Dalisclock plays through the Dragon Age Trilogy and makes a lot of running commentary along the way. Spoilers abound.
- Thread starter Dalisclock
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Yeah yeah, I know you *can* but it's the fact that player mages don't just switch up to being blood mages when they stub their toe or run out of toilet paper.
Kirkwall has that huge problem because the Veil is thin there thanks to all the blood magic that was practiced by the Imperium when it was under their control, and all the outright slave murder like at the Bone Pit - seriously it’s codex entry is horrific - which means the mages there, even the strong willed ones, are highly susceptible to possession and the Templars there being abusive pricks provides the motivation.
To a degree, yes. But that information is more to explain the whole affair rather than excuse them.
It's interesting this subject is being discussed now because it's starting to hit particularly hard in Act 1. In the span of about an hour of playtime, I got told by Fenris that Trevintar is a horribly corrupt magocracy because the Chantry there doesn't police them at all and thus they run the place in an authoritarian fashion, had a Templar say that mages can't be treated like real people(a bit harsh) and that he doesn't trust mages because of what happened at the Circle tower in Ferelden(fair enough) and then had a group of blood mages that were turning Templars into abominations by corrupting them. And man, Team Mage isn't looking very good right now.
Good thing nobody seems to be able to tell that Hawke is a mage and ironically one time i had a conversation option "I'm a Mage" the actual Dialogue pretty much sidestepped that point by not actually admitting that. I picked it particularly because I was talking to a Templar complaining about Mages and wanted to see what would happen, but the game lied to me there.
Good thing nobody seems to be able to tell that Hawke is a mage and ironically one time i had a conversation option "I'm a Mage" the actual Dialogue pretty much sidestepped that point by not actually admitting that. I picked it particularly because I was talking to a Templar complaining about Mages and wanted to see what would happen, but the game lied to me there.
The problem I have in the Mages V Templars issue is that both sides are, in the end, utter shitbags. Choosing between 2 shit sides isn't nuance, people. Where's the "fuck the lot of you!" option? Who do I want to side with? The average Kirkwaller (? Kirkwallian? Kirkwallista? Kirkwallan? whatever). Both sides can just get the fuck out of my town.
Pretty much, they make the Templar comically evil and they make the mage incredibly stupid. If there were less case of mage using blood magic because they stumped their toe and Templar we're more empathetic of the mage (at least the one that don't immidiatly turn to blood magic) maybe it'd be interesting.
I did wonder if there was a third ending when I first played through it that allowed me to rally Aveline and the Kirkwall guard to arrest you know who. Sadly not, but I'm not surprised given what the Chantry is meant to parallel: I don't think anyone other than Saladin ever made the Church leave a place it did not want to leave, and Hawke ain't fuckin' Saladin.
It may also be a situation where the whole framing device fails the overall narrative. Varric is telling a story; he's not recording history, so there's also sorts of little, dull but likely highly important details he's leaving out because he believes in the maxim 'Never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn'.
Compare even a 'snarky' Hawke in Inquisition compared to their presentation in DAII. They're more subdued, even a little sad most of the time. And I'll bet all the money in my wallet against all the money in Bezos' wallet that Inquisition is how they actaully are, and DragonAge II is how Varric writes 'The Champion of Kirkwall'. And I'm sure that A) I am not the first person to suggest this and B) its more by luck than design that it seems that way.
A 3rd ending? From Bioware?
Oh, at the time... right. Gotcha. In hindsight it's probably best for all that they didn't. Look at what happened when they tried to do one.
So he's an adherent of the Chopper Reed school of storytelling?
Find me a bullshit artist who isn't.
Honestly, I'm glad there wasn't a third option to not take a side. Throughout the story, at least for me, there was an overall trend of Hawke being able to slightly mend things, but they are only one person, and one person can't solve every problem on their own, especially ones that have been festering for years, and when things go to shit, they are basically only in real control of what side they get splattered on.
I gotta agree here. This is a long, long festering issue that the mages and the chantry need to resolve on a societal level and nobody seems that interested in doing so. Having hawke suddenly just show up and fix it in a few years time would be ridiculous, and we saw in ME what happens when you try the "one guy fixes all the problems" approach. To the point in ME3 the Reapers just give up the moment Shepherd steps into their room and hand the controls to him.
Fix it? Who cares about fixing it? They can just piss off somewhere else and have their little spat. I'm proposing heavily armed, militant NIMBYism.
To be fair, that's less a symptom of them giving Shepard too much Protagonist Power and more a symptom of them trying to come up with a new finale in the figurative 11th hour of ME3's development cycle and settling for copy-pasting the endings from Deus Ex.
True, but that's also a symptom of just trying to cram too much into one game. If the whole idea of the crucible was seeded in ME2 and the plot sections of ME2 had helped build this particular plot point up, then maybe it would have worked better then it did. Instead of focusing on the collectors that doesn't really go anywhere.
Thats the weird thing with ME2 is all about building a team, but the team is entirely used and discarded by the end of the game and nothing notable happens in the story outside of introducing illusive man so that he can be the true antagonist of ME3 (can't have a major position in the story be occupied by a non human!). So as a results ME2 is almost entirely useless as a game and you could skip right over it and just play 1 and 3 and wouldn't really miss anything outside of a cameo appearance.
I'd argue its a good game with good characters but the plot is pretty much pointless,yes. Unless that's what you were saying and I misunderstood.
Not unlike Metal Gear Solid V where the gameplay is good but everything else is kinda pointless and forgettable
Collectors were there to set up the Reaper motive/methodology. While there's repeated reference across ME2 to Dark Energy and how it's causing a lot of problems (teeing that up for the next installment), the second mission ties it vaguely to the Collectors through a passing line from Veetor about how he'd gotten weird dark energy readings during the Collector attack.
More prominently for the Reapers, however, is the Collectors being established as focused on genetic tinkering (most contact with them being trades in which they want anomalous biological specimens, the plague, etc) and their sudden prioritization of humanity. Harbinger's battle commentary on your companions doubles down on this to establish it as more than fluff by describing the deficiencies they perceived with each race that rendered them useless to the Reapers and reasons why humans were considered a "viable possibility", hinting that there's a greater purpose behind the abductions and human-reaper rather than just being a target of opportunity or spiting Shepard.
This in turn adds more weight to some of the subquests, such as the motive behind the Omega plague being further reinforced by Mordin's commentary in his loyalty quest about variation in human genetics being far more pronounced than those of other races, making them excellent lab rats. Piecing it all together, it's not difficult to infer that the Collectors had become so focused on humanity because that genetic variability was (or allowed for) something that the Reapers desperately wanted to exploit.
Point being that ME2 did a lot of foreshadowing and setting up, but the problem was that somewhere during ME3's development all of those plot threads were cut, leaving ME2 strangely orphaned in terms of narrative.
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They were cut, because they were guessed at or leaked and of course the internet shat it’s collective pants.
@Dalisclock I think I’ve found a version of the Mage-Templar conflict that works: the conflict between normals and telepaths on Babylon 5.