84 réponses à ce sujet

[Statulos]

EJ42 wrote...

The Angry One wrote...

How does that in any way prove me wrong?
It's my whole point, Alistair is female only, and in my opinion is written better, therefore you cannot claim that the game was written primarily with male PCs in mind or that Morrigan's romance is so overridingly good and deep (hint: it's not),

Work on your reading comprehension a bit.

I thought I was quite clear when I stated how that argument is a fallacy.

The female-player romances were most likely written better because female players would care more about it.

They don't write "chick flicks" for guys.

I´m a male and I hated the fact that some characters where über-limited in their dialogues. For example, I wanted Sten to indoctrinate me about the qun; I wanted more friendship (just as much as romance) with Alistair, I wanted more stories from Leliana, I wanted more "Oghren time", I wanted more memories from Shale...

[Inakhia]

I don't believe that canon is geared towards a specific gender or race, it undermines the entirely point of the game in which the player gets to choose their own path.

However for DA:2 I'm sure they will 'fudge' details with a little careful blurring of history. I'm sure male or female our characters will be given a very good reason to need to look for Morrigan, or she will reappear for some reason. Whether or not the God-child is good, bad or just wants to be the most emotastic teen and totally rejects his mothers hippy magickal ways and becomes a lawyer, I'm sure it will be in the sequel too.

If DA:2 keeps our characters around to reuse, I'm sure we will have some massive reason to have to pack up our bags and hit the road again. Canon is what you as a player chooses, because in the end its the only reason to guarantee you'll buy the next instalment. To see how your own journey continues.

...I only wish I had as much faith in that Alistair would be in the next game as Morrigan. I kind of feel like his story is mostly wrapped up. However I don't mind being pleasantly surprised if it isn't.

[EJ42]

Statulos wrote...

EJ42 wrote...

The Angry One wrote...

How does that in any way prove me wrong?
It's my whole point, Alistair is female only, and in my opinion is written better, therefore you cannot claim that the game was written primarily with male PCs in mind or that Morrigan's romance is so overridingly good and deep (hint: it's not),

Work on your reading comprehension a bit.

I thought I was quite clear when I stated how that argument is a fallacy.

The female-player romances were most likely written better because female players would care more about it.

They don't write "chick flicks" for guys.

I´m a male and I hated the fact that some characters where über-limited in their dialogues. For example, I wanted Sten to indoctrinate me about the qun; I wanted more friendship (just as much as romance) with Alistair, I wanted more stories from Leliana, I wanted more "Oghren time", I wanted more memories from Shale...

Congratulations on not being bound by the male stereotype.

At least Bioware didn't disappoint you too much.

[fanman72]

Guys, shut up with the flaming you're ruining this thread

[scrimex]

Yeah guys You'll wake mom and dad!

[Statulos]

EJ42 wrote...
Congratulations on not being bound by the male stereotype.

At least Bioware didn't disappoint you too much.

Kill **** Die is nice for WASP and considering that I like Death Metal, not even that.

I like stories and as a mythologist I basicaly cared for the "crunchies" of the game as long as they could lead me to story developement.

That´s why I want tons more interaction and conversation with other characters.

Did I said my fave RPG ever is Planescape:Torment? Well, maybe that can give you a clue.

Modifié par Statulos, 09 décembre 2009 - 03:34 .

[MForr71]

I am curious if as to whether BioWare is going to make Dragon Age into a bigger IP then just the video games, I don't know how much they have to do with the new pen and paper game coming out, or how much they really care what David Gaider writes about in the novels, but if they do then it would make sense that "something" will have to become canon.



If they don't do anything more then another game then I am sure it is going to be set up for a continuation of your choices, although I don't think it would be a direct sequel, or at least not with the same people, I mean I don't think they would have say Steve Valentine record hours and hours of dialog if half the people were not going to hear it, although I may be wrong seeing as there is already tons of dialog in the game that no one will hear.



That is the question I am most curious about, how big do they plan on making the IP.



Although I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't mesh it all together, finding someway to include all of the origins and following a middle of the road story where everyone just happened to survive in the most convenient way possible.

[EJ42]

Statulos wrote...

EJ42 wrote...
Congratulations on not being bound by the male stereotype.

At least Bioware didn't disappoint you too much.

Kill **** Die is nice for WASP and considering that I like Death Metal, not even that.

I like stories and as a mythologist I basicaly cared for the "crunchies" of the game as long as they could lead me to story developement.

That´s why I want tons more interaction and conversation with other characters.

Did I said my fave RPG ever is Planescape:Torment? Well, maybe that can give you a clue.

I hope you didn't take that as an insult.  I happen to feel the same way.  I just don't think the Bioware writers do.

I was more than a little disappointed on how...forced...the Morrigan plotline seemed to be.  It was as though, no matter what you did, if you did not bed her for the wrong reasons then you "lost" the game.

So many of the possible responses to Morrigan's conversations were simply juvenile.  I intend to remedy that when the new toolset comes out.  I also intend to add better closure to the game as a whole.

I've been playing around with Morrigan's sound files, and I've had decent success in making her say mostly whatever I want her to.  There is so much material to work with, I think I can offer a much better resolution to the campaign.

[SleepyBird]

Inakhia wrote...

I don't believe that canon is geared towards a specific gender or race, it undermines the entirely point of the game in which the player gets to choose their own path.

I absolutely agree.

Maybe they could start the next game off with a series of different beginnings which lead from the choices you made in the first one, to a meeting point for the main plot of the second one.  It could function the same way the origin storys functioned, giving players a little more closure, and tying things together toward a new story. 

And I slo agree with The Angry One; Morrigan's hateful baby is almost certain to make an appearance no matter how much we all protest.  There are, I believe, only two endings to that story - you either accept her deal, or she tells you that while you go do what you need to do, she will go do what she must do.  Which means the writers have given themselves an option to bring her back with the excuse that she had some other back up plan we didn't hear. 

[DariusKalera]

More than likely, Bioware will place the sequel sometime in the future. Maybe 30 years down the road after the heroic Grey Warden, they will avoid any gender and origin reference, has heard the calling and gone to the Deep Roads. It would make it easier to start from scratch with a new toon and storyline.



I would like to be able to track down Morrigan, but I really do not like the idea of the "god child" even though I have agreed to the ritual on most of my play throughs. FReminds me way too much of the two BG series.



However, if they do decide to make certain things canon, what i woudl like to see is the following.



1: Alistair is king. Don't really like him, but hell, most of the game you're going through trying to put him on the throne anyway so he might as well get it.



2: Anora is queen. Gotta even out Alistair with someone that knows what they're actually doing.



3: Loghain lived.



4: Dark Ritual with Morrigan. But, instead of having one kid, she has octuplets as karmic revenge for all the "Morrigan Disapproves" that I got.

[scrimex]

EJ42 are you for real or can anyone join this fantasy world of yours?

[EJ42]

scrimex wrote...

EJ42 are you for real or can anyone join this fantasy world of yours?

Anyone can join, as long as they swear fealty to me.

[scrimex]

I swear a lot so it'll be no problem to me!

[Zeleras]

I have a feeling the male human in the sacred ashes trailer is the canon warden. No idea on the ending though, god baby seems likely.

[scrimex]

mother mary , the apostles, mohammed and all the the pictures that hang on the wall, I'd give em all up to enter your fantasy world.

[Statulos]

If there is a sequel and my pc can ask Morrigan "what can change the nature of a man" and she answers the way she should (no, "nothing" is not the correct answer) she will have my eternal and unconditional love.



And of course, if events and dialogues lead to that in a coherent way, I´ll make a pilgrimage to Bioware´s headquaters and worship the script writers.

[Ravauviel]

What do I believe is supposed to be canon? My play-through of course!

[037686]

Assuming there is any intention of developing the IP outside of a few games (and I'm willing to bet, given two books already, that's going to happen), there is almost certainly going to be a canon ending involved at some point. It is simply inevitable if you want to create a coherent game world.

People need details, details need answers, answers need some definite source. Imagine Bioware make Dragon Age 10 twenty years down the line. They can hardly tell tomorrows generation of gamers to play 19 previous titles, many released before they are born, simply to establish their own unique generic canon.

Not establishing a canon eventually results in a generic, stale setting that doesn't offer much, because you can't go into any detail about what happened in the past. I sincerely doubt that anyone who goes to the trouble of creating their own IP is hardly going to brick themselves into a corner long term.

There are already hints of what the canon is. Sacred Ashes trailer, male human noble warrior. The fact I chose to make a human Circle mage as my PC doesn't bother me in the slightest. I don't care what the "real" Warden might be. It doesn't diminish my enjoyment in the slightest, whether the Warden is male, female, Qunari, whatever. My game is a "what if", and I'm not naive enough to think you can can create a long term game environment which encompasses any decision a player made in any game. The possible computations become astonomical extremely quickly. Even considering merely the 4 Archdemon kill endings we have possible, we have:

- Loghain dead
- Alistair dead
- Warden PC dead
- Morrigan with a baby by either L, A or W

That's 6 "death" endings right there, without even considering who is King/Queen, what Origin the Warden was, who is the Dwarf king, what happened to the Circle...and so on. Simply looking at the 6 "death endings" above and assuming a similar sort of option in a possible sequel, that gives us 36 possibilities for game 3. If game 3 had an additional 6...do the maths, it gets stupid very quickly. It is just not possible to sustain that sort of variation long term.

Roleplaying games live or die by interesting lore, and settings with no canon will end up with a very short shelf life. You can't have codex entries referring to every character as "The Warden", "The Private", "The Mage"...it would be about as immersive giving our PCs the ability to summon FOUR WHEELS OF FURY!!! and sending them at a dragon. If having my game playthrough disagree with a canon setting is the price I have to pay for an ongoing, interesting gameworld, I'm more than fine with that.

[037686]

Double post, deleted.

Modifié par 037686, 09 décembre 2009 - 04:35 .

[scrimex]

I thought a canon was a gun, silly me!

[Litchenstein]

As I understand it the "canon warden" when the videos were made was based off the concept art for Alistair.

http://dragonage.wik...air_concept.jpg

You can decide for yourself but the videos , comercial and such date before the game in its polished form. You can tell the morrigan in the commercials is based off her original face.

[EJ42]

037686 wrote...

Assuming there is any intention of developing the IP outside of a few games (and I'm willing to bet, given two books already, that's going to happen), there is almost certainly going to be a canon ending involved at some point. It is simply inevitable if you want to create a coherent game world.

People need details, details need answers, answers need some definite source. Imagine Bioware make Dragon Age 10 twenty years down the line. They can hardly tell tomorrows generation of gamers to play 19 previous titles, many released before they are born, simply to establish their own unique generic canon.

Not establishing a canon eventually results in a generic, stale setting that doesn't offer much, because you can't go into any detail about what happened in the past. I sincerely doubt that anyone who goes to the trouble of creating their own IP is hardly going to brick themselves into a corner long term.

There are already hints of what the canon is. Sacred Ashes trailer, male human noble warrior. The fact I chose to make a human Circle mage as my PC doesn't bother me in the slightest. I don't care what the "real" Warden might be. It doesn't diminish my enjoyment in the slightest, whether the Warden is male, female, Qunari, whatever. My game is a "what if", and I'm not naive enough to think you can can create a long term game environment which encompasses any decision a player made in any game. The possible computations become astonomical extremely quickly. Even considering merely the 4 Archdemon kill endings we have possible, we have:

- Loghain dead
- Alistair dead
- Warden PC dead
- Morrigan with a baby by either L, A or W

That's 6 "death" endings right there, without even considering who is King/Queen, what Origin the Warden was, who is the Dwarf king, what happened to the Circle...and so on. Simply looking at the 6 "death endings" above and assuming a similar sort of option in a possible sequel, that gives us 36 possibilities for game 3. If game 3 had an additional 6...do the maths, it gets stupid very quickly. It is just not possible to sustain that sort of variation long term.

Roleplaying games live or die by interesting lore, and settings with no canon will end up with a very short shelf life. You can't have codex entries referring to every character as "The Warden", "The Private", "The Mage"...it would be about as immersive giving our PCs the ability to summon FOUR WHEELS OF FURY!!! and sending them at a dragon. If having my game playthrough disagree with a canon setting is the price I have to pay for an ongoing, interesting gameworld, I'm more than fine with that.

I think the specific events of this Blight are largely unimportant.  Just look at the dialogue with Flemeth and other characters.  Who really "knows" what happened in the past?

The past is just a set of stories told by people.

Do you really know what happened during the reign of Julius Ceasar?  Do we really even know what happened during the Revolutionary War?  We have basic ideas of the major events, but those are often colored by the ones who documented them.

All we really know about the previous Blight is that someone named Garaheld supposedly slew the archdemon.  Well...maybe there is more in the codex, but still.

There have been authors of entire series of novels who claim to not really be sure of what actually happened.  They write the stories based on the way their characters remembered the events.

I think they can make a direct sequel to DA:O that expands upon the plot choices made by the character in this campaign, as long as they wrap up the sequel with a nice, tight bow around it.  Beyond that, I have a feeling that they would advance the story beyond the deaths of the major players.

[Statulos]

If you want a nice quote on that take a look at The Reader from Schlink (the book, not the film) about the narrator´s impressions on his own story.

[Saurel]

If they are going canon. I'd say Dark Ritual, Loghain Dead, Human Noble married Anora.



I would think whoever is related to the Ritual-Child will be King since its makes it more taboo.

[037686]

EJ42 wrote...

I think the specific events of this Blight are largely unimportant.  Just look at the dialogue with Flemeth and other characters.  Who really "knows" what happened in the past?

We know the name of the Warden who killed the last Archdemon. There are sufficient in-game references (depending on ending) to leave lasting impressions on the gameworld. I fully agree that history often obscures fringe decisions, but lets face it - there are a number of things our group is involved with that won't be forgotten. For example, the former Hero of River Dane, Teyrn Loghain, being executed for regicide would not simply be forgotten.

The last Blight prior to the one portrayed in Origins was 400 years earlier. This would mean, comparitively, we're looking at real world records from roughly 1500-1600 by way of comparison. We don't know exactly what happened in those years, no - but we DO know roughly what happened, even if that knowledge might be false. There are not 6 alternate versions of what happened in 1557, for example.

The past is just a set of stories told by people.

Do you really know what happened during the reign of Julius Ceasar?  Do we really even know what happened during the Revolutionary War?  We have basic ideas of the major events, but those are often colored by the ones who documented them.

No, but we know who was involved, what their names were, we know who won. History might be written by the victor, but we usually know who that victor is, even if the facts surrounding that victory are obscured. The Flemeth example you used is a good one. We know there was a guy called Cormac who won some violent struggle. Legend claims it was again Flemeth, but Flemeth claims the whole thing had nothing to do with her, and was actually a bloody civil war/power grab. Either way, we know Cormac won, despite the fact the exact details aren't really known to us (although I believe Flemeth's version is the more likely of the two to be true).

All we really know about the previous Blight is that someone named Garahel supposedly slew the archdemon.  Well...maybe there is more in the codex, but still.

Even if that was the only fact we know, it is something. That idea that Dragon Age 3 might be set 400 years in the future, and we don't know the name of the hero who killed the Archdemon in the last Blight, or if the Ferelden royal bloodline survived, seems tenuous to me. That info would be widely available, and I don't think it is something you can just brush over (from a lore perspective) without losing some immersion. I'd rather hear that the hero was disgraced Dwarf Noble  (invalidating my own mage choice) than look at a wishy-washy generic description of what happened.

There have been authors of entire series of novels who claim to not really be sure of what actually happened.  They write the stories based on the way their characters remembered the events.

I agree with this fully, but there is a difference between clouded character memory and deliberate obfuscation of major historical facts that anyone would know. We've made some significant decisions in game, and the idea that they'd all be lost in the sands of time  just doesn't sit well with me. Lets look at the Dwarfs: the events of Orzammar are entered into the Memories at the Shaperate, to be remembered forever. So in theory, our PC 400 years in the future could look up what happened and find out the "truth". I realise that this might not be implemented as a game decision, but the option is there. The last I heard, there is currently a Dragon Age pen and paper roleplaying game in the works. Campaign settings need sourcebooks, and sourcebooks thrive on a solid base of canon. You can't build an IP on the premise of "Hi, buy my pen and paper setting, and play the electronic game to find out what happened in the most recent Blight!" ... it just won't work.

I think they can make a direct sequel to DA:O that expands upon the plot choices made by the character in this campaign, as long as they wrap up the sequel with a nice, tight bow around it.  Beyond that, I have a feeling that they would advance the story beyond the deaths of the major players.

I agree fully. If you don't intend on expanding an IP beyond a game or two, then this is an absolutely fantastic way to go. But I feel that the reality of the Dragon Age IP is it isn't intended to be a throwaway one, but rather a full fledged new IP that will expand well beyond the confines of a simple PC/console title. It just wouldn't feel right to be to keep going through 400 year jumps every time a game arc finishes, with our new PCs conveniently unaware of any of the major historical sea changes of the past. Something has to give, somewhere...