zoneofsmites

[zoneofsmites]

knight who is constantly searching for a good and noble king to serve but cannot fucking find one for the life of him so he has to become the good and noble king himself.

and now all these other knights are coming around like "please let me serve you" and like obviously hes going to let them serve him thats the point of being a good and noble king but its also. very annoying. one of you become the good and noble king for once lets trade

[zoneofsmites]

Fave collection of Wreg yearning/smooching knights and generally loving dudes

[zoneofsmites]

ok i know we're all in the doomed by the narrative era collectively BUT!!!!!!!!! but. BUT. can i just say my little piece about how much i actually love a living HoF worldstate. like conceptually it's so fucking good okay like you go through your story and because of that you know your story. you know the complexity of the situation, you know & understand the circumstances only through ur frame of reference for that decision - u didnt know going to camp would doom redcliffe! u didnt know that the demon possessing connor wouldnt kill everyone if you went to the circle tower! u didnt know jowan doing blood magic was an option! u didnt realise there were kids living in the circle tower! u didnt realise zathrian was lying abt the origin of the werewolf curse! etc etc - and then like none of that matters because no one hears or cares abt the complexity. you are, exclusively, The Hero of Ferelden. the only thing that remains is that you saved ferelden - and at first, it matters to people how you did it, but eventually even that fades. all the difficult decisions you made get smoothed over into nothing - all of those lives that you might have been able to save are unremembered. all of the lives lost defending yours is irrelevant. and you're still here and even that's irrelevant!!! you are still alive but they've made you a living myth, something bigger than yourself. & it's SUCH a delicious parallel to loghain's status as the hero of river dane, which in turn, is the bookend to solas "the dreadwolf" dragon age. you're just left with the mythology of who you are!!! it's so fucking good

[zoneofsmites]

if a hand kiss isn’t done with either reverent trembling and closed eyes or with a certain slow sensuality and direct ‘fuck me’ eye contact, you are wasting my time and everyone else’s

[zoneofsmites]

[zoneofsmites]

homeless man calling another homeless man broke

[zoneofsmites]

the grey wardens being rat bastards is literally my favorite part of the order this isn't a joke. i love it so much. an order of legendary knights who act as the sole protectors of their continent against an existential threat, and they're literally trained to not care about anything else but stopping that threat. it's so heghghgrhhghh

[zoneofsmites]

things dragon age never explored so we as a society must explore ourselves:

grey wardens use the rite of conscription on criminals a lot. but. we're supposed to believe that deserting from the wardens is kind of rare.? what makes people who never wanted to be a warden to begin with stay.

dwarven templars. they're literally drinking their ancestors blood. not to mention that one-off line with a dwarven warden that kind of haunts me ("i've been fighting.... myself?")

literally anything with reavers

the relationship between dwarven berserkers and ash warriors

actually the fereldan """barbarians""" in general it drives me insane that the chasind are never mentioned again?

i miss spirit warriors tales. i miss them a lot.

did you fucking know non-dwarves can join the legion of the dead. one of cassandra's ancestors joined after being banished from nevarra. why doesnt this get talked about more.

the sha-brytol never fucking come up again in the series and it actually haunts me

[zoneofsmites]

Clingiest DA2 companion? Not on a romantic level, but platonic.

[zoneofsmites]

Hansry week day 4: Heat

[zoneofsmites]

Absolutely obsessed with the idea that Emmrich was so preoccupied with wondering if he could actually build a body for a wisp that he didn’t think of what that means after the fact.

Like yay! It worked! Wisp in a body! It’s sentient! Look at his boy!

But what he didn’t think about was then having to baby proof his apartment in the Necropolis.

Little baby (I mean he’s the same size but he’s new to having a body) Manfred has just learned how to walk and hasn’t fully mastered the art of balance. But there’s so many sharpened dges in the apartment that could cause harm to an open skull; table corners, bookshelf sides, doorknobs, etc.

Not to mention he has clumsy feet and there are so many piles of books that are stacked here and there and they must be cleaned up so Manfred doesn��t fall and break a femur or two. But books are also not safe on the shelf where they belong because Manfred now has little grabby hands that want to pull and tug and tear.

And we can’t forget how many breakable things Emmrich absolutely has in the apartment. A whole collection of skulls, decorative urns, glass jars full of Stuff and Things, vases with flowers, tea cups, the fine china, the everything. So now anything breakable and sentimental must be moved out of reach.

And much like a regular baby, Manfred sees A Thing and immediately it must go in The Mouth. And Emmrich isn’t concerned about Manfred choking on anything, he is a skeleton after all, but it’s very likely something could get wedged in the bottom jaw or even crack a tooth if he bites.

So Emmrich quickly goes from Eureka! to very tired dad over the course of one very long afternoon.

But, finally, after Manfred seems to have worn himself out, Emmrich can finally relax and sink into the very plush cushions of his drawing room chaise when he hears a little bit of scurrying and a curious hiss. He looks over and sees that Manfred has gotten into his begONIAS MANFRED, NO.

[zoneofsmites]

pretty sure by now that they never actually wrote the mage ending for da2, just the templar ending

it’s relatively common knowledge that the harvester fight with orsino wasn’t supposed to happen if you sided with the mages but they were too short on time to do anything else so they threw it in anyway for the sake of having two boss fights, but that’s not what’s really got me thinking this

it’s cullen

because the narrative beats the story tries to hit with cullen are absolutely incoherent. he’s casually complicit in enacting the rite of tranquility until meredith tries to kill hawke and that’s the moment he puts his foot down? then meredith turns on her own people and cullen’s fighting her with us? then he stands down and lets hawke leave rather than get his ass handed to him? cullen’s trying to carry so much narrative weight in the climax and it’s like. why. lmfao. why is he even here. why do we get him as an ally in the final boss fight. what possible purpose does his presence actually serve.

I couldn’t make sense of it so I just assumed it was bad writing for a long time, but I no longer think that’s the case, because he’s not out of place at all in the templar ending

hawke and cullen fighting mages side by side. meredith succumbs to her paranoia and turns against her own allies. cullen heroically stands with hawke against her. the day is saved whoop dee do. that’s a perfectly coherent climax, actually! it makes sense!

it just took me years to notice because I always play through the ending they didn’t have time to actually write oops ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[zoneofsmites]

I wish there was a narratively satisfying way to justify picking Sten to fight Loghain over the Warden and Alistair because the way he responds to getting chosen for the duel by actually smiling a little, saying "Finally" like his sole goal in life has been to beat Loghain to death in front of a live studio audience and then heading off for that standoff/quickdraw cutscene is very cool

[zoneofsmites]

Nexus Mods was acquired by Chosen, a company focused on growth and monetization of gaming startups.

Reddit thread

Dark0ne, creator and ex-owner of Nexus Mods, stepped down today in an update post:

NexusMods post

Users on Resetera were able to found out more about this sudden change of ownership:

Resetera thread

Victor Folmann, CEO of Chosen, published this "Gaming Startup Monetization Cheat Sheet" on his LinkedIn

Link to the post

Users are already sharing their fear of NexusMods allowing more bigoted mods in the future, and taking down inclusive ones to follow the current "anti-woke" trend in the gaming industry

Reseta threada bout their change in moderation concerning bigoted mods following Oblivion Remastered launch

Another User, this time on NexusMods forum, noticed queer and inclusive mods being removed following Dark0ne's post

Link to the forum post

It is also worth mentioning that Chosen and its CEO are seen using AI generated images on their website (including generated images depicting Tracer from Overwatch) hyping up ChatGPT on his Linkedin account, and are including "rewarding gamers with crypto money"

Users speculate that Chosen buying out NexusMods is to potentially train an AI model that generates mods

More about Nvidia's AI "RTX Remix" and future projects

[zoneofsmites]

i really wish that there was a way to spare the arishok without having to hand isabela over...