Posts made by Apollonius

Well done. Now we have a happy ending.

Basically, Kirkwall is Sunnydale. And your Hawke is Buffy the Vampire slayer.

I liked Merrill's story line a lot, even if it usually ended in Elven genocide outside of town. Look, I didn't hate Fenris. He just happened to be dreadfully redundant in my party and his demeanor and looks did not appeal to me at all. I like my men manly and my women... uh... womanly. Elven men, by default, are just not manly. Case in point, LOTR and Orlando Bloom. I don't care how hot and bad ass he is, he looks like a girl.

Then again, I may just be strongly biased against Fenris. After all, I was sleeping with Anders, who I made into a dirty Blood Mage in DAO:A. In spite of or because of, he turned out all weird with a healthy dose of bad writing. I really just wanted to find him a fucking kitten and DA2 wouldn't let me do that. THAT would have saved Anders entirely.

RL preferences aside, however, I usually just go with the so-called canonical Romance that Bioware likes to slap onto your Character. MaleShep ME1 was Liara, MaleShep ME2 was Miranda, MaleShep ME3 was Liara again. Male DA:O was strongly Morrigan between her and Leliana. DA:OA had no romance but my Male DA:O Warden would've totally slept with DA:OA Anders. Male and Female DA2 was Anders.

Gay DA:I Male was Dorian and Straight DA:I Male was Cassandra. That said... I got the weird vibe that the canonical Romance for DA:I was actually no romance.

I disliked FF7 and FF8. My favorite FF was FF6, followed by FF4, followed by FF5, with Chrono Trigger in between FF6 and FF4. I liked FF9. I am still unconvinced that RPG writing had not peaked with FF6 and a slight taper to CT before collapsing during the modern 3D era. FF6 had a huge cast of characters but you really cared about every last one, even the ones that were really whiny and annoying like Locke. DA2 had a surprisingly good set of well-written characters overall.

You know what was truly monstrous? No, not how they screwed up Anders. Did anyone notice how they reskinned Zevran from DA:O to DA2 to follow the new Elf model paradigm. It looked like they took his face, injected it with botox, and bashed it in with a frying pan til his face stuck a certain way.

Edit:

This is Fenris: http://i1306.photobucket.com/albums/s573/Stormborn8811/Fenris2_zps124a5a7d.png
This is female Korean Pop Artist Lee Jung Hyun: http://www.allkpop.com/upload/2010/05/100520_LJHmubank_main.jpg

I was also upset about Anders after he had been super awesome in DAO:A.

These are all points I've stated before.

I don't understand the appeal of Fenris. Please explain. He reminded me too much of the angsty weird-haired Japanese RPG androgynous emo chars to be likable. For me. I ended up with Anders for both my male and female Hawke. I felt Pirate Gal was too much of an STD carrier, not to mention she is super flighty, and I mean. I guess there was Merril, if you like Tali.

I know. Fighting words. Bring it on.

I liked DA2 but only when Hawke was being sarcastic. That saved the game after the first time I realized that the maps for each dungeon WAS EXACTLY THE SAME. I know it sounds trivial but that really did not settle well with me at all. Why would they be so lazy as to use the same map, down to the vegetation textures, over and over again? Did they think that if they blocked off one door with a stone wall, we wouldn't notice?

I started seeing patterns in DA:I but I feel like they went out of their way to make sure we wouldn't notice, down to the totally useless automap. I have never seen a more useless automap than DA:I... and I've played a lot of European RPGs that basically have no real map function at all.

@Alzie The norm in a typical MU*, much less an nWoD MU* is for inactive PCs to be put into the freezer rather than meeting some sort of back office end of their narrative.

Every indication suggests that the policy that staff will commandeer an inactive PC as an NPC or to finish them off off screen is not a written policy and whether it is commonly accepted or not, testimonials have indicated that it is handled in a very ad hoc manner. All that staff has to do is have this in writing on the wiki in a manner that outlines standard protocol in writing and maybe a line saying that they will handle this on a case-by-case basis in writing.

In. Writing. Clear. Unambiguous. Policy. Get it? In writing.

In the time I had to explain to you the conundrum, someone could've pinged Kingsmouth staff and made it so.

No invective about whether or not this policy is a good one. No particular interest in casting any ill will on the game. As an non-involved third party observer, it seems that this would be a good idea and a rather simple fix. I have said this now a couple times now in no ambiguous terms.

Let's be honest, I'm interested in ME:A as well. But I have little faith that Bioware is going to do the right thing and make a good game.

In the time we've spent arguing about unclear policy, new and unambiguous policy could have been posted.

Yeah, I don't think anyone is saying that Kingsmouth is a bad game or the Reach. I think there is just a strong interest in establishing clear policy in writing over a way of handling something that is kind of an anathema to the MU* community at large. I can understand why certain folks are being defensive but I think that the simple solution is for Kingsmouth's policy makers to just express in clear and unambiguous terms what the policy is.

All they need to do is use a lot of 'may' and 'can' and 'reserve' statements that give staff flexibility over their own policy but also shows potential and existing players unambiguous potential consequences of certain behaviors.

I fail to see why this is so controversial. Despite early thoughts indicated back in WORA, it sounds like Kingsmouth's paradigm is working so why not give clear indication of policy and be done with it?

I luckily did not have to deal with it on my Xbox 360. I saw the difference for AC4 on 360 and my PC and I made a conscious effort to abandon my 360 except for a few legacy games. I also played after version 1.6 where most of the game breaking bugs were resolved, although I still had weird clipping issues and if you scroll your camera around in a crowded area, the character doesn't render correctly and I only see lips and eyes discombobulated.

I haven't played the Knight-Enchanter build yet but I am pretty sure that will kill any interest in a second play through from what everyone has told me so far. I liked Cassandra's development and I loved Dorian but I agree that most of the companions were just flat and boring. It was like they took Fenris and multiplied him a couple times. Everyone was just dur, sad, dur.

The whole game smacked of Mass Effect 3's worst components, with a war table that had no real meaning to the game, arbitrary metrics that ultimately didn't change incredibly crucial components of the game towards the end (Well of Sorrows, Flemmeth) and they again slap together a drawn out multiplayer component with micropayments (that they need to constantly reiterate as being optional) that could have been used to bolster the main game... or at least make it relevant to the overall world.

As mentioned prior, I'm still not writing off Bioware, but I'm losing my patience. All the good will garnered from ME1, ME2, DAO, and DAO:A are wearing really thin. DA2 (I know you liked it @Ganymede ) was not awful but very disappointing with its literally copy/paste dungeons and strange fight mechanics. DA:I needed to really hit it out of the park and it was more like two strikes and four balls to walk to first. I used to enthusiastically buy their collector's sets in pre-sale and hand over my wallet for an endless stream of DLC... but I think that time has passed.

I feel like this is best resolved by ambiguity.

He's not dead. He's lost at sea with a high probability of being shark bait.

If someone insists on trying to find them: And he was never seen or heard from again.

If he owned a restaurant or something: Next of kin or whatever took control of the assets after he disappeared. Retroactively create a will with someone who is connected and wants to lay claim. Have people fight over it if there is a PC-PC dispute.

I'm not involved with Kingsmouth at all but even in cases where Staff lets me knock out an inactive PC for a political position elsemu, I like to try and frame it so that if he or she really really wants to come back, they can.

But it sounds like, as @Coin mentioned, they just need a better disclaimer. After all, a vague disclaimer is nobody's friend.

In fact, the DA:I does do some strange activity in terms of its percentage rolls. For example, there is an item that will give you a 40% chance of 'Mastercrafting' an item which gives you +10% to all of the weapon's stats. But if you save before and retry over and over again with the same item, if you didn't get a Mastercrafted item the first go, you will never get a Mastercrafted item with that particular 40% chance item. It has something to do with how Bioware games calculate out %s. The chance that you will get two Mastercrafted items in a row with the same Mastercrafting item (there's a lot of Mastercraft/Mastercrafting and it's their screwed up terminology) is effectively 8%.

DA:O had, admittedly, a tougher learning curve than either DA2 or DA:I, in my opinion. There was a lot more involved in tactics and how the classes/abilities meshed with one another. In DA:I, I mean, you can just hold right trigger while casting random abilities as a ranged Rogue or Mage and as long as you keep your distance, the combat handles itself. God forbid, however, on the off chance that your fragile-as-glass char is taken down from behind and you get stuck with an unfamiliar class in the middle of combat doing who knows what.

@SG, Bears ripped me apart early on. It's partially a learning curve and partially picking the right party... which you don't have much of a choice with in the beginning of the game. The first part of the game is really a matter of working around problem enemies that you can't handle til you're about level 3-4... that's when you should have enough special skills to start causing some actual damage. This is especially so as a distance Rogue or Mage, both classes being fragile as glass early on. If it kills you once, the true definition of insanity is to try and face the same enemy again. I had that with a rift that was in the middle of the Hinterlands and I kept charging at it. I went back a couple levels later and it was soooooo much easier.

@Roz, Cassandra warmed up to me well later into the game and I really liked her story arc, especially with how she played out with Varric. By that time, I was already well entrenched with puppy eyed Dorian but I felt like she was the one of the characters who really grew from a cold-hearted salty bitch on the outside to a character who is someone you can really relate to in the game. Then there were characters like Sera, Solas, or Vivienne who were sort of caricatures. Iron Bull was an unexpectedly interesting companion. No one captivated me like DA:OA Anders though, who happens to be my favorite companion throughout the series. He was witty, sorta broken, and quirky. Too bad Bioware wrecked that with mass murdering war criminal Anders in DA2 who was all sad and sullen and boring.

That's about when I took my break. That was about when I hit my XP/resource hump where I switched from having not enough stuff to having too much stuff. The world isn't worth fighting for at a high level and more power/influence than I know what to do with.

How far are you into it, @Rainbow-Unicorn ? The only slowdown from a bum rush to the ending is a potential series of war table stuff that take about 2 RL hours to complete if you're close to the end.

Six months in, I'm late to the game, quite literally. But I was being cheap and finally got it for my PC at $15 from Amazon.

1. Graphics look okay at Ultra but the fact that my rig can handle it at Ultra with only a handful of screen tears suggest that the graphics just weren't that great... and they weren't. I made the mistake of playing DA:I after finishing up Mordor (after a 6 month pause) and man, everything looked last gen. (i5 4690K @ 4.5 GHz, 16 GB DDR3 RAM @ 2133, MSI Nvidia GTX 760 Gaming Edition)

2. Movement mechanics, after playing Mordor and Assassin's Creed Unity pretty much blew. I went on a rant with @Monogram about this the other day... so the platforming aspects for some of the things in the game were pretty much terrible. Even with a 360 controller, I could not, for the love of me, get the right precision to do the fine motor movements required for some of the janky jumps and climbs I needed. The worst were hills where you're 95% up the hill and then there's a ledge a pixel too high for you to get on top of. Now you have to go all the way to the bottom and start the fuck over.

3. Ending was... meh. Let me rewind a little. When I finished Mass Effect 1, I was blown away by the ending. It had the perfect tenor, it did what I wanted it to do, and I was sold on Bioware. Fast forward to DA:I and... I mean, it was what I expected and it was sort of anticlimatic. The fight against Corypheus was pretty generic and I got no particular closure. I know that the DLC that is in play and one that is possibly coming up is designed for post-game excitement, but it's been six months, there's only one non-essential DLC, and I keep hearing rumors that the next DLC is meant to wrap things up. I guess the aftermarket sales prospective for DA:I wasn't that great for a Game-of-the-Year game.

4. Here's how my final save looked:

! Level 23 Rogue Archer Assassin (stupidly OP)... Imprisoned Mages, Non-Believer, Killed Celene and put Gaspard/Briana to rule together, Grey Wardens rebuilt with Hawke saved from the Fade, Loghain in the Fade, Leliana as new Divine, Morrigan drank from the Well and had a kid with the Grey Warden + Archdemon soul.

I ended up romancing Dorian, who, despite my usual preferences, was actually not my first or even second choice. I was entertaining Iron Bull (but his companion mission took too long to appear) and I may have pissed off Cassandra enough that it didn't seem very thematic. Dorian was kinda awesome, to be honest. His tarot card once you romance him is actually really cool too. Prolly my favorite of the romance cards.

I made a tactical error early on regarding the election, and realized I had a gazillion points for Vivienne whose perspectives I generally agreed with until it was pretty clear a quarter of the way in that she was just using me to get to a better position and that her perspectives were actually pretty damn extreme. I spent a crap ton of time trying to undo that and get my favored candidate to win.

My party tended to be Dorian as a mainstay (spec'd Fire Mage/Barrier and his Necro tree) with a warrior (usually Iron Bull/two handed but sometimes Blackwall/two handed or Cassandra/sword+shield) and most often than not, Vivienne because Solas actually disliked me from the get-go and it never improved. He was the only companion whose companion quest never triggered for me. Anyway, I liked Vivienne's bitchiness more. Her interactions with Iron Bull were hilarious.

Sera pissed me off but I finished her quests for completion's sake. I didn't mind her politics but her tone of voice really got grating. Also, I didn't really need her as a second Rogue (if I ever needed one, it'd be Varric and his soothing sarcastic tones). I also never used Cole (more human) but would if I had a place for him in my team.

So I didn't really craft til the very very end (on Normal, you get pelted with decent items) but I was pretty much an OCD resource collector, especially metals, since they could pop up with a fade touched that you really want (like the one that gives you guard). I had something like 400 Stormheart. I just went Dragon-everything for my Rogue.

I feel like I spent a lot of time fretting about completion and getting the perfect ending as I wanted it (which didn't really matter much in hindsight) to fully enjoy the game, and certain things like the platforming killed my mood. One Shard in the Exalted Plains really really really pissed me off. The Hissing Wastes seemed like an afterthought and a lot of the stuff like Skyhold upgrades seemed... well... rushed.

I want to say that after DA2 (which I enjoyed but fell well below expectations) and the ME3 ending (which still didn't quite satisfy me after the patch), DA:I resurrected my hopes for Bioware... and I'm not entirely sure I feel one way or another. Assassin's Creed: Black Flag single-handedly resurrected the AC franchise (only for Ubisoft to blow it with AC:U) and DA:I fell short of that exuberance. I'm willing to give Bioware a third chance to make things right with either a satisfying DA:I DLC or ME4... but somehow, I feel like my love affair with Bioware is about over. Put it another way, if I bought this full price retail, I'd have been somewhat put off. But at $15, the price was just right.

tl;dr Sorry for the thread necro, DA:I was okay.

All I'm saying is that having been in the game for some time, it doesn't seem to be the right fit for me. I've expressed my reasons and having chatted with some folks who have now seemingly departed, I'm not alone. There are people who are going to feel that way.

I've perhaps put in more of a negative slant and overstated things more than I originally meant to. I have expressed at multiple times that there is no particular staff malice or gross misbehavior by either the staff or the player base but that the game itself seems to be trending a certain way that isn't my cup of tea.

Sorry I accidentally stepped on the puppy on my way out.

Right, despite a lot of turnover since I've been in the game, it is still a functionally populated game. It means staff is not outright malicious or problematic or even unreasonable. That said, a lot of the people I've seen leave are people who are interested in more hard political intrigue that is being advertised with the setting and theme.

I never said staff is killing the game. Staff is killing the game I was interested in playing. That said, with countless fantasy nobles with land games before it, it's going to eventually crawl to a halt as a marriage simulator with its current trajectory. It's sort of the running trope for these kinds of games in the same way that nWoD has their own running tropes for each sphere.

I mentioned early on some of my discontent regarding KD but didn't quite verbalize... partially because I couldn't quite put a finger on it. I think I have figured it out and I regrettably won't be staying for long. That said, I am morbidly interested in how war season plays out because war season is going to climax in the winter, and winter in Germany tends to suck.

I'm a theme builder. When there's a vagary in theme, I like to fill something in that makes it an interesting point for the collaborative story or something that fleshes out something that is critically missing. Staff seems to have an idea of what they want when something is critically missing, but decides not to share it, and when it is raised by someone to try and flesh out, we are expected to read their minds or get a response that is not frothy and full of vitriol, but not the most pleasant of responses with staff clearly displeased.

I am sure I'll get flak for this post but if this was a Yelp review, it's like... 2 stars.

I know war season is coming up and maybe that'll keep things interesting. There are a lot of good RPers in the game. But honest to God, there really isn't that much to do and any attempts disrupt the entropy that is closing in on KD is met with rapid staff opposition. It's like a real unfun game of Calvinball. When you don't know the rules of this particular game of Calvinball or you fail to read the minds of staff properly, you lose the game. When I say 'lose the game,' I don't mean it literally. You can't really lose on KD or a MU* in general. The effort to drive an interesting story in a collaborative environment is met with a bucket of tepid swamp water in an environment that is simultaneously rigid and capricious. No one's malicious. Just, it's hard to prognosticate what the expectations are and frustrating to be in a game where things seem to be an open ended thematic environment but it runs along very tight bands of rules.

I'm bored. Attempts to break boredom is met by staff resistance. It's a fine enough game when you play within a very narrow imagining of nobility. There is a sense of an open world of unlimited possibilities, but it's actually more of a tightly closed sandbox or MMORPG in terms of narrative funneling. And it's not like there's actually much narrative at this point. It's more theme funneling/rigidity that make a lot of PCs less independent actors in a collaborative story and more of bit players in a world that they can only control in very limited amounts.

The game's active and the above are not as much faults as differences in what people want in a MU* (I tend to be more interested in expansive and collaborative theme-building exercises). If you are interested in playing fairly vanilla Kushiel-themed PCs and like to engage in social RP that is reminiscent of Mean Girls with corsets with limited ability to affect the world around you, this is the perfect game for you.

I will say this. The almost eldritch nature of the Reapers in Mass Effect 1 got totally ruined by the Terminator baby in Mass Effect 2 and got shit on by the Star Child in Mass Effect 3.

Sometimes, mysteries are better left to be mysteries. Imagine how much cooler it would have been if the Reapers were never fully explained in the series and humanity + aliens somehow managed to defeat an undefeatable ancient foe, the culmination of millions of years of civilizations working together to build a device using Reaper technology against them.

I imagine God-Machine to be sort of like this. As @Arkandel mentioned, reveal bits and pieces but leave the scale unfathomable. Make sure there's logical consistency but leave the rest to mystery or... the idea that someone can come in, think it is something, and end up really ending the world by not realizing more sub layers to the plot.

I had an idea back on HM long before GMC about an Architect of the Monolith who constructed a machine that corrupted the leylines and their raw life creating (and potentially reality creating) properties to sustain only vampiric life. But in the hands of someone else, sufficient nodes could reshape reality as they so desired.

On the Reach in the OD Academy, the Eye of Chiron was supposed to be part of a similar plot that was abandoned after Xanadu took over from Pompeii. The 'science' behind the artificial Crucible nest was it had arcane transformative powers.

On COFAB, this was meant to be something of a pieces race to reconstruct an altar whose owner could reshape reality. The earthquake was a consequence of someone trying to activate the machine as was the intention to do a thematic retcon to explain why COFAB only had Vampires and no other supernaturals (the person who triggered the machine had created a fissure in reality where no other supernatural could exist).

One Part 13 Ghosts Remake, One Part the Chase from Star Trek: Next Generation, One Part Mass Effect (in terms of the 'winning' faction of the GMC plot causing serious consequences including the possible end of the game), One Part Wrath of Khan/Genesis Device. Also, one part Star Trek Voyager: Year of Hell. I grew up watching a shit ton of Star Trek.

It was meant to explore the theme of hubris. I'm captivated by the biblical Tower of Babel. I liked my last iteration which was meant to force cooperation amongst unlikely factions and result in a situation where the game could have seriously ended if things went horribly wrong. But for various reasons, it did not go into fruition and I abandoned that narrative.

I am exploring in a pet project basically what would happen if human hubris resulted in the end of the world as we know it and the survivors trying to cope and possibly direct humanity's fate one way or another.