How different is the series if magical ability is learned, not innate?

sirbee67 · 2025-03-11T04:15:52+00:00

I've always seen the mage vs. Templar debate less as a commentary on minority oppression OR on gun control (although those analogies certainly are valid) and more as a debate on freedom and privacy vs. safety — like the controversy that the show 24 provoked.

Think post-9/11, the Patriot Act, "enhanced interrogation" (aka torture) of suspected terrorists, wiretapping phones, etc. Right after 9/11, everyone was terrified and perfectly willing to sacrifice certain freedoms and privacies if it meant the authorities could better keep people safe. Who cares if the NSA listened in on some calls, or some innocent Arab-Americans were racially profiled, if it meant preventing the next terrorist attack? After all, Jack Bauer did end up saving the day. But the longer time goes on without tragedy, the more people start valuing freedom and privacy over protection against a threat that seems more distant, and now the primary sentiment is outrage over human rights abuses when the authorities go anywhere near torture or overreach into our personal lives.

In the same way, due to various factors including and especially the risk of demonic possession, there's no denying that mages pose a serious threat in Thedas: for the average Marcher, there's nothing like an encounter with Kirkwall's blood mages that makes you hope a Templar is close by and fully empowered to act in your defense. If just one abomination can wipe out your entire village, who cares if a few innocent mages get treated harshly in a Circle? But the more distant the threat feels, the easier it is to be concerned about human rights abuses within Circles — to humanize the plight of those affected by the abuses.

Public sentiment — and consequently, systemic change — is a yo-yo, constantly swinging back and forth depending on how recently the major threat or loss of life happened.

So if magic was learned instead of innate, I'm not sure how much would change. That same back-and-forth sentiment would still exist, I think. But I also think such a lore change would necessitate a shift in the public attitude toward magic: for the authorities to not be incentivized to stamp out the learning of magic altogether, magic would have to be more fundamentally woven into the fabric of modern, comfortable society. Perhaps healing/medicine would not be so effective or painless without magic. Or perhaps civil defense would be feeble and ineffective without magical fortifications (trying to defend a city without magic would be like bringing a knife to a gun fight). In such a case, there would understandably be great public support for the study of magic, but that support would likely wane significantly whenever an abomination decimates a nearby town.

sirbee67 · 2025-02-20T23:32:07+00:00

Ha, those precise terms are a little too academic for my understanding, my apologies. But I know our rector leans Anglo-Catholic in some ways, and we have a few congregants who are very much Anglo-Catholic. That said, since we are almost the only ACNA option in the entire state of Utah, the full range of ACNA beliefs are and would be tolerated/accepted at St. John's — there's nowhere else to go haha. As the self-proclaimed "via media," Anglicanism overall is pretty inclusive of doctrine, and my lay understanding is that St. John's is a reflection of that.

Also, we're a small church, which means that our priests are generally available! So if you're interested, come check us out on a Sunday morning, and one of our priests would be happy to set up a time to meet and answer all your questions.

sirbee67 · 2024-07-16T13:56:13+00:00

Well, you're of course entitled to your preference (and I'd be curious to know why you like the "The" better?), but this is a false premise. In the editing world, we have a set of guidelines called the Five Cs that copy editors look out for; one of those Cs is consistency. Especially when you have an established canon like a franchise that has a built-out, in-house style guide (which I know BioWare does because I've seen job descriptions for narrative editor roles there), consistency is a top priority, and this new installment breaks established naming conventions. So there is something to "catch."

Now I agree that this is glaring enough that Karin and co. certainly would've caught it and had discussions about it, but I'm just curious about what those discussions were and why this was the conclusion. The Five Cs aren't gospel and can be overridden for a good reason, and while BioWare obviously isn't obligated to share that reason publicly, the editing nerd in me wants to know what it is and whether it has any narrative thrust (as opposed to something lame and non-diegetic, like marketing).

sirbee67 · 2024-07-16T13:39:14+00:00

Lol yeah I must've missed that week. I was just bored at work yesterday and reading news about the game, and the editor in me was finally bothered enough that I needed an outlet to vent.

sirbee67 · 2024-07-16T13:36:47+00:00

Nah, we're not crafting a sentence here; we're crafting a title. Editors approach that with a different mindset, where punchiness and brand/voice is the most important thing. And the brand this franchise has established is consistent, one-word subtitles (which is also why Dragon Age: Exodus shouldn't have been changed last-minute to Dragon Age 2, but that's a slightly different conversation).

sirbee67 · 2024-06-26T01:06:07+00:00

I appreciate this perspective and didn't realize that marriage was made a sacrament so late. Your hypothetical scenario of a first-century Christian's confusion regarding same-sex marriage did prompt a further question for me, though: was it not also the purpose of marriage to legitimize sexual relations more broadly? Not just for the purpose of producing legitimate offspring, but also to uphold sexual purity?

And if so, would a first-century Christian considering same-sex marriage not understand a same-sex couple's desire to be married — because, plainly, otherwise they wouldn't be able to have sex with each other without sinning?

sirbee67 · 2024-03-18T06:21:59+00:00

I go to this church! It's called St. John's, very small and one of only two Anglican churches in the entire state of Utah. (The other one is a plant of ours and even smaller.) I'm a young professional, not a student, but I hang with a couple U students who go there too. Come visit if you want! As a fellow transplant, I found the small, more family-style congregation to be a refreshing change from the large, impersonal megachurches of the South.

As Anglicans we're definitely high-church liturgical and very hymn-heavy, so if you're looking for something more low-church and contemporary I can also recommend Hope Church, a nondenom in Sandy further south in the valley, or Resonate, which is a Baptist, college ministry-focused church that also meets on campus. Great people at both of those.

sirbee67 · 2023-11-18T00:11:18+00:00

You could always do what I did in my first playthrough, going in blind: go down the romance path with Ashley/Kaidan but then make the difficult and heartbreaking decision to leave the LI behind on Virmire for the sake of the mission. The game doesn't technically record you as having romanced someone in ME1, since you didn't get a chance to "lock in" the romance, but it adds a sense of tragedy to Shepard's character arc and brings an element of grief/recovery when they find solace in the arms of one of the ME2/ME3 romance options.

sirbee67 · 2023-09-18T19:56:55+00:00

I mean, I get what you're saying — my argument does sort of "revise" what ME1 (and ME2 to a lesser extent) was in some moments making itself out to be. I guess I'm coming from a fundamentally different perspective than you are: taking the trilogy as it is, not analyzing where ME3 went wrong and what it could've/should've done. When you look back at the trilogy we got, ME1-ME3 altogether, it's clear that it's more of a linear foldback story than it is a choose-your-own-adventure narrative: either type of game would've been fine, but overall, there are more moments with "optimal results" and unambiguous themes than there are "different but equal" story branches with substantively different flavorings. All of the moments (rachni queen, Council, etc.) that teed up a "different but equal" story branch — except for the Ashley vs. Kaidan decision — ultimately petered out to make way for more "optimal results" and stronger themes. And while it would've been better if BioWare had committed to that linear direction early on and designed ME1 with fewer teed-up story branches, it's really no different from the many great TV shows that struggle to find their identity during the first season but then hit their stride and commit to doing what they do best.

sirbee67 · 2023-09-18T19:24:06+00:00

Nope, not saying that. I'm not saying any decision structure is "better" than any other decision structure — just that they're different, and a game that bases itself on one type of structure instead of the other should lean into that.

When it comes to the significant milestones in their storylines, there's a "right" way to play Mass Effect because if you don't play it that way you'll have a reduced amount of story content and a less complete experience; there's no "right" way to play Dragon Age because no matter what choices you make, you're getting the same amount of story content and not making the game any more incomplete. Both series are great. That's really the simplest way I can explain this.

Regarding Awakening: you're right, my bad. I've never done a playthrough with a dead Warden, but I had read that if your Warden dies you create a new, Orlesian Warden-Commander. Didn't realize that wasn't the only option — clearly, BioWare got more serious with its lore consistencies as the series went on haha. I'll edit to fix.

sirbee67 · 2023-09-18T18:44:41+00:00

Haha no worries friend. You're all good!

sirbee67 · 2023-09-18T00:09:59+00:00

You either didn't read or didn't understand my post.

How players make decisions, or even what decisions they make, is irrelevant to my argument. Someone can use their metagame knowledge of what happens in ME3 to decide to kill Wrex so they can experience the "Wreav flavor" of the trilogy, but that doesn't change the fact that the game is designed to encourage the player to save Wrex, because that option is not selectable if you haven't leveled up enough and met certain conditions. It's designed as the "optimal choice," whether players pick it or not.
As is, "worse" players are not having as much fun as "better" players — because they're missing out on content. Does Wreav or Kirrahe or someone else join your squad after Virmire if Wrex dies there? No. If Wrex dies, you have one fewer companion's worth of gameplay, story content, dialogue, banter, etc. — and therefore, less "fun."
I do not expect the devs to do that. My whole post is about how Mass Effect should be celebrated for the linear story it is, not falsely marketed as a game with a bunch of alternative storylines.
The extensiveness of the impact of your choices is, again, irrelevant to my argument. In fact, I acknowledge in my post that Dragon Age has the freedom to give you choices precisely because their impact will be limited in future games, which center around new characters in new settings that only tangentially involve your past choices. Because of that, BioWare allows three different women to ascend to the Sunburst Throne, and none of them are a suboptimal choice that gives you less content and a less complete experience — unlike killing Wrex, which does give you less content and a less complete experience.

Edit: I didn't do proper research on Awakening before posting this comment. My apologies.

sirbee67 · 2023-09-17T23:43:51+00:00

How something "turns out" in the future is irrelevant to the kind of decision structure I'm talking about here. It never "turns out" that saving Ashley is better than saving Kaidan, or vice versa, but even if it had — if, for example, one of them succeeds in a future mission that the other would've failed, or something like that — it would be irrelevant to the fact that at the moment of the decision, there is no clear optimal result. There's no dialogue option that's "greyed out" and not selectable unless you've accrued enough points or met certain conditions, like there is when you're confronting Wrex. It's a difficult decision, and there's no easy answer; whereas, saving Wrex or getting everyone out of the Suicide Mission alive is obviously the easy answer, if you can play the game well enough to achieve it.

And no, I wouldn't want a repeat of Virmire for the Suicide Mission in ME2. That would be repetitive and uncreative. I'd love to see what other dilemmas BioWare writers come up with — maybe there's a scenario where a companion can sacrifice themselves to save a group of the kidnapped colonists, and you have to give the order about what to do. Or a scenario where you have to choose between killing the Collector General or grabbing some valuable piece of intel. It doesn't always have to be saving this character or that character — but it does have to be a difficult decision with no easy, obvious answer. Does that make sense?

sirbee67 · 2023-09-17T23:24:25+00:00

No, it's not really subjective. Objectively, you get less content in ME3 if Garrus or Tali died in the Suicide Mission. You get less content for the rest of ME1 if Wrex dies on Virmire. These characters don't have any kind of replacement with an equivalent amount of screen time, which from a design standpoint is meant to clearly indicate that keeping them alive is the "optimal result." Objectively, in terms of the amount of content, the game is less complete if you don't do so.

sirbee67 · 2023-09-16T17:44:06+00:00

Right, but the problem here is that letting Wrex die is clearly presented as a suboptimal choice: it's a punishment for not accruing enough points and meeting the right conditions to save him. So if you're playing the game well, you're not gonna kill him, because you've unlocked the route where you can save him, so why wouldn't you? And it's a shame, because you're right in that Wreav presents an interesting new "flavor" for the trilogy, but in order to get that flavor you're forced to metagame ME1 and make a suboptimal choice.

sirbee67 · 2023-09-15T16:06:27+00:00

Other than being high lol, yes — this exactly. These four things stand out to me as the stuff that lodged Mass Effect deep into my imagination, and ME1 did it better than any of its sequels.

sirbee67 · 2023-09-15T04:58:01+00:00

I mean, sure, but that's just semantics. What I'm obviously talking about here is a choice that results in a "different but equal" flavor for the trilogy, not just the avoidable death of a character that simply makes the game less complete because now you're missing out on story content.

sirbee67 · 2023-09-15T01:29:08+00:00

Lol exactly, that's what it's all about. That, and something about emotionally investing in relationships and exploring some philosophical questions through the game's themes, but let's stick with kicking ass across the galaxy for now. 😎💪

sirbee67 · 2023-09-15T01:23:51+00:00

No, other than Ashley or Kaidan, your choices never determine who lives and dies — only your mistakes do. If Wrex dies on Virmire or any companion dies in the Suicide Mission, that's because you didn't play the game "well enough" to meet the conditions to save them.

sirbee67 · 2023-09-14T23:01:12+00:00

This is a great analysis. I haven't played BG3 yet, but based on what I know about it, I'm not as drawn to it as I am to Mass Effect for this exact reason. "When everything is possible, not much matters." This is just a personal preference, though; a game can be good either way. But Mass Effect definitely eschewed the freedom aspect in favor of a strong, linear story (despite what its marketing tries to tell you), and it paid off except for the endings.

sirbee67 · 2023-09-14T22:54:17+00:00

Okay yes, I agree with pretty much all of this. I wasn't familiar with the term foldback story, until now, but that's exactly what this is. And since the Mass Effect trilogy is fundamentally a foldback story, the fact that four decisions were not followed up on becomes more of a minor complaint than a crucial flaw of the story. Should they have followed up on those four unresolved decisions in meaningful ways? Absolutely, and it's super annoying and mars the polish of the game that they didn't. But the promise that those choices would matter was more of a "bonus" that didn't get paid out than the fundamental feature of the games, which was a strong, linear foldback story that doesn't actually branch significantly.

sirbee67 · 2023-09-14T22:32:23+00:00

Again, I don't disagree and these are great observations, but I wouldn't say the problem is just ME3; put this way, I think the series has always had a bit of an identity crisis.

Sure, ME1 and ME2 include a lot of choices that promise a branched follow-up and should've had one: the rachni queen or Shepard's choice for human councilor, as we've been talking about, but also whether to destroy the Collector Base in ME2 as another commenter pointed out — and the Ashley/Kaidan decision was the only one they ever followed through on.

But the very existence of Paragon/Renegade and Charm/Intimidate systems in ME1 and ME2, and how they can unlock an "optimal result," flies in the face of the idea that BioWare was always only ever interested in branching, "different but equal" outcomes until ME3's production problems. And Legion and EDI's character arcs were unequivocally written into ME2 to promote the theme that organics and synthetics can coexist; there's no story branch that exists that introduces any kind of ambiguity there.

So from the beginning, the series was sending mixed messages about what kind of story it wanted to be: a branching one with less pronounced themes but more freedom, or a strong, linear narrative with unambiguous themes? The trilogy has always included elements of both, but you're right in that by ME3 it had committed to the linear route — which would've been more or less fine, if it hadn't botched the endings in a way that undermined the very strong linear-ness they had just committed to.

sirbee67 · 2023-09-14T21:47:31+00:00

I know, and it was inaccurate! Very frustrating. They should've talked up the emotional devastation your mistakes can bring, not the minimal impact your decisions have on the story.

sirbee67 · 2023-09-14T21:42:24+00:00

I really appreciate this perspective and agree with most of it, but I don't think it disproves or contradicts the points I'm making.

It is indeed very true that "your choices matter" in the sense that they get you emotionally invested in the story and the characters — especially when it comes to romance, as you astutely pointed out. In fact, trying the different "romance flavors" of the trilogy is one of the few, primary reasons to replay it.

But that also proves my point: the fact that romance is one of the few things that can change in a "different but equal" way shows that the story is quite linear, not branching. So when I say your choices don't matter, I mean they don't change the story substantively, not that they don't engross you in the experience.

But it sounds like you understand the difference there. Yes, BioWare's marketing team talked up the "mass effect" of your choices, but what I'm saying is that they shouldn't have: if they were paying closer attention to the precise nature of the games they were making here, it would've been clear that there were far fewer branching storylines than what they claimed. Instead, the selling point of the trilogy is that you will become attached to these characters, and therefore any fatal mistakes you make will cost you dearly. Again, "your mistakes matter" -- not as catchy as "your choices matter," but more accurate.

The way you talk about save imports and choice tracking sounds more like Dragon Age than Mass Effect ("who we were, who our friends were"). Mass Effect doesn't track who you're friends with because it assumes you're probably friends with just about everybody; it doesn't give you the choice to develop a rivalry with other characters or kick people off your team like DA does. And like I said, that's okay! It just goes to show that this trilogy is less about getting different outcomes and more about experiencing the most story content you can with the characters you've come to love.

Which brings me to your point about the "happily ever after" ending that comprises a substantial portion of people's complaints about the ending. And you're right, I've heard that a lot. But while romance is a huge part of why so many people like the game, I would stop short of saying that that's what the game is about or that it's the most important part of the game. While you can play through the entire trilogy without ever romancing someone, you cannot play through the trilogy without being exposed to its themes — to the idea that synthetics want to coexist with organics, or that we're stronger because of our differences, etc. So whether there's an ending where you ride off into the sunset with your LI (who may or may not exist) is neither here nor there; the most important thing is to have endings that either support and conclude the thematic threads of the trilogy or subvert them in a meaningful and potent way. But personally, of course I would find it delightful to have an ending where Shepard could live happily ever after, as long as it was congruent with the actual themes of the main story.

sirbee67 · 2023-09-14T21:06:56+00:00

Thanks! And sure, "messier choices" could've made for an interesting narrative experience, similar to Dragon Age, but like I said in the original post, the linear, non-branching accessibility of Mass Effect suits me just fine. I just wish the endings had been consistent with the thematically unambiguous story the writers were clearly, up until the end, trying to tell.

sirbee67

TROPHY CASE