97 réponses à ce sujet

[JJDXB]

The closest Earth equivalents I can think of are the Gobi Desert of Central Asia, and the Atacama of South America.  The Gobi is quite far north, approximately along the same bands of latitude as Japan and Korea.  Despite this, because of it's remote inland location and the fact that groud heats up much faster than water, it can reach extremes of 50°C.  Astana, the Capital of Kazakhstan (not quite in the Gobi, but close enough) has experienced temperatures of -50°C and +40°C.  The Atacama experiences the shielding that the Western Approach does; where the Atacama is sandwiched between the Pacific to the west and the Andes to the east, the Western Approach has the Gamordan peaks to the west and the Waking Sea to the east.

Given also that the inhabitants of Orlais and Ferelden are used to temperate climates, they might very well consider 30°C and above 'blisteringly hot', so it's not necessarily the case that we have figure out how temperatures of 40°C come about in this part of Thedas.

As an aside desert doesn't have to be hot - Antarctica is one after all - it just needs a severe lack of precipitation.

[Captain Nimbaud]

the game isn't set on planet earth

That should be the end of the discussion really.

[cronshaw]

That should be the end of the discussion really.

 

evidently not

[Blackout62]

Well, having people consistently throw fireballs and calling down fire storms ought to cause some queer weather. 

 

Ser Al Gore's report on magic depleting the ozone layer was correct!
 

And what I'm getting from this is that Ferelden, contrary to being fantasy England, basically has the climate of Northern California. Of course! Orlais conquered Ferelden to avoid the shame of the Judgement of Paris!

[Das Tentakel]

And people have explained that it very much can and should be blistering.

 

There are similar real-world locations on similar latitudes.

 

Except that we don't know what the comparable latitudes are. Thedas is supposedly based on Europe - its map is actually a crude, distorted upside down version of Europe. You can also sea ice floes on the map in the seas along the map's southern edge, which reinforces the impression that Ferelden, but also Orlais and the Western Approaches are roughly at a comparable latitude as northern Europe (Britain, southern Scandinavia, northern Germany and Russia). The far north of Europe would probably be roughly analogous to the southernmost rim of Thedas.

 

For you northern Americans, we are talking the latitudes where on our world you find Labrador, northern Ontario, and central and northern Alberta, Saskatchewan etc. Or, if you go to the southern hemisphere, Tierra del Fuego. 

 

You'll be hard-pressed to find cold deserts there, because of the low level of sunlight and low evaporation. You might get some 'cold' or even warm-ish (during summer) deserts or semi-deserts on the northern edges of southern Thedas, say along the border between Orlais and Nevarra. In our world, we have the Canadian badlands in southern Alberta. In Eurasia there's steppe and forest, but no deserts at comparable latitudes (Gobi is further south, same with the central Asian desert steppes).

 

Anyway, no reality-based worldbuilding reasons are needed for the desert.  The fortress Adamant flavour text mentions that the surrounding region gradually changed into a wasteland. So it's presumably magic, meaning the Darkspawn and the Taint.

 

In a general sense, the map of Thedas (and the lore?) lacks any reliable indications of distance. Some fantasy worlds are like that. Makes it also harder to judge whether the whole thing makes sense, but well, that's how it is.

[StrangeStrategy]

The Blight is why it's a desert.  I don't know why it's a hot desert, though.

 

Is it a hot desert? I remember Cole being bitterly cold in the Western Approach while he was following the others. It may be a desert, likely because the Blight killed everything but I'm not sure if its a hot desert, or if a cold desert is even possible

 

Either way. Game of Thrones; Winters and summers last years. World of Warcraft: Walk a few feet and the climate changes 100% in an instant. Pretty much any fantasy/rpg has to have drastic environmental change otherwise it just gets stale.

Think of Oblivion where the whole thing was basically "forest".

[Blackout62]

Guys! Guys, guys, guys. Maybe, just maybe, the map of Thedas was made by a bad cartographer. Think about it, there's no satellite photos, no advanced methods of determining a location relative to another, they probably don't even have latitude lines. Bioware and friends have gone on for three games about how the information you get is subject to the speaker's perspective and may be wrong. Have you seen early maps of the world?

 

And to everyone who says something about the devs making that map well maybe, just maybe, the developer who made the map of Thedas was a bad cartographer

[Kelwing]

(Indiana Jones)It's a game. You pretend!(/Indiana Jones)

[Russian Berserker]

Don't get me started on this. Cyrodiil was supposed to be a jungle. When Oblivion came out fans were cussing like sailors. Michael Kirkbride had to retcon it by saying Tiber Septim used a Shout or CHIM to change Cyrodiil's climate to make it more bearable for the Nords (which is a retcon done right).

CHIM!

 

The realization that you are part of a dream, and as such YOU ARE NOT (real). But through LOVE (of yourself), and great WILL (power), (you decide that) YOU ARE (real) and become a lucid dreamer in the dream of YOU, the god head, and retain your identity.

[Stormy]

To quote my brilliant daughter:  "Because Magic."  ROFLMAO!

[Das Tentakel]

This is no excuse. The people behind TES lore has thought of things like this and have gone through great lengths to explain it in thousands of in-game books. 'It's just a video game' encourages laziness.

 

TES has been around for much longer than Dragon Age, of course. On the other hand, these days there are plenty of books, articles and even courses out there if you want to systematically build a believable world. 

 

But back to that desert - if Ferelden and Orlais are roughly at the Thedosian southern hemisphere equivalent of northern European latitudes, unnatural causes are the way to go if you want to have a desert. Key is to have the vegetation cover destroyed and something -  magic poison a la the Taint, grazing, soils or rocks that don't hold the water once the old topsoil is gone, - prevent it from recovering. 

 

I once posted it before, but there are some examples in northern Europe, particularly the Low Countries, of miniature quasi-deserts that emerged because of human behaviour. In the Iron Age and early medieval periods agriculture, grazing and above all, the local iron industry led to deforestation. Once exposed, the underlying sandy soils (legacy of the ice age) turned into a wasteland of sandy dunes, which gradually spread outwards. Things got so bad it swallowed entire villages, and in 1899 - by which time these sandy wastes had been present and slowly expanding for the better part of a millennium - the State forestry management department ('Staatsbosbeheer')  was formed in the Netherlands to combat it. 

 

So: What human activity created in the real world, should be perfectly possible for 'baaaaad, eeeeeeeevil magic'.

Once the vegetation cover is gone and the ecosystem has collapsed, the same magic can prevent recovery. Same applies to some local conditions in terms of soil and climate that may be disadvantageous, making recovery even harder.

 

Note that these areas aren't 'true' deserts and don't lack precipitation per se. They are deserts because, for a variety of reasons, the vegetation was destroyed and failed to recover.

 

Incidentally, those miniature quasi-deserts in the Low Countries (Netherlands, Belgium) can experience temperatures during the summer of over 60 degrees C in the day, and freezing by night. In this respect they are really desert-like.

 

 

Kootwijkerzand, Netherlands

[cronshaw]

Don't get me started on this. Cyrodiil was supposed to be a jungle. When Oblivion came out fans were cussing like sailors. Michael Kirkbride had to retcon it by saying Tiber Septim used a Shout or CHIM to change Cyrodiil's climate to make it more bearable for the Nords (which is a retcon done right).

So basically Magic did it?
That's one small step less lazy than saying "it's a video game"

[Das Tentakel]

So basically Magic did it?
That's one small step less lazy than saying "it's a video game"

 

I think the idea it's 'retcon done right' because the reason for the 'terraforming by magic' emerges reasonably naturally from the history of the region (conquest by the Nords under Talos, who don't like it so hot).

Still a retcon, though, and not a really popular one. The original Cyrodiil (http://www.imperial-...dition-cyrodiil) sounded like a pretty exotic place and far more interesting than the nice-looking but fairly bland and generic province we got in Oblivion.

[Ibn_Shisha]

There are snow-capped mountains in Lebanon, around 20KM from the Syrian desert lol

If you time things perfectly (and the weather cooperated) in like March (or I assume sometime in fall, maybe Nov or Oct?), you can ski and swim (outdoor) on the same day. 

[cronshaw]

I think the idea it's 'retcon done right' because the reason for the 'terraforming by magic' emerges reasonably naturally from the history of the region (conquest by the Nords under Talos, who don't like it so hot).
Still a retcon, though, and not a really popular one. The original Cyrodiil (http://www.imperial-...dition-cyrodiil) sounded like a pretty exotic place and far more interesting than the nice-looking but fairly bland and generic province we got in Oblivion.

The bottom line is the devs wanted it that way so they came up with a Deus ex machina, which if you are a critic of narratives should really only be marginally more satisfying than "because it's a video game." So the idea that "because it's a video game" is lazy and "magic did it" isn't is nonsense; they are both lazy.
And to be honest I'd be hard pressed to find something I care about less in either Oblivion or DA

[Ibn_Shisha]

^^^ This about a thousand times. I live in Hawaii (on Oahu), and I can tell you that while it's a lovely and tropical here, the Big Island actually does get snow on Mauna Kea (it's where all the major observatories in the state are located) because of the altitude.

Mahalo

[robertthebard]

Yes children, I know we're standing in the desert looking at the Rocky Mountains, but that snow is an optical illusion, since snow cannot possibly exist in the same latitude as a desert.

So much for my surfing, snow skiing and water skiing stories from when I lived in California, eh? After all, it was all on the same latitude and can't possibly have happened.

[ArtemisMoons]

So because Thedas is sort of based on Europe, that means that it MUST be exactly like it?

 

It feels like you forget that Thedas isn't Europe. They don't fall on the same lines of latitude or longitude. They don't have to share any weather patterns because they are not actually the same place.

It's kind of like when someone says a movie is "based on a true story". You can pretty much assume that the movie is VERY loosely based on some story that may or may not be true.

[cronshaw]

So because Thedas is sort of based on Europe, that means that it MUST be exactly like it?

It feels like you forget that Thedas isn't Europe. They don't fall on the same lines of latitude or longitude. They don't have to share any weather patterns because they are not actually the same place.
It's kind of like when someone says a movie is "based on a true story". You can pretty much assume that the movie is VERY loosely based on some story that may or may not be true.

We don't even know if the planet is the same size as earth or the same axis tilt meaning small variations in latitude could cause extreme changes in climate. As I said in my 1st post, the game is not set on planet Earth.

[AkiKishi]

If it happened because of the blight then it should just be a dead landscape. 

[Feybrad]

I have always had the Impression that thedas is much larger than Europe - Par Vollen, Seheron and their likes are pretty clearly tropical in their Climate, while I interpreted the Korcari Wilds as borderimg on frozen Tundra in the South. The western Approach is not on the same latitude, but, judging from it's Position on the Map, I think it's perfectly valid to be a full on Desert like depicted. It lies fairly far into the Continent, waterways are distributed west and north, south and east are block by a Rainshadow. It will most likely be incredibly hot at Day, while reaching equally extremely cold Temperatures in the Night. Add to that the Seasons and you have a very good reason for scarce Vegetation. I think it is comparable to the Gobi Desert, which looks for example, this Way:

[Das Tentakel]

If it happened because of the blight then it should just be a dead landscape.

 
Yup, and that is what I think is the explanation - the region gradually changed into a wasteland according to the fortress Adamant flavour text. 

The entire Western Approach had become a wasteland, and thus the expense of maintaining the fortress became harder and harder to justify

 
 I don't think the devs intended it as a natural desert. Also note the fact that the Tirashan forest lies well north of, and even further inland than, the Western Approach. Under somewhat 'natural' circumstances, it would have been a far better candidate for being an arid desert region than the Western Approach. Guess the Darkspawn didn't get there - yet.

[Saberchic]

Latitude, as many many people have already pointed out, does not dictate the overall climate of an area. There are many other various factors that contribute to it. I don't understand why people are still debating this as it has already been pointed out.