spoiler *Spoilers* Did you pick up a "moral" to this story?

[DarkeWolf]

So. Did you? Did you... yourself, come up with a moral to this story, or pick up on anything that the story may, or may not, have been trying to impart?

Discuss it here.

 

 

For myself, I say that it was really heavy on something that I believe very strongly in. Choices and consequences. Not just in what the player does, but also in some of the things that the NPC's do also. I was really glad to see that you can't do just anything you want, and end up not paying for it, somehow.

 

I also saw a lot of influence of "the second chance". The option of trying to make up for the bad things that they have done, if they are given the chance to. A LOT of that.

 

And I also see them portray people undergo change. For the better, for the worse. Based off of choices and influences.

 

 

I'm not trying to come off as a "dad" here. For real. No way! (I hardly qualify as the parent type!). But I was actually sitting here THINKING about what choices I was gonna make. How's it gonna turn out if I do this? How's it gonna affect it if I say "this" instead of "that"? And that's a GOOD thing. To me, somthing that people should do a LOT more of.

 

And I also noticed that in some of the characters that I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY wanted to KILL, I couldnt. Maybe something along the lines of just because you Want to kill somebody, doesnt mean you can, or you should.

 

LOL I also noticed the "devil on the left, angel on the right" story too. Wynn and Leliana as the concience, with Morrigan and sometimes Zevrahn as the dark side. With Alistair bouncing around between the two of them trying to balance "Right" with "practicality". Yes, it's VERY wrong to kill a little boy...but....he has a demon inside of him thats killing an entire castle and village!

 

Alistair also shows to me, the side of learned bigotry. And overcoming it. He's always been taught such and such about mages, but actually hanging out with a couple of them, maybe they ain't so bad.

 

Oh, and I gotta say.... I got really Sick and Tired of being manipulated by a bunch of freakin half-pint Dwarves who were making a WARDEN jump thru hoops to get what they wanted! "We're so happy and honored to have you here, Warden!" "Now do what I want, or I won't help you out, and lie to your face about why I won't do it!" :verymad:

[Stormwind32]

- I feel the game has done a good job of making consequences for 'evil' choices, but has done a very poor job of making consequences for 'good' choices. At Redcliffe castle you have 3 choices, kill Connor, kill Isolde, or go to the mage tower and kill no one. The first 2 choices offer immediate resolution to the problem but have consequences. The third choice however has NO consequences, and you can leave Redcliffe for a 2 day roundtrip to the Circle (thats 2 days travel only, does not count the time needed to resolve the circle quest if you haven't done it yet). What SHOULD have happened is that if you left for the circle, Connor would marshall his forces and attack the village and destroy everything, just as though you had not helped the village in the first place. Instead, you go to the circle and come back, and everyone is safe. No consequences for the people in castle, no consequences for people in the village. And most of all no consequences for Isolde. There is no mention of her making up for what she did, all we hear is that she 'refuses to speak of it'.

 

Another no-consequences plot is the Kolgrim arc. If you kill him, the dragon ignores you, if you don't, it blocks your path and he has to convince it to stand aside. It is just duplicitous behavior I find completely annoying. If you kill Kolgrim, it should have forced a confrontation with the high dragon. Instead, for whatever reason, Bioware decided to make it so there are no consequences for killing Kolgrim.

 

- By contrast, the best written quest is the "Nature of the Beast", mostly for its consequences and numerous choices. I have been playing this game for months and I am still discovering new outcomes and dialog lines. In many ways I wish more content was developed for this quest instead of the dwarves (which just eat up a disproportionate amount of game time).

 

- Morrigan is practical, not evil. She does make mistakes though, like when she suggests that Kolgrim would be a powerful ally - except he doesn't have any interest in fighting darkspawn.

 

- Alistair is an interesting character, it definitely takes more than one play through to see all sides to him. I will say I hate him so much, but that is a testament to good writing. I probably won't spend my money on future DA expansion/games if he is a mandatory party member in them though.

 

- The best thing the game did was remove those stupid good/evil scales in the character screen that previous games always had.

 

- I feel the same way as you on the issue of dwarves - After I was done with the Anvil quest I seriously wished I could cut off the tongues of all the Deshyrs and put them in pens (what the Qunari do to mages).

[TGBlank]

The game likes to play the "sacrifice of one for the benefit of many" card, it plays it with wardens (of which you're reminded several times through the game), it plays it with dwarves several times (bhelen/harrowmont choice, legion of the dead, golems), and it plays it on redcliffe (connor).

 

From all the groups that you must go through hoops to help in order to get an army, the dwarves are the ones that:

 

- Aren't royally screwed up, example: all our soldiers are bed-ridden with a curse!.. and fleas!.. help us so you can have our useless warriors against a horde of darkspawn! you know, the ones that failed to kill half a dozen puppies.

- They have (story-wise) the strongest army and the most experience against the darkspawn (outside the grey wardens), i'm willing to go through extra hoops to get them.

- They have the best excuse not to help you: they don't give a damn about the surface (why should they?), and even if the darkspawn wipe ferelden from the map, they'd be eventually beaten and there'll always be more surfacers to commerce with.

I do dislike running around orzimmar to solve things (albeit orzimmar is one of the places with better plot & non-party npc characterization, thanks to having two origins that tie in there), but the deep roads have enough goodies to keep me interested (two endgame armors, 3 daggers, 1 pair of boots and a sword, more than any other place).

 

The mage origin & the non-fade part of the mage tower, THAT, i loathe.

[Stormwind32]

I see your point TG, but what pours salt on the wound for me is that Orzammar and all its zones have horrible load times. In the deep roads I have to exit and re-load before switching zones if I don't want to wait forever. I will say that the Dead Trenches is the best Darkspawn encounter in the game and it is what the final onslaught should have been like. I loved the way you are slowly cutting a line through the Darkspawn as opposed to the one hit kills.

 

I just feel that some of the stuff could have been cut out in favor of developing other parts of the game. Unless their goal was to make you really hate dwarves!

 

Edit - Maybe not make you hate the dwarves, more like understand their burden - maybe. And the dwarves treat you with the most respect, so that is a plus on their side.

[DarkeWolf]

TG- you make some very good points there, about the dwarves. Things that I hadnt really considered till you mentioned them. Even tho, I'd considered what was going on with the elves. (Which is a reversal for me. I haven't liked elves since playing ShadowRun, and enjoyed playing dwarves in D&D).

 

Yes, the zone loads were killing me. They took forever, and were sucking my RAM dry. So aggrivation at having my game crashing was probably a factor in why I wasn't paying attention like that.

 

Other than the crap with the kingship, and having to tell that mother that her son was dead (and lying to her about that!) I felt pretty good about what happened in Ozimmar. I took out the Broodmother fairly well, (tho playing 17-18 level characters....) destroyed the anvil, and only took a -1 loyalty hit from Morrigan. Which is actually the first time I've taken a hit from her in quite a while! Made that one chick really happy about getting her family title back, killed off rooms of spiders with only minimal troubles (aside from game crashing) and only got mauled by them twice (overpower). gads I HATE that attack, tho I will say that it does look pretty realistic, what I can see of it. and figured out that anvil trap all on my own without having to go look it up somewhere.

 

Take one for the team. Yeah, that outta be the Warden Motto. Subtitled- Bend over and take it like a man.

No, no! It's a lesson is personal sacrifice! afffff

 

Was it just me being foul mood from my computer, or did one those female ring fighters really get under your skin? The one that was the femme half of the twins? She's the one that I really really wanted to kill, and couldnt. not really, not completely.

I did however, blow her butt up! Damn but I love those messy explosions from Walking Bomb. Moreso when it's a toon I dont like :D

 

So aside from Leliana, who has the blatanly obvious character change (Oh, I'll put my past behind me and be good from now on....) did you guys notice any other character changes that your playstyle influenced?

I've noticed that morrigan and sten both rag me a lot less, unless it's something to do with mages, or the Circle. Tho I'll admit, Claudia Black did a great job of catching the moment, when I threatened morrigan to put her inside a golem when she was going on about me wanting to destroy the anvil. I almost wish that I'd had shale there for that.

 

Speaking of morrigan, there's a lesson right there for the younger generations... GEE... YOU WONDER WHY SHE ASKS YOU TO KILL HER MOTHER AND THEN YOU DO IT, AND then SHE BREAKS UP WITH YOU??? Cuz you gave her what she was boning you for? Cry about it that she closed her legs, or cry about it that you were dumb enough to fall for that crap!

 

Ya know, I've read so many, many, many different interpretations of morrigan's character that I have to absolutely take my hat off to the writers. For that reason alone, she is one of my favorite characters in this game, because there is just SO MUCH conjecture over her. So many people reading into different nuances about her (tho some of it is just believing what they WANT to believe). They did a PHENOMINAL job, in that aspect. Not to mention that her script is pretty good. I think my favorite liines of hers are "I hate you all" and "I'm going to pretend I never heard that". basic lines, but in the context they were given was just awesome.

 

edit- Actually, ya know.... you mentioned morrigan being practical. I'd been watching the Farscape episodes on netflix before I got the game. And there's a pretty good character familiarity between the Earlier episode Erin Sun, and Morrigan. Both played by Claudia Black. Hmmmmmmm.....

[TGBlank]

About the load times, i haven't really experienced any difference on them. There are many tricks you could try to reduce the memory leak's effect and reduce load time (closing antivirus & misc while playing, defragging, save/quit/open once you enter orzimmar to clean up memory used for outside stuff...).

 

Total personality change? you can ruin alistair's cheery personality by being an ass to him after his personal quest. He becomes cynical and much less whiny (tho he makes less jokes, which where actually semi-funny). You can also turn Leliana into a heartless assassin by mocking her faith.

Partial?, Sten grows to respect you, Shale becomes semi-fond of you, Zevran turns from direct stereotype to a deep and well-made character, Oghren remains the same disgusting dwarf/irish stereotype, Wynne doesn't vary either.

[DarkeWolf]

interesting. I just did some playing with Shale earlier tonight. She's VERY astute! One of her party banters started going on on Morrigan. Asking her if "the swamp witch" (LOL) had planned on killing her mother from the very beginning. A question that I myself had also been thinking about.

Odd tho, that it came after flemmeth was already slain, but.....

 

very interesting about Al. Didnt know that you could convert him over to the dark side. Thats really interesting!

[Lookimscared]

One moral I found in this game is concerned with the chantry.

The game puts this whole 'spreading the word' 'for the greater good' 'Jehova Witness' sort of theme to them.

Which puts this option or a hope of 'world peace' which reminded me a great deal of current religions irl;

and essentailly how they annoy the crap out of me.

 

There's also the matter of the circle of magi which i'm also going

to relate back to religion because there's a common trait between the chantry and the circle which is essentially

'If your not with us your f*^#'

Now while this may be a bold assumption think of how the Circle reacts to others who are not

'part of the organisation' as it were.

They are the 'commdemed ones' like blasphemers, when really they shouldn't be pointing the finger so much.

Does this sound familiar ?

the Catholic church maybe,

the Pope stating that if your not with us good luck, you know?

 

Whether the developers/writers of the game really intended this or not,

That is simply my interpretation.

I hope I have not offended anyone 0_o

[DarkeWolf]

no offense at all. in fact, I actually laughed in agreement to some of your statements.

 

soooooooo basically the moral you picked up was "Don't trust religious organizations, especially ones who have members who can secretly do mind control (blood magic)?

 

1) Never trust a religious organization that has political and/or commercial power.

2) NEVER EVER trust a religious organization that has a standing army or military force!!

3) ABSOLUTELY never ever trust a combination of 1+2 !!!

4) Separation of church and state was instituted for a damned good reason!

5) Religious zealots are great bad guys because we athiests have no compunctions against KILLING them! (I personally enjoy it!)

6) Being preached at on a religion that we don't believe in by the NPC's is very annoying.

 

As for the game writers.... come on man, its a marketing strategy. Get the bible thumpers all in an uproar and they provide you with free advertisement and publicity. Plus the kids HAVE to then play it, as an act of rebellion. ;D

No, I'm joking there. Kinda. Maybe. ;D

 

Other than the preachiness of it, I think that the chantry and the Circle are nice additions to the game. They provide you with potential allies, and enemies to kill. And the Bioware team didnt really take one side or the other with either organization. Especially considering that one of your followers in the expansion will be a runaway apostate.

[brokenergy]

I've learned that sticking your hand into a log can get you killed. I've also learned that obsession can kill you and that religion is distorted so much so that the true meaning of the texts is lost. All this amounts to the fact that the darker sides of life is a better way to live than being goody two-shoes.