41 réponses à ce sujet

[Almostfaceman]

 

I mean...I am the Herald of Andraste, so I can do whatever I need to, to save the world right?

 

Well, if you haven't played the game (series?) before, you're in for a treat with the Wardens. 

[robertmarilyn]

DAI was mature dark? Don't even make me laugh, it mostly ignored drarker aspects of human nature to the comical degree, to the point DAI tries to sell message that freedom will solve every problem and power of love will remove over a thousand years of justified fear and hate toward mages pretty much instantly.Hell even Inquistor and Corypheus portrayal is white vs black , you are good guy and he is bad guy. DAI was no darker than Mass Effect heavily idealistic series, hardly can be considered dark otherwise almost all other RPG would qualify as dark just because they have it's darker moments .  

 

 

Merely just seeing you reply angers me. Immediately.

Also aren't you the one who usually defended DAI while I trashed it? I agree with what you're saying here actually. What I really meant when I said "perfect darkness" is that making it more gratuitous would not automatically make it better like a lot of people think.

I don't think lack of rape and blood should be the area of concern in the game, surprisingly.

As for comical good vs. evil, that's just a matter of writing.

 

Are you two married?    

[Deadly dwarf]

 Allow me to quote: The crows and Queen Madrigal

 

The first crow refused to speak, even when we put hot coals to the soles of his feet and peeled the skin off his face and hands with a paring knife. He opted instead to chew through his own tongue and choke to death on the blood...

 

Yeah dude totally not dark at all. This game is dark as F!

 

You are dealing with codex entries meant to give you details about the world that is Thedas.  It can be a wild place.    As would be almost any fantasy world.  (The fantasy worlds of My Little Pony and the Smurfs being exceptions.)  I don't see that it's any darker than Tolkien's Middle Earth or most other fantasy worlds.

[TheKomandorShepard]

Are you two married?    

 

Nah, if i was married to every person on this forum that gets angry because of my presence  i would be married to 1/3 of people on this forum.   

[GoldenGail3]

No, it really isn't.

[GoldenGail3]

Nah, if i was married to every person on this forum that gets angry because of my presence i would be married to 1/3 of people on this forum.

*lols out of her seat* so true, so very true.

[PhroXenGold]

DAI was mature dark? Don't even make me laugh, it mostly ignored drarker aspects of human nature to the comical degree, to the point DAI tries to sell message that freedom will solve every problem and power of love will remove over a thousand years of justified fear and hate toward mages pretty much instantly.Hell even Inquistor and Corypheus portrayal is white vs black , you are good guy and he is bad guy. DAI was no darker than Mass Effect heavily idealistic series, hardly can be considered dark otherwise almost all other RPG would qualify as dark just because they have it's darker moments .  

 

To be fair, Origins was every bit as "bad" (if we consider a lack of "darkness" to be a bad thing). No matter what happens our gallant heroes can save the day and everything works out just fine (unless you deliberately go out of your way to screw stuff up). It's basically a fairy tale. The setting is reasonably dark, but the actual story was pretty much sunshine and rainbows - the Blight, which typically lasts decades if not centuries, is ended in a couple of months by a motley band of heroes and there's even the get out clause to avoid the sacrifice. DA2 was the only really dark one story wise. In the end, you can't change things, you can't save the people you care about. There's no big damn heroes. Just an ordinary man struggling against the world.

[In Exile]

A good contrast is TW2 actually. Act 2 of that game isn't dark at all - it's incredibly uplifting, if you side with Iorveth. But it's insanely dark if you side with Roche.

[umadcommander]

DA isnt especially dark

 

i dont know why some insist it is as if dark fantasy is somehow inherently better, DA isnt objectively worse as a series for not having the label

[TheKomandorShepard]

To be fair, Origins was every bit as "bad" (if we consider a lack of "darkness" to be a bad thing). No matter what happens our gallant heroes can save the day and everything works out just fine (unless you deliberately go out of your way to screw stuff up). It's basically a fairy tale. The setting is reasonably dark, but the actual story was pretty much sunshine and rainbows - the Blight, which typically lasts decades if not centuries, is ended in a couple of months by a motley band of heroes and there's even the get out clause to avoid the sacrifice. DA2 was the only really dark one story wise. In the end, you can't change things, you can't save the people you care about. There's no big damn heroes. Just an ordinary man struggling against the world.

 

Dao was darker than DAI , as i said all you would need to do is check how they treated whole issue with mages in both dao and da 2 to get the picture.Mages weren't painted as innocent victims that all they need to fix issue is freedom like in DAI only dangerous group of people that is imprisoned in a circles for good reasons and they showed us reasons more than once.This comes even to protagonist in dao you could be very dark anti-hero or even villain protagonist you could do a lot of crappy things that under normal circumstances would be considered monstrous by other people in order to defeat blight.In DAI on other hand protagonist is good guy at worst lighter anti-hero rarely game will allow you to do something nasty.Then there are such things that you don't fix the world in dao you only save it unlike in Inquistion and that protagonist in dao spends most of the game as criminal while in DAI protagonist almost from get go is treated like messiah.

 

I would agree on that da 2 was darkest game (sadly also poorly written) and dao had a lot of heroics even if it had quite number of darker elements. 

[Obadiah]

Especially those fleshy balloons attached here and there to the walls or the floors of most dungeons.....these are the dark elements that DAI lacks!

Was thinking of the darkspawn "mother" in the deep roads, at the very least. But there's a lot of other stuff. Maybe it just only troubled me.

[roselavellan]

DA isnt especially dark

 

i dont know why some insist it is as if dark fantasy is somehow inherently better, DA isnt objectively worse as a series for not having the label

 

I agree, I prefer it balanced.

[AFA]

DAO struck a pretty good balance between Dark and High Fantasy. DA2 leaned more towards dark, while DAI went High.

 

DAI did sanitize a lot of things, and got preachy on certain issues, but part of that can be written up to your character being so powerful and influential. You never have to see what the average person lives with, unlike DAO or DA2.

[stop_him]

I never though DA was a dark series, but jesus only in first area and already had an NPC tell me they saw a Templar about to rape the body of a burned woman (not sure if she was a mage or a normal person) before the NPC killed him.

 

I believe she was a refugee.

 

A refugee was still burning. His arm went up to a templar. The templar used his sword. It went up and down. Up and down. There were pieces of black.

 

He stayed while other templars ran after mages. He took things from bodies. One body was moving. It had long hair and burned dress. The templar started to take off his armor and I shot him.

Aside from the Templars Bioware chooses to humanize (Cullen, Barris, etc), templars are disgusting. Most instances of atrocities committed by mages seem to be by the hand of a single mage, as with Uldred and Jowan in DAO and Anders in DA2. Templars seem to commit atrocities at an organizational level. Like Cole says, "It is dangerous when too many men in the same armor think they're right."

 

DAI seems to imply that both are equally dangerous (they're not) when the two previous games demonstrated that each group was dangerous for different reasons. One of DAI's drawbacks... But the quote above I found particularly disturbing, and it added to my bias against templars and their so called holy calling.

[paramitch]

To the OP, to echo several other posters here, I think it's key that every instance you refer to is a Codex entry, aside from the pretty dark action you took yourself in killing a harmless NPC who didn't need to be killed.

 

The Codex definitely has some grimmer moments to it, but most of the violence in the writing is implied (as is the attempted rape you mentioned -- we don't see it, we just know from the implication because the Templar 'started to take off his armor' -- then the diary writer killed him before he could go through with it). 

But I actually like that the Codexes can get grim, because the writing is artful and more about implication than about blow-by-blow detailed descriptions of violence. And meanwhile, it tells us things that are perhaps too grim to view in detail in-game, but that are part of a world in magical chaos that is also being ripped apart by war, demons and whatever else is around. And as always with reading, what we read can sometimes be more powerful even than what we see.

 

So many times, in replaying this game, I've found that it's one experience to come upon a tragic scene, skeleton or burial site, and just loot and move on -- it's sad but it doesn't feel as real. However, if you pause there, look around, loot, and also read the associating Codex entries, I've found that I was powerfully affected by those locations, and they also made the situation feel more real to me. I said this in another thread, but one of the illogical things I always do is, man, I always carry that blood-soaked teddy bear with me once I find it, in hopes that my Inquisitor can save the world a little faster or a little better this time around.

 

As far as your having the option to go dark, to me that's not the fault of the game, that's on you and your character choice to kill an NPC who was peaceful and not adversarial toward your Inquisitor at all. I don't see how that's really something to blame the game for -- you can have a lighter game experience, but you'll have to choose to play a 'lighter' more heroic character. (But that's just my 2 cents.)

 

Meanwhile, DAO was actually much darker to me -- not just the Broodmother, but, for example, in my first DAO playthrough, my Warden did

Spoiler

kill Connor to spare the town from the constant undead assaults -- I couldn't figure out another way out of it, and felt horrible (compounded by the fact that Alistair rightfully yelled at me about it afterward). 

I of course felt even worse when I found out later that I could have resolved it differently!

[Fylimar]

How is DAI any darker than DAO or DA 2? In the origins alone you can see your family get killed (in one origin by your own dear brother), your fiance get killed before your eyes, your cousin raped multiple times, your best friend /boyfriend got killed by a cursed object ... and that are only the origins in DAO. Later you have villages completely destroyed by darkspawn, abominations terrorizing the circle of magi, women turned into broodmothers and forced to eat their own comrades ... should I go on?

 

An let's talk about DA2: you have a bunch of serial killers (one specialising in innocent children, one killing your own mother), bloodmages, sadistic templars, dark cults, slavery, racism and religious wars (Andrastians vs Qunari) ... 

 

So far, DAI is not worse than that.

 

And you have codexes with dark stories in the other games too. I get the feeling that Thedas may be even worse than Westeros in terms of violence 

[Addictress]

I'm replaying DAO now and just defeated brood mother.

Maker that's dark. Hespith literally stating bluntly overhead her friend was violated and raped in the creepiest way possible, then Akira-body-horror-time. F*ck

I hope Bioware never refers to that crap again. I suppose "artfully demonstrating the real horror of rape with Akira body horror" has a place for some audiences but I wouldn't mind if such audiences kindly removed themselves from the Dragon Age consumer base