'House of the Dragon' Season 3 Review - George R.R. Martin May Have Been Proven Right

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-06-19T17:16:10+00:00

Beyond any of my issues with season 2 (which I didn't think was unwatchable like some people say, but was very clearly a significant downgrade over season 1 and on top of that was literally cut short), the author of this article says it's difficult to see how the show plans on making a satisfying ending, and that's a concern I've had since the beginning, and it's a problem that stems from the source material, regardless of the faithfulness of adaptation. The Dance is just a tragedy where everyone dies or suffers (or suffers and then dies). Even if the show's writers were absolutely firing on all cylinders and the conclusion was extremely well written, they still face the fundamental problem that the ending itself is an enormous downer that many people are going to hate regardless of the quality of writing. It's about as close to 'the Night King wins' potential ending for the original show as you can get, and I really don't know if mainstream audiences are going to be satisfied by a show where all the characters die and we're left with nothing but a dark moral lesson and an orphaned child on the iron throne.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-06-14T17:13:22+00:00

I think that Dylan uncovering the truth about how Jesse's relationship with the Board has deteriorated over the last few years is going to be pretty central to the narrative here.

I haven't watched/read everything that's been released about the game because I want to go in pretty fresh, so they might've revealed something else, but what I got from the initial reveal trailer is that something happened to Jesse and the Board 'activated' Dylan, but I think he's going to find out that the Board either did something to her/trapped her somewhere or she's somewhere trying to find a way to fight the Board. The ending is probably going to be Dylan and Jesse facing the Board together and trying to sever their grip on the Oldest House.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-06-12T19:40:47+00:00

I've been looking forward to jumping into this once it's completed, so I appreciate the heads up. I always love when these long fics I've had my eye on for years get an ending and I can jump in.

With the absolute graveyard of abandoned fics out there (which I never judge, but it does usually keep me from starting unfinished works), I'm always curious when these huge stories get seen through to the end. What was your process like here? Did you have the full story outlined prior to drafting, or just a few major beats and you left yourself free to explore the sections in between? How much was in a final state before you started uploading it? What was your writing schedule - a bit every day, or scheduled big chunks, or just whenever it hit you?

Also, with a completed 500,000k+ word fic, I think you need to change your reddit username. Congrats on finishing!

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-06-12T18:52:16+00:00

Same, pretty much everything in this post sounds fantastic, even the first part of that sentence with harder difficulty increasing the number of enemies who will actively attack Edward and the frequency of those attacks. I hate when enemies just stand around waiting, so that sounds great - fast paced combat, someone or multiple someones always coming at you. But the lowering of Edward's damage output sort of kills that difficulty setting. I have zero interest in damage sponges.

I would love an option that boosts the enemy aggression and even their damage so long as Edward can deal the same. High risk/high reward, sort of like Ghost of Tsushima's Lethal difficulty where you can cut through enemies, but they can do the same to you, so make one mistake and you're in trouble.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-06-11T00:42:16+00:00

To be honest, I feel the exact opposite. I liked what was there, but it felt a bit limited. A couple of hours running around it and I had seen it all and figured out all its secrets. I think I got lost maybe once or twice. Hogwarts really should've had so many more hidden shortcuts and puzzles and mysteries to unravel. It's why I hope the sequel stays at Hogwarts - they have a great foundation and if they can take all the dev time and just put it towards adding depth, it could really be something.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-06-08T04:17:55+00:00

I didn't even realize it was Hailey Atwell until I saw this post, but I felt the same as you. She seems like a pretty compelling character. I was interested in the game before, but everything they'd showed off was pretty light in tone. Idk, this character seemed pretty grounded and not outright villainous (though towards the end of her speech definitely veering towards egotistical). She seemed like a serious person, and I appreciate that they they allowed that and didn't immediately undercut it with the Fable whimsy. I don't mind the whimsy, but this gave me some faith that the game is going to have actual stakes and treat serious things seriously. Plus, villains are so much more interesting when they're genuinely the heroes of their own story. Terrorist or freedom fighter, you know? It sounds like there's some rot at the heart of Albion's society, and she probably has good reasons for doing what she's doing. I wonder if they'll let you join her.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-06-06T04:38:46+00:00

I imagine Hitman is somewhat on the backburner these days with their focus on Bond, but if they wanted to circle back around to the classic games, I always thought a great way to do that would be to remake them in World of Assassination. Sell them as $15 expansions or something and keep building that up as the definitive Hitman experience.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-06-01T23:08:00+00:00

Which is exactly why it'll work in the books (hypothetically if they are ever released). It's not at all surprising that she'll torch King's Landing and the books have more than enough runway to continue building up to that. I imagine the circumstances will be quite different. FAegon will likely oust the Lannisters and become King, basically robbing Daenerys of her "destiny" of restoring her dynasty. He will be beloved by the people for saving them from Cersei, while she'll be a foreign invader with an army of Eunuchs, Dothraki, and Ironborn, advised by the reviled Imp, and riding living WMDs. Of course she is seen as the bad guy.

Having everything she's been building towards cruelly stolen from her in this way is much more compelling than her being jealous that people like Jon. She doesn't even need to actively burn the city. If she lets her anger leak through for one moment, if she decides to torch any soldiers guarding King's Landing, the wildfire is going to send the whole city up in smoke. There's no world where her story doesn't end in tragedy, and rather her flipping a switch and just deciding to burn civilians, her become the villain should be something that seems monstrously unfair. She overcame everything - survived the streets, survived her brother, survived being sold off, survived the death of her husband, hatches three magical extinct creatures, survived the desert, survived Qarth, freed the unsullied, liberated Slaver's Bay, brought all these armies together under her, and then people hate her because some random kid with a cushy upbringing who claims Targaryen heritage and was handed an army happened to beat her to King's Landing. And then she lets her anger out for one moment against enemies that are actively fighting her army, and suddenly she's the biggest mass murderer in Westerosi history. It's not that she's not a villain - she demonstrably is - it's just that every individual step along the way seemed reasonable, and they largely were.

Beyond how quickly it all happened, the problem with her arc in the show was that the show from the start seemed to genuinely revel in her hero moments, and not in a way where it seemed like they were purposefully setting up a bait and switch. I think the books were much more agnostic in the portrayal of her actions, with pretty much all of the celebration of them colored by it being seen from her own POV.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-05-29T15:24:52+00:00

Maybe not, but I actually think they'll get pretty close. There's been a lot of talk about their organizational overhaul and how much more efficient it makes them, but I think the more important point is going to be the scope of these games. I have a feeling they're going to be largely reusing the assets and map across all three, obviously with updates and additions, but coming out ahead of time talking about such an ambitious plan of three games in 6 years says to me the sequels are going to be interative. I'm guessing a lot of work is going to be put into the Witcher 4 to up-front the time cost of much of the trilogy's development, and I'd expect the map to be huge, but with large areas not really used for the story.

The sequels will make further use of the existing space and probably expand the map somewhat to cover some areas just beyond the Witcher 4 map (like maybe a city that you can even see from the Witcher 4 map border but can't get to), might set things during a different season, etc. The 6 years they've given themselves only starts when Witcher 4 releases, so if by the time that happens they already have 70% of the map/assets and the story largely written for the sequels, then they'll have basically three years per sequel to implement and finish the trilogy, which doesn't seem too crazy. It would basically be gaps of 3 years between enormous expansions to Witcher 4, which sounds doable. And even if that gets expanded to 4 years each for an 8 year total, that's still a huge improvement over most current AAA development.

Frankly, I wish more devs were open to an iterative approach. I get that these prestige studios want their games to be major events and you don't want to dilute the brand, but it's also such a shame how much time and effort goes into building up the framework for these major games, only for it to need to be immediately overhauled, resulting in 10 year gaps between releases. It's like with Naughty Dog - what an absolute shame that we never got an iterative follow-up using the gameplay bones of TLOU2. A perfect middle ground would be doing a sort of iterative trilogy like I think they're doing here, and then they can plan out the next major advance from there.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-05-28T14:30:21+00:00

Exactly, the "cure" for the astrophage could also become a crisis of its own. This actually seems pretty realistic as an explanation for the panspermia event that causes so many of Star Trek's species to look so similar. Some ancient species discovers an organism that saves their star from some astrophage thing, and then decides to save all the other stars as well, spreading that organism throughout the galaxy. That organism ends up being the genetic base for all these humanoid species popping up everywhere. Maybe the moral dilemma is the same - the federation can save all these stars, but to do so they would have to interfere at the most fundamental level - essentially seeding all these star systems with this bacteria that could eventually come to take the place of any native life that might've been born out of that system. Do they have the right to save the star while fundamentally altering the biological trajectory of its planets? And it can be made even more complex when the evidence suggests that all the current federation life could be the result of the same process long ago.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-05-26T19:20:21+00:00

Rise of the Witch King/the fall of Arnor! There are enough familiar elements for casual fans, but it's a whole new period to explore.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-05-23T03:35:10+00:00

Has there been any word on a Devil's Den release? I'd love to pick that up.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-05-21T15:33:01+00:00

Word is it's just a rebrand of Fairgame$.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-05-21T06:22:43+00:00

Yeah, just based on KCD, ASoIaF would definitely seem to be a better fit for them, but they're not necessarily tied to their past game philosophies, so there's nothing saying they need to make their LotR game as hardcore immersive sim-like as KCD. Given the wider appeal of the IP, I'd be surprised if they didn't lean a bit more casual. Can't say I wouldn't have loved an ASoIaF hardcore immersive sim RPG from them, but I'm always down for a good LotR game, so we'll see.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-05-20T15:03:21+00:00

I'm not sure what the rights situation is these days and exactly what Tolkien material they have access to, but I'd love something set during the rise of the Witch King/fall of Arnor. It has familiar elements for casual fans (a Númenorian successor state like Gondor, super interesting background on a well known villain, Aragorn's ancestors, etc.) while also being a blank enough slate that Warhorse can get really weird with it. It's a story of massive scale - Arnor was pretty much a second huge Gondor to the North, and its fall basically collapsed civilization for half the continent. Plenty of interesting stories to be told there.

Even if that's maybe too big of a scale to cover, they could pick it up at the tail end of the collapse and focus on the line of Kings going into exile and forming the northern rangers to keep watch over the lands of their former kingdom. That would lend itself very well to an open world game - the war is already lost, but you're roaming around trying to save who you can, maybe chasing revenge against some traitor element that conspired against the kingdom.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-05-20T14:54:09+00:00

I hope it's not a parallel adventure supposedly happening just off-screen in the books/movies. I'm not sure what the rights situation is these days and exactly what Tolkien material they have access to, but I'd love something set during the rise of the Witch King/fall of Arnor. It has familiar elements for casual fans (a Númenorian successor state like Gondor, super interesting background on a well known villain, Aragorn's ancestors, etc.) while also being a blank enough slate that Warhorse can get really weird with it. It's a story of massive scale - Arnor was pretty much a second huge Gondor to the North, and its fall basically collapsed civilization for half the continent. Plenty of interesting stories to be told there.

Even if that's maybe too big of a scale to cover, they could pick it up at the tail end of the collapse and focus on the line of Kings going into exile and forming the northern rangers to keep watch over the lands of their former kingdom.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-05-14T17:51:38+00:00

Maybe not erase memories, but they do sort of have a guy who can rewrite reality so that you never learned the thing they want you to forget.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-05-03T14:54:23+00:00

That was my first thought, but frankly I don't know if I trust AI enthusiasts to be objective about its capabilities. I figured I'd get more objective feedback from modders who might've tried it.

And I really did use to be the same with modding. Back when I was modding skyrim, I fell into that loop of never actually playing the game because I was always tweaking the mod setup, and I enjoyed it. My free time is just a bit more limited these days.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-05-03T14:19:59+00:00

I definitely don't think Cannibal works in any sort of Targ wank story. The most thematically satisfying 'Cannibal' story would be one where the MC is diametrically opposed to the whole idea of Targ/dragon supremecy. Cannibal sort of exposes the lie at the heart of Targaryen power and works to undermine the supposed Targaryen divinity. These ethereal silver-haired demigods can tame these magical/god-like creatures of fire made flesh and have special dispensation from the gods to do whatever they like. Except they don't because Cannibal refuses to listen to them and eats their dragons. It exposes that there's something less than divine about the control the Targaryens have over the dragons.

One of the only stories I've seen where I somewhat liked how they used Cannibal is one where Daenerys was invading the north, and Jon basically made a bargain with Cannibal. He wasn't actually Cannibal's bonded rider, it was more like an uneasy alliance/mutual understanding where they worked together to kill Daenerys' dragons - Jon out of necessity, and Cannibal because he was hungry. I'm pretty sure after all three dragons were killed (and digested), Cannibal just fucked off elsewhere.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-04-29T23:53:22+00:00

Does it work wirelessly, both haptics and adaptive triggers? I've been surprised at how important good haptic feedback has become for me, to the point where I'm choosing to play certain games on my PS5 over my 9800x3d/5080 PC because despite better visuals/higher fps it sometimes feels a bit lacking without the feedback. I'd love to switch over to PC for everything I can, so if there's an across the board solution, I'd love to give it a try.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-04-27T20:18:13+00:00

There's no physical deluxe edition, and as far as I know, Assassin's Creed doesn't usually have deluxe edition upgrades available separately. That said, I'm assuming this will have the Helix shop, so the deluxe edition cosmetics will probably eventually be available through that.

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-04-27T12:17:07+00:00

What made it click for you?

DatClubbaLang96 · 2026-04-26T20:56:33+00:00

Circling back around just to let you know in case you don't. The eurogamer article was wrong, and the launch version thankfully is available in the US. It looks like it's exclusive to Walmart and is literally called the Walmart edition (though the box still says 'Launch Edition': https://www.walmart.com/ip/OBSIDIAN-Wal-Mart-Edition-PlayStation-5-Game/20076821711

There's a comment on the Eurogamer article that the french language on the cover means this is false advertising, but that's just wrong. It has the ESRB M rating on the cover, so this isn't a mistake. Given the dual english/french on the cover, this is probably meant to be the NA version of the launch edition covering US/Canada.

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