DA2 ride or die

31 | she/her | ASD + ADHD | Dragon Age themed blog - I'm trying to learn how to mod the games and will hopefully be able to share some positive results here soon. Currently I'm just laugh-crying at failed attempts. Probably also meta, tinfoil lore theories and general fangirling

[knife-eared-jan]

Tag List

#my da mods

#my da theories

#my obsessive da ramblings

#my art

[knife-eared-jan]

Except that we are currently able to watch live irl that that's not true and never was. And DATV not getting that is actually getting to the core of what's wrong with it... and, if you wanna be melodramatic, with angloamerican perspectives on morals in general.

It really doesn't need that much for ordinary everyday people who might have been decent under slightly different circumstances to willingly run into the arms of tyranny and not even realise the immorality of it. Unfortunately, tragically, that's something intrinsic to the human experience, no matter how much we don't want to face it.

[When could it have felt more poignant than right at this point in time, to get a video game exploring the literal manifestation of tyranny and how it snares people in, how perfectly ordinary people can be lured by its appeal, can cave under the horrible pressure of it, didn't think it could get that bad, can break against the heartbreaking sheer overwhelming number of willing allies. (No tyrant lasts long once they really have their people against them - that's why they invest so much in censorship and controlling public opinion.)]

I'm not saying it is that critical for the game to specifically explore Elgar'nan's character more or whatever, even though that would have been cool. But everytime this banter comes across my dash I get apoplectic bc this line is so symptomatic of the ridiculous black and white, evil people are just evil because they're evil vs. all good people never do anything wrong and intrinsically know not to be wrong ever that the entire game falls prey to.

Spirits would never support Elgar'nan bc spirits in this game are good innocent victims and Elgar'nan is evil so he would never appeal to anyone who is on the "good side".

Like, I'm sorry I know I carry more religious trauma than average, but does this not reek of the same kind of bullshit we were fed for centuries to anyone else? Have we really gone so full circle? It's actually ironic that the game gets so much shit for being too woke, when this, to me, actually screams the very opposite.

[sewermageboy]

Hey remember how in that one interview they were like "Oh yeah we only wanna bring up choices that are meaningful, not just one liners and cameos"?

And how most of the three choices we are given boil down to flavor text?

Disband Inquisition or have it join the chantry? Doesn't actually matter, the Inquisitor is doing the exact same thing and there's none of the corruption from within that was given as a reason to disband the Inquisition in the first place

Inky vowed to stop or redeem Solas? Also doesn’t matter, most of their lines are identical, they'll still argue that he might listen to reason and will still help you redeem him

Who did you romance? Literally only comes up in one codex entry letter from the love interest (or in case of Dorian: a two line exchange as they're standing next to each other at the end). Only matters if you romanced Solas, which also affects weird things like your Inquisitor only asking Rook after their love interest if they've romanced Solas, like, what??

Anyway idk if I am pissed at this or just find it funny. Like. They knew that the three choices they put in barely influenced the world, and they STILL gave us that excuse??? What's that about???

(Honestly, I would have respected it a lot more if they'd simply said "yeah, we had to work with the time and budget we had, and while we would have liked to include more choices, we had to narrow it down to what's directly relevant to the story of this game")

[shanamahtopoeia]

Yay, functional!

Some differences in porting from DAV vs. porting from DAI that I've noted so far:

Veilguard meshes have HUGE face counts. Need to use the LOD1 or possibly even the LOD2 (or decimate the LOD0 yourself), because Origins will not like it otherwise.

Texture files: "_norm" = norm, surprisingly straightforward. 😋 "_bclr" = diffuse. As for "_amms", it has metal on the blue channel and the specular on the alpha. Whatever the A & first M are, they're nearly identical to each other on most of the maps I've popped open so far.

Porting to DA2 is not going to be as easy as it was from DAI. The bones in the FBX refer to the deformations you can apply in the character creator instead the ones used by animations. Combining these vertex groups into something resembling the DAI/DA2 skeleton should be possible, but I haven't tried it yet.

And probably the biggest one: no separate models for each gender/race. HM is the default, and all the others races/genders used deformed versions of that, apparently done in-engine. Using the deformation bones to alter the mesh for each gender/race should be possible, though; I'm just not terribly adept with new versions of Blender. 😅

[knife-eared-jan]

THIS IS VERY HELPFUL AND PERFECTLY TIMED!

Uff on having to do it all again with a LOD1 mesh tho...

[knife-eared-jan]

Not that I thought that I was done anyway, but lmao

...I may need to make it all one mesh bc there are too many things I have forgotten in the last 2 years...

[knife-eared-jan]

When the Isabela nude mod was out faster than the first one to give her back her proper skin colour or any mod to actually clothe her in the first place :(

[rpgchoices]

Dragon Age choices and romances

I am trying to understand if people prefer the same romances or not (ex. if a lot of people tend to romance the same characters each game) a

Last day to submit your answers for the DA romances survey!! During the weekend I will put together all the results

[knife-eared-jan]

Good lord, those weights loaded for like 3,5 hours jfc... lets pray these didn't turn out horrible

[pinkyjulien]

Damn so at one point we could choose our Inky's class and if they sipped from the well uh 🤧

[felassan]

Some DA:TV resource links:

DA:TV mods on Nexus Mods

DA:TV CC sliders subreddit

EA Forums: DA:TV Technical Issues & Bugs

[felassan]

More DA:TV resource links:

Datamined character descriptions [source post] (spoiler warning for links)

Skill Tree Calculator

Tip on how you can import Inquisitor appearances too

[arlathen]

import inquisitor trick in case u don't have bsky 🫶

[knife-eared-jan]

Sensible part of brain: the armor only shows a bit of chest, if you really want to do scars and tattoos for it, that's all you need...

Autism part of brain: *HISSSSSSS* WE WON'T REST UNTIL EVERY TINY SCAR ON THE REMOTEST BODY PARTS ARE ALLOCATED. WHAT DOES "NEEDING" IT HAVE TO DO WITH IT, THIS IS ZEVRAN'S BODY?!?!

[knife-eared-jan]

Currently breaking my brain how I can give Zev the tattoos and scars he has in my heart...

[knife-eared-jan]

It's 3:30am on a work day and the brain gremlins are demanding to see Zevran be properly clothed.

[knife-eared-jan]

I'M GOING TO BE VIOLENT! Isabela literally has a custom mesh and a custom skin texture and these are the choices they delibaretly went with! I fucking knew it.

To finish on a positive takeaway: since she has all these unique assets we can go crazy on giving her the outfits (once we can import meshes) and looks she deserves bc it won't affect any other characters!

[knife-eared-jan]

I realise I've played probably less than half of this game but WHO IS WEARING THIS? And why isn't it Morrigan?

[knife-eared-jan]

Seems like it can't view mesh assets yet... crashes every time I open one :/

From the looks of it people are mostly just publishing texture edits rn.

But the incredible Padme4000 already did a tutorial for editing appearances in DATV... so I guess I could try something with that maybe?

Less exciting than exporting meshes to put into the first three games, but I'll take it for now!

[knife-eared-jan]

I AM AN IDIOT! In my sheer excitement to find the frosty releases I just read the 2 at the end and was like, well 3 is obviously higher than 2 and got an old version... WE CAN EXPORT MESHES OMG OMG

THIS IS NOT A DRILL!

[knife-eared-jan]

hiii, sorry for this if you don't want to answer, but i was wondering something. can anyone start using mods right now for DATV? because the mod manager asks for an encryption key, and i have no idea what that's about. hope you don't mind me asking! i don't know much about modding D:

Hi there! You do need an encryption key, which people don't want to openly share bc it tends to be against platform policies/legal stuff...

On a totally unrelated note, check out the comments on this new mod if you want to read more about that: https://www.nexusmods.com/dragonagetheveilguard/mods/395?tab=posts

*cough*

That being said, with it being so close after launch and the devs presumably releasing further patches and the frosty magicians still working away to make things possible, it is very much an "at your own risk" thing to play with mods installed rn.