Just a BioWare Fan

In the universe of Dragaon Age, the Veil that separates the Fade from the rest of the world is not a physical thing, despite references to it being torn and breached. It's more a barrier, like that mages cast in battle, to be dispelled. Even its name implies a thin covering that hides rather than a solid wall.

Consider the codex entry on the Veil which can be found in all three games, giving it more heft as “the devs see the Veil this way and want the player to know it” than the mere conjectural nature of half-blind research would normally carry.

"Regardless, the act of passing through the Veil is much more about changing one's perceptions than a physical transition. The Veil is an idea, it is the act of transition itself, and it is only the fact that both living beings and spirits find the transition difficult that gives the Veil any credence as a physical barrier at all.”

It's a spell that Solas cast, expending vast amounts of power (as well it should require, considering the magnitude of its effects). We don't know the source of that power, whether it was inherent or drawn from people or amplified by his focus or all three. We do know that it had the effect of making everyone half-tranquil compared to the way the world used to be.

Solas tells us in Inquisition that he’d approached Dalish camps only to be turned away by foolish mortals too superstitious to entertain a stranger in their midst. I got to wondering how those conversations might go. It turns out they fit perfectly into my Questions series. What a coincidence!

Solas: [strolls into camp] No need for alarm. I am merely a humble mage seeking shelter for the night.
Guard: [aims arrow at his eye] Where did you come from, flat-ear?
Solas: I wander the world, exploring the Fade and learning about history. Perhaps I could speak to your Keeper.
Guard: What’s the name of your clan?
Solas: I don’t have a clan. I am a lone wolf, as it were. [smirks]
Guard: How do we know you’re not an abomination?
Solas: [ponders] I haven’t killed you yet.
Guard: [narrows eyes] You…may have a point. What do you want?
Solas: A meal and a place near your fire to put my bedroll for the night.
Guard: You want me to let a clan-less stranger with no vallaslin into the heart of our camp when everyone is sleeping?
Solas: Hence my suggestion you fetch your Keeper.
Guard: How about you fetch your flat-eared self the hell out of here?
Solas: I admire your caution but I think someone a bit farther up the food chain should make that decision.
Guard: I’ll give you a food chain, loser.

I finally bought and played the Dragon Age: Inquisition DLC this past weekend and, I have to say, I’m delighted. The Jaws of Hakkon gives you a big new area with all kinds of brand new goodies, lore, and challenges. Since most people can't even play it yet I thought I'd post my thoughts without spoiling the story for anyone.

When BioWare made the Frostback Basin they took pieces of the most gorgeous areas in Inquisition and blended them. They took the Arbor Wilds and combined the best bits of the Storm Coast and Crestwood into it. There’s a dash of Fallow Mire for flavor and you might find a hint of the Western Apprach in the ruins.

It’s late afternoon in the Frostback Basin and the mountains shade parts of the landscape (until later, when you emerge from a ruin and it’s night with that huge moon from the Hissing Wastes laying a silver glow over the still-active forests.)

The passage through the eluvian brought only a moment’s discomfort.  It hadn’t been pain, precisely, more a dislocation centered on his navel, one that slewed his viscera a hand’s span widdershins and his heart a finger’s breadth to the right.  The twist drove the breath from his body so that he gasped indecorously as he emerged from the blue glare into a diffuse gleam.

Had he been able, he’d have caught and held his breath the moment his eyes adjusted.  On the graveled path before him stood the goddess herself, her flowing gown coated in gem dust so that it glittered and flashed even in the muted light.  It had covered one arm and left the other bare, covered in a filigree of gold chased with bright silver.

The waist had been caught with a wide belt of pale leather on which her symbols had been worked in the same threads that sparkled from his own new cloak.  Her hair had been braided and coiled to lie over the exposed shoulder in tangled profusion while the sides had been tied and lacquered into impressive horns that swept back just shy of meeting well behind and above her head.

Abelas could not recall a time he’d been so afraid.

When he’d strode from the temple that had been the heart of his life in every way he’d had a destination in mind.  Once he’d known the way; he had walked the path a thousand times.  Once Mythal had been alive and her sentinels patrolled a wide swath of the wilderness that protected her home.

Abelas, his name never more appropriate in the anguish of failing in his final and most sacred duty, got no farther than what had been a road before his last, lingering bit of purpose failed him.  What had stretched across miles, shining white stones fitted with precision and arching over the gorge of a rushing river, now lay in rubble and broken spans.

The river had dwindled to shallow, still pools flanking a sluggish stream.  Once-familiar trees, stretching graceful limbs to shade the road, had gone.  A jungle had replaced them, choked with undergrowth and trailing vines that had strangled the trees into tortured shapes.  Yet this was no young forest.  Abelas could see fallen trees with trunks twice his height, their roots long since crumbled from the banks the meandering course of the river had undercut.

I’ve been entertaining myself lately with songs that leap to mind during certain portions of Dragon Age: Inquisition even though they either contain too many anachronisms or just really don’t fit.  To that end, I thought I’d share a few of my head canon songs for entertainment purposes.

First, there’s Van Canto’s cover of Primo Victoria.  It has to be the cover because there are no electric guitars in Thedas.  There aren’t any Nazis, either, but at least we can get the music right if not the lyrics perfect.  If you can ignore the date of the D-Day invasion and hear “Nazi lines” and “Venatori” you might get a sense for why this one pops into my head.

Every time I’m getting ready to go to the Arbor Wilds and throw the weight of my epic army against the forces of evil (as in the Red Templars) I start hearing

Blackwall and Solas have more in common that you might see at first glance.  Both are lonely, guilty men who ran from their respective pasts and come to face the music.  Each has constructed a façade behind which he hides and each finds through their time with the Inquisition that the time has come to tear it down.

We never get a chance to ask Solas how old he is.  BioWare also leaves the reveal that the village he claimed to have grown up in had been in ruins for centuries until after he’s run off at the end of the game.

Our Inquisitor never gets the opportunity to confront him about his history.  When you consider how much traveling he says he’s done, how much distance he’d have to cover, and the fact that he doesn’t have his own freaking horse at the very least you have to question how he’s managed to stay so smooth-faced.

Generally, after a passionate kiss on the balcony outside her bedroom, a girl presumes returning indoors will result in something more or less physical.  Saetha, in this one single case, was like most women.

As she followed him into the room she couldn’t help but smile.  After months of her teasing and tempting, she’d finally gotten him to give in to his desire.  She thought she had, anyway. 

Solas, unfortunately (in this one single case), was utterly unlike most men.  Instead of taking her in his arms again, he started toward the stairs.

So it turns out Alistair’s mom really is an elf and a mage. Scandalous! She was a Grey Warden at the time and when she’s miraculously, mysteriously cured of the taint she heads right for the Circle so she gets a pass on the apostate part, at least. Randy Ol’ King Maric, though, has some ‘splainin’ to do what with the maid that died having another of his bastards about the same time.

Given the sort of battle prowess one presumes she once had, having been recruited to the Wardens in the first place, one would have thought she’d be a great leader for the mage rebellion. She does manage to cement a power base for them with the regent of Ferelden and a safe haven in Redcliffe with one of the most defensible castles in Thedas.

Then, someone whacks her with the stupid stick. Consider the situation, if you would.

Keeping the Tome of Koslun in Dragon Age 2 is a dick move. It’s like stealing ancient religious scrolls from the Vatican, running off to Luxembourg, and waving them in the Pope’s face while saying, “Neener neener”…and then killing the captain of the Vatican guards, most of his best men, and kicking the rest of them out of the country. When they’re gone you shove the scrolls in a chest and never speak of them again.

The game, however, did not give you the option of giving the Arishok the Tome without also giving him Isabela. It’s also the one thing Hawke actually achieves in the entirety of DA2: saving Kirkwall from the rampaging Qunari. That lasts for four years and then it descends into chaos after Anders does his thing. Hawke keeping Isabela in Kirkwall in the first place also arguably causes their continued presence and eventual loss of patience so, really, it’s all her fault in the first place.

Hawke’s whole story revolves around damage control, whether that damage accrues to (or from) her family, her friends, Kirkwall, or the mage or Templar faction. I play her like Mr. Incredible: I just cleaned that up! Can’t the world stay saved for, like, five minutes? Every time she turns around there’s another idiot doing something to endanger people and she’s the only one who can stop it.

I was pondering recently about the ruined land your Inquisitor finds in the Western Approach.  It’s been centuries since the Darkspawn roamed the lands freely and still nothing can live there.  As the blights of old lasted years the horde had plenty of time to ruin the land.

Since our superstar Warden ended the Fifth Blight in a mere year, Ferelden recovered quickly.  There are still a few references to tainted land but not a horizon-spanning, blasted waste.  One more reason your Warden is awesome—as if you needed one!

In following this trail of thought, however, I suddenly realized that the dwarves have a much bigger problem in reclaiming the Deep Roads than I’d thought.  Also, BioWare has a much bigger lore problem.  The Darkspawn have been carousing down there for a thousand years.

I’ve written in a few places about how deeply The Head and the Heart’s Lost in My Mind moves me. Now that I’ve played Dragon Age: Inquisition it has a new layer of meaning for me. I picture Solas, humming this song as he’s painting the mural of your Inquisitor’s story. I imagine the lyrics running through his mind when he’s talking about or to the Dalish.

Most strongly, I want to see him singing this with Abelas, the perfectly pitched, civilized howl of loss and yearning and hope for moving forward. Solas sings the first two verses and Abelas the third then they burst the hearts of shemlen everywhere with the emotion of the chorus, sung together.

Excepting a minor anachronism the words fit beautifully for a pair of ancient elves embarking on a painful journey out of the past to which they’ve clung for so long.

I know many people hate the “fetch quests” that proliferate across Inquisition. I, however, look at them as the best way my Inquisitor can make a name for herself in Thedas.

The Dragon Age has heroes already—the Hero of Fereldan and the Champion of Kirkwall in the past decade alone. My Inquisitor has to set herself apart somehow. Hawke and the Warden focused on tattered pantaloons and lost knuckle bones delivered without comment. It can be done better!

Thus the Inquisitor sets about delivering flowers to graves, scattering ashes, lighting candles, and feeding the hungry. She doesn’t just bring back a [often quite strange] lost heirloom, she delivers medicine to save lives. She helps the grieving. She gives blankets to the cold.

While Dragon Age: Inquisition showcases the robust senses of humor that informs so much of what BioWare writes, it has a bit of a reputation for being much less dark than the previous Dragon Age titles.  In part, that may be because it actually has a color palette, rather than shades of brown, grey, and gore.

For those of you who think Inquisition is all Disney princesses (though none of them would sit like Josie does at her desk, I’m telling you) and fluffy fennecs, I’ve compiled a list of forty things I would qualify as dark and/or creepy.  The list is in no particular order, just how they came to mind.

1. Tevinters making the ocularum out of the skills of the Tranquil, with the explanation in that locked hut in sleepy Redcliffe
2. The Hunter’s note about mages and Templars behaving badly, with its desperation, murder, and implied rape
3. Dead bodies in poses of torment freakin’ everywhere, most particularly at the Temple of Sacred Ashes half-melted into the ground

Naturally, any exploration of Dragon Age: Inquisition’s main story arc will require massive spoilers. Consider yourselves warned!

What follows is a synopsis of the main story quests and what I think is going on in the mind of the big bad. This whole post is a reaction to what feels like an almost nonsensical final quest after the epic build-up, particularly “From the Ashes” (that armor!) and “The Final Piece” (that surprise reveal!).

Dragon Age: Inquisition culminates not in a boss fight but in the last gasp of a boss you’ve been fighting the whole game. You weaken him with every side quest, every new agent, every closed rift and new recruit. By the time you face him directly for the last time he’s but a shadow of the threat he was at Haven and you handily put him in his place. It’s nothing like the end of Origins but it shouldn’t be, not if you’ve done your job.

I thought it ideal to stop 50-some hours into Dragon Age: Inquisition, a quarter of the way through the touted 200 hours of content, to write a review of the game thus far. While I do have a few complaints, in the main my reaction boils down to one word: wow.

This review will avoid spoilers but the main story quest has consistently impressed and surprised me. Think Skyrim meets Dragon’s Dogma meets the beauty of BioWare’s wonderful storytelling. Here’s the tl;dr version: Dragon Age: Inquisition takes a little getting used to but it has amazed and delighted me and I’ve only just found out what the main story’s about.

Note, please, that I’m playing on the X-Box One. Hubby has had continuous problems on his PC, including taking three days to download the game and a number of freezes and crashes. I’m not going to address those because they aren’t the game, they’re likely a combination of hardware and Origin problems. Let’s talk about the glorious masses of content, instead.

If you haven’t yet seen the multi-player trailer for Dragon Age: Inquisition, give it a watch.

I admit that, after the great fun that the Mass Effect multi-player format turned out to be, I’m excited to see how BioWare does the sword and sorcery version. Devs have assured people repeatedly that the single player campaign will not be affected in any way by what’s known by the unfortunate acronym DAMP and that’s good enough for me, at least for the moment.

Then I got to thinking about why they would add a multi-player element to a story so dedicated to role playing. For me, the answer lies not in BioWare’s history (though they’ve shown enough interest in social play over the years) but in the wild success of Bungie’s Halo series on-line.

Other game series have had on-line multi-player, certainly, but it was Halo that actually brought me into that world. After a decade my family and I still hop on to Bungie’s servers from time to time and go nuts fighting total strangers. Even I, a terrible shot and someone who never remembers to look at her radar, can have fun blasting away in various game modes. Who doesn’t love blowing half a dozen skulls out of someone in Headhunter?

As yet another “BioWare should market to women” thread has been locked at ye olde BSN, I thought I’d condense my thoughts here. The topic has been bashed to death and will continue to be beaten like a dead horse, but there was much of interest in that thread.

The contention that irritated me most claimed that marketing should focus on the biggest of a game’s existing demographic, to the exclusion of all else. This, proponents declared, is the most efficient use of each marketing dollar. This, I say, is short-sighted.

If women comprise a growing share of the gaming market why wouldn’t you target that demographic as well? According to BioWare devs, the Dragon Age consumer base is already 30% female. While a large percentage of those women love the company and their games because of their strong female protagonists, and thus will purchase new BioWare games by preference, not all women loved Mass Effect 3 or Dragon Age 2 and may abandon both franchises unless shown that DA: Inquisition will be different and more to their tastes.

What company can afford to ignore nearly a third of their current customer base? And what company wouldn’t like to grow their market share across more than one demographic? This question leads to the most pertinent one: what should BioWare do to make the most of each penny it spends marketing DA:I?

For this, I have a vision. Picture, if you will, a screen shot of the character creator. The invisible player selects a human male warrior. Bam! You see a cut scene of him catching a massive blow on his shield. Then back to CC and switch to a female dwarf berserker. Pow! She’s dropping a flying cleave with her two-handed axe on the head of some demon. Back to CC and a male elf. Thwack! A searing arrow of death hammers into a Red Templar. Then a female Tal-Vashoth, then her flinging a fireball into a group of whatever.

You get the idea: showcase the classes, their unique abilities, and the fact that you can customize your character all at once. The strengths of the Dragon Age games lie not in one gender or character but in their choices. These begin at the very start with the selection of appearance options. BioWare offers dozens of ways to play epic heroes and those options will appeal to the largest number of people. Why limit potential customers to those who want to play stubbly, lantern-jawed white boys when that’s not the only way to play?

Of all the genres out there, particularly on consoles, I’d argue that role-playing games in general and the fantasy types in particular, are most likely to appeal to women. In part I base that on my own preferences and in part I consider the stereotypes that most women are raised beneath to influence those choices.

Women are raised to love fairy tales and believe science and math are, if not beyond them, at least too hard for them to master to be worth the effort. Don’t believe me? See one or fifty of the thousands of articles, blog posts, and videos about bringing women into STEM fields. They’re also told that they’re too delicate physically and emotionally to handle a battlefield, leading to the current struggle to convince men that women willing and wishing to put their lives on the line as soldiers should be included there.

By extension, this discourages women from reading, writing, and playing science fiction. Certainly, you can name dozens of exceptions to this rule, women who have followed their passions and excelled. In general, however, women tend to be more comfortable with magic and dragons than space ships and gunplay. It’s more socially acceptable for them to enjoy fantasy than to criticize the accuracy of a sci-fi universe to real-world physics.

Should that change? Hell, yes. Is it? Yes to that, too. But remember that I’m refuting the argument that BioWare should exclusively target straight white males with their marketing of Dragon Age: Inquisition. That’s foolish. As it becomes more and more common for women to start gaming or try new platforms, the marketing of new games should find ways to include them in the target audiences.

The guys in the so-called target demographic already know that the games will have plenty to appeal to them. If anything, BioWare and the gaming industry in general should limit the stoic, manly, white protagonist of old and start promoting PCs of color, female leads, and LGBT relationships in games. Consider the size of this largely-untapped pool of players, people who don’t know yet how much they love Dragon Age. Tell me again why no one should market games to them, please.

All of this ignores one key element in the advertising of DA:I. We don’t know who has the final say over the marketing purse strings. If BioWare gets to direct the campaign over the next several months before release I have a great deal more faith that they’ll be willing to take a chance and expand their focus. If EA picks what will be shown, however, I fear that the “safe” route will stay the only one they see. Time will tell.

As a little background, the BioWare Social Network contains about four million posts outlining one member or another’s feelings on the way that mages are treated in Dragon Age. They cover all sides, from whole-heartedly defending Templars and the Chantry to declaring that mages should rebel and take over as they are more suited to rule.

Personally, I’m invested in grey area when it comes to human freedom in Thedas. David Gaider recently posted about this very issue and made an apt analogy: “It’s more like a gun control issue—if there were people with guns that could go off and kill innocents by accident, and who couldn’t be disarmed without a lobotomy.”

That’s pretty much where I fall on the question of human rights when it comes to mages. I don’t ascribe nefarious motives or in-born weakness to them as a group. Each mage is a different individual, but one born armed and—without training—one who grows more dangerous over time.

We know, now, that Morrigan will play an important role in Dragon Age: Inquisition. From past experience, we can guess that Flemeth will also be involved somewhere. BioWare has set the two against one another, after all.

I’ve seen some vehement defenses of Morrigan, some folks who insist that she’s sacrificing her happiness for the greater good in fighting Flemeth (and having that pesky Old God Baby). Rather than derail a thread or three there I thought I’d post my thoughts here.

The first of them is, “Poppycock!” While some people see our acerbic hedge witch as altruistic and self-sacrificing I see her as cold-hearted and calculating. She has an agenda, all right, but you have to consider who she opposes as well as what she says.