#bioware needs to man tf up and own up that

[pestopascal]

why vivienne compared to leliana or cassandra?

this got long.

it’s a big fuck you to the whole concept of the chantry in general. a mage in the seat of southern thedas’ seat of power? oh my god they aren’t any better than tevinter after all! funny about that, orlais. 

vivienne has been a part of ‘the game’ for so long, she’s like actually willing to use it to her advantage, whereas leliana has struck out on it several times and cassandra just doesn’t want to do it. celene could’ve honestly learned from vivienne if she wasn’t so enamoured by “weird dalish artifacts” and hiring morrigan lmao

yeah the last two were the left and right hand of justinia, but like... leliana was dipping in and out of kirkwall to see if they needed to send an exalted march at one point and was keeping an eye on things from a distance (and even varric says shes good at her job because she’s not emotionally involved), cassandra got her place bc dragons (remember that animated film? lmao what the fuck was that) and the whole seeker concept is just. they know how to reverse tranquility.

guess who gets access to secret official records? a mage. guess who would probably use that information in likely a more controlled environment because magic, instead of trial and error and fucking around with spirits? a mage who is fully aware of the attraction to spirits and demons that her magic has.

yes you can soften leliana again. i recognise that. i have a lot of grievances with leliana being bioware’s widdle baby angel (much like liara), but her hardened as divine is fucking baller and makes sense for her development. softening her was just such a weird concept to me so whatever idk man she doesn’t wanna take chances but does? leliana still hardened takes no chances in orlais.

leliana is literally so detached though as well and she doesn’t get what being a mage is actually like. and cassandra honestly hates magic up until like either you romance her or “wow you’re the only mage i know who is okay” part comes up. i mean she has more of a reason to not like them, i know, her entire backstory is literally shaped around politics and magic. i read the books, i watched the movie.

rivain’s circle was so successful because it remained open and accessible to literally anyone. including family members. it got marched on because the chantry didn’t fucking like that apparently. vivienne would know this. same with how she knows how the marchers work with their circles. she knows how the orlesian circles work.

bioware wants you to hate vivienne so much and they try to play it off as not pure racism on their behalf but they literally dress vivenne up as maleficent and then like hint the entire way through that she hates you and will betray you but if she gets mad at you? you know what she does? she cleans your room for you. gives you life advice, understands if you betray her in regards to the love of her life, and moves tf on. like. she also does like other forms and styles of magic and education. she is wary of people (solas) who take to the fade lightly, because that is what she has been taught. she has opinions on the dalish (as does literally everyone), and y’know what she is wrong. but she’s also not. i think people also need to remember that bioware retconned the fuck out of everything in dai and that her dialogue reflects those changes? so like naturally her first fucking conversation is highlighting that retcon.

it can also be a reflection of what she has been told about the dalish by circles like you have to also remember that no matter what, everything in the game hates dalish elves.

vivienne is prioritising education. look, fiona gets royally fucked over left right and centre and we get it. she doesn’t fit into anything more. she’s not warden enough. she’s not mage enough. she was grand enchanter, she also technically was part of the reason the mage-templar war kicked off (not anders, contrary to popular belief). fiona wants to do things at her own pace without the chantry breathing down their necks because we know how horrific the templars are in the circles (i mean. kirkwall??? alone???). vivienne leashes the templars under her control. cassandra ends up effectively prioritising them still, especially if you rebuild the seekers, and leliana just chops off a whole movement. people still hold grievances towards mages, no matter if the entire south of thedas came out with “ok only a small margin are bad like 1% but the 99% are honestly good people”. protection, controlled protection, is something.

especially to tackle something so deeply rooted into the south of thedas religion. she fucking recognises that it is the worst time to be a mage and that everyone else’s decisions have fucked up the majority’s livelihoods.

vivienne wants to give mages political power and advantage which isnt legally possible even when she was elected to work beside celene. she wants them to be more prominent in the societies they live in.

accessibility. the game doesn’t phrase it that way at all. vivienne doesnt remember her parents. like literally so many people in game comment how trevelyan was lucky/rich enough to be visited by family at ostwick. vivienne didn’t get that luxury at ostwick circle.

lyrium control. literally the biggest fucking market in the entire game that we only ever hear bits about, primarily in tevinter, but orzammar is right there hello.

she actually?? doesn’t trust?? templars?? idk where people came up with that. hello she grew up in the circles.

the game fucking sabotages her okay. bioware wants you to hate her So Damn Much. they want you to completely distrust her because she is a better introduction into orlesian society than what leliana could dream of being. even josephine gets it. orlais is the seat of power in the south and the game was based in ferelden. leliana’s approach would work in ferelden because they literally left everything up to a bunch of barely 20 year old fugitives in the end. orlais is disgustingly french and not in the ‘we are good at revolutions and leave guillotines around when we wanna make a point’ kind of french either. it’s all the worst parts. vivienne knows that.

[pestopascal]

thoughts on andromeda?

Sry if you're expecting smth rly concise in regards to like overall feelings… Like I’ll talk about specific parts and all but … overall? I enjoyed Andromeda. Glaring technical issues aside… it wasn’t that horrible of a game despite what everything pre-release said (and, hey, i got it for below release price, plus a deluxe upgrade so like basically saved myself more than $100. even better).

Like, clearly though, there is a HUGE need for improvement. Another just… 6 months to work out the bugs. They sat there and went ‘this is good enough for release’ when honestly it wasn’t. It so wasn’t. Tbh this just begs the question of every company that looks at their games tho and decide on who deems it good enough lmaooooo. Reactions to the demo alone should’ve given them that idea but oh, no, they thought it was good enough and Bioware’s classic ‘we’ll just fix it later’ attitude is… honestly getting kinda grating. Like I sat through DA2 and Inquisition with this kind of attitude bioware. Come the fuck on now. 

And look, honestly, conspiracy theories aside, for a new studio group, especially since most worked on DLC alone, it wasn’t bad. Not the greatest thing I’ve ever played, and Andromeda gave me maaaaaaaad ME1/ME2 vibes — which actually caused me to go back and replay OT for like 2 weeks haha

Under the cut to keep going bc I got kinda long and complain-y lol but smth specific hmu

But like… I’m not gonna ignore that it was literally made with straight white male gamers in mind. Like this has to be one of the worst games out of Bioware that specifically had that group as a main demographic. Considering they’ve come pretty fucking far with everything else, Mass Effect as a whole has always struggled in my opinion to be Up There with everything else they’ve produced. I know it’s different teams. I know. But there still should be a standard the company sets for itself and each fucking team to achieve. How can they go from DAI (which wasn’t that awful either and was pretty forward) to this? How come all their fantasy stuff has always been SO much more ... everything compared to their future space series? There are more than enough posts and articles out there to point out why specifically, and it’s not just like now how they’ve made Sara Ryder sexy and smooth skinned and small faced and bedroom eyed. Like these issues were existing loooooooong before during initial releases. You literally do Peebee’s first time if you choose to embrace eternity with her (again with the space virgin thing!!!). Gross. 

Honestly the teammates weren’t bad either I really ended up enjoying the dynamics. At first, yeah, I turned my nose up at like Vetra and Drack just because… we’ve already had like a space vigilante turian teammate for three games, and a dad krogan for a while now, and I’m still wondering who the cut teammate was and I’m putting money on it being another fucking quarian okay just because Bioware is gonna stick to what they know as far as dynamics go. I bet it’s gonna be a dude quarian. They’re just gonna do it we know they will. Like that’ll be cool don’t get me wrong but it’s not exactly groundbreaking. We’re gonna have to pay for this person too lmaooooo fucking sink hole. 

And Jaal is a pretty decent dude (he’s actually fucking hilarious which I kinda didn’t… expect) and Liam is alright but goddamn like. I know Ryder is supposed to be sufficiently inexperienced compared to Shepard. But like NOTHING came about from nearly dying in both Liam and Peebee’s loyalty missions. A friendly bit of banter and ‘we nearly killed the human pathfinder but that’s okay we’re all bffs!!!’. Also Liam just feels like he was written by like four different people. What is consistency. Boy has some Issues. Cora grew on me heaps after her loyalty mission which I noticed happened for a lot of ppl too ig bc she finally stopped acting like she knew everything about asari lol rip. Peebee actually got tolerable and the dismissiveness will forever bug me in regards to her past relationship but idk why I even expect anything? Like this dev team thought Hainley was okay for release. Fuck. Kallo and Suvi were rly cool I rly liked them (I Trust Kallo) but Gil needs a huge fucking overhaul. Or you just need to be able to tell his bff5eva off for being such a judgy bitch tbh. 

(also makes me wonder who they’re gonna play pair the spares with but that’s another question for another time)

Some of the shit they pulled though (Sloane Kelly being one of the Biggest Fucking Concerns) isn’t even something you can just shrug over. Sure when I first played I was like yah fuq that nonsense with head on spikes. And then they give you a goddamn novel — which is UNsurprisingly fucking important to understanding wtf happened before Ryder/s arrived — to basically convince you that Sloane is probably the better choice in some respects even though honestly I feel like there was no  inherently right or wrong choice in that situation. Reyes and Sloane both had their pros and cons and it just came down to personal preference. Tacking on a romance that literally hinges on that choice was rly unfair to Sloane tho. LIKE OK it was kinda unfair to Reyes too but rly it was just sooooo rude to Sloane. You literally have to let her die to complete Reyes’ romance. Wtf. What kinda BS is that. 

And it’s ALWAYS the fucking shadowy types (who are, unsurprisingly, ALWAYS their male bisexual characters who are Always Labelled as the sleeping around kinda guys u kno) that fucking backstab. Come the fuck on bioware. You can only run this trope into the ground so many times before it just becomes offensive as a whole. And by so many times I mean like once. You did that way back before KOTOR. Enough is enough.

And then there’s the whole no m|m romance teammate. Srsly. SRSLY. ITS SPACE. 600YRS IN THE FUTURE THAT WAS ALREADY 100+ YRS IN THE FUTURE. THERES LITERALLY NO EXCUSE. I don’t give a flying fuck if you have a straight white male audience. Bioware has built itself on being some kind of fucking “””””””pioneer””””””” in the way of romance and storytelling. Like i saw smth that said Bethesda and Bioware tried to trade secrets and messed up (in relation to Fallout 4 too) and honestly that’s a rly accurate summary of what happened. and ESP when bioware was all like ‘deeper more meaningful relationships! more realism! JKS we rly don’t care and gave Peebee 3hrs of content and Liam less than 30mins. We lied. Again. We do that a lot.

TLDR;; okay. overall… I did enjoy it. I will replay and honestly I’m waiting out for lots of patch fixes before I rly settle into a second play through — and I would like Bioware to admit they fucked up big time. Not just these small apologies and “we’re getting to its” just. Admitting it. They won’t but I hope so. And like I don’t expect anything perfect as far as Andromeda develops, and honestly I’m GLAD it wasn’t like OT like I know some ppl bitching their heads off expecting Shepard 2.0 and getting Ryder … and Ryder is honestly hilarious as far as protags go but like. Needs improvement. Hopes for DLC??? Please don’t give away very valuable world building information in a dlc this time tho pls thnx