oscararcane

[oscararcane]

The Blade of Frontiers (with a sturgeon spiky tail)

[oscararcane]

Challenged myself over the past few days to cement Mal's various armor/clothing sets over the course of the Fifth Blight as I picture them. I've never really vibed with the vanilla game armor for him, and as I've addressed before, I love dressing him up.

I might do a breakdown of the real-life clothing and armor elements involved and where/when they come from over on my Patreon once I've gotten a little more sleep.

If you would like to see me draw your beloved Warden in a complicated outfit full of historical references like this, my commission info is here

[oscararcane]

nothing but respect for our troops (smut writers) but listen. i dont want to be the person to tell you this, but not every character is going to be a dom or a sub. some people. and i know this is hard to hear. but some people do have vanilla sex. and some of those people might even be The Character.

[oscararcane]

I've been getting back into Palia lately (just before the Elderwood expansion anouncement, believe it or not lol) and I have sunk quite a a bit of hours into remaking my plot (the mental health is that bad, yes). I've more or less finished it yesterday and put it on the house tour board today.

So if you play Palia and are interested in checking out my plot, my character name is Agate Foxglove. (Yes I would love the rewards, but honestly I just want to show the result to people, I'm pretty happy with it, even if it's nothing crazy.)

Mind you, it's not quite where I want it to be (especially clutter and flower-wise) but given the object count limit I don't know if I can make it any better than that lol. For future plots I'll have to keep that in mind and keep them more contained...

[oscararcane]

ok so i think that my favourite fantasy subgenre is The Inherent Tragedy Of Being Born Into Royalty. which mostly means that i like to read about gay princes but with some nuance

[oscararcane]

Interiors of Wightwick Manor, Wolverhampton, built by Edward Ould for industrialist Theodore Mander in the 1880s and 1890s.

[oscararcane]

Provoke the blade and suffer its sting 🗡️

[oscararcane]

my friends r so talented. rb if ur friends are talented

[oscararcane]

For scientific purposes, who was your FIRST romance in each DA game.

[oscararcane]

I finished Avowed not too long ago and I felt like throwing some thoughts about it out there:

(it's way way too long I'm so sorry)

The good:

The main thing I loved about it is the main story which was lovely. It dives into the usual themes of Pillars of Eternity (colonization, souls, godhood, etc) while still exploring new facets of them, and it dig ever deeper in Eora's lore which, as a PoE girly, I find very satisfying.

Things can go a lot of different ways depending not only on choices, but on how you explore the game and how much you discover and when. There is a lot of nuance to most choices (expect the last one tbh, where there is only one actual good choice imo), which had me struggling to pick one multiple times. Not because you have to choose between two equally bad options (which happens too often in games like this — looking at you Bioware), but because I could see good reasons to pick either in most cases (again, except the last one lmao). It encourages you to think about it in earnest instead of meta-gaming, you think about what your character would choose in this situation and about the possible consequences and moral implications. Instead of, you know, what character am I going to be locked out of romancing lmao.

MILD SPOILERS: I especially loved Sapadal, their position in Eora's cosmology and especialy, especially the PC's relationship to them and how you can influence them. I cried a couple of times in scenes involving them. They're my baby and if anything happens to them I will kill everyone in this room and then myself.

The characters were generally interesting, but I DID NOT expect to relate to Kai the most. Man, his personal quest... SPOILERS FOR KAI'S QUEST: The whole self-sabotaging thing to avoid failing people again hit way too hard, man. Sometimes it's easier to see yourself and present yourself as a shitty person rather than risk disappointing people. Unfortunately, you can't really live your life that way, oops.

Overall I enjoyed the gameplay. Exploring and combat was fun. Maybe not the best ever, but still fun. As much as I love PoE, real time combat with pause is not really enjoyable for me, I find it too chaotic and overwhelming lol. So the change to a more action-y gameplay worked for me. Although I think I would have been just as happy with a turn-based system. I also play on the easiest difficulty setting and combat is usually what interests me the least in games, so take what I say about combat with a grain of salt lol.

The 'could be better':

I think the main thing I found lacking were how the companions were handled. While I found something interesting about each of them, I was not as attached to them as I would have liked. We can have pretty extensive conversations with them, which I appreciate, but it wasn't enough to get me invested in their personal stories. I think it's due to several factors, one of which I will get into more later, but the most obvious one is the lackluster personal quests. Kai has the most well-rounded one, I think, and resulted in him being my favorite companion by far. But even in his case, the pacing of his arc could be improved. Once you finish his quest in Shatterscarp, there's not a whole lot going on with him until the end of the game which was a bit disappointing. Marius has an interesting story but because it all unfolds in one of the last maps of the game, I didn't have much opportunity to grow attached to him beforehand and what could have been a very emotional questline ended falling a little flat for me. Giatta and Yatzli don't even have personal quests until the very end of the game which gives resolutions to arcs we didn't really get to participate in, or see enfold in the game. SPOILERS: What if Giatta's parents died more recently or even during the game? What if you discovered what happened to them with her? Wouldn't accompanying her in her grief and how to handle her legacy be more compelling that way? What about Yatzli? She's a fully grown woman, and appears confident in her life choices. Why are we the one to tell her what to do with her future? I think we need to see her doubt her life choices more, have something impactful happen to her in game that rattles her. Just something to raise the emotional stakes. Of course what happens in the main story is important to both of them and can impact them deeply, but it needs to get more personal than that.

Still relating to the companions, I think the other thing that prevented me to be fully invested in them was the lack of relationship between them and the PC, and maybe each other. There are some attempts at it, don't get me wrong. Kai in particular is often asking the PC how they're doing and how they feel about things which is GREAT. More of that in RPGs, please. The companions can end up admitting they consider you a friend by the end of the game, but it doesn't feel entirely earned. It doesn't feel like that relationship has really been built throughout the game. I think a lot of that would also be fixed by more companion quests, better paced, and with higher emotional stakes.

Lastly, maybe a more controversial take lol: I have mixed feelings about this new, more mainstream direction Obsidian is taking for the Eora franchise. Of course I don't really know if it's a 'new direction' per say or just a choice they made for Avowed specifically. But I suppose it makes sense, financially speaking, to keep making games that appeal to a larger audience and unfortunately I think something got lost in the process. I did say that I liked the gameplay and that I find action fun, that I even prefer that to real time with pause... but the amount of resources they likely had to put into that kind of gameplay and visuals probably meant that other things were cut back, things that are more important to me like more story, more dialogue, more choices and customization. Yeah sure, it was nice that the PC had a background and to see the different dialogue options it added. But PoE already had backgrounds. And classes. And a reputation/personality system. And they all contributing to adding variety to the dialogues and to make your character truly feel like yours, unlike any other cRPG I've ever played, tbh. I don't know if we'll ever see that level of customization again, but I would like to. Is it possible to do that in a game with the budget and scope of Avowed? Idk. I hope so. I've heard that development had been difficult, so maybe if a next game goes smoother we can see some of those come back? Another thing this new format does is that written narration, which added so much richness to PoE, had to disappear (although maybe it didn't have to, Baldur's Gate 3 managed to keep some of that in an interesting way). That means that dialogue and visuals have to do what narration used to do, and to be frank, with Obsidian's budget? That's a tall order. For example, (MILD SPOILERS), when Marius experiences panic attacks, he has to tell you all of his symptoms out loud, the voice actor has to do everything because the character model will just stand still and emote very little. And it's still going to fall flat regardless of his efforts because it's the least efficient way to represent a panic attack. With a BG3 or Veilguard budget? Maybe you would have more camera movement, more visual effects, maybe an actor would have been motion-captured for that scene specifically, and maybe it would have had the impact that it needs. But for a smaller budget, like in a PoE game? The narration would have taken care of that and it would have been just as impactful, maybe even more. And that's really why I'm not convinced that Avowed is the best way for Obsidian to tell the wonderful stories they have to tell. Maybe if they get a BG3 budget someday, if that can ever happen... Then it'd be over for all the other RPG studios, lol.

[oscararcane]

Had some stressful stuff coming up so I'm coping by sinking all of my free time into Avowed lol. This is my envoy, Jocosta. :)

[oscararcane]

greetings from the living lands 🍄 thanks for playing avowed, everyone!

[oscararcane]

Anyway shirtless Fenris.

(no one check the correctness of the tats pls and thank you)

[oscararcane]

hey! *rotoscopes your fool*

[oscararcane]

Do you have a "favourite" physical trait to give to your OCs? If so, what is it?