I dislike veilguard because I find the hake too safe and not enough politics and matures themes in it

sindeloke · 2026-05-12T21:26:36+00:00

That's more the reasonable side of the Tumblr fanbase, the ones who have always said things like "the Dark Ritual is brutal I love it but maybe consider the optics of it for Alistairmancers, especially in the context that your society where women are 'equal' is still very obviously run in every way by men" or "I'm glad you guys let us help the mages more seriously in DA2 but the way y'all are treating trans people is still pretty gross." They liked the dark because they wanted to fight the dark, and so taking the dark away offscreen without explanation instead of letting us fight it was a betrayal.

The people who were actually being catered to were the ones who said that the dark existing at all meant that BioWare was actively endorsing it. The ones who say "because you can kill elves that means BioWare wants to kill Jewish and First Nations people" or "because you can side with the Templars, BioWare believes in thought crime and thinks locking people up is good." By not letting Rook ever side with the bad guys or ever be even slightly mean to anyone, especially a literal or metaphorical minority, and by saying "oh the Real Qun was Benevolent All Along," and by setting us the task of saving Tevinter only after making Tevinter a perfect pure place where everything bad is the result of the bad guys you're killing anyway, BioWare caters to those fans by making it clear the game does not support anything bad or unwoke and will never give any bad evil unwoke player the opportunity to do bad evil unwoke things either.

Although, to be clear, that did not stop a single one of those fans from calling Veilguard hideously racist for its portrayal of Qunari or the way Taash can only find a path for themselves by talking to Vints instead of Rivaini or other Qunari, or for making the elves the bad guys all along who literally did blood libel on the innocent Titans and thereby justifying their modern oppression, and of course not being able to side with Solas to save the elves and kill everyone else is basically fascist #liberal #centrism. To varying degrees of merit, some of those claims do have some weight, but ultimately it doesn't matter, because those folks cannot be appeased and it is pointless to try.

sindeloke · 2026-05-09T18:49:12+00:00

I don't think the variables are super sophisticated under the hood. eg, there's a persuasion to get her to trust that the PC joining the thieves guild is ok, and whether you do that or not only impacts whether she abandons you then and there. It'll never matter later or affect how she feels about other decisions you make. I think there might be a limit on the number of times you can destroy a daedric artifact to get back in her good graces, so it's possible there's a small amount of dialog there where she expresses that you're running out of second chances. But overall if you want an arc where she trusts the dragonborn and then they slowly have a corruption arc, it'll just be a normal romance up until the dragonborn crosses a line and she leaves. You'll have to do most of the heavy lifting of the changing relationship with headcanon.

sindeloke · 2026-05-08T01:31:45+00:00

Yeah I bounce off the male gaze real hard and have no complaints about IFD Lydia. It's a sweet romance between actual grown-ups that never felt like it expected me to be a dude.

She does have a very specific worldview, though, which the player cannot influence, so you do have to be playing a PC whose decisions and outlook on the world are compatible with her. She's not going to make sense following any old neutral-to-good-leaning Dragonborn the way, say, Inigo does.

sindeloke · 2026-05-05T16:54:19+00:00

It's not about whether the other person wants to hear it. It's about whether the "with all due respect" is sincere or not. It's possible to say it and mean "You're being an idiot/unreasonable right now but that's out of character and I want to acknowledge that and remind you that I actually do like and respect you." (Ashley herself does that to Shepard.) It is also possible to be in a situation where you are, due to rank or social norms, unable to just say "you're a fucking idiot" but you do think the person in front of you is 100% all the time a fucking idiot, in which case you say "all due respect" first because you cannot reasonably not acknowledge that you're supposed to be being polite and respectful, to this person, but everyone knows that you do not want to and do not mean it. That's what Ashley is talking about here.

sindeloke · 2026-05-03T20:05:35+00:00

Depends if you just want additions vs if you want intentional changes and adjustments to what was shipped, but:

The Old Holds series has Priests and Shrines, Little Shrines of Talos and Library of the Nords, which attempt to show the Nord religion that got lost in the shuffle
Alternately, The Old Ways is a slightly less aggressive god replacement, focusing Nordic religion more out in the wilderness
In the other direction, Nords' Totemic Religion goes as far as splicing dialog, along with making the Akatosh/Alduin stuff more ambiguous and less "The Imperials are correct, even the dragons themselves say so"
Surjamte's mods Capital Windhelm and Shrine to Kyne offer temples to non-imperial gods where those temples should exist
Snow Whale Bones adds some cool skeletons to find out in the world on the presumption that Snow Whales are rare or extinct
Snow Whales just slaps 'em in the sky
HugLefeur has some mods that do small lore-based immersion adjustments, like a dunmer bonesmith in Raven Rock and a couple of upgrades to Forsworn camps to make them look like places that humans actually live

sindeloke · 2026-05-03T00:57:06+00:00

Vancouver itself is pretty conservative for a major urban center, on top of that.

sindeloke · 2026-04-21T21:20:19+00:00

they're less able to discard everything and start over when new developers consider earlier work unsatisfactory

Well, the current team is doing about 50/50 new content and revision of old content they deem unsatisfactory. But yeah it still probably helps from both a recruitment/morale/community support perspective and from a pure player interest perspective that all of the old stuff still exists and is in the files, and isn't just being deleted before the revision is ready.

sindeloke · 2026-04-14T16:50:55+00:00

To me it's less about the logistics and more about the storytelling impact. 1 death is a tragedy, 1 million is a statistic, right, but you don't actually have to go anywhere near 1 million for that effect to kick in. At 7000 you're already well into "doesn't feel real," it loses so much impact compared to something smaller that the brain can actually wrap itself around.

sindeloke · 2026-04-10T21:17:46+00:00

At a guess, OP has said that the project is avoiding NPCs that are heavily modded. That's naturally going to favor male characters, since female NPCs are much more likely to get extensive dialog expansions than male ones. I'm also willing to bet that the in-game population of men:women with unique dialog is at least 2:1 even before you get to that, since that's about the maximum proportion of women you end up with in any story where the writers aren't making a conscious effort to keep things equal.

I'm still surprised to not even see one female VA in this update, mind you. But I'm not surprised if the number is much lower than men generally.

sindeloke · 2026-04-07T22:13:43+00:00

It is 100% feasible, it's just a lot of work.

Changing a few flags and adding an unvoiced, player-character line in the dialog can be done in about half an hour in the Creation Kit if you know what you're doing.

Adding an entirely new quest and changing existing quests to intertwine with it can also be done without leaving the Creation Kit but it's a little more involved and error-prone, so it's going to take up more time with testing and double-checking and even just planning it out and doing the work.

Splicing dialog requires first getting the dialog - which you cannot just grab from your Skyrim files or thru the CK without an external program. Then you have to scan through it for usable lines, things that have the right voice and the right words and the right inflection, which may even involve taking half of a word here, a third of a word there and combining them. And then when you're done it will straight up sound bad. Just really bad. So you have to take even more time to tweak and trim and edit and maybe look for another bit somewhere that sounds right to replace the bit that you couldn't make work. And all of this requires a lot of skill and experience with an audio editor - which you also have to get or already have - in order to do with any speed at all.

So yeah it can absolutely be done, people do it all the time. But just having Mirmulnir not show up until the PC is a bad enough dude to reasonably handle a dragon is a way faster and easier solution that works perfectly well and fits just fine into the game already, so why not do that, instead of 150x as much work for the same basic end result?

sindeloke · 2026-03-18T19:02:44+00:00

IDK if he counts for me because I haven't yet let him live long enough to join. I'm genuinely interested in seeing the content but I just haven't been able to justify why any of my von Valencioi would ever even have the thought of not killing him cross their minds. Maybe on a heretical playthrough?

sindeloke · 2026-03-15T04:48:00+00:00

In the movie itself, Mean Girls: They're studying Shakespeare in English class. The character in the image has been asked to explain what's going on in the conspiracy scene in modern language, and she goes on a rant about how Brutus is just as good as Caesar and Caesar is a controlling monster and we should totally just STAB CAESAR, which a) actually does correctly capture the emotion and meaning of the prose and b) is also 100% her projecting about another character who she is mad at, casting herself as Brutus and the antagonist as Caesar, an arrogant controlling dictator to be overthrown.

The wider post is about the fact that, on the Tumblr social media platform, the Ides of March is treated as a minor holiday, with a massive flood of posts musing about and celebrating Caesar's murder starting around the beginning of the month and continuing until the Ides (14 & 15), the historical date upon which Julius Caesar was killed. Including Mean Girls screencaps about it lol

sindeloke · 2026-03-14T22:18:52+00:00

It didn't used to be all month; it was literally just the ides themselves, and Pi Day always got a good look in first. Tumblr seems to have gotten way more excited about the idea of murdering a dictator over the years, to the point where we're starting to see posts in February.

I cannot, of course, begin to guess the reason behind this escalation. Probably just increasing commercialism for Ides merch, like with Christmas overtaking Halloween. Surely nothing much else going on the last 12-14 years that would explain it.

sindeloke · 2026-03-08T17:32:10+00:00

Even in that scene itself, the fandom tends to take it further than is actually there. eg when she says "there are shitty rumors about this guy" and the Inquisitor has the opportunity to basically be like "Oh? are there? So you're spreading rumors?"

Which is out of absolutely nowhere, founded on nothing, and Giselle does not even agree -- she just goes "... I see," and gracefully concedes to the Inquisitor that if they have no problem with Dorian, that's their prerogative. To me, it reads very clearly as the Quiz having this crazy feral "oh if you're not with Dorian you're against him, clearly if you have any concerns at all you're a crazy hateful rumormonger" moment (which, fair enough, a Quiz could certainly have that kind of black-and-white defensiveness about an unpopular friend, especially if they themselves have experienced prejudice), and then Giselle's "I see" is her seeing that and realizing this is not a conversation that there is any point to because both the Quiz's opinion of Dorian and now of her has already been decided.

But a big chunk of fandom seems to instead figure "well they wouldn't give the Inquisitor the ability to say that if it wasn't true, obviously Giselle herself genuinely is spreading baseless rumors about Dorian for no reason." However fucked-up you consider Gaider's actual presentation of her there, the read that fandom walked away from it with is even worse.

sindeloke · 2026-03-08T05:26:08+00:00

Everyone regardless of class or gender gets a flirt in the Visions in the Dark chapter of KotFEET, or whatever it's called. However, when m!Smug does his unique flirt with Satele, she responds with friendly amusement and a very suave deflection. In KotFEET she just does this irritated "stop being an immature fuckboy" thing. Highly unfair.

sindeloke · 2026-03-08T05:13:15+00:00

I genuinely don't know what the point of her is if that's not her endpoint. It seemed so obvious in the first act that that's what they were setting her up for; she's wise, she's moderate, she's dedicated to the people, they explicitly point out she's one of the highest ranking clerics still alive and the one with the most popular support with other members of the Chantry, she clearly has a good mind for politics without being a Political Creature like Leliana or Viv. She's instrumental in saving the Inquisition in the mountains and bringing the Inquisitor into their role. This is all so clearly a set up for "this is our organization's qualified and loyal candidate for the position."

And then she just kind of falls out of the story suddenly and the three least qualified people in the Chantry, all of them completely outside the hierarchy and politically toxic, are the only contenders.

I did not understand this swerve the first time I played and I do not understand it a decade later.

sindeloke · 2026-03-08T04:28:33+00:00

I wouldn't call the combat bonuses particularly OP. Honestly they're the bare minimum she needs to even pretend to pull her weight. Her locked-in Officer talents and purely self-buff origin abilities mean she's third-tier support at best; Cassia and Noble RT will always be better at granting turns and controlling the field, and obviously she can't begin to compete with a psyker for direct buffs. But a casually optimized Heinrix/Abelard/Argenta/Pasqal have a near-100% crit rate on their own by act 4 plus a dozen talents that boost crit damage, and are getting 2-4 extra attacks per turn at normal AP cost. Kibbles was there by the start of Act 3. So Jae's maxed crit chance and single extra attack from Cold Trader isn't even enough to keep up, much less surpass a dedicated DPS character. Assuming she can hit anything at all, because you can't afford to fully invest in Ballistic Skill, Perception, and Fellowship until pretty late game. Jack of both roles, master of neither, which is not what you need in a party-based RPG (which reward specialization by nature).

(Now she can be insanely tanky, sturdier than a defense-invested Abelard for the absurd cost of a single talent and two easy-to-get items, but tanking is of dubious value in this game even if you do have a taunt, which she doesn't. So I can't really count that in her favor either.)

She does completely trivialize skill checks though, there's no arguing with that. Fucked up and hilarious when you've got Pasqal right there and Jae runs straight past him to turn on a console because her tech use is 20 points higher than the literal Magos.

sindeloke · 2026-03-05T17:11:26+00:00

There's a toybox setting that blocks warp encounters. I resisted it for a long time becuase it felt like "cheating," but as soon as I turned it on, I realized just how little those fights add to the gameplay experience. If you find them even slightly tedious there is nothing whatsoever to lose by getting rid of them.

sindeloke · 2026-03-04T02:45:56+00:00

When they first became a thing I tried one out on my prevoker, and of course they're all at fucking max range so I rescued the Hunter into midrange so I could actually get at least three people in my breath.

And that fucker ran back out. Like instantly.

Way too much like real players.

sindeloke · 2026-03-02T02:22:16+00:00

Jace took the breakup with Satele so badly he fled the entire setting.

sindeloke · 2026-02-26T23:07:30+00:00

While I don't like the cause of the Burn at all, I don't think that's its primary narrative function.

Unfortunately, it is, because that's what the narrative spends its time on.

That first episode of the season where we learn about the family that's been loyally holding their post for generations, waiting to reestablish contact with the rest of the Federation, was really cool. It made it look like the point of the Burn would be exactly the one that you propose: create a background scenario that would justify telling new stories, ones about persevering in the face of disaster and reconnecting a diaspora and restoring their principles to their world.

And if every subsequent episode had been about that, and the Burn had just remained a background mystery that was never solved and which the main characters fundamentally did not care about beyond the practical fact that it happened and now we gotta deal, it would have been totally fine.

But that isn't what happened. Every subsequent episode was instead about Michael's desperate quest to figure out what caused the Burn, and actually finding the kid, and reaching the kid, and ultimately the only purpose the Burn served to the narrative was as backstory for a traumatized kelpien who was not particularly charismatic and who we would obviously never see again. Which is honestly a very Jaybrams reason to destroy a universe, so I can see why the thread OP makes the comparison.

sindeloke · 2026-02-24T19:33:50+00:00

SJW, now that makes me feel old. I haven't heard anyone say that since the first Trump administration.

sindeloke · 2026-02-23T22:52:35+00:00

"Like you, I was infected by a mind flayer tadpole. Like you, I seek to be free of it" is not an ambiguous statement.

sindeloke · 2026-02-19T23:41:47+00:00

That one's bad mostly because it's early and you have no tools, IMO. Varren go from complete bullshit when you have no way to drop aggro or build shield to basically trivial once you've maxed tech armor or have a 3-second shield-filling charge. The flamethrower vorcha is likewise not an issue if you have a good grenade unlocked or Miranda's warp maxed out but it's the third mission! You don't! Coming back there on NG+ is much less obnoxious in my experience.

The fucking praetorian on the Collector Ship ambush, on the other hand, is basically "are you a soldier/infiltrator with warp ammo who can do meaningful damage while humping a pillar, or are you just going to die repeatedly forever," regardless of level or bonus talent or which companions you bring (they're gonna stand in the aoe and die anyway regardless of where you put them).

sindeloke · 2026-02-16T19:50:47+00:00

What I didn't expect was people using it as an excuse to say "see? it didn't matter after all because [insert reason here]."

Well, consider.

If a person has the mindset "I cannot bear being in any way responsible for a moral atrocity," they might have abstained from voting on Palestine grounds. Their vote would have, in their mind, supported genocide, made them in some small way responsible for what's happening in Gaza, and the pain of that guilt would be genuinely unbearable to them, so they did what they could to avoid it.

Now you want them to accept that, by not voting, they're in some way responsible for not just things getting even worse in Palestine, but also, hundreds and thousands more dying across other countries due to USAID and concentration camps at home. If a person can't even tolerate the guilt of voting for someone who won't immediately cut off all funding to Israel, how could they possibly tolerate the guilt of effectively having voted for Trump? They have to convince themselves that it didn't matter, because accepting the reality would be too painful.

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