#gen: bioware

[mass-effect-anonymous]

CONFESSION:

I got my GenX uncle the Legendary edition for his birthday since he expressed an interest to play. The first time he saw the Mako, he yelled "its the big track!". He explained to me it was one of his favorite toys as a kid and the mako reminded him of it. I looked it up and discovered it was called the 'Big Trak' and I could see how the Mako reminded him of it. GenX had some pretty cool toys back then.

Here is an actual commercial for it.

#mass effect anonymous #mass effect confession #mass effect legendary edition #bioware #the mako #Youtube #A lot of game developers are gen x'ers so maybe it was an inspiration

[sun-marie]

The Gen 5 Pokemon games are some of my favorite games of all time, and I thought it would be fun to see what Hilda would look like 2 years after BW, in BW2! I also wanted to emulate Ken Sugimori's iconic style, so I used Bianca and Cheren as reference 🤍🖤

#Honestly it's such a shame the protag from BW doesn't make an appearance in BW2 #bioware spoiled me ngl #I know a lot of other people have made designs for her #and while I love all of them none of them hit that very 'tomboy' feel she always gave me #pokemon #pokemon black and white #pokemon unova #pokemon hilda #pokemon touko #pokemon gen 5 #my art #sun-marie art #artists on tumblr #small artist #digital art #fan art #fanart #pokemon fanart

[legionofpotatoes]

Is Andromeda worth revisiting? I'm about to finish ME3 but didn't know if I should give it another go. Didn't care for it when it came out.

I mean if you didn't care for it then probably not? It didn't change much. A few bug fixes, couple performance patches, negligible character model and animation improvements but overall nothing major. It's still the same game.

I personally fell in love with it for some of the reasons that I love ME1, but I wouldn't expect anyone to like it now if they didn't before!

#anon #asks #I've done 3 full playthroughs in total I think. maybe 4? #really appreciated that they fixed the dead eyes and salarian eyelids :D some of the small stuff like that is tuned up #but really nothing super major. combat and multiplayer is still fun as heck and the open world mission design is.. inelegant but functional #there's a timesink grind to some of the semi-procedural missions but I stuck with it out of love for the universe #not gonna comment on story at all cause with bioware it's such a loaded topic. your mileage will vary and it's hard to quantify irt ME1-3 #it does contain drack though. possibly my favorite krogan character in the series. I adore everything about his arc #one thing that's worth mentioning is that it runs like ass on prev gen consoles. PC and PS5/xbox equivalent should be good #but my first few goes were on a PS4 and the choppy slideshow was seriously annoying. havarl was unplayable

[talizorahs]

can you please make another bad batch gen fic rec list?

anon my darling!! of course i can! i've been tossing up the idea anyway, as my old fic rec list (found here) turns 10 months old in a few days. so much has changed since then, and the fandom has had some amazing fics shared with it in that time. so without further ado...

Bad Batch Fic Rec List 2.0

find below 17 gen fic recs which cover pre-canon, republic era and imperial era, also with a section for alternate au fics.

happy reading! <3

Backstory / Pre-Canon

stick together by delightwrites.

Gen | 2.9k words | Complete

Summary: "Hunter hated individual training because it separated him from his squad. He didn't even really know where his brothers were taken on those days, and even if he had known, he couldn't do anything about it. He couldn't look after them."

a storm, a promise and four cadets all squeezed together in one bunk after a particularly hard day of training

Notable tags: Bad Batch as Kids, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, jeez give these boys a break

Comments: An oldie, but a goodie. I think this is one of the first fics I read when I rejoined fandom in June 2021 and it has had me in its claws ever since. Delightwrites paints us a lovely, but sad, scene of the Bad Batch in their formative years. They paint us such a good picture that the picture continues on into the painful events of the show, in fact. I will never forgive them for that. Mostly because of Transformersluna's matching comic. Ouch.

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Now We Are Free by wwheeljack.

Gen | 12k words | Complete

Summary: A few weeks before the start of the Clone Wars, Clone Force 99 are given leave and travel to Naboo for shore leave. Where Hunter, Crosshair and Wrecker see a mission, Tech steps foot off Kamino for the first time in his life and changes his brothers' perspectives on the galaxy they live in.

Notable tags: N/A

Comments: I would put Wwheeljack's entire Ultra Soft Batch series here if I could, but this fic in particular has always stuck out to me in the series. It has a different tone to the rest of the entries in the journey of her story, and it writes us into a precedent that the remainder of the series is trying to catch up to.

Now We Are Free is a story about brotherhood in the face of cruelty, no matter the source. It is gentle, or it at least potrays men that are trying to be gentle in a universe that wants them to be anything but. It portrays a different start to the Clone Wars than the rest of the clones get, but the Bad Batch have always been different, so it's very fitting.

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Drizzle by tincturedwords.

Gen | 15k words | Complete

Summary: One of the handlers is stupidly reckless with Crosshair’s training one day and the rest fo the batch are there to help in the aftermath.

Notable tags: Abuse of Authority, Caretaking, Hypothermia, Sharing a Bed

Comments: Drizzle is one of those fics you want to read when it's raining, to picture both the vivid scene that Tincturedwords paints us, but also the gentle comfort the second half of the fic boasts. The fic manages to say so many things without saying much at all. Tincturedwords' writing style really plays into this well, making the fic easy to read, and even easier to picture exactly what is going on. There are both big moments in the fic that I adored envisioning, such as the training sequence with sets of this series of events, but also the smaller and more initimate moments between the Bad Batch as well. There's plenty of those in the fic, even hidden between the lines, the sort that make you go "oh". Wait for a rainy day for this one, and make yourself a nice cup of tea!

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Republic Era

Art of War by Moxibustion (RyuuzaKochou).

Gen | 73k words | Complete

Summary: Echo had never had any particular talents. He'd never sought to be special, never tried to break the mould. He'd never aspired to be anything more than a clockwork soldier, watching his far more brilliant brothers rise up above him. He'd never expected to wake up one day and find out that he was, in fact, the last of them.

Funny old galaxy, really.

Now he was in the Bad Batch and one thing he was rapidly beginning to understand is this: in a galaxy filled with combat engineers, the Bad Batch are artists. Echo had never really known much about art. At least… that's what he'd always thought. New body, new squad - maybe it was time to look at things in a whole new way.

A story about art, war, coping, hanging on, letting go, restoration, reforging, plotting in a brig, military intelligence isn't, Wrecker's diplomacy doesn't, cooking, the thin line between genius and madness, starting over, struggling with loss, team bonding, art therapy, guerilla knitting therapy, big boom therapy, shaking down shinies for fun and profit, guilt, rage, forgiveness, waging war by fitting in…

… and making your peace with standing out.

Notable tags: Grief/Mourning, Finding Your Place, Echo-Centric, Echo Is Equal Parts BAMF - Sassmaster - And Cinnamon Roll

Comments: I don't where to begin with this fic. The whole piece is just... wow. It's a work of art. Moxibustion is a master of the written word and every single chapter of this is example of their command of the craft. They weave us a beautiful story about Echo settling into life with the Bad Batch, but at the same time, reconciling the fact that his old life is gone. Fives is gone. The 501st as he knew it is gone. It has that bittersweet tone to it in that sense, but it is also respectful of Echo's capabilities as a trained soldier - and the Batch's abilities in turn.

Art of War treats us to a chapter for each member of the Bad Batch and Echo acclimatising to them, with an overarching storyline about grief, fitting in, and taking care of yourself. It fits on a beautiful, poignant note about Order 66 (unbeknownst to the cast of characters) and the authorities which surround the Grand Army of the Republic. I will always go back to this fic when I have a few hours to kill. I find something new hidden amongst the dialogue every single time, as Moxibustion writes each character as if they have been lifted from the show itself, then some. I will highlight Tech's two chapters in particular. I adore all of it so very much. Truly a gift to the fandom.

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Success Rate by Viva_Islenska.

Gen | 64k words | Ongoing (14/16 chapters)

Summary: On a risky assignment to liberate allied hostages, Clone Force 99 is ambushed and overwhelmed. With the mission objective at stake, Tech and Echo stay behind as the rest of the Bad Batch is forced to make a hasty escape. Hunter, Crosshair, and Wrecker race to complete the assignment while Echo, dazed, injured, and badly damaged, occupies a prison cell onboard a transport bound for kark-knows-where. What’s worse? His brother lies bleeding and bereft of his goggles in the cell next door. (Takes place between CW 7.4 and TBB 1.1)

Notable tags: CT-21-0408 | CT-1409 | Echo Whump, Tech Whump (Star Wars: The Bad Batch)

Comments: Success Rate is a heart-stopping thriller from cover-to-cover and we've only just got to the gentle comfort of 'hurt/comfort' in the most recent chapter 14. Viva_Islenka is an amazing writer for the heart-wrenching torture scenes, gripping rescue scenes, careful medical scenes, and finally, the gentle comforting scenes at the end. Their version of the Bad Batch are so astute to their canon selves that it feels like you are reading an episode straight out of the show itself. I really, really enjoy their writing style and how it moulds so well into the story they are telling us, albeit laced with maximum hurt/comfort to boot! Please go give them some love for the ongoing story!

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Grit by CT_IForgot.

Gen | 33k words | Ongoing (12/? chapters) Currently on hiatus.

Summary: Grit (n.) 1. Small particles of sand. 2. Courage, resolve, determination.

Grit (v.) 3. Doing absolutely anything and everything possible to ensure the five squad members that started the mission are still alive at the end of the mission.

Notable tags: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Injury

Comments: This style of mission fic is not one you often see in fandom, so CT_IForgot treats us to a horror-esque story that's written with expert craftmanship to match. Their writing style is born for this sort of story; suspenseful, action-packed, and gutwrenching. They paint us a vivid picture of the Bad Batch (with Echo) trying to confront an invisible foe, but also foes from within the Grand Army of the Republic. The story also allows the Bad Batch to fail (and fail they do!) which is another theme not often explored within this fandom and its fan fiction. And not only does it allow them to fail, but it explores their failures and the realistic consequences of said failures, while still sticking to its horror-esque genre and the mission fic trope.

I can't give CT_IForgot enough love this amazing addition to the fandom's fan fiction halls. Please go give them some extra love while they're on hiatus! Please also be sure to heed the warnings!

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To Love and Be Loved by eternalqueenofthemyscira.

Gen | 11k words | Complete

Summary: Three times that Tech’s brothers tell him that they love him and one time he starts to believe them.

Notable tags: Brotherly Love

Comments: This fic is just. So cute. I go back and re-read it when I need a pick-me-up, or when I need to wind down in the evenings. Eternal writes us into four gorgeous scenarios across the Clone Wars (unfortunately without Echo) which focuses on Tech's relationship with the three other founding members of the Bad Batch. It borrows from Wwheeljack's Ultra Soft Batch series in a way, that Tech is characterised as an unsure and shy man who struggles to find his place in amongst his unit. But the fic is also gentle and permitting to Tech as he ponders his reason for being, while existing in a galaxy at war. Eternal gives Tech ample time to learn, and she is kind to the rest of the Bad Batch in turn, allowing them to be gentle despite what is going on around them.

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Pyrrhic Victory by TheEasternEmpress.

Gen | 5.8k words | Complete

Summary: Pyrrhic victory - a victory that comes at a great cost, perhaps making the ordeal to win not worth it.

The Bad Batch’s mission was marked as a success, but a feeling of failure flooded every corner of the Havoc Marauder. In their hearts, the Bad Batch knew they had truly failed.

Notable tags: Mentions of Child Death

Comments: As the name suggests, this fic follows a particularly haunting mission for the Bad Batch in the early years of the Clone Wars. We know that the unit boast a 100% success rate, but this fic is one of those that makes you ponder how that 'success' is defined. Empress explores this concept hauntingly, in a way, but also in a way that is comforting - to us as the readers, and to the characters in this scenario. I really enjoyed her use of language throughout the piece, with long, swelling paragraphs that paint the picture of a larger scene of desired peace between her Batch members. Though this is a sad fic, it's another one I go and re-read when I need it, because it gives you the message of "it's okay to fail, even if you've succeeded". It's a lovely message and this is a lovely fic to match.

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The Burden of Command by Destril.

Gen | 4.1k words | Complete

Summary: Hunter is struggling under the pressure of balancing his duty as their Sergeant and with his duty as their brother as the war rages on and Clone Force 99 is pushed to the brink. His team notices and steals a moment to just breathe and take care of their brother.

Notable tags: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hunter is trying to be the best leader and best brother he can

Comments: Full disclosure, I prompted this fic out of Destril because I adore her iteration of the Bad Batch so very much. The Burden of Command focuses on the unit nearing the end of the war (including Echo!), and it's a unit that's dreadfully weighed down by responsibility and fighting (fighting droids, and in-fighting). Like with Silence, Destril paints us a picture of an imperfect squad with a perfect track record. That pressure is enough for anyone to crumble under, to which this fic portrays them succumbing to some of the pressure. Hunter, specifically. Somebody needs to give that man a break.

Destril weaves us a beautiful picture of some of the Bad Batch's downtime with this fic. A slice of life, sort of thing, with hurt/comfort mixed it. Her writing is a treat, allowing us to explore those hidden moments, with beautiful brotherly intimacy between this group of 5 men. I'm very thankful for the chance to prompt her, and just had to include this fic in my must-read list.

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Imperial Era / Current Canon

Exceptional Minds by Echo_Base1.

Gen | 6.2k words | Complete

Summary: Tech and Omega grapple with guilt and unfamiliarity following Daro.

Notable tags: Omega & Tech (Star Wars: The Bad Batch) (relationship), Character Study

Comments: This fic is a lovely insight into Tech's state of mind following the events of season 1, episode 14 (War Mantle). It sees Tech trying to reconcile what happened to Hunter with Tech's reason for being - his intelligence and his 'enhancement'. Echo_Base gives us some lovely insight into Tech's upbringing on Kamino for him to have adopted this point of view, and how the Bad Batch being on the run has continually challenged Tech's previous views of himself. It then complements this line of thinking, in its study of Tech, by introducing us to Omega, who is similarily upset after the events on Daro. The two of them have a heartfelt conversation about what happened. It's one of those canon 'missing scene' fics for me, between episodes 14 and 15, and one I will hold dearly to my chest. Echo_Base really brings it home here in the end, and goes in for the kill in the last section. A good read all the way through.

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I need a minute (to get my head straight) by postapocalyptic_cryptic.

Gen | 407 words (drabble) | Complete

Summary: For the dialogue prompts: 'I just need to rest' for Hunter.

Notable tags: Post Season 1, [Hunter's] had a rough couple of weeks

Comments: I always really enjoy Mikey's short Batch fics and this one is another great one to their collection. In 400 words, I am worrying, smiling sadly, worrying some more, and then smiling bittersweetly. It also touches on something the show does not - that is, is Hunter okay? He fell off a mountain, got captured, held hostage, fought droids, survived a bombardment, and then escaped a destroyed underwater city. Someone give this man a break.

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Long Road Ahead by pierced_shrike (hanged_albatross).

Gen | 3.1k words | Complete

Summary: Just like their armor, the Bad Batch changes over the months following the destruction of Kamino.

Notable tags: Obligatory Trailer Fic, Cuz ya'll- the outfit change

Comments: I love this fic. Love love love this fic. It fills the gap between seasons 1 and 2, where we now know we will see the Bad Batch change their armour. It is so bittersweet, so beautiful, yet tells the story it needs to. Every word has purpose and it hits said purpose, tenfold. I have always really enjoyed Hanged_Albatross' works (one featured on the last rec list!) so it's a joy to see them return to the fandom with such a gorgeous fic.

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Other / AU

Scrambled Feelings All Get Replaced by Littleking_caduceus.

Gen | 3.6k words | Complete

Summary: A distant part of Tech, the one separate from the chip, separate from the eyes wide with misplaced, fiery anger, would have screamed at himself. He was hurting his family. Was this how Crosshair felt? His twin brother, his little brother, pushed by an unseen force to hurt the ones he loved for an unnamed crime?

What if Tech had been the one who's inhibitor chip activated on Bracca?

Notable tags: Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Sign Language

Comments: Littleking weaves us a short but sharp 'what if' look into Tech's chip activating on Bracca. We get the wrenching action, but we also get the tender care afterwards, which makes this fic a perfect execution of the hurt/comfort trope. I really enjoyed how Littleking's writing style moulded to the theme of the fic, particularly the second 'comfort' chapter. The inclusion of the Batch's realistic reactions (specifically Hunter) to what happened is the icing on the cake for really enjoying this brief but impactful exploration into an alternative path of action on Bracca.

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Even If We Break by NightOwl1796.

Gen | 2k words | Complete

Summary: [The only sound was the whispering of the waves, carrying on the breeze, sailing into nothingness. And suddenly the infinitely aching realisation that Crosshair would not resurface on his own hit him like a dagger in the chest.]

It is Crosshair's capsule that does not resurface from the Kaminoan waters. This time, Hunter won't leave him behind. Not again.

Notable tags: Drowning

Comments: I really, really love this 'what if' exploration for season 1, episode 16 (Kamino Lost). It's short and sweet, but it does the job for an emotional twist of the knife about Crosshair's motif of being left behind by the Bad Batch. And it does it well, in a song fic, which is themed to Brother by Kodaline. Which I have on all of my Bad Batch playlists. Ouch.

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Carry Us Away by lunarshadow.

Gen | 5.5k words | Complete

Summary: “Echo,” he repeated, “I will not be angry at you for leaving me. It is the only choice we have. And I will not let you die here when you clearly have a way to survive.”

Tech’s grip tightened on Echo’s shoulder, a sincere look in his eyes. Echo had never seen Tech like this. One thing was for sure: he wanted Echo to do this. Losing an ongoing battle to the flood swimming in his eyes, Echo heard his brother whisper one more word.

“Please.”

OR: What happens when Tech and Echo's capsule is the one that remains underwater.

Notable tags: Tech Whump (Star Wars: The Bad Batch), Drowning

Comments: This fic is exactly the same as the above fic (a 'what if' for Kamino Lost) but it focuses on Tech instead of Crosshair. And I enjoyed it just the same, just because Lunarshadow paints us a gut wrenching picture while balancing it with some more repetitive Crosshair motifs. It reads beautifully and I can't speak more highly of the imagery. Carry Us Away really did let me think of where we could have been, what with this course of the story for episode 16, and it's somewhere I wouldn't have minded ending up at all.

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if the ocean was whiskey by hellowkatey.

Gen | 5k words | Complete

Summary: If you are reading this, then you must have the unfortunate privilege of encountering my brothers while they are under the influence of alcoholic beverages. First, I begrudgingly apologize on their behalf.

Second, I have rigged this message to be automatically delivered to the comms of those in their vicinity whenever their blood-alcohol levels rise above a level to indicate they are beyond the capacity of rational thought. I hope this guide may offer some helpful tips in the event that they start to escalate any situations, as they are known to do.

Good luck, and I hope to not hear from you tonight. -Tech

Notable tags: Drunken Shenanigans, vignettes of the batch being fools

Comments: This fic is just. So funny. Hellowkatey is an amazing writer, and this fic is an example of her writing ability and range within the numerous genres and fandoms she is a part of. If The Ocean Was Whiskey was a product of our amused musings in an 'out of character' roleplay chat and I will go and re-read it whenever I need to smile a little bit. It explores each of the Bad Batch's reactions to being drunk, and Tech's reactions to each of them throughout their drunken shenengians (as Tech himself abstains from drinking alcohol).

I've lumped it in the 'other' tab as it reads a little like crack!fic, but it's crack only in the sense that it involves drugs and alcohol. You can also check out the associated roleplay thread, Adjustments For Life and Personality (and How It Hurts).

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The World We Once Knew, Gone It Is by AgentMaryMargaretSkitz.

Gen | 77k words | Ongoing (8/? chapters)

Summary: What if it wasn't Crosshair's chip that activated with Order 66?

What if the chip that activated belonged to the leader of the Bad Batch?

What happens then?

Notable tags: Echo's Leadership Era, Imperial Hunter

Comments: I have no idea where to start with Kate and her fic. She has crafted us a beautiful alternate universe that manages to be even more painful than canon, with Crosshair's inhibitor chip activating. She crafts us a universe where the Bad Batch are struggling without their leader, but are coming into their own with the void that Hunter's absence/betrayal has left them. It touches on all of the correct and satisfying emotional notes, including addressing that void, Hunter's fall, and the outcomes of that while having a child in tow. The fic also boasts a storyline for Hunter while he is under the influence of his inhibitor chip, and an interesting one at that, which continues to develop in Kate's ongoing chapters. She has just released chapters 7 & 8.

Please go give her some love for the ongoing work. She deserves all of it, then some, with the innovative and captivating universe she has created. Her writing style leaves you hanging for more, but it makes you read between the lines as well - where Kate generously leaves us plenty of clues for what is going on in her newly-crafted universe. Her ability to have you on the edge of your seat is unparalled. Truly another gift work to the fandom.

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#the bad batch #star wars #tbb #bad batch #fic rec #thank you nonnie u just accelerated something i was already thinking of doing pfffft #so this worked well #enjoy the recs!!!! #and feel free to ask for more always #i have read every gen fic in the tag i swear #this show has me in a chokehold #not bioware

[chaoticspacefam]

For the SWTOR NPC asks. What happened to Loyat and Cytharat in your canon?

From the [SWTOR NPC Headcanon Asks List]

thank you for the ask, as always! <3

I’ll start with Cytharat since I definitely have more headcanons for him than Loyat atm! 

Based on him mentioning being Malgus’ apprentice and a very newly-appointed Lord, and also being way Pinker than the obviously-older Pureblood NPCs/the PC Pureblood skintone options, I’m assuming Cytharat is pretty Young for a Pureblood, so I figured him around about Ty’s age, maybe 10 years (~2 human years max age difference) younger if that

Vano and Kas are kind of working in tandem by the time the Makeb storyline comes around so they attend to the Makeb questline(s) together. 

Kas had one conversation with Cytharat and immediately went “Yep This Is My Apprentice Now If Malgus Wants Him Back He Can Come Fucking Fight Me” (Malgus was never brave and/or stupid enough to come fight her XD). Since they’re working together, Kas and Vano manage to split up so Vano saves Catha Niar and Kas manages to save Cytharat. Afterwards she offers him a spot on her crew and since its obvious to him that even if she might be A Little Weird, Kas obviously Cares unlike most of the other Sith so he accepts and ends up becoming part of Kas’s crew. 

While he’s hesitant at first about the idea of teaming up with Jedi/Republic personnel, he trusts Kas by that point so when she says they’re going with Lana and Marr to Yavin IV to help deal with the Revanites Cytharat just accepts it. When Kas is reunited with Rai after arriving there, Cytharat meets Ty and maybe (Definitely) gets a crush. They’re only together for a little while before the whole temporary alliance dissolves again and when Rai (and by extension Ty) refuses to go back to the Empire with them they part ways for a time

Cytharat misses Ty a lot more than he was expecting to and Kas Notices (™). She casually mentions that she has Ty’s holofrequency if he wants it and deliberately leaves said frequency where she Knows he can find it. Cytharat sneaks a few message/letters through and keeps chatting with him until Arcann and the Eternal Empire give them more pressing concerns at which point they lose contact again until one day Lana rocks up to Kas’s office with Rai and Ty in tow. 

Ty gets left with Kas and co. while Rai goes with Lana and Koth to Zakuul and the poor kid is a Nervous Wreck about it so Cytharat has to help Kas calm him down because they’re the only two people he Trusts. Kas then pulls a classic old “oh Cytharat do you think you could help us with this star chart, oh wait a second is that Ashara and Khem calling me? You and Ty can handle looking through this one by yourselves right? I’ll check on you later byeeee~” and at some point during their moving everything over to Odessen he ~finally~ asks Ty out. 

So of course Cytharat stays on with the Alliance afterwards. I’m not 100% sure if they’ll ever get married yet (haven’t gotten that far with their relationship planning yet but they’re defo solid as an item :’3) but Cytharat is absolutely okay with being the muscle of the relationship while his bf hides behind him when things get scary (which is, unfortunately, very often. Poor Ty XD) 

And Loyat!! (who I do not have any screenshots of rn since none of my current pub toons are as far as Ilum (anymore, I yeeted a few of them when I stopped vibing with them oopsie)

I have less solid plants for Loyat but I do love her and I am definitely kidnapping her she’s mine now Bioware /hj

Loyat and Aria are definitely buddies. Probably even drinking buddies, much to the abject horror of anyone who happens to cross paths with them when they’re out drinking XD

They absolutely would meet during the Ilum war/storyline. Though it’s not until after (the Assault on Tython FP) that Aria’s officially outed as a Sith plant, Loyat can probably Sense It so she agrees to go with Aria to the Jedi if only knowing that Aria probably has an Out Again if she’s managed to be in deep cover this long and not get caught.

It’s a minor wrench in the plan when Aria tries to fuckin fight Satele and gets arrested, but I’m kiiind of feeling like Loyat might go with her to Manaan. Especially since with Zenith and most of the other Consular crew lickity splitting when they realise Aria Was Sith The Whole Time. Ya girl’s gonna need some crewmates/friends, so why not Loyat? ;3 by the same vein, probably goes with Aria to the Alliance and ends up working under Kas’s Force Enclave sector, but where specifically I have yet to decide owo

I definitely want to expand on Loyat more, but for now sadly that’s all I got for Loyat! 😅😅

#Q&A with the fam #ask me about swtor NPCs ask game #lord cytharat #bioware when will my tomato son return from the war #jk i'll do it myself #lord loyat #look at that i have notes for loyat now too thanks raven! /gen :'D #i'll prob expand on these later but hey; she's off the ''i WANT you to be included but i don't know HOW'' list now #so that's a start xP #elven's swtor headcanons #long post #tumblr if i have to re-write this one more fucking time i am going to BITE YOU #for some reason tumblr really did not want me giving you these headcanons smh #i had to resort to typing it out in a google doc and then pasting it over bc every time i tried to copy-paste an emoji in it'd delete #all the text and then i wouldn't have it on my clipboard to replace it #thank you for asking! #the-raven-of-highever #you WILL let me post my headcanons tumblr (threat) shjkjkgdjdg #😂😂😂

[alpaca-clouds]

Biopunk is super interesting

You know what? I will now do a "rambling about punk genre stuff other than Solarpunk" Saturday think. Because I feel like it and because the punk genre are super interesting as a concept. So I want to explore this a bit further.

I kinda grew up with the entire punk-genre thing. Literally. As a kid I got into Cyberpunk when I was like... 12. So, I always had an interest in the genre. That I ended up playing Shadowrun hence was not a bis surprise. (Maybe I will talk about that a bit more one day...) And it was through Shadowrun, that I got interested in one of the subsubgenre of Cyberpunk: Biopunk.

Fun fact: Outside of fanfiction this is the one bit of Cyberpunk that I have actually written quite a bit about. And I just think it is interesting.

Now, to catch everyone up to speed: Biopunk usually (though not necessarily) is set in a Cyberpunk world, but instead or additionally to cyberware, there is gen-modifications happening. And this of course brings new and interesting avenues to explore with it.

See. One idea in this regard that gets played with a lot in Shadowrun, but also other Cyberpunk media, is the entire idea of "cyber psychopathy". Basically, a "ship of theseus" thing. If you replace too much of the human, the human looses their humanity and might do bad things. In comes bioware and goes like: "Sure this, we do not replace the human body, we just alter it." Basically, GMO for the human body.

Now, a while ago I talked about how gene tech is nobody's enemy as it is. BUT... gen tech currently suffers from the issue of people copyrighting gene sequences. Going so far as "you cannot use you non-genemodified harvest as seeds next year, because it has been pollinated with pollen from other gene modified stuff".

What would that mean for a human?

The possibilities for gene tech in medicine would be endless. Cure cancer. Cure all sorts of genetic diseases. Cure stuff that would kill you in real life. And do not even give up parts of your body.

But what if you cannot pay? With Cyberware you can still say: "Fuck it, have your stupid cyber arm back." And give up your arm. But with gene tech... Well, looks like you belong to the company now!

And of course, even more than normal Cyberpunk, this genre is also ripe to explore for the human relation to disabilities. Because, yeah, imagine gene tech could fix all disabilities. What would it do to the way humanity treats disabled people? Are your forced to be cured? And if so... Does your cured body then belong to the company?

So many interesting questions to explore.

The Biopunk stuff I wrote basically featured the set up of "the company" (that also was the state) offering parents of children, that would probably not be born alive or if born alive would die within the first two years of their life, to cure them. For free. And while they were on it, they gave the embryos all sorts of gene treatments, turning them into basically a different species alltogether. But when the revolution came... Welp, the company sat down: "Looks like we own you. Time to be our soldiers."

So... Yeah. Interesting concepts to explore here.

#cyberpunk #biopunk #dystopia #sciece fiction #gene tech #gmo #gene modification #cloning

[felassan]

I was sent a link to an ‘interview with Mark Darrah about BioWare and games’ video that I hadn’t seen before. it’s called “INTERVIEW | Former BioWare Dev Mark Darrah On Crunch, Electronic Arts, Unionization, & More" and [here is the source] link. the interview took place in 2022, so bear that in mind when listening, but it still has interesting insights and things in there. the video description reads as follows:

"Former BioWare developer Mark Darrah joins us for a talk about crunch, workplace culture, accessibility, Elden Ring, and much more." Timestamps: 1:31- Why did you get into game development? 4:12- Crunch 14:05- On Activision-Blizzard & corporate culture overtaking studio culture 15:50- Crunch continued 21:06- Toxic workplace cultures at game studios & why they’re tough to fix 29:13- Unionization in the games industry 36:36- Rising game budgets and why they’re getting bigger 48:00- Elden Ring and game budgets 52:59- Accessibility in games 1:10:38- Relationship between the creative and business sides of game development & corporate directives 1:14:43- Anthem 1:22:16- EA doesn’t understand what BioWare is 1:28:20- Indie development & being bought out by larger companies [source]

the rest of this post is under a cut due to length.

this post is just some notes and transcribed quotes of interest from the video, in case that’s of any use to anyone, for example for accessibility.

Dragon Age: Dreadwolf / 'current or recent general BioWare’

“The culture around crunch has been changing dramatically at BioWare for the last 7 or 8 years, but I would actually think that it’s maybe not the, I don’t believe that it’s the reporting [increasing reporting on crunch in the industry in recent years] that’s causing the changing culture at the studios. And the change in reporting is caused by something, there’s another cause for both of them. And I think it might be that we just have a development, people are getting more experienced, older, and I think that might be what it is. But I don’t believe that we were trying to improve crunch culture because Kotaku was talking about it or Jason Schreier wrote an article about what happened on Anthem. I don’t believe that’s the cause. I think that those are both symptoms of another cause, which is causing the change. And maybe it’s older people in game development, but actually, now that I say it out loud, maybe it’s actually the opposite. Maybe it’s Gen Z coming into the workforce with very different expectations of what work looks like that are causing the change.”

“I think BioWare may have abandoned it, but something that I was working on in sort’ve, the last couple of years at BioWare was Pile of Sand. And the idea of Pile of Sand is to focus the team on a single point or at least as small of a point as you can, and then use that focus to kind’ve cause things to come into being around that. And I know that there are people at BioWare who hate Pile of Sand, but it definitely causes Completion Urgency. In a way that nothing short of crunch or E3 has done very successfully.”

“I’d like to think that.. well. For sure BioWare’s culture today is way better than BioWare’s culture was in 1997 when I started. Or even see it like, you can even see it in the games. But, I mean, it’s not perfect, and there are people in more senior roles, or there have been people in more senior roles that are problematic, and as someone who worked to remove people who were problematic, it could be incredibly difficult to do, because usually there’s no smoking gun. Usually it’s reports or innuendo, or you know it’s, everyone kinda knows, but to actually have something actionable is really hard. And that sounds so terrible because it is terrible, because it is really hard – I’ve burned massive amounts of political capital in some cases to get rid of people who were toxic, but who were in very senior positions.” “I think what’s happened is [in the industry generally] the level of what’s being treated as acceptable has become way lower. Way less is acceptable, and that, I think, is a net good. Does that, is that how you want improvement to happen? No, this is not, you don’t want it to work this way, you want it to be a constant steady state towards better and better culture. And I think, you know, BioWare’s been trying to do that, but I think when other studios don’t do that and then a giant light gets shone on them it actually helps with other studios to say, you know, we also have to take a look at ourselves and think about what’s going on and look at our processes and our culture and our hiring practices and all of these things.”

The host asked how you go about setting that culture where you say, ‘these kinds of things aren’t okay’. “Are there techniques, rules, seminars?” Mark: “I mean, all of those things exist and, don’t get me wrong, I do think that BioWare, I do think that EA has done a better job of this than some of the other publishers and studios have done. So all of those things I do think help, but I do think that honestly the single thing that you can do that helps the most is to get someone of the group that is under-represented at a high enough position to have a voice be heard.”

The host asked about Keywords attempting to unionize recently. Mark: “I’m curious as to some of the details with the Keywords union, because back in 2020, when I was still at BioWare, which, where they’re saying like, they were forced into the office. I wonder if that was a BioWare, I don’t believe that that was actually a BioWare interaction, that it was a BioWare contract. Because at the time, at that time, early Covid days, I was trying to get into the office and it was like locked down, we couldn’t get in to the office, I couldn’t get into the office, I was the Vice President, I couldn’t get into the office. So I’m curious as to the details of that. They are contractors so it’s possible that they were working on something else and they were being forced into an office, I don’t know, it’s possible that something was happening that I’m not aware of. But that specific thing that they were talking about is, just caught me by surprise because we were actually, I was trying to violate the rules and I couldn’t even do it for myself, so.”

On the relationship between the creative and business sides of game development and corporate directives: “[direct orders from corporate], actually, it does happen. There are directive things. I mean, Joplin, the thing that was Dragon Age 4, was cancelled because it was perceived that the next Dragon Age needed to have an online component, it needed to have live service, it needed to have an online component, it needed to be live service, live service. That was, so it was like, there was essentially a decision made at a corporate level about what the game needed to be. And whether that was real or not, I don’t know, but I have my own thoughts on that front, but that’s what was said. And, but sometimes it’s even stupider stuff, like there were people that were like, ‘in DA:I, you NEED to be able to fly a dragon!’ and it was like, this was a dictate, and I judo’d that out of, into us not actually doing it. But that was a dictate that came down. So there are reviews, so with EA there are gates, so you have like numbered gates up to actually, I think there are more gates now. But basically you have a concept gate, a vision gate, a pre-production gate, a production gate, a post-production gate, and like alpha, and things like that. Some of those gates are formal gates, you have executives gather in a room and a presentation is made to them and then they say ‘I don’t like that, do something different’ and that could be anything from ‘I don’t like that your character has a frog for a head’, to ‘this entire-’, especially in the early days, ‘this entire concept is flawed, we shouldn’t make this game at all’. At EA, once things cross a certain threshold they tend to continue, but in the early days games do get cancelled because they don’t get through those gates. So they do have influence because there is, they are seeing the game during development and they are very important people who are expressing their opinions and it’s not entirely clear. I mean, I report to someone who reports to someone who is providing this feedback. So the presumption is they get to say what goes. And I guess they probably do. It’s not actually clear that they do, but the presumption is the reporting line is literally, person reports to person reports to this person who is saying this thing, I suspect they probably get to decide, if they say this needs to be a certain way, it’s gonna be a certain way. Maybe I’m wrong on that but that’s certainly what seems to be the case.”

On Anthem and why it got made: “I wasn’t on Anthem in the early days, but there was a, with some of the executive, EA’s never really understood what the heck BioWare is, but in the early days of Anthem, or let’s say, the days after ME3, there was a sentiment with some of the executives at EA that storytelling games were over. They were done. That we needed something different. So there was a lot of language that was being pushed at Casey, and at Aaryn, that was essentially to that effect, of, ‘don’t you think that the days of storytelling games are over? Maybe it’s time to do something different. And I don’t know, because I wasn’t in the room, I don’t know if that just fed into exactly the kind of game Casey wanted to make anyway, or if they just sort’ve lined up, so yeah. They weren’t, no one at EA was saying ‘Make Anthem’ or ‘Make Dylan’, which is what it was at the time, but there was pressure around, like, ‘probably if you’re making another thing and it’s not another Mass Effect, you shouldn’t just make another story-driven RPG. We don’t want another one of those, we don’t think’. So there was a push towards something different. Some of the early things that Casey was pitching were still, you know, they were multiplayer story-driven things, they were different, but yeah, there was definitely a push from corporate to do something that wasn’t ME, that wasn’t DA, it was something else.”

“It’s definitely frustrating, I did a ‘dear executive, you’re being managed’ video. As an Executive Producer, a big part of your job is managing executives so they feel like you’re listening to them even when what they’re saying is stupid, so it can be incredibly frustrating. I feel like BioWare’s left a lot of money on the table because of the purse strings that are held at the corporate level, like I feel like, porting SW:TOR to the consoles would make a ton of money for not very much investment, and it’s not been, it could’ve been done 3, 4, 5 years ago. The remasters, it’s a frankly, a miracle that they ever got made for ME. The thing that most studios within EA seem to do is they seem to do one thing at a time. Dice makes a Battlefield, then they fix it, then they make a new Battlefield. That makes corporate interaction, I think, a lot more clear [for them]. When Battlefield 4 comes out and it doesn’t do well, they’re given not just the ability, they’re given the mandate to fix it. BioWare’s always had a lot more plates spinning. But I think the consequence of that is, when something goes wrong, it means that there are a lot of potentials that could be spinning, and it means when something goes wrong, it’s less obvious what to do. When ME:A launches and has problems, unlike with Battlefield 4, EA doesn’t say, ‘fix it, I don’t care what you were gonna be doing next, fix it’, what instead happens is the resources get taken away and put onto other things. Anthem fought to have resources to fix itself, but ultimately was always fighting with Dragon Age, to be frank, for those resources, for some of them at least. I mean maybe that’s just an indication that BioWare has stubbornly held on to a structure that is incompatible with EA’s corporate culture, but I do think that having so many plates spinning means that BioWare’s always short of resources. And I think that’s given EA a lot more ability to influence what BioWare’s doing at any moment, because, like, ‘well why don’t you just put those people, we don’t want to keep trying to fix ME:A, why don’t you just put those people onto Dragon Age? Or we’ll take them away and put them onto EA Montreal.’ Whereas if you’re just one studio in Sweden or you’re Sims 4, same thing, is, they got nothing else do, I mean, they do, they absolutely have things to do, but it’s not obvious, there’s not an equal priority, there’s the next thing, which is a lower priority. Whereas at BioWare, there’s always something else they could be doing. And I think it’s been, it’s allowed EA, I think, more control over what BioWare does, maybe, than they’ve had in other studios possibly. I dunno. Probably someone from Dice is gonna angrily tell me I’m an idiot in your comments.”

Other BioWare things

“At least at EA, the executives, the corporate-level executives, the C-suite people, don’t really set culture at the individual studios. But they do control the purse-strings. And because they control the purse-strings they ultimately kind’ve do control everything. So I do think that public companies, or at least, all the public companies that I have worked for, are obsessed with short-term results. You know, ‘your game is supposed to come out in this quarter, and it should’ve come out in this quarter, and if it doesn’t come out in this quarter, it better come out in this fiscal year’. And moving across, so BioWare has a history of sliding games, but the reality is that EA, you can slide from quarter to quarter, but sliding outside of a fiscal year – it’s happened, but it’s really hard, and there are usually really terrible consequences involved in doing so. And I think what is happened to some degree is, corporate culture will eventually infect and take over the cultures of the studios, I believe. So if you look at BioWare in 2008, 2009 and 2010, it was BioWare’s culture with [inaudible] culture kind’ve on top, dictating things at a very macro level. But then if you fast forward ten more years, that EA culture, that sort’ve fiscal, that fiscal culture has sort’ve bled into BioWare’s culture to some degree. So I think actually, to some degree actually I think what EA really wants is they want studios like BioWare to be like, ‘it’s all about the art, man! We don’t care when it ships, we don’t care how many copies it’s gonna sell, we don’t care, we don’t care!’, and they provide the rigor to force that. But instead I think what’s happened, what naturally happens is, you realize ‘that this is a corporation, we need to care about profitability and release dates and all of these things’, but by doing that, that resistance has gone away. And while before, in like DA:O and ME1 [inaudible] the balance was over here, it starts to shift more towards a corporate-focused way, so I think that the thing that probably, the central, the C-suites need to do is, figure out how to give back the studios back that resistance, that willingness to say, ‘you know, the game’s not ready, it’s not gonna hit the fiscal year’. And they say they do, but they really don’t, because it’s, the culture’s just eroded away over time. It’ll be interesting to watch Respawn because it’s EA’s newest acquisition, and right now, just culturally, that resistance just there, just like BioWare in 2008, 2009, but let’s see what’s happened with Respawn in 5 or 6 years. I hope they can keep that up, but I don’t even think it’s, it’s not like ‘Evil EA’ infecting on purpose, I just think, naturally being within a bigger organization, it just happened through osmosis over time.”

“DA:O is about 7000 staff months to make, so it was a huge game at the time. Most of that was done before BioWare was owned by EA. Salaries went up dramatically, way higher than inflation after BioWare was acquired by EA, so that made a big difference. But DA:I was more staff months than DA:O by a fair amount and, so, a couple of things. The entire code base for DA:O was, I think, about two million lines of code. Frostbite is like 20 million lines of code. So that is, there is development cost of just holding that together, but things are just more complicated. As games get bigger, they get expensive.”

“When KOTOR put in voice-acting for all the conversations apart from the player. That changed the industry. At that moment it became no longer acceptable to not have voiced conversations in AAA games.” “DA:I has a horse because at the time it was seen that you had to have a horse in a fantasy RPG. I don’t think that’s true anymore, you’d get away with not having a horse today.”

“I would argue that a consistent problem of a lot of BioWare games is we try so hard to explain to you in the first three hours what’s going on, how everything works, all the mechanics, everything, we’re just dumping so much on the player that they’re overwhelmed and bored, probably bored. But also overwhelmed, if you throw too much at me you’ve actually reduced my ability to learn it, so you’ve actually made the game, in your effort to make me understand, you’ve actually made me understand less, potentially.”

“I think we made the wrong decision on DA:I. I think the crafting system in DA:I is completely inaccessible. It’s a very complicated system, there are no recipes, it’s all based on, like, combinations of different things giving you different materials and then there’s an appearance system layered on top of that which adds an additional layer of complexity. I think as a result, we have a system that is basically not engaged with by most players, by the vast majority of players, do not engage in crafting because it is inaccessible.” “Something that’s come up a couple of times in BioWare’s history is the idea of story-mode difficulty, so the ability to play through the game on essentially, you can’t lose combat. ME3 has such a difficulty, but we didn’t do that in DA:I. And the reason is not because I don’t think, given what BioWare games are, which is a lot about the interaction of different characters and engaging in the story and that, I don’t think that a story-mode difficulty is inappropriate for a BioWare game. But the problem is if you play ME3 on that difficulty, combat’s kind of awful, like it actually kind’ve makes the game, it damages the game in the process because combat is easy but fast, so it’s kind’ve just this weird morass you have to dig through. So I think when you’re thinking about accessibility, something like that, you have to think about, how does the more accessible version still allow the game to be good.” “A common example in a lot of BioWare games is puzzles. So you’d put a puzzle in, and then the game is broken and you’re going along and then the level comes together and it’s weeks or months later and then QA start playing it saying, ‘I can’t figure this puzzle out’. And you’re like, but it’s obvious in my head! Says the puzzle designer. And then you have to decide what you’re gonna do. You can pull the puzzle out completely, which has happened a lot in BioWare games, you just end up pulling it out. Or you put the answer on the wall, which you can see in tons of BioWare games, where it’s like, figure out this puzzle! Oh really? ‘Cause the answer is literally written on a giant poster right beside the puzzle, which I think just undermines the whole puzzle, what’s the point? Or you just say, forget it, we’re just gonna leave it. And the way that we’ve typically made the decision at BioWare for things like that is, if it’s on the critical path, the expectation is it should be accessible to every player, so you should be able to get through the main line of the story even if you can’t figure out any of the puzzles. So we might put a puzzle on the critical path to introduce the concept of puzzles to you, but the answer is on a poster board right beside it. If you’re off the critical path, if you’re on the optional content, then, all bets are off. If you can’t figure it out, then you can’t figure it out. But that comes from a belief that we want most people to finish the story, which I think might actually be a mis-placed belief. Maybe 2008, 2009, I had this feeling that, you know, Bethesda’s got a big problem. People don’t finish their games. You play their games and your last experience of a Bethesda game is always ‘ehh I guess I’m done’. But what I realized more recently is, actually, in a lot of ways, that’s maybe the best experience you can get from a player. Because if you think about how you experience a ME or a DA, your last experience is one of two things. Either it’s, what the fuck was that, I hate that ending, I am angry. Or, it was, that was the greatest ending I ever experienced! Now I’m disappointed that it’s over. And in both cases the actual last emotion is actually negative. It’s either a positive followed by disappointment, or it’s a negative right off the bat. I’m guilty of the obsession of, we want people to finish our games, but actually, maybe we don’t? Maybe we just want people to have their last experience not be negative and lots of positive experiences in the middle. I dunno.”

“Ray Muzyka was always certain that one of BioWare’s competitive advantages was replayability. But actually I would argue – there are people that have played DA:I thirty times, but most people, they don’t do that. Most people go through, you experience the story through a particular viewpoint, and then that’s the viewpoint. You might go and you know, make a Qunari just to see what it’s like, but what you see in the data is, if a person finishes the game, usually they finish the game once and then maybe they might have a few little ‘I played for 45 mins or an hour just to goof around’. But very rarely do you get people that are like, I played through the entire game like 10 times. It happens but it’s not common. I think replayability in these story-driven games is actually kind’ve an illusion.”

On EA not understanding what BioWare is: “I think there’s a lot of things, but I think fundamentally EA is a company that understands sports games. They understand how to make sports games which come out every year at a very high quality, monetize very well, they understand, they know how to market those, they know what production for those looks like, they know how to keep that team moving forward and proving their quality, they know how to do lots of things there. They know how to put processes in place to make the risk go down. I think when you apply those processes to shooters I think they actually work pretty well, though maybe they don’t work anymore. But I think they did work pretty well. You can kind’ve market a shooter like a sports game and it basically works. I think that one of the huge advantages that sports games have is, you already know if you like soccer or not, so I’ve already, so now I’m selling you the product, not the concept of the product. Shooters you can kinda do the same thing. You kinda know if you want a shooter or not, now I’m just selling you on this specific shooter, not the concept of shooters in general. RPGs aren’t like that, you can’t, because RPGs are so different from each other that you can’t sell me on the concept. Like, I don’t know if I just like RPGs, I need more than that to know if I can make a decision, which makes marketing them different. Also, for whatever, for a variety of reasons, RPGs are the most expensive genre you can make because they have, in theory, all the complexities of a shooter plus you have to tell an engaging, interactive story that branches on top of that, plus you need progression systems that are more complicated than your shooter on top of that. And that all needs to work together into some sort’ve combinatorial mass, to be frank. So I think that what EA wants from all their studios is they want things that can sell 10 million copies or 20 million copies, I mean that number changes. And the truth of the matter is, is, that maybe is just never BioWare. I mean, I say that, DA:I sold more than 10 million copies, but I mean, I think that what you have with BioWare is, maybe, you have the Oscar studio. Do the Oscar movies make three billion dollars? No, but they win you the awards. If you want that, do you want the studio that wins you the awards? But maybe, it makes money. I’m not saying that EA should just let BioWare lose money, that’s stupid, but do you want something that’s less profitable, but earns you acclaim? And if you do, then you need to measure in a different way. Do you want something that can build new IP? BioWare can build new IPs, and then maybe you take those IPs and you do other things with them. Not that EA has done that, and maybe EA doesn’t need to because they own like 40, 50 IPs that they’re currently not doing anything with, so. But, I mean, like building an IP is incredibly expensive, and incredibly difficult. Does EA want new IPs? Maybe, but again I don’t know that they, so what they have with BioWare is they have a company that gets into the conversation at award season, that can push culture, that can build new IPs. But, you know, be in the conversation at award season, push culture, and build new IPs, are those characteristics that EA wants or do they want ‘can sell 25 million copies and make a billion dollars’? And probably you can’t have those first three things and get that fourth thing. You can be profitable, but you’re probably not selling 25 million copies and making a billion dollars. I mean Skyrim did, but that’s. But I think honestly Skyrim just proves how hard it is. It’s the one in the RPG space that you talk about, and that’s from 2011. It’s the exception that proves the rule. That’s the RPG that was culturally relevant, relevant at awards season, but also made a ton of money.”

At the end of the interview, they had tech difficulties, so they transcribed the last segments of the audio to post for folks to read. This can be found pinned in the comments of the YouTube video.

[source and watch link]

#dragon age: dreadwolf #da4 #the dread wolf rises #dragon age 4 #bioware #mass effect #mass effect: andromeda #next mass effect #sw:tor #anthem #video games #covid mention #long post #longpost #(ty for sending this link!)

[anneapocalypse]

Mark Darrah's Memories and Lessons on Dragon Age: Inquisition

Former BioWare developer and Executive Producer Mark Darrah talks about the development of Dragon Age: Inquisition.

A summary of major points:

If Dragon Age 2 had come out any later, it would have been post-Skyrim, and regardless of what changes had been, it would have been difficult for that kind of game to hold up in comparison to Skyrim.

Dragon Age: Inquisition exists and was developed in a post-Skyrim world. Skyrim changed the gaming landscape.

Frostbite was basically the only choice for DAI. Unreal was not on the table as an option for them at the time the choice was made.

Frostbite was great for art and level design, but at the time it was not ready for RPGs—so the art team was able to get to work right away, while the dev team had to get certain systems built before they could really begin.

In the early days, they had a hard time boiling down DAI into a 30-second pitch or vision statement.

Q3 2013 was the planned release date for DAI. It actually shipped a year later. Execs at EA wanted a launch title for the next gen consoles, and they wanted to replicate the fast and cheap turnaround of DA2. Darrah says that he and the devs never believed in that date—they expected to go back and push for more time later—but they to agree to 2013 in order to get started. This also meant that they had to scope the game as if it would ship in 2013, planning for a much smaller game than the eventual finished product. Notably, he says that while the devs had always wanted to put playable races back in after DA2, it was due to the executive pressure to ship in 2013 that they initially scoped the game without them, with the hope that they could add them in later.

Mounts were a table stakes feature for fantasy games at the time. DAI had to have mounts to check that box, but chose to deprioritize them so they didn't take over the game. (Darrah has another video on why mounts are harder than you think.)

Darrah describes DAI's structure as "multi-region open world" and thinks it's a good model if you want your story to take place over a large geographical area.

At the PAX 2013 demo (which Darrah has also made a detailed video about), they still hadn't really nailed down how the player would control the Inquisition's power across territory. They didn't ultimately want it to be a heavily tactical game to the detriment of the RPG elements. Eventually they found a balance in the War Table, though Darrah feels it's a little short of what they wanted. He thinks it would have been great to go further letter the player play with Skyhold as a fortress, and as central to a quest.

Scout Harding was a late addition to the game, designed to introduce the areas, give some life to each new area, and establish the Inquisition's presence there.

Darrah calls the Hinterlands "basically a trap," because it has so much relatively mundane content and doesn't adequately urge the player to go advance the plot. After launch, they immediately realized the problem and began adding in some content to give some sense of urgency to advancing the plot.

As they were populating the regions with content, they actually played Skyrim to see what made the open world work even in large, isolated spaces. Darrrah notes that you're never far from some sign of life in Skyrim—a note, some kind vignette that tells a story, etc. He calls these "designer hugs," and says that it's a lesson they learned pretty late in development.

DAI's tactical camera is "a bit of a compromise." Unlike DAO, it doesn't have a freely-moving camera, something that makes level design more complicated as you have to make sure the camera doesn't show anything it's not supposed to. Darrah doesn't expect that we'll see tac-cam in Dreadwolf, but adds, "I guess we'll see."

"Operation: Sledgehammer": In late 2013, after getting their extra time, all the writers plus Darrah and Laidlaw got together to try and scope the story into something they could finish and which made sense. He thinks it's really the characters that make DAI, not the story. He acknowledges that Corypheus's plan isn't really very well established. "Characters are what drive BioWare games, not plot," he says, and the story needs to make enough sense to hang your characters off of it.

Darrah considers the Hissing Wastes a great example of size for the sake of size, and specifically for the purpose of being "bigger than Skyrim." They were also in a "pissing contest" with The Witcher 3 over things like number of possible endings (which the DAI team was counting in terms of the number of possible combinations of end slides). Darrah thinks that sharing your numbers is often a bad idea and potentially misleading. "Size != quality."

A lot of core features weren't put into the game until after they had declared Alpha.

DAI was always intended to be a multi-gen console launch. EA was worried that the uptake rates on the next-gen consoles would be slow, and that a next-gen-only launch would hurt sales. Compromises had to be madeto be sure the game could run on last-gen, losing things like density of NPCs and eliminating even the possibility of mounts for companions. Darrah still thinks the multi-gen launch was a mistake, but it's a difficult decision to reverse late in development.

Darrah maintains that the base game is not incomplete on its own. Corypheus is the villain of the game; the game ends with defeating Corypheus. What is revealed about Solas in Trespasser and even in the post-credits scene is additional. But he thinks that the backlash to Trespasser will have made BioWare gun-shy to ever do another post-game DLC, which he thinks is kind of a shame.

Story DLC is not cheap to make, and has a tendency to fall into "attach rate hell" and be less profitable than the base game, even lower the overall profitability of the title by percentage.

Darrah suspects a lot of his viewers don't even know a multiplayer mode exists in DAI.

The Mass Effect 3 team felt that the MP mode helped them to more easily refine the combat for the whole game, but it also had drawbacks. The multiplayer mode was perceived by players as mandatory because when the game shipped, you couldn't achieve max readiness without playing. This was actually a bug and not intentional, and was later patched, but it generated a negative response.

DAI's multiplayer mode (or DAMP, as it was called) did not help the combat in the same way, because due to the different ways that Dragon Age utilizes party members compared to Mass Effect, the mechanics had to be rebalanced for DAMP where players only controlled one character. The team also overcorrected for the ME3 backlash, and DAMP had very little visibility.

For a brief time, DAMP was free to download and play in hopes that it would be an onboard ramp to new players. EA didn't love that strategy, and it didn't last long.

EA has tried Origin subscriptions and early access as a subscriber perk as a means to generate additional revenue streams. Darrah does not like early access; it allows opinion on a game to solidify before the game is even really selling.

DAI's branding moves away from the red and white color scheme of the first two games. Darrah thinks they lost a certain distinctiveness, but understands the decision.

Collector's Editions of games are becoming less common in an increasingly digital world, with some titles offer "Collector's Editions" that are really just the collection of special merch without the actual game, allowing the game to be acquired separate however the player chooses. Darrah likes the DAI Collector's Edition but thinks it lacked the one big standout item, like a statue, that many such editions have.

Dragon Age: Inquisition received a number of Game of the Year awards in 2014, but that year also turned out to be a tough year for games, with fewer GOTY awards given out overall than other years. A lot of intended launch titles for the next gen consoles had been pushed back to 2014, and then pushed back again. Darrah also wonders how much The Witcher 3 changed based on the reception to DAI.

Darrah is overall really proud of DAI, saying that of the games he's led it's the closest to what they were going for.

Things Mark would change, with a remaster or a time machine:

Make it smaller. Cut the Hissing Wastes, one of the areas in the Dales, and possibly another region, and it wouldn't really affect the quality of the game.

Tune down the Power required to progress the plot.

Don't make the Hinterlands the first open area, or at least create a stronger push to get the player going to other areas, and progressing the story.

Time machine option, where anything is possible: Use Unreal instead of Frostbite. Building on Unreal doesn't necessarily make DAI better, but it might lead to better development for Andromeda and Anthem.

Darrah predicts two more videos in his "Memories and Lessons" series: one encompassing Anthem, Andromeda, and "Joplin" (the codename for the scrapped early concept for DA4), and another video for "Morrison" (the codename used for what is now called Dragon Age: Dreadwolf.

#mark darrah #dragon age #dragon age inquisition #bioware #ea #game dev #mark darrah on games #dai #Youtube

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

What are some of your favorite games of all time?

This is a great question, more questions about video games, less questions where people make up things I never said and demand I defend those positions, XD

Anyway, here's a short list:

Pathfinder: Kingmaker. The best isometric RPG ever made, in my opinion.

Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. The best version of one of the best games ever made.

Mass Effect Trilogy. Yeah the third one shit the bed in a lot of ways, but I still enjoy the series as a whole. Playing a game series where your choices carried over from one game to the next was groundbreaking in the 2000s, and I always enjoyed my time with these games. Especially rereleased in the legendary edition.

Resident Evil 2, Original and Remake. My favorite Resident Evil game of all time. Great game, great story, great characters.

Resident Evil 4, original and remake. Second favorite Resident Evil game. Also, my husband's favorite game ever. I love seeing him get excited over it, XD

Suikoden 2. Great gameplay, great story, best game in the series.

Tales of Zesteria. Mikleo my beloved!

Jaws (NES). Yes, it's bad. Yes, it's short. No, I don't care. This was one of the first games I ever owned, and me and my dad used to play it together when I was very little. I have a lot of fond memories of trying to figure out how to beat the game with him. I still remember how excited we were when we started to figure out the gameplay loop for the very first time.

Mortal Kombat 2. The game that introduced me to the series, and still one of my old favorites. I still play and love MK to this day because of it.

Kingdom Hearts, whole series. I can't really pick one game, because they're all both really, really good and really, really bad, XD. But I love the story and the characters, and I've enjoyed each of them in different ways. But if I had to pick just one, I'd probably pick 2.

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. Still the best Star Wars game ever made. Still one of the best western RPGs ever made. The plot twist is still one of my favorite moments in video game history.

Max Payne 2. Ugh, so good. Great storytelling, fun gameplay. Took everything great about Max Payne 1 and did it better. RIP James McCaffrey.

MegaMan Battle Network, whole series. Probably the best reimagining of a classic IP I've ever seen, from the old days when "reimagined" didn't mean "vandalized". I was several years older than him when the first game came out, but in a lot of ways I grew up with Lan and his friends, and these games will always have a special place in my heart.

Jade Empire. Another great BioWare western RPG. Great setting, good story, unique characters, and really good and unique-for-the-time combat.

Soul Nomad and the World Eaters. I don't even know why I like this game so much, but I do, lol. They should have given the male PC a romance ending with Gig, though >_<

Pokemon Red and Blue. Pure nostalgia entry, but even though there are a lot of boring Gen 1 haters, to be a 10 year old kid when the original US Pokemon craze was at its peak was something special, and the games and the Pokemon will always be cherished in this house. Gen 1 supremacy, noobs!

Batman Arkham Asylum. You have no idea what it was like growing up a Batman fan and a video game fan in the years before Arkham Asylum. Every Batman game was terrible. It was a running joke how no one could do a good Batman game. Hell, half the word of mouth for AA was "did you hear someone's trying to make a good Batman game?" That they got many of the incredible voices from Batman the Animated Series back was even better. RIP Kevin Conroy and Arleen Sorkin. (And fuck Mark Hamill)

Legacy of Kain, whole series. Aside from Metal Gear Solid, this series is the definitive master class on video game storytelling and voice acting. I love the plot, I love the characters, I love everything. I hate how the ball was dropped so hard after Defiance, because that game set up an amazing follow up that just...never happened. It was such a sad fall from grace, because in the early 2000s this was the AAA game series. Everyone loved it. Everyone was desperate for the next game. And then it just kind of fizzled out after a few missteps and developer woes. And it died a quiet death in a proto-live service multiplayer game that no one wanted and even fewer people played. And while the tragedy is appropriate to the Gothic setting, I'm still hoping against hope for a faithful remake of the first games that spurs the original developers to finally finish the series the way it always deserved.

Honorable Mention: Final Fantasy 8. Gonna be honest here, 70% of my love for this game comes from fanfiction, lol. I played the game when I was a kid, and didn't really like it. It was weird and looked bad (I played it long after I'd gotten used to the "modern" graphics of the PS2 generation) and even with a Codebreaker and cheats the final boss was super frustrating. But there's some really great FF8 fanfic out there. Stuff I reread every few years. And it's given me a phantom nostalgia for the game.

[dekarios]

as a sera fan, im curious as to what your thoughts are regarding her lines toward krem? /gen

ok if u really want me to talk dragon age on tumblr dot com publicly where anyone who searches their names will see ur gonna have to give me more than that particularly with a character that tends to bring out some of the worst of the fandom

tell me the exact comments you want me to think on and exactly why you want me to. i'm sure this is some "what are ur thoughts on sera being transphobic" but i want to give u time to like. expand ur ask cuz if thats truly the case such a vaguely worded low info ask isn't something i appreciate for such a topic yknow what i mean

dragon age in general has never been a trans friendly series and krem comes across to me as an appeasement like hey look. we dont actually hate trans people :) look we made one :) stop criticising us now!

it is also worth me mentioning i either don't recruit ironbull or i barely interact with him, and thus, the charges. i don't hate krem, but ironbull makes me deeply uncomfortable for personal reasons so there's a very good chance i have missed some sort of dialogue. so the vague ask in that context is extra confusing cuz i googled it and i couldn't even see people talking about sera and krem together

and i also think sera's writer is a lesbophobic ableist cockhead who genuinely hated sera and wrote her with intent for you not to like her, and i feel that's pretty much the general consensus there with sera fans and is the primary reason we say we want to take her out of dragon age and put her in a better series - its not so much dragon age hate (though it is) it's more pointed as 'get her the hell away from bioware'

if this is about sera going "he's a she" at the ball, i cannot outright say that's transphobic because we have absolutely zero context on who that is said at. it could very well be transphobic. it could very much not be. in the context of dragon age where trans people have only just started to exist with any level of respect in the universe, do i think the writers are suddenly all going to be respectful? absolutely not. like i said i think krem is there to appease not to show real change and improvement. with how sera's writer clearly doesn't like her adding another way to justify fans hating her like how he does yknow, also makes sense to me.

did i personally, as a trans person, think sera was transphobic in that moment? not really?? my genuine first thought was it was probably an assassin or a bard or a servant pretending to be a man to get more respect and not just be leered at and seen as a sex object and to get less attention at the ball because dragon age loves to be misogynistic. i was so out of the mindset that bioware cares for trans people at all, or even thinks about them at all, to even add transphobia - my first thought was this is coded in misogyny and the history of "woman pretends to be man" that media still likes to do. lmao

#fray.txt #ask #Anonymous #ask to tag

[galesautismdiagnosis]

Please please dragon age fans I was one of you once and if DA4 ever actually claws its way out of development hell I will think about buying it

But like let’s not pretend BioWare has anything more than the social awareness of a Gen X white dude who only JUST started thinking of social justice issues

[leam1983]

Starfield - Impressions

Once you rip off the "No Man's Sky does it better" Band-Aid, you're left with something that's competently assembled at the barest possible level, that still packs an appreciable amount of Bethesda jank and that seriously hearkens back to BioWare's Mass Effect series, in reducing outer space to a cumbersome menu system.

Still, they've picked some good elements to steal, starting with NMS' organic focus on discovery. Planetside maps aren't gigantic, but having five or six markers with several hundred meters in-between each of them makes for an appreciable bit of real-estate. Each generated or tailored map feels like it's about the size of one of Skyrim's bespoke biomes, although you'll quickly pick up on the proc-gen aspects of it all. The same bases get repeated, the same clusters of rocks, debris and resource nodes are spaced apart with just enough randomness to break the illusion of a repeating pattern - it basically feels like No Man's Sky pared itself down and put on its best dess.

The plot has a middling start and seems a little too eager to shuttle you off into the vastness of space. Five minutes into your stint as a space miner, and you're off to bigger and better things, with a super cereal express for sure order to head to New Atlantis straightaway.

As is typical of a Bethsoft game, you can disregard this entirely and get yourself over-levelled for your meeting with Constellation's weirdly financially independent luminaries. The setup doesn't make much sense, as if Alan Quartermain could just kick your door down and issue you the Call to Adventure because you happened to find a weird nickel in your dryer's lint trap. It feels like they tried to respond to criticisms involving overly-involved intros and wanted to make sure you'd effectively be boots-on-the-ground within fifteen minutes.

Otherwise, I don't get the uproar about Alanah Pearce's findings in regards to outer space. GameBryo Creation Engine delineates and pens down player spaces by default; it really isn't surprising that space would actually be its own connection of cells linked by a menu system. It also isn't surprising that planets are basically 2D art assets and nothing more. To truly deliver on Starfield's promise, Bethsoft would have to abandon their roots, rethink their entire engine pipeline and pivot to something like UE5. I doubt that's in the cards, honestly.

As for the issue of pronouns... If anyone's biggest concern in life is the absolute fucking certainty that they receive their appropriate particulate in all facets of life, then they're not fit for public spaces to begin with. Tell me to call you Mx. and I'll call you Mx. Tell me to call you Galactic Space Waffle and I'll do exactly that. It's basic fucking respect. Getting to choose pronouns and body types really isn't an issue for me.

As for everything else, there's already a shit-ton of mods on offer.

#not a review #starfield #impressions

[kipaia]

Hey tell me about your Insane Mass Effect Timeline!

Oh my god. Mary.

I know you are FULLY aware of how FUCKING INCONSISTENT AND ANNOYING the official Mass Effect timeline is. I had a night last spring where I was trying to plot out my fanfic from start to finish and was getting super irritated about it so I went through, year by year, from 2115 to 2188 and wrote up my own timeline down to the exact dates of everything I needed to know for something like 14 characters entire lives, of which I think 10 or 11 are all complete ocs; I needed to know exactly where they all were and what was happening around them all at any given time, so I went through year by year wove them into the given Bioware timeline and put everything into a legible order.

This fucking document. The timeline alone (because I did end up sticking a couple of one shots on the end because I was too lazy to switch at the time),

Is thirteen pages long.

I have a thirteen page long timeline where I could put everything in a more sensible order, stretch out some of more ludicrously condensed major historical events of the official timeline and wrote up an actually sensible working order for the first two games because frankly, the way Bioware wrote it there is no possible way Shepard could have been spotted on Omega in Mass Effect 2 in mid-February of 2185 after having been dead two years and ten+ days and still have had enough time for the events of Mass Effect to occur in 2183.

If rumors of Shepard being alive came from Omega on Feb. 15th, they'd been dead for at least two years and ten days (plus a couple of days to account for Freedom's Progress and travel), and the attack on the Normandy happened a month after the Battle of the Citadel, the official timeline puts the entirety of Eden Prime war in the span of, maximum, the first week of January 2183, which can't have been the case if they also listen 2183 as the year the Normandy was constructed.

So yeah I got mad at that and how young a bunch of the 'older' characters canon ages are listed as (Anderson is in his early 40's according to the official timeline which I do not agree with, Hackett I think is something like 53 in official timeline, I don't remember off the top of my head) when humans canonically have 150+ year lifespans now. Neither of them would even be middle aged in that case, ffs, yet we're supposed to believe they're grizzled older gen soldiers on the verge of retirement? Yeah, no. First Contact War experience notwithstanding, I aged almost everyone from the older generations up, as well as my Athena Shepard by a few years because she has a teenage kid in the first game and I needed to sort all of that out.

I love my insane thirteen-page timeline and I reference that thing like it's the fucking bible whenever I'm writing anything for my mass effect fics.

Yeah so that's my rant about the Mass Effect timeline and how my thirteen-page monstrosity came to be and I love it so much

#mass effect #mass effect fanfic #the discovery of the actual mass effect to the 'present day' is only like 40 years #and somehow humanity has the second largest fleet in that amount of time? out of the entire fucking galaxy? #like i'm not saying they can't have built the ships or that they wouldn't be powerful #but i'm not going to believe they built a fleet to rival the turians in such a short amount of time #plus the entirety of the Systems Alliance has only existed for some 34 years this shit is brand new #my timeline includes the creation of the combined militaries of the first 18 countries into the Alliance Military #and yeah og timeline has Anderson as the first N7 in the first contact war when he was 20 like damn dude #also i just checked and yeah hackett is supposed to be like 49 at the start of the games #absolutely not #i love these games but that timeline is my bitch now

[caithyra]

Random Game Ramble

Well, it's been a while, hasn't it? Getting back into the swing of things here's a few game fandom thoughts I've had for the past few weeks:

Starfield ended up being a disappointment for many due to various issues, and hilariously enough, I was in the middle of a completionist playthrough of Mass Effect: Andromeda when reviews began coming out, and all I could think was that several of the complaints about Starfield mirrored the design and features of MEA (chiefly, loading screens to get off and on planets, stilted NPC animations during interactions, et cetera). MEA also seems to have done better than Starfield in some ways (planetside vehicle for exploration, more handcrafted locations and so on).

Baldur's Gate 3 feels like next-gen Dragon Age: Origins and I love it for that, but it also makes me wonder what is going on with Dreadwolf (and to a lesser extent, the next Mass Effect). I hope it will be at least as good, but development seems to be... slow on both Bioware franchises given the early announcement trailers... (seriously, the one thing EA and Maxis does right with Sims 4 is that there is a short time between announcement trailers and full trailers and releases).

The next The Sims 4 expansion is rumored to be about becoming a landlord (well, it is a young adult wish-fulfillment sim at this point) and rent and whatnot, and I wonder just how different it will be from the earlier roommates system (similarly to how the ranch hand is a reskinned butler)... I hope we will be able to build our own apartments and duplexes with it (perhaps divide existing lots into smaller lots for more moved in households?), but TS4 EPs have been so underwhelming as of late even relatively speaking for TS4 that I'm not holding my breath.

#games #starfield #mass effect #baldur's gate 3 #dragon age #the sims 4 #ts4 #mass effect andromeda #mea #dragon age origins #dao #bg3

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

Haven't been playing BG3 because I don't feel like making myself sick from the lag, so instead I have just been thinking about BG3 and about making characters and how I would adapt all of my Bioware protags (I was about to say "Bioware girls" and then remembered Avrian) into dnd and what class they would be...

My problem is that I like making Buff Mage Women in DA and there's no super great way to do that in dnd in a way that's true to their characters because like. Paladin. Okay. Neither Ra nor Genevieve has convictions strong enough to give her superpowers. Their priorities are "survive" and "protect the 12 people I care about", and those make kinda shitty oaths, tbh.

Or Warlock. Okay. Again, neither Ra nor Genevieve are the type willing to submit themselves to some shady higher power in order to get powers. These girls got control and authority issues. Absolutely would not be doing that warlock shit.

Which is unfortunately, because mechanically at least I think Gen as a Divine Soul Sorcerer with a level of Hexblade Warlock would work, other than the fact that the Sorcerer's d6 hit die leaves Gen a little less tanky than she usually is. (Divine Soul is because she's a Spirit Healer, and Sorcs don't usually do much healing, but Divine Soul gives access to the cleric list. Also, it's funny, because Gen's opinion on religion/gods is "no thanks flips you off" so for her to be in a setting, where the gods are objectively and clearly real because they give people powers sometimes, and her powers are objectively and clearly of a celestial/angelic/godly source would be really really funny. She'd be so mad about it.)

Meanwhile, Catalina would be a drow because she's a Grey Warden who hates the Deep Roads, canonically, so a drow who hates the Underdark is equally funny to me. And just like in DA I think she would be the world's worst rogue (charges headfirst onto the front line and doesn't know what a "flanking" or a "backstab" is).

#anyway i am thinking about the girls again and i miss them. gen and catalina especially #thinking a bunch about them for no goddamn reason. i mean the reason is i'm trying to build them in dnd. but. anyway.

[cobaltswriting]

So, I've beaten Mass Effect 2. Did all the side quests, except one to do with a forged I.D., and apparently a lot of people have issues with getting the NPC who you need for the quest to actually show up, I gave that one up as a bad job. I saved all the crew, though!

So, onto Mass Effect 3. And oh boy, I found something to annoy me already.

So, I think I might have talked about Ashley Williams before. For those who don't know, she's a badass soldier, albeit held back by racism. The 'I'm not racist but-' sort of racism.

But that's not what this is about.

To show you the problem... here's Ashley in Mass Effect 1.

Here's Ashley in Mass Effect 2...

So far so good, right? She's fairly attractive, but you can still tell she's a soldier and doesn't care for make-up or stuff like that, right?

....Then we get to Mass Effect 3 and...

...I dunno. Maybe I'm over-reacting? And I'm not even THAT fond of the character, the whole 'I'm not racist but-' thing turns me away from her but

what did they do to you, Ashley?

It's not even a case of it like

being a next-gen console, the entire trilogy was on the Xbox 360.

They just decided to make Ashley like THAT for it.

And there isn't a HUGE timeskip between the second and third game, like there is with the first and second game. Like, the gap between the first and second game is 2 years.

The gap between the second and third game is 6 months.

I haven't had much time to actually interact with her, she gets taken out of action pretty quickly and ends up in a hospital, but

From what I remember, her personality has also been... shifted a fair bit. Way more 'girly' than she used to be and I'm just like...

Is it just me? Did I have her pegged wrong? Or did Bioware really just drop the ball on this one?

....The rest of the game though, absolutely great. The gameplay is *chef kiss*.

But just...

I don't like Ashley Williams anyway but I feel like they killed her character for the sake of just having more sex appeal and I don't like it.

#Mass Effect #Mass Effect 3