Hi again. I will try to address some of your points, and explain the rationale behind some of the design choices here!
you’re still there chugging along, it’s only that the curtain was pulled on it
Canonically Failbetter Games had to force you to “chug along” as Serault, and her Marquis, have a minor role in Dragon Age: Inquisition (aka the game this one is a prequel/interquel of). That’s why you don’t have an apocalypse-sort of ending even in worst scenarios.
You can’t go back and revert something at chapter 3 for better stats (even if you could) because it may drastically affect something later
This is one of those gamebooks where you are supposed to play again and try different approaches if you want to see different/better endings, and getting a less-than-ideal ending on your first run is absolutely a genre stapple. Though perhaps the current threshold IS too harsh?
I will make more test runs, but feel free to share your own endgame stats, it would be helpful!
‘30’ is hardly the high mark the game implied for making it through
Sorry, the number is not important actually, the flavor text next to it says it all. Did you read the Tutorial?
“If your Threats rise too high, you may be taken to the Game Over screen. You may get one final chance at redemption if, depending on your situation: your Dignity isn’t Pitiable or Despicable, your Prosperity isn’t Desperate or Shattered, or your Freedom isn’t Wretched or Oppressed.”
If you had a Dignity Game Over, your Dignity was Pitiable or Despicable (i.e. less than 30) and your Twilight was above the (appropriately named) “Midnight looms” threshold. Hmm, I really need to test this more.
I was playing on Normal. I don’t mind failure at all
Oh. Ok. This is useful information.
You cannot just rewind every 5 seconds and pick the most beneficial choice in the moment because then you aren’t playing your story
Sometimes our choices, guided purely by role-playing, lead to “failure” scenarios like these. Perhaps the game is poorly-balanced. Perhaps you just chose poorly (no offense, I also got bad endings myself! lol).
Perhaps it’s a bit of both?
you say the original allowed you to pay to carry on past it anyway, but at least there would have been that option
I made Casual Mode for cases like this. Did you know you can just skip over that Game Over passage if you were on Casual? Bad stats will take you to that screen anyway, but you can always just jump out of it on Casual.
I am feeling like half of your core problems would have been solved by playing Casual. Why “half”? Well…
The ‘Bad’ ending is no ending at all
… because - spoilers ahead - all endings are sort of like this, even the best ones. You won’t be getting e.g. a slideshow or cutscene saying what happened to every character. You get a passage describing the gist of what happens to Serault now, and that’s it. Your imagination must do the rest.
This is the half of your issue that I cannot fix, and I am very sorry for that.
A player shouldn’t be treated like that in a standalone
Like I had mentioned, this isn’t a standalone. This is a pre-existing work, a sequel to Dragon Age II and a prequel to Dragon Age: Inquisition, and Serault’s story continued in the latter… to a degree.
And I concur, the player shouldn’t be treated like that. We still don’t know whether the Hero of Ferelden from Dragon Age: Origins managed to find a cure to the Calling, and what on earth happened to Hawke after Inquisition. These guys had AAA budgets behind their games, and still got very little closure from BioWare.
Between Failbetter’s text-based low-budget and me - who teaches History to schoolchildren for a living - spending about 130 hours on this preservation project for free, your Marquis never had a chance! lol
I am sure you liked (most of?) your journey since you clearly cared enough to be quite annoyed about a bad ending… but damn mate it’s the Dragon Age curse, vague-ass endings, so we either enjoy the journey despite unclear destinations or we just move on. :S
By the way, I just finished a quick test run with zero planning, clicking mostly at random. Got into the same Game Over as you did, but had plenty of Dignity to escape. Narrowly escaped a Revolution Game Over though, by 1 point (I would just have rewinded 3 or 4 passages to deal with the Iconoclast differently if that bothered me to be honest). I am on Normal Mode too. https://imgur.com/a/4JDPMon