majestic

Well that's awesome, I'm not sure how you get the idea that this particular gamer is fifty years old because "just shy" of a quarter of a century is a little less than 25 years. So in essence that guy isn't even old enough to be able to use nostalgia goggles on the good old days of computer gaming where you bought a game and actually had no idea if you even could make it work in the first place (the CD version of Strike Commander was an especially egregious case because early CD-ROM support by Microsoft required a truckload of memory, and by that I mean 45 kilobytes), but that was all at a time probably long before that guy diddled himself for the first time. So more realistically for that guy we can go back 15 years and look at Baldur's Gate 2, a game that had an annoying habit of corrupting your savegames without you noticing because some area you haven't visited in 40 hours but needed to go to after coming back from Spellhold died, or scripting bugs that rendered your game unfinishable if you saved at the wrong time and then loaded that save. That took some fiddling around with Near Infinity to get those damaged saves fixed. Which we did on the tech support forum without ever thinking whether or not we should be paid for that (well Interplay did give each of us a free copy of Lionheart before it died, but I'd rather not talk about that game). Coz we, you know, cared. And people would wait patiently for those fixed save games and politely say thank you instead of raging on like the whiny entitled kids of today. There are some good points on that opinion piece by the way, especially about DLCs and microtransactions. The gaming nostalgia not so much, at least not for PC gaming. On consoles, oh yeah, you never had a chance to get a patch 20 years ago so the games really just had to work but they were also a lot less complex than today's games. Having to download 10GB patches before you can play a console game these days while waiting hours for it to be installed, well THAT really is ridiculous.

Don't tell me that you believe that Hollow Earth crap too? Oh well, why am I surprised...

Just watched Kung Fury. Twice. Now I'm off to watch Iron Sky again.

I wonder, if making more templars would be as easy as simply infusing someone willing to fight with a dose of lyrium then why is the Chantry close to collapsing because of a mage rebellion and a renegade templar faction? That's the sort of quirks expected whenever you represent years of training as a click of a button or finishing a quest. By all rules of Thedas a player character should never be able to pick up being a templar as specialization but as a base class giving you a rich background similar to being a mage in Origins. It doesn't however and so everything that has to do with your own PC gaining powers falls squarely into story and gameplay segregation. It's a necessary tradeoff and not something worth constructing a conspiracy from. Especially if it involves a retcon by David Gaider. Seriously. DA:I very strongly hints at lyrium being more than just the mineralized essence of magic it was in the earlier games, what with red lyrium apparently having being corrupted by the blight and growing rapidly under the careful guidance of Imshael.

Quest items are always stashed and are automatically removed when you need them, so there is something else preventing you from progressing with the associated quests.

Oi, looks fun aaaand is backed.

Odd, for me there were no fade-touched materials available, and I was level 25 when I first went to the Emporium. I'll double-check that when I get the chance. Also, only tier 2 materials were unlimited. Maybe there is some sort of restocking that triggers upon returning or going back there after the first visit. Hrm. So, uhm, to quote myself: Nope, I can't get any fade-touched materials from the Black Emporium. I've seen lists where it also should have materials for runecrafting, which it doesn't have in store for me either. Just tier one to four leather, metal and cloth stuff. The DA wiki also only lists the normal materials. Other people say it stocks everything that isn't limited to the Jaws of Hakkon DLC. So dunno, it's either working as intended and people are imagining it selling fade-touched stuff, bugged as hell or limited to an inquisition perk I don't have (I do have the Short List, so it's not that).

Odd, for me there were no fade-touched materials available, and I was level 25 when I first went to the Emporium. I'll double-check that when I get the chance. Also, only tier 2 materials were unlimited. Maybe there is some sort of restocking that triggers upon returning or going back there after the first visit. Hrm.

For me loading times are annoying the first time around, i.e. when I load up a savegame after not having played for a while. I guess that would depend on the amount of RAM you have, the game seems to cache a lot to buffer the loading times once you've been to Skyhold and then my loading times drop off to almost not noticeable. Still, going to Skyhold and then to the war table will always be annoying, why doesn't going to Skyhold via the world map simply drop you off in front of the door to Josephine? I for one had hoped that the Black Emporium would actually stock fade touched crafting materials, at least some of them. The weapons and accessories are a bit weird. Not sure why I would want to wear a +5 DEX / +5 CUN ring when there are straight +5% crit rings around. The legendary schematics are pretty neat though. I was getting tired of not having purely offensive weapons or heavy armor with silly things like cloth utility slots.

Dude, like, Bioware released the Black Emporium 20 days ago. Oh and they also fixed the Flask of Fire / Focus bug which means my Tempest rogue playthrough just went out of the window. Yeah, I'm cheap like that.

I don't think Magran's true reason to destroy Waidwen/Eothas is all that complicated. Selfish yes, but not really complicated - it's probably because she's a prissy bitch just like Durance always says. By bringing conflict, strife and war to the mortal realm, Eothas intruded on Magran's domain and that's good enough a reason as any to get to killing and blowing stuff up by secretly working with the pariah of the gods. The real MYSTARY I'd say is the question what the hell drove Eothas to interfere like that disregarding all the rules and drawing the ire of the other gods by doing something silly like that? When you talk to them the other gods all make it plenty clear that they do not want to see Woedica empowered and ruling again, and with Thaos having been Woedica's reach for thousands of years, which they quite clearly know about, why would they not believe Eothas when he says he found this nice little annoying plot to reinstate Woedica?

Just that it's currently at place 5 (Hero) and 16 (Champion) of gog's charts - no absolute numbers. PoE has consitently been in the upper half of the top 10 selling games on GOG ever since it came out. It only dips a bit when a weekend promotion includes a sale like the current one, 75% off on all Unreal games and 50% off on Mortal Komabt 1-3 (speaking of which, I think it's time to buy something). For the better part of this week the Hero Edition was the best selling item that wasn't The Witcher 3. But that only means it is popular on GOG which still is rather niche compared to Steam. CD Projekt's past sales figures have shown GOG to make up less than 20% of their sales, so... that might not mean too much.

So that's it then. Just like every other conspiracy nut on this planet when faced with evidence to the contrary you just retreat further into your world of self-delusion and make-believe. It's funny how you dismiss the Seekers as proof to the contrary saying "there is no proof that they don't secretly do lyrium" when all you do is talking about how faith-based abilities SHOULD REQUIRE NO PROOF as to not turn them into science. I'd bet my ass that if Bioware had a lot of story DLCs lined up or even planned they'd sell a season pass right now like all the other good boys do, so that doesn't look too good. Personally I was hoping for a Leliana's Song type of DLC about what happend with Solas before Inquisition retelling how Corypheus got his orb.

Well, I'll come out and say it: That is wrong. Whether the Templars really need to use lyrium or not doesn't matter because there are Seekers having those powers who gain them by training and faith alone. You're drawing up a huge anti-religious conspiracy from a silly retcon that was retconned again by adding Seekers into the game. There's no organized conspiracy here, just two or more writers taking liberty with established lore. That's unfortunate to be sure, but not really unexpected, especially not from Bioware. The only other more retcon happy bunch is working at Blizzard, and oh boy, compared to them Bioware is especially tame in comparison. No, they are not atheists, they are satanists, Illuminati. That's why they use eye symbol. People always confuse, of course atheists attack religion, but atheists are just tools, behind them are satanists, these people, the Illuminati, are not atheists, they are very "religious"... As i mention, they give you doubt about God, but they show demons existed. Demons in this game are not solely bad and evil. You may become friends with demons, sex with demons, working with demons, ect. They are beings of another realms want to be in this world just because they want to be in this world. In this game, demons is not your enemy. In this game, they try hard to destroy the very basis of religiuon, that is faith to God, in other way they show you making deal with demons could lead to something either good or bad, but you can make deal with demons, and demons can give you anything you wanted In this game, you may deny the existence of God, but you can't deny the existence of demons...Bioware is not atheist, but satanist, Illuminati. Except that demons simply being a name mortals gave spirits who embody negative (mortal) traits and emotions. Like everything in the Fade they are a reflection of the real world and exist only because there's both good and evil in everyone. The bad things also happen to spirits of positive traits should they ever join with mortals, like Justice joining Anders and becoming Vengeance in the process. Oh and by the way, where is the good that comes from dealing with demons in Dragon Age? That's silly. While I'm not a satanist I have to work closely with many of them on the HAARP base and some of our chemtrails subconctractors often demand satanic rituals before we're proceeding at meetings. Can't be too careful these days, look at that terrible Snowden business. Not once ever did they burn a kitten in their proceedings, that's just propaganda. In fact they never burn anything in the first place, that's just for TV - kittens are far too delicious to simply burn.

Well yeah, that's why many of them prefer to be called "illusionists" now. The only people going around calling themselves magicians are those crappy ones who can't perform without a group of actors pretending to be amazed for the cameras for their TV series. Err, I might be too opinionated on this. I thought those people called themselves psychic and starred on The Next Uri Geller. Ah, who am I kidding. Uri Geller makes clocks tick again, he's awesome. Certainly not like those magicians who only do make believe.

Firewalking has been explained by science 80 years ago. Sorry, I guess I now ruined shaolin monks for you. And for themselves. Because, obviously. So I do have a question here: What do you think of D&D's divine magic system? In case you don't know anything about it, in D&D there are many gods, they are real for as long as there are people worshipping them and in return for said worship they gain access to what's called divine magic (as opposed to arcane magic which is either trained or innate, depending on your class). There's an explained way how this power transfer works, the existence of everything involved is a proven fact, however it still requires faith to work (both ways). Are D&D priests scientists? Or sceptics? Your entire point about something mystical not having any explanaition, cause OR effect is a little strange. Sure, it's true for God and concepts like qi in our real world because those are not observable, have no apparent cause (how could they, without being observable) and also aren't measurable. A sceptic now would say those don't exist, someone having faith would argue it is of no consequence because it is faith. But how can you take that concept and apply it into worlds where the mystic has real, factual effects? Templars have anti-magic powers. Force users have abilities. Those are real, and according to your definition that alone makes it science, not faith? How can that be true?

You lost me there. Honestly, what is your point here? "The force" didn't suddenly turn from mysticism into science because Lucas thought the midichlorians were a good idea. The force quite clearly exists and can be manipulated by force users to achieve a wide variety of effects. Those are both observable and measurable and therefore require no faith - these things are the factual reality of the Star Wars universe. The real mystic quality of the force arises from the various orders of force users and their philosophical differences, which are seemingly represented as the dark and light side of the force - again, which according to Star Wars lore may or may not be a real or philosophical dualism, that is something we do not know. The midichlorians don't change that. They merely give an indication as to how powerful a force user could become - in theory. You're reading far too much into it. If science would find a genetic predisposition necessary to become a shaolin monk* that would change nothing for the monks and their adherence to buddhism. Because faith has no observable prerequisites - it wouldn't be faith otherwise. * Other than an aptitude for martial arts - unfit people are weeded out during training after all. That's the same for any elite group whether it is sports, warfare or organisations like Mensa.

The concept and idea of life energy is universal to esotericism and not exclusive to shaolin monks or even other chinese traditions like TCM or martial arts. It exists as prana, mana (yes, mana), energy or ruah in a lot of other traditions and mysticism, and while the force shares some similarities and may even be partially based on qi, it certainly isn't synonymous. And no, qi isn't science, it is faith.

Oh boy. Midichlorians or not, the fact alone that "the Force is strong in [Luke]" after knowing about for for a day or two just tells bare and plain that is some innate ability and not something gained through training and meditation. Empire Strikes Back then shows that you can improve upon your innate abilities through training. The idea that the Force represents some religion or mythical force that anyone could access through training and faith is a (now apparently proven false) assumption on your end. Nothing else. You're making an awful lot of those and then react annoyed if your own ideas don't match up with those of the writers. Do you do that if reality isn't to your liking as well?

This makes no sense. First Lyrium is a magical substance that gives you access to the spirit world. It is hardly HNO3 or whatever. Secondly in DA:O it was just a skill Alistair could teach anybody, like one might teach any combat skill. So I am not sure what the basis of that assumption was. You did not get any scene of Alistair teaching you intense meditation or anything. Of course lyrium is a "magical substance" but actually it's a mineral dug up from earth, is "magic in raw form", so in other word means it's "the Fade" in chemical form, since magic come from the Fade, lyrium is a physical Fade. You consume it, you get the Fade inside you. But according to Alistair in DA:O, we don't really need lyrium to learn Templar ability, that give the impression that Templar ability is something you gain by dedication, training and understanding of religion (this goes the same with Jedi). I compare the ability with Spirit School magic of DA:O, there is so much similarity, so i assume the anti-Magic line of Spirit school is NOT actually magic, well the school itself is ANTI-magic. Since Spirits are The Maker's first children, there you can get the conclusion, Templar have the connection with the divine influence through their understanding of religion and dedication in their faith. I assume it is just the Chantry who is corrupt, want to control the Templars by giving them lyrium to make them addicted, also fooling them by saying lyrium increase the magnitude of their ability Furthermore, anti-magic is NOT magic isn't it? So why would lyrium that is "magic in raw form" giving anti-magic effect for Templars? Eh? For me, there is NO justification for "you really need lyrium to learn Templar ability" in DA2 and DA:I, it totally toss away the religious side of the thing. You are no longer gain power by your understanding and dedication in religion, you gain your power by chemical substance and manipulate it. It have nothing to do with divine thingies, therefore those divine thingies don't exist, religion is fake So now you guys understand my argument? P/S yes you don't see a cutscene video but you get the dialogue scene from Alistair "i could teach you" and "sent everyone who is trained as a warrior" implying Alistair DID teaching Templar ability WITHOUT lyrium There is a thing called story and gameplay segregation, and becoming a templar as player character is a huge part of it, no matter whether you actually need lyrium or not. Templars are the militant arm of the Chantry, and through long, dedicated training and lyrium (or not, depending on which writer you like to take at face value) they achieve powers that help them fight mages. And then you come along and become a full-fledged templar with the abilities in 5 minutes of gameplay and none of the training, without the need to join the Templar order or take any vows. You can be the most sinful person on the planet or you could be a saint, it doesn't matter. Because it is... well, gameplay, and when push comes to shove gameplay always wins against any story considerations. Always has, always will. So riddle me this, regardless of the retcon that templars need lyrium for their powers: Where do the Seekers get their power from, it obviously isn't lyrium? Oh, right, dedication, training and being touched by a spirit of faith. So that's the in-game answer. The real world answer is probably that someone else at Bioware thought David Gaider was full of crap when he retconned Alistair into having taken lyrium in that Dark Horse comic and introduced a secret templar faction having templar powers without lyrium intake just to spite him and get back to the argument of whether it is just a control element or not. For you, the answer can be "oh, like, maybe they didn't like the idea of no religious background for Templar powers" while coming up with DA:I. For Luzianus that answer would probably be because the Maker took pity on Cassandra for looking like a man.

Indeed, even with the midichlorians as an explanation (one which I intensely dislike) joining the Jedi or becoming a force-user in the first place was limited to a select few. Jedi are simply space wizards (or sorcerers in D&D terms because their ability is innate, not trained). Sure Vader gets called out on adhering to an outdated religion in A New Hope, but it's not like anyone could use the Force if they wanted it enough, or were religious enough. The midichlorians suck butt like much of what Lucas did with the prequels, but to construct a science vs. religion debate or conspiracy out of them is ludicrous at best and borderline paranoid at worst.

Sure, because using the not really modding-friendly Frostbite engine was totally Bioware's decision. And why did they choose so? Because when they are not busy enough with creating their satanist illuminati conspiracy they get a kick out of hating you in particular. Yeah, that seems just about right. Lex parsimoniae be damned, stupid Ockham obviously had no idea what he was talking about.

You're not missing much by not having played Legacy as DA:I neatly gives you enough exposition on the matter. You're just left wondering what and who the hell is going on at first. IMO the main story picks up a good deal of pace after Haven, especially if you're interested in DA lore. You know, that awful statanist conspiracy is just about to start and all. xD edit: You're right about the game being slightly offline-MMOish. As I posted a while ago, there was way too much Bethesda crap in my Dragon Age.

Hiho. *waves* It's probably more accurate to say that this is the first time I actually use my account to post a bit. It's been around forever, I just barely ever checked back here after the community split up into loads of different boards. Nice to see so many oldies around. ^^

No, I don't think so. 99% of the people probably don't even bother with the lore. She's just really good and interpreting things the wrong way, which is why I said it is willful. Nothing of the sort really happens in the games, and nothing of the sort is written in the lore. It's just her willful misinterpretation, and I say willful here because it's not possible to read that much text and accidentially get everything almost but never quite right, and it is liberally seasoned with flat out lies. Or she never played the games and just read about the lore on some weirdo conspiracy site, in which case she's a victim of exactly what she's saying Bioware is doing. Having an agenda. Take the interpretation that the Darkspawn are the Maker's curse to punish the hybris of man, yeah, it's not like there haven't been real life precedences. The bubonic plague was seen as exactly that, a punishment of God for sins committed. So did the Catholic church in 14th Century Europe have an anti-religous agenda as well? I like that interpretation, so I'm keeping it. Bioware is just an extension of a catholic conspiracy that started seventeen centuries ago when emperor Constantine apparently converted so that heathen pagans eventually would be able to destroy it from within.