cerebus23 said:
I been wanting to destroy the chantry since the first game, a religious group using addictive drugs to control an army and keep mages in line? please there is no way that can end well.
and we have had mages since dao that were free and yet not pure evil just because, the whole mages will do evil because magic is evil thing never rang true.
mages needed support groups not a bunch of religious zealots lording over them.
we really need to tie up the whole morrigan/flemmith/god child thing in the next game.
and we really need to stop the clown car spawning out of da2.
I'm wary of DA3 like many people on this thread, and thought DA2 was a train wreck, surpassed only by ME3.
As you might guess by my handle I'm a big fan of playing mages in RPGs, I however have a mixed opinion about the Chantry in the Dragon Age universe. I think DA2 was supposed to give some perspective on the problem, but didn't quite do a good job with it because the game had horrendous writing and scripting all around, especially in tying it to the other games.
In "Dragon Age" magic is supposed to be similar to the use of psionics and sorcery in "Warhammer 40k", it opens the person using it to corruption and possession by malevolent forces, while it can be used for good it requires a lot of training, discipline, and a bit of luck, and even in the best cases people do fall prey to it. DA 2 ruined the whole thing by making it seem like every mage was a time bomb ready to turn demonic given enough stress, but DA:O which developed it originally made it clear that the Chantry wasn't exactly wrong as you saw by what happened in the tower.
My basic attitude is that the Chantry has simply gone too far, it's basically become obsessed with power, but it fundementally has the right idea that there needs to be a balancing force against magic.
I do think that the Chantry shouldn't be directly controlling mages as they do, but at the same time I don't think the Chantry needs to be destroyed, and having the Templars around if the need arises is a good balancing force to have around in case of an emergency.
When it comes to Templars and Lyrium addiction, I've thought that one through, and the impression I get is that Templars know what they are getting into when they sign up for the training. Consider that without that control they would just be basically creating more mages of a sort, which would represent a lot of the same problems.
To be honest it would be interesting if DA3 explored the Chantry a bit more and made them a little more sympathetic (especially after DA2) without trying to make the mages quite as monsterous as in DA2.
