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Post by GravityEmblem on Feb 13, 2021 11:48:18 GMT -8
Well, Dragon Age has become a point of contention between my parents and I (maturity and such), so I won't be able to play for the time being. But with luck and communication skills, I should probably earn back privileges in time to finish Inquisition before 4.
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Post by Daos on Feb 13, 2021 12:21:52 GMT -8
Yes, the Red Lyrium reveal knocked me for a loop. I remember I had to put down the controller and walk around the living room a bit, just to digest all of that. Realizing that the music Bartram heard from the idol was the song of the old gods. Blew my mind! Also, as you said, that it means lyrium is biological in some way. (That is explored more in The Descent DLC.)
You probably have plenty of time before DA4. They haven't even given a release date yet or introduced any of the companions. I'd be surprised if it comes out at all this year; 2022 at the earliest, would be my guess.
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Post by GravityEmblem on Feb 15, 2021 10:00:51 GMT -8
So, since I'm not playing Inquisition any more, this still leaves this thread as a place for me to talk about interesting Dragon Age things. Like, for example, the fact that Nightmare apparently tells Solas "Dirth ma, harellan. Ma banal enasalin. Mar solas ena mar din." Off the top of my head, this translates to "I know you, liar. You never [suffer?] Your pride will be your death." Which of course brings up the question of how the heck a gigantic fear demon knows Solas, and what he's lying about.
EDIT: Apparently, enasalin actually means victory, so he actually said "You'll never win/succeed." Which of course brings up the question of what he's trying to do that Nightmare thinks he'll never achieve.
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Post by Daos on Feb 15, 2021 13:32:45 GMT -8
"Off the top of your head?"  The only Dalish word I know off the top of my head is 'solas' which means 'pride.' |
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Post by GravityEmblem on Feb 15, 2021 14:08:36 GMT -8
"Off the top of your head?" The only Dalish word I know off the top of my head is 'solas' which means 'pride.' I've been...learning. For, you know. Writing. .....fanfiction.... When you constantly have the Dragon Age Wiki page "Elven Language" up, and have written several conversations entirely in Elvish, you start to get a sense for the language. |
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Post by Daos on Feb 25, 2021 16:38:26 GMT -8
Thank the Maker; Dragon Age 4 will be single-player. I have no idea what DA4 will be like, but my biggest fear was that it would be a 'live service' game instead of a proper single-player RPG. Hearing that will not be the case now, I feel much more optimistic about what the game will be like when it eventually comes out. |
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Post by GravityEmblem on Feb 26, 2021 6:08:14 GMT -8
Thank the Maker; Dragon Age 4 will be single-player. I have no idea what DA4 will be like, but my biggest fear was that it would be a 'live service' game instead of a proper single-player RPG. Hearing that will not be the case now, I feel much more optimistic about what the game will be like when it eventually comes out. Oh, thank goodness. The fact that it was even a considered idea is scary. ...to be frank, I don't know exactly what a live service game is. But Google lists Cyberpunk and Fortnite as examples, so....yeah, definitely dodged a bullet. |
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Post by Daos on Feb 26, 2021 14:02:27 GMT -8
Normally, you buy a game and it's yours. You can play it whenever you want, even years or decades down the line. Eventually you finish the game; even if you decide to do 100% completion and do every objective, quest and sidequest and collect every collectable, you eventually run out of stuff to do, so you either put it away or start a new game.
Live Service games are the opposite. You pay for it, but it's not yours (you may also pay a monthly fee). It's always online, so if the servers are ever shut down, you can't play it anymore. More content is always added later on, so the game never finishes. Basically, ever MMOG is a live service game, for instance. Fortnight, Destiny, Fallout 76 and Anthem are all examples, too.
Triple A game studios love the 'games as a service' model because it allows them to make far, far more money that way. They usually have things like season passes, micro-transactions, and lootboxes, as well. However, they are also unsustainable. Especially when ever AAA company keeps making them. People's time is limited; there is only so much time in a day you can devote to these eternal games. So usually they thrive for awhile, then subscriptions wane, and eventually the game is cancelled and nobody can ever play it again after that.
These same studios, especially EA, have also pushed hard on the narrative that single player games are 'dead' and nobody wants them anymore. Gamers, they say, only want games as a service now. But the market keeps proving them wrong, again and again. I'm not surprised that it took this long for EA to listen...I'm surprised they ever listened at all.
This is why you've probably heard me on more than one occasion mention off-hand that Dragon Age 4 is probably going to be the last one. Because this is, traditionally, what EA does. They buy up a small and growing company, force them to make games that go against whatever they were popular for in the first place, ruin the big IP franchises, break up and swallow what's left of the company, then move on. And that is exactly what was happening to Bioware. Bioware was known for making single-player RPGs with a big focus on story and character. EA bought them and started making them do the opposite. The creation of Anthem was, in my mind, the death-knell for Bioware. It was a multi-player, live service game with no character romance (another big thing Bioware was known for) that was basically a big Destiny-clone. And not to crap on Anthem or anyone who likes it; but Bioware should not have been the company to work on that game. That's not their wheelhouse. That's not what they are good at.
So my prediction was that Dragon Age 4 would be a messy, buggy live service multi-player game with season passes and micro-transactions. Maybe it would be good despite those things. But odds are, it would turn off a lot of people. The critics would pan it, the audience would hate it, and that would be the end of Dragon Age and probably Bioware, as well. EA would break up the company, absorb it, and move on. Especially after the failures of Andromeda and Anthem.
The fact that EA is changing course on this comes to a big surprise to me. And keep in mind, this doesn't mean DA4 will be good automatically. But it does give me a bit of hope that it will be good, and perhaps won't be the last one, either.
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Post by GravityEmblem on Mar 17, 2021 12:25:19 GMT -8
Is anyone on here interested in reading some of the Elvish conversations I've written? I've made several, because I am, apparently, a linguist at heart. Or a man with too much time on his hands.
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Post by Daos on Mar 17, 2021 12:43:44 GMT -8
Sure, but conversations between who?
Also, isn't Elvish an incomplete language? Mostly forgotten. I don't think even the Dalish hold full conversations in it.
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Post by GravityEmblem on Mar 17, 2021 13:52:42 GMT -8
Sure, but conversations between who? Also, isn't Elvish an incomplete language? Mostly forgotten. I don't think even the Dalish hold full conversations in it. Solas, Merrill, and Kevlan, mostly, with a little bit of Iris thrown in (she's learning). All written for a fanfiction of mine, because I obviously can't play a story-heavy game for two seconds without writing something about it. And as for the incomplete language thing...I didn't know that.  But only about 15% of the words are made up. 30% is reverse-engineered from existing Elvish, and the remaining 55% is lifted straight from the game. Take this little bit where Kevlan tells Merrill Iris is a Blood Mage, he learns she is, too, words fly: “Ar enefenim Ar nadas dirth ma. Hawke dara valla’evan.” Merrill nodded. “Si, Ar dirtha. Ir sa jan.” Kevlan looked shocked. “Ma? Ma...hal ema elgar’harel?” Merrill nodded fiercely. “Si, Ir banal abelas on.” Kevlan sputtered. “O… o vana valla’eva, ma endaka ma. Ma endaka Vir.” Merrill shook her head. “Tel’enfenim ma eva. Ar vana e nar gro, tel har.” “Valla’eva NA har!” “Tel. Ma rel,” she said, staring sternly at him. The first big bump is the word for Blood Magic. But we do know that vallaslin is Blood writing, so that would make valla blood. Mage/magic is a bit more tenuous, but evanuris is translated as "mage leader," so I went with eva for magic, and evan for mage. Next, I used the Spanish/Italian/French si for yes, because Elvish as it is doesn't have a word for yes??? I could have gone for teltel, "not no," but that would be ridiculous. Sa being "one," I invented the word jan for "in addition," so in context, the phrase is "I'm one, too." Hal, used here to describe dealing with someone (in this case an elgar'harel, "spirit of lies," or demon), based on halani, help. On is used for the phrase "for it." O is the other preposition in the Elvish language. The way I write it, every conjunction is either a or o. Specifically, a is used for more connecting conjuctions (like a, the, and) and o used for comparative ones (like but and or). In this case, it means "by." Vana is another made-up word, for "use," which doesn't have an existing word for it. Daka I invented to mean "danger," which breaks the typical trend of avoidance of hard consonants, but I figured that might be waived to further undercut the meaning. Finally, I invented gro for "good" and other such positive things, and took har, from harel (Lie) to mean "evil," as well as taking the other part of the word, rel, to mean "wrong." So a lie is an "evil wrong." The remaining words are all official Elvish. |
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Post by Daos on Mar 17, 2021 16:42:59 GMT -8
I know David Gaider once said that elvhen is just a cipher of English. I have no idea what that cipher is, though, and don't know enough about linguistics to even take a crack at breaking it. But if you could figure it out, then you'd basically have access to the entire language.
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Post by GravityEmblem on Mar 17, 2021 17:14:37 GMT -8
I know David Gaider once said that elvhen is just a cipher of English. I have no idea what that cipher is, though, and don't know enough about linguistics to even take a crack at breaking it. But if you could figure it out, then you'd basically have access to the entire language. I don’t know what type of cypher gives you a different number of letters than you put in. The only word I know that shares a letter count with its English definition is Solas. (Arguably Ir, which is “I’m”) |
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Post by Daos on Mar 17, 2021 18:33:51 GMT -8
Not sure. But a couple of possibilities:
The first is some letters might translate to more than one letter. For instance, perhaps 'e' becomes 'lyr' or something like that. Thus, you could type in a simple word and come out with a more complex one with more letters.
Another possibility is they don't type in words exactly each time. For instance, instead of typing in 'sleep' and getting a direct five-letter translation from the cipher, they instead type in 'walk the fade' or something, and thus the word for sleep is much longer in Elven. That sort of thing.
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Post by GravityEmblem on Mar 18, 2021 6:36:10 GMT -8
Both of those, in my mind, would end up with quite long words for quite short ones (in English), but most of the ones I'm thinking of are only a letter or two off. (By the way, sleep is "ashir," and rest is "hamin." There's no official name for the Fade, though they might call it "neran," place of dreams. And the official Dalish term for it is the Beyond, so that could be Elvish that creeped its way into English, as real-life languages are known to do. Also no term for walk, but "shiral" is journey, so that phrase would be "shiral'aneran," or "shiral a Beyond.")
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But only about 15% of the words are made up. 30% is reverse-engineered from existing Elvish, and the remaining 55% is lifted straight from the game. Take this little bit where Kevlan tells Merrill Iris is a Blood Mage, he learns she is, too, words fly: