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literally nothing will ever be funnier than this oneshot kill from merrill

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Has anyone done would Anders or Fenris win in a fight. Like at the full height of what their powers would imply as a highly trained warrior augmented with lyrium + abomination who can black out and wake up to a room of obliterated templars and wardens. I know in balanced gameplay Fenris bodies Anders easily

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No nuance, no multiple choice option, just pick your favorite game

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zevran just invite your friends to brunch or smt you can't keep using assassination attempts as good excuses to visit them

(commission info // tip jar!)

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f!hawke and m!hawke are siblings. to me.

(commission info // kofi support!)

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I love baby Wardens and Inquisitors a lot (like 18-20 year olds not actual children). Like dude you should be taking your gap year right now why are you leading a major historically significant organization? You should still be living with your mom why are all of these old people making you save their asses?

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First off wanted to say how much I enjoy these polls :]!! Thank you for doing them!

I was wondering; have you done who's the 'soldier, poet, or king' out of all the main PCs? (so out of the HoF, hawke, the inquisitor, and rook) -👑

Poet and king polls on separate posts

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like i know of course the games industry is fucked and EA will continue to make money with impunity but i just. continue to wonder how the fuck they operate as a business if they keep getting caught setting people up to fail on purpose. from a logistical standpoint, do you not want to make money on every product you develop so it’s not a “waste of resources”? do you not understand market research and what appeals to consumers?

like we keep hearing about how they wanted to turn the franchise into something else and the fact that it “”failed to meet expectations”” because they couldn’t adequately course-correct, but i am so baffled how those expectations got set in the first place. how are you a video game company who doesn’t understand the concept of a target audience. why do you keep trying to broaden your appeal when time and again it’s proven that just alienates the people you already had. someone who plays overwatch is never going to come to dragon age for the same thing. the devs who work on it are never going to be able to make something comparable because it’s not the kind of thing they’re used to doing. like who let them think this was a reasonable thing to expect would just. happen

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I miss you here...

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commission for @ruumiinlaulaja !!

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All of this. I feel like I've read enough interviews with/social media posts from various former dragon age devs over the years to have pieced together this vibe before, but the ME team vs DA team vibe really just smacks to me of the eternal 'jocks vs nerds' battle. Like ME was the flashy shooter with a wide appeal to the kind of audience that EA wanted. And ME team thought they were the cool kids on the block with their COD bro-appealing space game. DA was the nerdy shit for nerds (and women, and other minority groups) and so it was the red-headed stepchild along with its entire team. And every shit decision made was just fans on the flame of this absolutely toxic dog shit dynamic. My heart honestly breaks for all the devs and creatives who did their absolute best with what they were allowed to do and got fucking railed for it.

Like, I hate Veilguard. This won't be a surprise to people who have followed me specifically for my Veilguard critical posts but I recognize I have gained a few followers since then, and those followers specifically followed me for Dorianposting with Veilguard gifs. Please don't take it personally that I hated it.

I didn't like the game mostly for its writing. I won't go into a long spiel because this post is not about that, but what I dislike about the game is mirrored in a lot of longtime DA fans who were disappointed with Veilguard, and it reflects a lot of the problems with the writing that the article touches on.

And I don't think "the DA team was mistreated" contradicts "the DA team wrote a terrible game", but…COME ON.

There's something so unjust about it. That EA and Bioware and the ME team came in at the end of development and said "this needs to be a serious and gripping narrative, fans want a serious and gripping narrative", and yes, they are correct, that's what we (fans like me) wanted and the game didn't have enough of it, but also like. As though the DA team didn't say this from the very start?

The very first version of Dragon Age 4 was going to be a serious and gripping narrative! It was going to have the worldbuilding we wanted, it was going to expand on the things we were interested in, it was probably going to have a million terrible and enraging plot points but it was going to be a Dragon Age game and it was going to have choices and conflict and everything fans of the series wanted. And it was NOT the DA team's fault that it wasn't that. Like maybe the people left behind at the end didn't know how to write a fantasy game but it wasn't their fault that they were the only people left.

Like, they argued over this. They were fired over this. People who had been with Bioware for YEARS resigned over this. The ones who were left were told to make it a multiplayer so they started designing a multiplayer. Then when they were probably half or even most of the way through making the multiplayer they were told to make it a "broad-appeal" singleplayer. Not even "restart development and make a singleplayer" but "take the game you were already making and turn it into a singleplayer". Do you know how insane this production standard is??? If you look at pretty much any other game, you are supposed to know what you are making BEFORE YOU START MAKING IT. It's like being told to paint a portrait, then told after you're done thumbnailing for the portrait to instead make an elaborate pastoral scene, and then told as you are layering paint on the canvas "actually we want a portrait".

And someone comes in and is like "why is this portrait in landscape orientation have you never made a game before in your life".

Like, yeah I get annoyed when I see comments from the DA writers that imply "this character was a two-dimensional caricature on purpose" but it's kind of like. Seeing the Mass Effect lead crowing about how "Mass Effect 5 isn't going to have a tone change like Dragon Age did" gives me the same fury, you know? Like, what do you know? You were the golden child. You got what you wanted when you asked for it.

I liked Mass Effect, but the second the story was over I stopped caring about it. Dragon Age is the thing that's endured. And the comment about the differences in ME team structure compared to Dragon Age? Yeah. I can see that. Dragon Age is a series comprised of multiple viewpoints and narratives. Sometimes this means that the narrative contradicts itself. Sometimes you have characters where you can tell they were handled with love and care by one writer only for the next one to completely change who they are. It is what it is. It's part of what makes the series so compelling and also what makes it so terrible. I'm going to miss it forever. I don't think we're ever getting it back even if they try to make another one because the people who made this series what it is, who understood what it was about, they're gone.

Anyway. I guess I'll just die mad about it.

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anders dragon age i will always love u

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My favourite character from Dragon Age is probably Wynne. She is adorable! 

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the imagery of varric making cassandra pay him to talk about sebastian is taking me out