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it's so over😔

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listen…. this idea woke me up at 5 in the morning

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hey uh new type of ao3 spam comment just dropped. (I know it's spam because the fic they left this comment on . doesn't have chapters. lmfao). Report this kinda comment as spam and don't take it personally it is literally recycled bullshit

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That elderly couple who volunteers at the soup kitchen after church on Sundays and attends every town hall meeting has done more community direct action than 99% of internet leftists 🤷🏽‍♀️

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Jason Schreier for Bloomberg reports: 'Inside the ‘Dragon Age’ Debacle That Gutted EA’s BioWare Studio'

The latest game in BioWare’s fantasy role-playing series went through ten years of development turmoil

[note: article is below cut after these tweets]

Jason Schreier: "NEW: What went wrong with Dragon Age: The Veilguard? Why was the writing so tonally inconsistent? Why did it feel so shallow? Why were there so few choices? Really, after ten years of turbulence, it was a miracle that anything came out at all. This is the story [link]:" [source]

Jason Schreier: "The fatal flaw for Dragon Age: The Veilguard wasn't just that it pivoted from single-player to multiplayer and back again. It was that after the second pivot, the team was forced to keep going rather than hit the reset button and take the time to create a new plan." [source]

Jason Schreier re: this old tweet from Casey Hudson: "Fun fact: when I first reported at Kotaku in 2018 that Dragon Age 4 was rebooted to become a live-service game, BioWare studio head Casey Hudson wrote this on Twitter. But it was not entirely truthful. In reality, the game was being designed around cooperative multiplayer, replayable missions, etc" [source] Casey Hudson's old tweet from 2018: "Reading lots of feedback regarding Dragon Age, and I think you'll be relieved to see what the team is working on. Story & character focused. Too early to talk details, but when we talk about "live" it just means designing a game for continued storytelling after the main story."

Rest of post/article under cut due to length.

"In early November, on the eve of the crucial holiday shopping season, staffers at the video-game studio BioWare were feeling optimistic. After an excruciating development cycle, they had finally released their latest game, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and the early reception was largely positive. The role-playing game was topping sales charts on Steam, and solid, if not spectacular, reviews were rolling in. But in the weeks that followed, the early buzz cooled as players delved deeper into the fantasy world, and some BioWare employees grew anxious. For months, everyone at the subsidiary of the video-game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. had been under intense pressure. The studio’s previous two games, Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, had flopped, and there were rumors that if Dragon Age underperformed, BioWare might become another of EA’s many casualties. Not long after Christmas, the bad news surfaced. EA announced in January that the new Dragon Age had only reached 1.5 million players, missing the company’s expectations by 50%. The holiday performance of another recently released title, EA Sports FC 2025, was also subpar, compounding the problem."

"As a result of the struggling titles, EA Chief Executive Officer Andrew Wilson explained, the company would be significantly lowering its sales forecast for the fiscal year ahead. EA’s share price promptly plunged 18%. “Dragon Age had a high-quality launch and was well-reviewed by critics and those who played,” Wilson later said on an earnings call. “However, it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market.” Days after the sales revision, EA laid off a chunk of BioWare’s staff at the studio’s headquarters in Edmonton, Canada, and permanently transferred many of the remaining workers to other divisions. For the storied, 30-year-old game maker, it was a stunning fall that left many fans wondering how things had gone so haywire — and what might come next for the stricken studio. According to interviews with nearly two dozen people who worked on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, there were several reasons behind its failure, including marketing misfires, poor word of mouth and a 10-year gap since the previous title. Above all, sources point to the rebooting of the product from a single-player game to a multiplayer one — and then back again — a switcheroo that muddled development and inflated the title’s budget, they say, ultimately setting the stage for EA’s potentially unrealistic sales expectations. A spokesperson for EA declined to comment."

"The union between BioWare and EA started off with lofty aspirations. In 2007, EA executives announced they were acquiring BioWare and another gaming studio in a deal worth $860 million. The goal was to diversify their slate of games, which was heavy in sports titles, like Madden NFL, and light in the kind of adventure and role-playing games that BioWare was known for. Initially, it looked like a smart move thanks to a string of big hits. In 2014, BioWare released Dragon Age: Inquisition, the third installment in a popular action series dropping players in a semi-open world full of magic, elves and fire-spewing dragons. The fantasy title went on to win the much-coveted Game of the Year Award and sell 12 million copies, according to its executive producer Mark Darrah — a major validation of EA’s diversification strategy. Before long, Darrah and Mike Laidlaw, the creative director, began kicking around ideas for the next Dragon Age installment — code name: Joplin — aiming for a game that would be smaller in scope. But before much could get done, BioWare shifted the studio’s focus to more pressing titles coming down the pike. In 2017, BioWare released Mass Effect: Andromeda, the fourth installment in a big-budget action series set in space. Unlike its critically successful predecessors, the game received mediocre reviews and was widely mocked by fans. A few months after the disappointing release, the head of BioWare stepped down and was soon replaced by Microsoft Inc.’s Casey Hudson, an alumni of BioWare’s early, formative years."

"Like much of the industry, EA executives were growing increasingly enamored of so-called live-service games, such as Destiny and Overwatch, in which players continue to engage with and spend money on a title for months or even years after its initial release. With EA aiming to make a splash in the fast-growing category, BioWare poured resources into Anthem, a live-service shooter game that checked all the right boxes. One day in October 2017, Laidlaw summoned his colleagues into a conference room and pulled out a few pricey bottles of whisky. The next Dragon Age sequel, he told the room, would also be pivoting to an online, live-service game — a decision from above that he disagreed with. He was resigning from the studio. The assembled staff stayed late through the night, drinking and reminiscing about the franchise they loved. “I wish that pivot had never occurred,” Darrah would later recount on YouTube. “EA said, ‘Make this a live service.’ We said, ‘We don’t know how to do that. We should basically start the project over.’” Former art director Matt Goldman replaced Laidlaw as creative director, and with a tiny team began pushing ahead on a new multiplayer version of Dragon Age — code name: Morrison — while everyone else helped to finish Anthem, which was struggling to coalesce. Goldman pushed for a “pulpy,” more lighthearted tone than previous entries, which suited an online game but was a drastic departure from the dark, dynamic stories that fans loved in the fantasy series."

"In February 2019, BioWare released Anthem. Reviews were scathing, calling the game tedious and convoluted. Fans were similarly displeased. On social media, players demanded to know why a studio renowned for beloved stories and characters had made an online shooter with a scattershot narrative. In the wake of BioWare’s second consecutive flop, the multiplayer version of Dragon Age continued to take shape. While the previous games in the franchise had featured tactical combat, this one would be all action. Instead of quests that players would only experience once, it would be full of missions that could be replayed repeatedly with friends and strangers. Important characters couldn’t die because they had to persist for multiple players across never-ending gameplay. As the game evolved over the next two years, the failure of Anthem hovered over the studio. Were they making the same mistakes? Some BioWare employees scoffed that they were simply building “Anthem with dragons.” Throughout 2020, the pandemic disrupted the game’s already fraught development. In December, Hudson, the head of the studio, and Darrah, the head of the franchise, resigned. Shortly thereafter, Gary McKay, BioWare’s new studio head, revealed yet another shift in strategy. Moving forward, the next Dragon Age would no longer be multiplayer."

"“We were thinking, ‘Does this make sense, does this play into our strengths, or is this going to be another challenge we have to face?’” McKay later told Bloomberg News. “No, we need to get back to what we’re really great at.” In theory, the reversion back to Dragon Age’s tried-and-true, single-player format should have been welcome news inside BioWare. But there was a catch. Typically, this kind of pivot would be coupled with a reset and a period of pre-production allowing the designers to formulate a new vision for the game. Instead, the team was asked to change the game’s fundamental structure and recast the entire story on the fly, according to people familiar with the new marching orders. They were given a year and a half to finish and told to aim for as wide a market as possible. This strict deadline became a recurring problem. The development team would make decisions believing that they had less than a year to release the game, which severely limited the stories they could tell and the world they could build. Then the title would inevitably be delayed a few months, at which point they’d be stuck with those old decisions with no chance to stop and reevaluate what was working. At the end of 2022, amid continually dizzying leadership changes, the studio started distributing an “alpha” build of Dragon Age to get feedback internally and from outside playtesters. According to people familiar with the process, the reactions were concerning. The game’s biggest problem, early players agreed, was a lack of satisfying choices and consequences. Previous BioWare titles had presented players with gut-wrenching decisions. Which allies to save? Which factions to spare? Which enemies to slay? Such dilemmas made fans feel like they were shaping the narrative — historically, a big draw for many BioWare games."

"But Dragon Age’s multiplayer roots limited such choices, according to people familiar with the development. BioWare delayed the game’s release again while the team shoehorned in a few major decisions, such as which of two cities to save from a dragon attack. But because most of the parameters were already well established, the designers struggled to pair the newly retrofitted choices for players with meaningful consequences downstream. In 2023, to help finish Dragon Age, BioWare brought in a second, internal team, which was working on the next Mass Effect game. For decades there’d been tension between the two well-established camps, known for their starkly divergent ways of doing things. BioWare developers like to joke that the Dragon Age crew was like a pirate ship, meandering and sometimes traveling off course but eventually reaching the port. In contrast, the Mass Effect group was called the USS Enterprise, after the Star Trek ship, because commands were issued straight down from the top and executed zealously. As the Mass Effect directors took control, they scoffed that the Dragon Age squad had been doing a shoddy job and began excluding their leaders from pivotal meetings, according to people familiar with the internal friction. Over time, the Mass Effect team went on to overhaul parts of the game and design a number of additional scenes, including a rich, emotional finale that players loved. But even changes that appeared to improve the game stoked the simmering rancor inside BioWare, infuriating Dragon Age leaders who had been told they didn’t have the budget for such big, ambitious swings."

"“It always seemed that, when the Mass Effect team made its demands in meetings with EA regarding the resources it needed, it got its way,” said David Gaider, a former lead writer on the Dragon Age franchise who left before development of the new game started. “But Dragon Age always had to fight against headwinds.” Early testers and Mass Effect leads complained about the game’s snarky tone — a style of video-game storytelling, once ascendant, that was quickly falling out of fashion in pop culture but had been part of Goldman’s vision for the multiplayer game. Worried that Dragon Age could face the same outcome as Forspoken — a recent title that had been hammered over its impertinent banter — BioWare leaders ordered a belated rewrite of the game’s dialogue to make it sound more serious. (In the end, the resulting tonal inconsistencies would only add to the game’s poor reception with fans.) A mass layoff at BioWare and a mandate to work overtime depleted morale while a voice actors strike limited the writers’ ability to revise the dialogue and create new scenes. An initial trailer made the next Dragon Age seem more like Fortnite than a dark fantasy role-playing game, triggering concerns that EA didn’t know how to market the game. When Dragon Age: The Veilguard finally premiered on Halloween 2024 after many internal delays, some staff members thought there was a lot to like, including the game’s new combat system. But players were less impressed, and sales sputtered."

"“The reactions of the fan base are mixed, to put it gently,” said Caitie, a popular Dragon Age YouTuber. “Some, like myself, adore it for various reasons. Others feel utterly betrayed by certain design choices.” Following the layoffs and staff reassignments at BioWare earlier in the year, a small team of a few dozen employees is now working on the next Mass Effect. After three high-profile failures in a row, questions linger about EA’s commitment to the studio. In May, the company relabeled its Edmonton headquarters from a BioWare office to a hub for all EA staff in the area. Historically, BioWare has never been the most important studio at EA, which generates more than $7 billion in annual revenue largely from its sports games and shooters. Depending on the timing of its launches, BioWare typically accounts for just 5% of EA’s annual bookings, according to estimates by Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co. Even so, there may be strategic reasons for EA to keep supporting BioWare. Single-player role-playing games are expensive to make but can lead to huge windfalls when successful, as demonstrated by recent hits like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3. In order to grow, EA needs more than just sports franchises, said TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz. Trying to fix its fantasy-focused studio may be easier than starting something new. “That said, if they shuttered the doors tomorrow I wouldn’t be totally surprised,” Creutz added. “It has been over a decade since they produced a hit.”"

Article by Jason Schreier. [source]

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i'm bisexual and tired. rb if you're bisexual and tired.

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on watching a parent age

i saw somebody say “what if you’re gone and i haven’t become anything yet” and basically that broke me on a random thursday evening

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20 Questions, Writing edition

Thank you for tagging me, @sillyliterature

How many works do you have on AO3?

8

What's your total AO3 word count?

455,742

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

1. Traveler (Dragon Age - Solas/OC)

2. Healer (Dragon Age - Solas/OC)

3. Traveler (Rewrite) (Dragon Age - Solas/OC)

4. Fly Me To The Moon (Dragon Age - Gen)

5. Healer (Rewrite) (Dragon Age - Solas/OC)

What fandoms do you write for?

Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate 3, Fallout (DA and BG3 are the ones I'm actively writing for)

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

Yes! I want people to know how much I appreciate them taking the time to comment. Also, I wouldn't have one of the friends I do if I never replied to comments.

What's the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Most of my works are unfinished (I know, I know!), so... Traveler and its rewrite, I guess. But it's part of a series, so idk if that counts?

What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Same issue as the previous question. I'll just say that it's gonna be the third installment of the Traveler series.

Do you get hate on fics?

No, luckily. Thought I did recently, but it just ended up being spam.

Do you write smut?

Yup

Do you write crossovers?

No, but maybe someday

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

All of my fics, even the locked ones, were just recently AI scraped

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Nope

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

No, but my friend and I have talked about it. Again, maybe someday...

What's your all-time favourite ship?

That's an impossible question. My favorite ship depends on what my current hyperfocus is. If I'm being 100% honest, I suppose my fav ship is Solas/my oc (I mean, that's my main fic. They live in my head 24/7 lol).

What's the WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

I have multiple unfinished fics, a couple of which I have no interest in finishing and have called them abandoned. The others fall under my main series and I will be finishing it. Even if it kills me!

What are your writing strengths?

I think I'm pretty good at conveying emotion in my writing without having to outright state it. I've also been told my writing style makes it easy to get sucked into the story.

What are your writing weaknesses?

Action and fight scenes. I struggle with them. Also, getting so wrapped up in details that I end up missing some big picture plot holes.

Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in a fic?

Only if it serves a purpose in the story. Otherwise, I think there are better ways to write it that don't exclude some readers.

First fandom you wrote for?

Dragon Age: Inquisition

Favourite fic you've ever written?

Traveler

Tagging (only if you want to/have time - feel free to ignore this): @voidchill @thereallonelyagain @wickedwitchofthewilds @lagingersnapz and anyone else who wants to do this (you can say that I tagged you).

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the prison and urgency

One of the most pieces of new information that I appreciated the most from Veilguard was the insight that the prison holding Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain was beginning to fail, because in retrospect that makes sense of some things I had previously been quite confused by.

I was always a little puzzled by Solas giving the orb to Corypheus because it seems like an unusually bad plan (even for him!) - there were just so many variables that he couldn't control. And it seemed so unnecessary, because after all there must have been other possible sources of power to open the orb, if he'd been willing to take the time to gather supporters or find his lyrium dagger or even just wait for his own power to return. He's immortal, after all; why the hurry?

But it makes far more sense now that we know the prison holding Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain was starting to fail. So the matter was in fact extremely urgent! We've seen now the devastation that E+G wreaked after their escape - given the prospect of that disaster, it's actually pretty reasonable that Solas was panicking and that he went with a quick and crude approach, rather than taking his time. The whole thing makes much more sense to me now.

It also casts new light on his decisions with respect to Lavellan in a romance. I always assumed that it was at least a possible option for him to put his plans aside and stay with her, or shelve the plans for a while and have a few more years with her. Indeed, in his letter to Lavellan he reflects wistfully on that possibility. But although it's clear this is a fond dream of his, in reality he could not have done that, because if he had done nothing then the prison would have come down and Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain would have been released. Simply turning his back on the past and remaining as Solas forever was never really an option, no matter how much he might wish it was.

Finally, this insight gives weight to the fact that Solas changed his approach so dramatically after Inquisition: rather than going for a quick and crude approach once again, he spent ten years carefully planning a ritual and putting plans in motion to mitigate the damage, preparing spirits to help etc. Given what we now know about the urgency of the matter, that really speaks to how seriously he took what he learned in Inquisition and how deeply committed he was to reducing the damage as much as he could.

Anyway, I do really enjoy how some of these little insights in VG reflect back on past events, and this one in particular dovetails really well and rationalizes his past actions in a very satisfying way.

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My two yr old is looking through a book about prehistoric art and she saw a picture of those cave painting of hands and she held up her own and said "hand!" And I gotta be honest. That hit

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finally sharing the cameo I requested of Solas saying this post!

"Damn, I wish I could wolf out right now." "This fight would be so much easier if I wolfed out." "Fuck this guy, imagine if I wolfed out on them."

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This passage here breaks my brain.

Felassan rescues this girl from bandits, and upon hearing her tragic backstory he immediately decides that the best course of action would be to teach her how to be himself.

A long time ago, Felassan would have looked out at the world around him and dreamed of a world without slavery, subjugation, or Evanuris ruling everything. How did he go about making that dream a reality?

Supporting Solas. Being his right hand. Welcoming the refugees to the Lighthouse while Solas was sequestered in the music room grieving Mythal. Compromising his own morality. Giving Solas everything he had.

Is that not what he taught Briala to do? Celene was her best shot at shaping the world like Solas was once his. When he told her to go back to Celene, he was thinking about how he himself went back to Solas even after he put up the Veil and destroyed their world.

But then Briala forces Michel to yield in the duel against Gaspard, and what does Felassan do?

He laughs.

He laughed because this was the moment when Felassan stopped seeing himself in Briala and started seeing Solas. Just like Solas did with Elgar'nan, Briala spat in the face of her ruler and declared that Celine could no longer be trusted to lead her people. She rebelled, just like Solas rebelled, and like Solas she inspired Felassan to do just the same.

She reignited that spark of hope in him that once led him to follow Solas—but now instead of following Solas, he was following her.

And Solas—Pride—couldn't see that as anything other than betrayal, so he killed him.

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Write Characters with Deep Emotional Wounds

(Without Making Them Walking Tragedies)

╰ Start with the scar, not the stabbing. Everyone talks about what happened to your character (The Big Trauma) but honestly? It’s the aftermath that matters. Show me the limp, not the bullet wound. Show me the way they flinch at kindness or double-check locks three times. The wound shapes them more than the event ever did.

╰ Don't make them "Sad All The Time" People with deep hurts aren’t just dramatic sob machines. They make bad jokes. They find weird hobbies. They have good days and then get wrecked by a song in a grocery store. Layers, my friend. Pain is complex and it sure as hell isn’t aesthetic.

╰ Let them almost heal and then backslide. Real healing isn’t linear. One good conversation doesn’t erase ten years of bottled-up grief. Your character might think they’re over it, and then one tiny thing, a smell, a phrase, a look, knocks them right back into the hole. Make them earn their healing. Make us ache for them.

╰ Give them armor and show the cracks. Maybe it’s sarcasm. Maybe it’s perfectionism. Maybe it’s taking care of everyone else so no one notices they're broken. Whatever mask they wear, show us the hairline fractures. Let us catch the moments where they almost drop the act.

╰ Don’t turn their trauma into their only personality trait. Yes, they’ve been through hell. But they also love spicy chips and bad reality TV. They have dumb crushes and secret dreams. A tragic backstory isn’t a substitute for a full human being. Let them be more than the worst thing that ever happened to them.

╰ Let their wound warp their decisions. People protect their wounds. Even badly. Especially badly. They might sabotage good relationships. Or push away help. Or cling too tightly. Make their past live in their choices, not just their flashbacks.

╰ Don’t make the world validate them for existing. Not everyone is going to understand your wounded character. Some people will misunderstand them. Blame them. Get frustrated. And honestly? That’s real. Let your character find their people, after facing the ones who don’t get it. It’s so much sweeter that way.

╰ Wounds can make them kinder—or crueler. Pain changes people. Some become protectors. Some become destroyers. Some do both, depending on the day. Let your character’s hurt make them complicated. Unpredictable. Human.

╰ Don’t heal them just to tie a neat bow on your story Sometimes the best ending is messy. Sometimes the healing is just starting. Sometimes it’s just hope, not a full recovery montage. That’s okay. Healing is a lifelong, terrifying, brave process—and readers feel it when you respect that.

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The herald with her elven servingman <3

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Wow, now there's a bot going around on Ao3 telling people that the "moderators" will delete works from "deprecated" fandoms and impose bans.

Fearmongering bullshit, but it's fearmongering bullshit that seems to be taking advantage of the recent spotlight series in order to trick authors into deleting their fics.

Just. Why.

What the hell does anyone get out of making these bots.