#the creature and environment designers should've been going ham...

[sunlight-shunlight]

yeah!! like the veil going up should really be the equivalent of a mass extinction event, almost... by the time the games start there's been a few thousand years for stuff to readjust, but that's still not long enough for the environment to actually flourish after such a big change. especially with the blights haha. i think the first blight lasted literal centuries? so that should REALLY have an effect. not even just from the direct effects - people would be unable to farm from the blight, there would be tons of displacement, and they'd be basically hunting anything big enough to eat into extinction.

i like to think solas was doing the equivalent of constantly looking up youtube tutorials in his first year haha. like just phoning his spirit friends every 5 minutes like "what's that plant. what's that animal. can i cook this-". so he probably was fine but hated almost every minute of it. those orlesian frilly cakes were the only time he wasn't suffering, alas.

one thing about ancient arlathan i wish vg had gotten into (along with any other interesting details besides being vaguely desaturated haha) is that: the ecology should've been pretty crazy? i think it's hinted that spiders get really big in places where the veil is thin. and with all the ambient magic before the veil existed, surely there'd be tons of cool megafauna?? plus ghilan'nain was going ham with bioengineering stuff, there should be all kinds of things running around.

plus modern thedas has survived multiple rounds of blight, which would logically kill off tons of species and lead to a lot of places being turned completely barren... what would it have been like before that? it would add an interesting element to solas' nostalgia if the world is quite literally different in that way.