Dragon Age

She seems so passive specifically because we're told she will die if we do not interfere. We are explicetly told that Celene doesn't know of the assassination plot and she will be out manuvered if we do nothing. Of course she's passive when the actual assassination happens.

I don't like how little she interacts with you during the quest arc itself, but her passivity is gined from Florianne's subterfuge.

I wish this was real.

Exactly! Celene's passive, she's ignorant, she's outmaneuvered - when she's supposed to be some brilliant politician and mastermind. Even Gaspard and Briala are scheming beneath her nose and she doesn't really do anything about them until you hand her evidence of their plotting. She apparently gets back with Briala just because the Inquisitor says so.

She didn't come off as brilliant at all to me. She came off as a dunce who dances and looks pretty and does whatever the Inquisitor tells her. No wonder Orlais falls so easily under the Inquisition's thumb.

I want to make it clear that I'm not really disappointed in Bioware for writing her like that. I'm just saying I was decidedly unimpressed.

edited 1st Apr '15 2:54:49 PM by Pyrogenic

Celene pulls an inverted Sun King—gets the nobles even more obsessed with fashion and pointless intrigue, but it's to keep everyone from noticing how ineffectual she is. Fridge Brilliance! Leliana doesn't really like Celene, so she brings everyone dressed as Nutcracker soldiers as if to say, "just try to shift the conversation to our feathers and haberdashery..." After all, that red clashed with her hair, so clearly there was a reason for the sacrifice.

Why doesn't Leliana like Celine?

I think Celene asked her to get the Divine's permission to purge the alienage? Maybe?

I figured it was because while Leliana is good at the game, she still remembers how much harm it brought her personally with Marjorline and Raleigh, unless Leliana's song isn't canon for whatever reason, it wouldn't surprise me.

I watched through the Ball again to figure out what Celene's issue is.

I think the issue is not exactly that she is passive, because she clearly isn't passive during the ball by any means, but that she's constantly passive on screen. We know that she has seduced and tied up Gaspard's Captain and has moved to counter Gaspard's potential coup attempt, but her knowledge of Florianne's plot is what leads to her downfall.

Like I said, I think part of the issue is that, by the premise of the situation at all, we know she will be out manuvered no matter what. That is the entire premise of our choice and allowing Celene to be more active might compromise the player's control over their Grand Game.

I would say that the easiest solution to the entire issue would have been to just get us some more time with Celene to get a better sense of her character or the character she is putting on for us, and maybe have some more cutscenes to the ball in general. As much as it is my favorite quest arc of the game, I think there are a lot of obvious points where it could use some polish or additional points.

I kind of wish we had another scene with Morrigan and perhaps with Celene and her; it seems odd that Morrigan would make a show of introducing herself and then disappear until after the Ball is over on the pretense of 'I need to protect the Empress', yet is nowhere to be seen when Florianne attacks.

I would also like a scene between the Inquisitor and Celene, during or maybe after the ball. Give us more insight into her and how she got out manuvered and maybe she starts trying to manuvere around the Player; ESPECIALLY if they're mid-blackmailing her.

edited 2nd Apr '15 2:39:33 AM by InkDagger

Yes the fact that she counters Gaspard shows a spark of the character she's supposed to be but even then it's just a reactionary measure. At no point during the quest does she take charge of anything and get proactive. She just accepts, ignores, or reacts. Even the ending slides seem to support this since letting Celene keep the throne means that she comes to depend on the Inquisition to maintain power. Because you have to remember that the Inquisition's just as much of a outside party as Gaspard or Florinne. Just like them the Inquisitor's a potentially hostile party striving for power and influence. The only difference between us is that we're the protagonists so we don't see that as a bad thing and no matter what we do any success in the Quest results in us gaining that power and influence somehow.

But from the perspective of the Empress how is what we do a good thing? Yeah we save her life but we more or less control her empire too. Gaspard at least has something of an excuse. He's an outsider and the Inquisition's his way in so of course he'll rely on them and possibly end up as their puppet. But Celene's already Empress. She only needs the Inquisition to stop this one assassination plot and she ends up handing over the keys to kingdom for it. That doesn't smack of a grand and experienced player of the Game to me.

And again to be clear I have no problem with Halamshiral. It just completely changed my grasp of Celene's character. We can speculate on how that WOULD have been different IF the writers had done this or that. But they didn't and so we can only truly judge the characters based on what they decided was important enough to show us.

edited 2nd Apr '15 3:25:36 AM by Pyrogenic

Well, I'm not sure how 'active' she could really be. She seems to try and set up her oponents for failure. "Oh, look at Gaspard how he tried to plot a coup against me at my peace talks. What an idiot!" and let the rest take care of itself.

I'm wondering if maybe she still is rather active, but she just doesn't need to be in this instance that we see her in. She isn't like Walder Frey and murdering people at a wedding in her palace. It seems reasonable that she would use that information more activly had Florianne not interfered and it became necessicary to pull everyone aside and figure out wtf is going on.

Its also a good contrast between Gaspard and Celene. Gaspard says 'Fuck it' to The Grand Game and just marches his soldiers into her palace, while Celene seduces his captain and holds him hostage in a rather humiliating way, perfectly in line with how Orlais runs its game.

I wound up reconciling Celene and Briala after this exchange

• INQUISITOR: So, how do we protect Celene?
• LELIANA: By letting her die.
• INQUISITOR: That's not really a solution. It's the Failure Condition rephrased as a plan.

Lele may enjoy the Game, but I have no patience for it. We came here to keep Orlais from descending into chaos in the wake of the Empress's assassination, and we were going to do that.

edited 2nd Apr '15 11:41:33 AM by TobiasDrake

Well, Florianne wins because NO ONE became Emperor. She killed off Empress Celene and, presumably, Gaspard was blamed for it and executed. And Briala was ignored because no one would listen to her anyway. Which left no one on the throne for Orlais to descend into madness (as though it isn't already). Putting Gaspard on the Throne may not invoke a whole ton of ease in the transition, but certainly less than if no one were on the Throne.

I don't remember ever having the inquisitor say that. I wish I did.

Question. Do you thnk Dragon Age could pull off a prequel? I can certainly buy a prequel happening from DA a lot more than I can from Mass Effect because the quality of recorded information is significantly less than it would be in a futuristic setting like ME.

edited 2nd Apr '15 1:42:12 PM by InkDagger

Sure.

Hell yes. Give us another Blight, or one of the Exalted Marches against the Imperium or the Qunari.

Could work, could even work well, though they'd need to balance choice with "we can't change already made games".

You could probably do a really big prequel story in Rivain, for instance, but if in Ferelden it'd need to be a bit more personal or else your choices would all seem railroaded.

Make it set far enough in the past that the choices don't impact the existing games

Can you reconcile Briala and Celene and have Gaspard alive?

Only in the "All three rule together" outcome. Otherwise he dies.

I think so.

x4: Even if really far in the past, it can seem like none of it'll really matter. From the outset you know the Xth Blight will be defeated, the politics will become this, eventually every choice you make here fades and results in the same thing. Even more than you already know, if you have any sort of Genre Savvy, that the Fifth Blight is done for the moment the game begins.

Of course, good characters could probably help make you care about what's going on now, even if ultimately everyone's dead and oh the tragedy of time.

edited 2nd Apr '15 2:16:54 PM by Lavaeolus

I will never understand why any of that stuff matters.

Like, historical fiction is a really popular genre, and that's even less malleable and ultimately even more irrelevant than something like that would be.

From the outset you knew the blight in DA:O was gonna be defeated. That didn't stop you from playing the game.

Anyway, they can go through periods that are so poorly documented, seeing how it came about could be interesting. A prequel dealing with Tevinter's first meeting with the Elve's kingdoms?

edited 2nd Apr '15 2:28:41 PM by CobraPrime

Last Flight is supposed to take place half during the present day and half during the Fourth Blight. I'll know more once I actually read it, but yeah prequels set more than a few years back have been done.