes you a significant threat to the rest of the population. There is no strict parallel for this in real life. Which is why something like the circle tower would never be ethical in real life. But in Thedas, in this fictional setting, this is the way life is. If you are born a mage, you could blow up a town unless you are properly educated and tested.

So if you are in favor of mages having liberty, this is the threat you accept and you choose that side. If you are in favor of people not living in fear of mages, then you cage them, and that is the side you choose.

Modifié par the_one_54321, 12 avril 2012 - 04:34 .

[esper]

GodWood wrote...

esper wrote...
It is not a virus, not even a sickness.

That was a seperate scenario that followed the exact same logic you were promoting. 

Magic is not a sickness, it is a gene that makes you different.

It makes you different in such a way that you're always susceptible to demonic possession (whether they like it or not) which can result in the deaths of a whole town (See Connor) and it can be exploited in a multitude of ways from blood magiking someone's wife to sleep with you to blowing up hundreds of people.

Does not change the fact that it is something your are born as. It is not a sickness. Quraintines are temporal. If someone is placed in a qurentine people are always working on a way to get them out. And quite frankly. The moment you begin to compare someone who are born different to a sickness, are the moment you and I have nothing more to talk about.

Everthing can be exploited. It is no excuse for that .

[the_one_54321]

esper wrote...
The moment you begin to compare someone who are born different

No one in real life is born like a mage is in Thedas. This is fiction. Do not make emotional connections between the two, because there is no stictly accurate analogy in real life. Such comparisons are dangerous.

[esper]

the_one_54321 wrote...

esper wrote...
But mages are not possessed by automatic.

Doesn't matter.

This isn't a real life issue, wherein all humans are equal. The setting is literally such that being a mage makes you a significant threat to the rest of the population. There is no strict parallel for this in real life. Which is why something like the circle tower would never be ethical in real life. But in Thedas, in this fictional setting, this is the way life is. If you are born a mage, you could blow up a town unless you are properly educated and tested.

The world did not crumble under the Tevinter empire, nor was it overrun by demons, nor is the rivani, the chasin, the dalish or any other society where mages exist. Of course you need education, but that does not mean to be sent into a prison.

Everyone is a signifanct threath to society. I could look up how to make a bomb on the internet and go explode my univseristy if I got a bad grade. I won't, but I could.

[the_one_54321]

The Tevinter Empire subjugated all normal people under magic. Lets not forget that little piece of fictional history.

[GodWood]

esper wrote...
Does not change the fact that it is something your are born as.

So?
 
Just because it's a biological trait that doesn't mean the rest of the community should be forced to live in constant danger of it.

Quraintines are temporal. If someone is placed in a qurentine people are always working on a way to get them out.

Quarantines are as long as they need to be.

If no cure can be found, they're permanent. 

And quite frankly. The moment you begin to compare someone who are born different to a sickness, are the moment you and I have nothing more to talk about.

Do you live on some other planet where people are not born with diseases?

Lucky.

Modifié par GodWood, 12 avril 2012 - 04:41 .

[LobselVith8]

GodWood wrote...

Concentration camps where they're fed, sheltered, educated, able to work, make friends, practice their abilities and eventually aquire prestigious positions.

Circle mages are only able to achieve positions in a system where they are at the mercy of the Chantry of Andraste and the Order of Templars. That isn't saying much. The fact that they live in societies where the Chantry preaches that magic is a "curse" hardly makes life ideal for them, even in the Circle Towers. The fact that we read how Fiona thought the Circle was worse than her life as an Orlesian sex slave informs me that it's not quite the paradise you're making it out to be.

GodWood wrote...

Certainly a better living than the majority of the population of Thedas.

I'd imagine there are quite a few mages who would trade life under the Chantry controlled Circles in exchange for freedom, as we see a plethora of examples in real life of people abandoning everything they have and know to leave brutal dictatorships.

Modifié par LobselVith8, 12 avril 2012 - 04:42 .

[esper]

the_one_54321 wrote...

The Tevinter Empire subjugated all normal people under magic. Lets not forget that little piece of fictional history.

So? Your argument were to wherever mages possess a danger due to demons. Real life armies in our real life history did what the Tevinter did in terms of slavery quite easily without magic. All you need to make someone a slave is force. It is wrong either way, but is not something only a mage could do.

[LobselVith8]

the_one_54321 wrote...

The Tevinter Empire subjugated all normal people under magic. Lets not forget that little piece of fictional history.

Tevinter subjugated mages and non-mages alike under the rule of the Magisters. In fact, Arlathan was a kingdom with elven mages (as we know from Witch Hunt) and the Magisters enslaved them as well.