Dragon Age: Dread Wolf's Rise

[magee101]

I can't even connect to this game via it's IP address on the wiki it has up, so I have no idea what this game is.

Edit: one of the few games where if you don't use the IP in the "world name" box it won't let you connect, so it's known as 216.136.9.8 in my MUSHclient as well, but I connected!

Edit #2: Looks like a custom coded MOO, can't find any references to a ruleset or system so looks like a custom job. No one online at 5am my time to talk with. If anyone else in this thread has checked it out sorry if I missed it, I tend to phase out of reading these MSB responses when I notice there's a large section of them that has nothing to do with the content of the OP

[escapegoat]

@fatefan said in Dragon Age: Dread Wolf's Rise:

broad interest in Dragon Age

it seems like someone needs to respond to the exigence for a gritty fantasy game...

Is that really the category that Dragon Age falls into?

[Thenomain]

@escapegoat

DA:O and DA:A, yes. DA2 and DA:I, not so much. I prefer the gritty side of Dragon Age far more.

[Kanye Qwest]

@Thenomain How do you figure DA2 isn't gritty if DA:O is? You literally lose your entire family in pretty much the worst ways imaginable and are stuck in a shithole where everyone is going insane and summoning demons all around you.

[Thenomain]

@Kanye-Qwest

Of the two family members that I lost, the first was almost impactful save for the 1960s cardboard set of nothing that they gave us, the other was handled so badly with the most lame foreshadowing. I mean yeah, at least there was foreshadowing, but both situations came down to nothing more than reacting to something bad that happened around you. It was a cookie cutter example of what gritty might have looked like if they fleshed it out more. Or, like, at all.

DA:O does what a good drama should: Introduce the characters and their situation before messing with it. Hell, the City Dalish intro alone left me rooting against the humans, doubly so as I had chosen a female character for that. I chose a rogue to begin with, but by the end of the intro I wanted to go full on assasin.

The world this Hero of Ferelden left was not a pretty, golden one.

I will give DA2 one prop for not pulling all the punches (like FO4 utterly wussed on). You could leave things kind of messed up at the end, but in such small, inconsequential ways. DA2, to me, was a game about waiting for something to happen.

Good for a Mu*, I suppose.

---

Edit:

Thanks to the DLCs, my shithole home had two gigantic statues each worth at least the price of the hovel and more, and so many weapons, armor, and magic staffs that we probably could have eaten like kings for a year.

Gritty is a mood, not a setting. DA2, I feel, failed it horribly.

[Kanye Qwest]

There's a vast ocean of difference between the metrics for "gritty" and "good", isn't there? I mean I think Malazan book of the fallen is actual cancer in text form, but I would never say "it's not gritty" because it's horrible.

[escapegoat]

@Thenomain said in Dragon Age: Dread Wolf's Rise:

Gritty is a mood, not a setting. DA2, I feel, failed it horribly.

I agree, but I find Bioware's rote attempts to bog you down in the emotional troubles of people you wouldn't want anywhere near the task of saving the world to break that gritty mood, when gritty is what they're attempting to go for. It's all a little too Whedonesque.

[Ghost]

In DA:O I got a dwarf and an elf to have gay male sex.

Ferelden took a big step towards civil rights that night.

[krmbm]

@Thenomain said in Dragon Age: Dread Wolf's Rise:

So I decided to check it out. Apparently this place used to be a Pern game, or their code was cribbed from one. It happens. This is from the "tutorial" rooms:

Since this is very specifically a Pern based game, names that would not fit the Theme are rather frowned upon such as Cyberboy, or Dragonkiller.

Pernisms exist all throughout the tutorial room and there are no existing help files. The login screen says they're in Beta, but I think they're really in Alpha.

This game used to be VirtuaPern. You can still connect using virtuapern.kydance.net 9999. I happened to notice on their wiki that someone with whom I still Pern had removed the tag "VP" and added "DWR."

VP died a heat death back in the mid-2000s. Its owners briefly tried to revitalize it circa 2014, but - from what I gathered - they had essentially just stolen a bunch of Wikidot code from HT (claimed not to have stolen it, but there were actual comments still in the code), slapped it on the web, created new super-special-characters of their own, and then... nothing. The game never went anywhere. You could occasionally find a wizard and a goldrider logged in, but that was about it.

This may or may not have any bearing on how this game is going to run. Just sharing some details 'cause I have 'em to share.

[Thenomain]

@Kanye-Qwest
I don't think DA2 is gritty because its attempts to be gritty fail.

[Ganymede]

@Thenomain said in Dragon Age: Dread Wolf's Rise:

I don't think DA2 is gritty because its attempts to be gritty fail.

I think you fail.

Forget about your sibling: your mother dies in a horrible, random way. There's no rhyme or reason to it; it just happens because your mother tried to find a bit of happiness in the world.

The little, adorable elf-girl? She gets to murder her entire clan in a pointless pursuit.

Emo-elf? He murders his sister because she wanted a better life for herself. And if you decide to side with the oppressed mages? You may have to kill the fuck out of him. (Granted, this isn't as gritty as it is enjoyable because fuck Fenris, the worst character ever.)

The Magistrate's son? A pedophile.

The bouncy, sex-pot? Betrays the fuck out of you, and is the cause for half the city going up in flames at the hands of a pissed-off Arishok who just wants his fucking book so he can leave the shit-hole he's forced to stay in.

The rebel with a cause? An abomination that succumbs to madness and sets off the genocide of mages.

The ne'er-do-well dwarf rogue? Nearly gets you killed, and then has to kill his brother.

Dude, I know you weren't a huge fan of DA2, but there's no way in Andraste's twat that you could find it less gritty than the flim-flam pansy human noble storyline in DA:O. About the only reason I gave a shit about Morrigan's self-centered whining is because I wanted to eat her out, and, when that wasn't possible, I went with the loose-and-easy bard.

[Thenomain]

@Ganymede said in Dragon Age: Dread Wolf's Rise:

@Thenomain said in Dragon Age: Dread Wolf's Rise:

I don't think DA2 is gritty because its attempts to be gritty fail.

I think you fail.

I think your mom fails?

Forget about your sibling: your mother... (etc.etc.etc.)

Yes, I agree 100%. These things are horrible events, but they're presented as a 5th Grade Puppet Show that had all the horrible parts edited out by the PTA. The game fumbles this ball so hard that the quarterback almost makes a touchdown for the other team. The bit with Hawke's mother? Tragic, but not gritty until a little bit at the very, very, VERY end. The bit with Merrill? Tragic and a bit grittier. Bethany in the Deep Roads? Yeah, okay, that was a bit gritty (especially the epilogue in the next chapter), but it was mostly tragic. DA2 was a game of tragedies on a field of bland covered with bland with a bland chaser. This is not gritty.

Morrigan is living with the Sword of Damocles over her head. Sten is trying to survive knowing that he will eventually have to kill himself. Leliana is living with the world's worst case of false hope. The first town you pass through after surviving the Blight is very obviously overcrowded and filled with prejudices. The stories in the Deep Roads hit hard and don't stop until the scripted main plot at the end. Even the Redcliffe plot, which I thought was the weakest main area, were still grittier than the plot of Hawke's mother.

Were the events in DA2 gritty? Sure, if they weren't so badly handled. But they were. They were handled like a stereotypical 1950s housewife handles a dead mouse: At arm's length and with as little involvement as possible. I have to do a lot of mental gymnastics and read between a lot of lines to make it as nasty as they intended.

The game Dragon Age 2 was not gritty. I stand firmly by this.

[Ominous]

I agree that Dragon Age was not gritty. Then again, I spent the whole game faffing about, using the "funny" options in dialogue.

[Roz]

I love DA2 with the fire of a thousand suns. I don't care they were rushed and reused the same map a billion times, it's far and away the best Dragon Age game for me.

I actually don't agree that DA2 is a gritty game. Gritty isn't just about bad things happening in the game -- although plenty of bad things happen -- it's as much about tone and tenor and reaction to the bad things. But THIS is DA2 to me:

It's an awful, terrible black comedy. Like, it's literally ridiculous how much shit the game piles onto one person who would probably rather be sitting in a bar with her group of misfit loser friends getting trashed than actually be forced to save the shithole of a city she lives in.

That said, gritty isn't the word that comes to mind when I think of DA:O, either. But I can swallow it far easier for that than I can for DA2.

Also, Fenris is amazing. Fight me. (ง’̀-‘́)ง

[Kanye Qwest]

@Roz I was also a big fan of DA2. Not for the gameplay, dear god, but I loved that it was just this scumbag and her scumbag friends, forced to muddle through a lot of crazy bullshit.

I agree it wasn't an epic fantasy, but I found it far more immersive and relatable.

[Tinuviel]

It was very much the Firefly to DA:O's Star Wars. (And Inquisition would be... DS9?)

[Akurel]

@Roz So you know what I'm hearing...I'm hearing you need to make the Kirkwall or even the Inquisition version of Alpha and Omega.

[Ganymede]

@Kanye-Qwest said in Dragon Age: Dread Wolf's Rise:

I was also a big fan of DA2. Not for the gameplay, dear god, but I loved that it was just this scumbag and her scumbag friends, forced to muddle through a lot of crazy bullshit.

And that's why I liked Mass Effect. Sure, you have an earth-shattering reputation, but once you ally with Cerberus, you become scum who mingles with other scum to do shit that needs to get done.

And that's why I liked The Last of Us. "We're shady people, Joel, it's been that way for a long time now."

DA:O and DA:I? You so super-special, yes you are. Warden or Inquisitor. But in DA2? You're Hawke, who only gets recognized after saving the city from someone attempting a genocide.

[Roz]

@Akurel Lol. But my love of DA2 isn't based on Kirkwall itself so much as Hawke and his merry band of misfits. And I'm certainly not going to build a game about them for obvious reasons.

(Also I'm not going to build a new game. Although the A&O team has certainly chatted about what would make a good DA game setting. We think something like Kirkwall or the Free Marches or something like that. Base things in one city with a lot of cross traffic.)

[Thenomain]

@Ganymede said in Dragon Age: Dread Wolf's Rise:

DA:O and DA:I? You so super-special, yes you are. Warden or Inquisitor.

What? As one of the last two Grey Wardens in Ferelden, even with an old treaty you have to lick the boots of pretty much every group who signed just to get them to agree. And the only group who has any respect for you by title are the Dwarves. You're only one step above nobody.

In DA2, you're a displaced noble. Horrors. Once you buy back your family estate, you could sit on your ass for the other two thirds of the game. You're the DA:O Noble Origins by default. Not exactly "from nothing".