I haven't been around here much lately, but I'm sorry to hear that this is happening. Maybe it's because I wasn't around much in the last year, but I didn't see it coming.

 

It's going to be weird not being able to drop in here now and again after twelve years of doing so. I get that maintaining and properly moderating a forum -- especially one of a size such as this one -- is a huge amount of work, and if the staff at BioWare don't feel it's worth it any more it's a sensible decision. Taking it down completely is probably a better move than leaving it to run wild, considering what that tends to look like on the internet. However, for me, this means I'm just not going to have anywhere to talk about these games any more. I'll miss it.

 

Social media may technically be a faster and easier way to keep contact with large groups of people, but it's also one that doesn't facilitate full or meaningful discussions. It doesn't take the place of a forum. I hope eventually people will come around again and realise that it's not the best way to actually engage with a group of people.

Yes, being able to name saved games is great. It's much easier to figure out which game is which, it gives you something to look back on, and it lets you put a hint of what you were doing in the name if you feel like it. (Or something funny. Either one is good.) It's definitely less confusing than auto-named games.

I did actually enjoy DA 2 more than I had originally when I replayed it prior to playing DA:I (I replayed both DA:O and DA 2 then in order to nail down the choices of my two characters I was going to use in the Keep). The combat, in comparison to DA:I, was better than I remembered it -- the system was still recognisable as compared to DA:O at least, although there are still some large annoyances for me there. The handling of the voiced character also didn't seem quite as bad when compared to having just played the latter two ME games.

 

I still think the ending would have been better were it more different, but overall the plot was never the problem I had with DA 2. It still has essentially no replayability for me -- the only way I did replay it was to replay it using the exact same character as I did the first time -- but it was a better game than I remembered it being. Still disappointing for many reasons compared to DA:O, but not bad on its own merit.

But it's weird and unnatural for substantially different reactions in tone and content to lead to identical reactions from others. 

 

Not if the reaction they lead to makes sense in some way for all of them. Granted, that's not always the case, but people certainly can react in the same way to a wide variety of different things. It's also not something that tends to really jump out, as you don't see the same reaction to different things one after another, rather on each different play through the game.

 

I recall from previous iterations of this topic that you're a lot more particular about NPC reactions to dialogue than I am, though, so this may simply be a difference of opinion.

And then there were the conversation hubs with tons of possible answers that all led to the same NPC reaction

 

I don't mind those. I would still rather have more choices for what my character says even if it leads to the same NPC reaction, because it's still a character choice that can be made.
 

I've always really liked Throne of Bhaal, and I feel that it's an important ending piece to Baldur's Gate. It feels appropriate, it's great to have a game with that much high level play, and it adds another dungeon in Watcher's Keep -- and I always like those. From my perspective, there's really nothing not to like about it. All of the possible endings are very satisfying, and there are lots of great fights. It's more light on the RPG elements, yeah, but there's also plenty of room for the imagination to fill in, and that's enough to keep me happy. It is epic and (compared to low-level play, at least) over-the-top, but it should be, and it feels right that it is.

 

I appreciate it even more in retrospect, having now played through some sequels that didn't allow your character to keep their levels all the way through or didn't have satisfying endings.

I never stopped playing them, really, aside from a brief stretch where I had trouble getting them to run on my computer (which was a serious problem which I worked hard to solve). I typically play through the series anywhere between once a year and once every year and a half. They're still my favourite games, and the replayability -- especially playing in multiplayer mode to get a full party -- is excellent. I like to play with a full party and replace a character every time they die for a challenge, either limiting myself to a set number of reloads or going full no-reload as well. I still like the style of game the best, I still feel that AD&D rules work great in CRPGs, and the overall feel of the trilogy can't be beat, so I doubt that I'm going to stop replaying them any time soon.

 

Dark Alliance wasn't bad, either one. I played them both while staying at my mother's house some years ago (although I believe also a few years after they came out), and they are among the better console games that I've played. Would have been better if you could make your own characters, though.

I should clarify that I don't dislilke the very notion of having the PC be voiced. If technology should get to the point where you can control the voice as much as you can currently control the face, including at least some control over the inflections used, I wouldn't have a problem with it at all (assuming one was able to know what the actual lines were, but that's a problem with the paraphrasing rather than one with the voice per say).

 

I feel about it now much as I felt about head selection in Knights of the Old Republic, which was the first game I played that had that instead of selecting a portrait for the character. It seemed very limiting, since there were only a handful of heads I actually thought fit any characters I was wanting to play, and it was a big step down from the near-limitless possibilities of finding an appropriate portrait for the character. However, at this point in technology, I'm fine with not having portraits; face creation has got to the point where you can do just about anything, and it's a reasonable replacement. I still like games offering the portrait option, but I consider the two roughly equivalent with tradeoffs now, rather than one to be far superior to the other.

 

However, so far at least, voice customisation has proved to be much more difficult than face customisation. I'd much rather have no voice than a very limited selection of voices, particularly with not being able to control the tone/inflection (which would be really hard to do).
 

I originally had a bit about this in my response, but deleted it. One way that it helps is in the difference between male/female. My Inquisitor is a man, but I'm a woman, so hearing the man's voice helps me to get into his head space. This is especially important to me with something like the Dorian romance, since Dorian is gay. I want it to feel like the scenes are between two men, and not myself with my character as a proxy (since I'm a woman). I couldn't do that if I had my own voice in my head.

Thanks for explaining! I find it very interesting the way different people approach things like roleplaying, really, and I often find myself falling into the trap of assuming that whatever I do must be the thing that most people do -- when of course, it often isn't, as people vary wildly and there's no logical reason to assume that I would tend more towards the average than anyone else.
 
That's not a reason that I would have thought of, although now that you mention it I can see that it would probably make sense for a good number of people. I don't hear my own voice in my head when I read anything, in-game dialogue included, so I hear either nothing at all for a silent PC or whatever voice I'm purposefully imagining (which I only do occasionally, so it's usually nothing). As such, when the PC is voiced, instead of a void to interpret or ignore I'm getting something that may actively contradict what I'm thinking of -- particularly if the voice option(s) don't include one that I like for the character. I do know some people who hear their own voice by default when they read who also prefer silent PCs, though, so I expect they just work harder to imagine the character voice -- I'll have to remember to ask, since now I'm rather curious about that. That sort of level of attention to gender is also something that almost never occurs to me, because gender itself is not something that I've ever really understood on a deep level. I have trouble wrapping my head around it having any effect on personality or making any difference in interpersonal relationships, and I often forget it exists at all as anything other than a grammatical/taxonomical distinction until I'm reminded of it.
 

Also, I must say that the accent helps. Obviously, they're not really speaking English with the various British accents, since that language does not exist in Thedas, but they've established that certain groups sound a certain way. Being American, hearing the British accent also helps me to get into the human Thedosian character. It might be different if I played a dwarf or qunari, since they use American accents for those, but I don't.

In other words, hearing the voice helps it to not be me.

For whatever reason, the character I'm playing never really feels like me, even in games that aren't roleplaying games at all. I generally end up feeling like I'm playing a character even in first person shooters or racing games, and I'd have to actively try and exert a fair amount of mental effort at it to actually come close to playing myself in a roleplaying game. I can see that it would be helpful to have something to distance yourself from the character if you have trouble with that, though. I can kind of understand this, perhaps, in that I prefer to play Elder Scrolls games third person because it's more of an RPG experience for me that way.
 

Another difference is just in the way that the games are designed around the voice. As mentioned in my other posts, the non-voiced games like DAO have an over-the-shoulder view of the PC's conversation partner the entire time. I suppose you might say that it helps to put you in the correct RP mindset since that's how real-life conversations are presented: we don't see ourselves while talking. To me, it only has the effect of pulling me out of the scene. Also, I have a strong sense that my character is a mute in a speaking world, which is just uncomfortable.

In general, the PC in DA2 and DAI just feels more engaged with the world. I find it very difficult to go back to DAO after playing those games.

I do like being able to see the character's face from time to time, but I'm cool with the over-the-shoulder view as well. I'm actually quite neutral about the two cinematic styles, save that the one focusing on the character requires the character to be voiced.
 
I've heard the "mute in a speaking world" thing said quite a lot by people who prefer voiced PCs, but I admit that I mostly assumed it was hyperbole used to express a simple dislike, but here it sounds as though it really does make you feel that way. That's interesting. It's never had that effect on me, nor had it actually occured to me that it would actually have that effect on somebody, and I wonder why that is. The silent PC overall feels more natural and integrated to me than the voiced one, although perhaps some of that is that the voice is often drawing my attention by saying things in a way that I didn't want them to be said (or things that I didn't expect it to say at all).
 
For all my dislike of the voiced PC, except for the paraphrasing and inflection problems (which do show up inevitably), I don't mind the idea inherently if there are sufficient options for voices. If I can select a voice that I feel really fits my character, and if there are enough voice options that I can proceed to select a different one for each subsequent character, I don't mind the simple fact that they are voiced if/when all the problems are worked out -- but having only one voice per gender, even two, is a real strain on replayability. Odds are good that not all of them will even fit any of the characters I might like to play (in DA II, for example, the female voice really didn't fit any character I was interested in playing, so that narrowed my options down to exactly one), and once I've used a voice for one character I'm not going to be able to use it for a different character -- it'll feel too strange, having that character sound exactly the same as the other one. Maybe this is partly because I'm not used to hearing anything at all in my head when selecting dialogue options when the PC is unvoiced, because I know that this specifically isn't as much of a problem with the voiced PC for most other people I know, but it is a big problem for me.

This come down to the individual player, and none of what you stated is universally true for everyone. I found that my Inquisitor was the most enjoyable protagonist for me to play across all three games; he is my favorite, and I was able to connect with him on a deeper roleplay level and a big part of that is because of the voice.

 

My roleplay is dependent on the voice, not done in spite of it.

 

Yeah, I thought I left in a caveat about there being exceptions to that, but apparently I didn't. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone, but I do strongly believe from what I have observed that it is the general case. It's definitely true for the people I know personally, but of course that doesn't necessarily translate to the wider populace.

 

Sometimes I do also think that people are using the world "roleplay" to mean different things from each other on these forums, but I do get the impression that you're using it much the same way I am, so that's probably not the case here.

 

The voice has the opposite effect on me, but Inquisition was in general much better for roleplaying than DA II, so that's not the only variable that goes into it to be sure. I find the way in which people say things to say quite a lot about their character, and if I can't control or imagine how my character is going to say something, I find it very difficult to make decisions and roleplay them properly. Sometimes I have to just try to ignore the spoken lines, but that's difficult, and the nature of the way they've chosen to deal with the voice (I.E., the paraphrasing) makes it really hard to choose the most apropriate line when you don't actually know what it's going to be. It creates a disconnect where I'm trying to get across the character I have in my head and the decisions they would make, but I don't actually know what's going to happen, and often the spoken line is more out of character than the paraphrase would have been -- whereas with no voice for the PC, one is left to imagine the line however one wants, and there's no doubt of what your character is actually going to say.

 

Do you build your character around the voice over time, then? That's the only way that comes to mind that the voice could actually help, but it may be that it's such a hindrance to me personally that I just can't see the ways in which it could be advantageous. I generally have a strong idea of what the character is like from character creation, and if I end up having to fight with the voice and/or the dialogue to get that across, it's a huge annoyance. I like going into a game with a fully formed character and seeing how they react to the world and how the world reacts to them, and if I have to improvise based on what they end up actually saying, it feels less like I'm actually controlling my own character and more like I'm desperately trying to guess how somebody else wanted me to play the game or what character they were intending to be played through the game, which is much less fun.

Yup. Especially for the mages and templars question (I side-eye anyone who thinks you MUST hate one side and love the other) and for the romantic-partner traits one (aromantic asexual here).

 

Indeed. I find both sides of that conflict interesting (although my character in DA II sided with the Templars -- maybe that's what they're getting at?), and I stopped filling it out when I couldn't select "none" or "not applicable" or such for the romantic partner traits question. I suppose I could have made something up for that, rolled dice or what, but it seemed more honest just to stop.

I'm always more reluctant to replay open world or semi-open world games, particularly quickly, than I am to replay those that aren't. It's a much larger time investment, and I don't have as much time for gaming as I would like these days; plus, inevitably, a large portion of that time is spent essentially with filler that I have no particular desire to encounter again. If I do replay it, I'll probably skip most of the exploration, unless I wind up with a character who just wouldn't do that.

 

The main reason I think I won't be replaying Inquisition any time soon is the combat/general game mechanics, ultimately. I'm just not fond of them. My initial impression was that combat was better than it was in DA II, but I quickly ended up changing my mind about that. It manages to combine just about everything that potentially annoys me about CRPG combat into one package, and there's only so much of that I want to put up with. It's particularly unfortunate since I really enjoy combat when it's done in a fashion that I like, but it's an aggravating slog in DA:I and reminds me of nothing more than MMORPG combat... which I usually dislike. If the tactical camera wasn't so messed up, I could probably play with that and be happier (since that eliminates some of my biggest pet peaves about the combat), but it's a mess, so it doesn't really help. I ended up setting it down to casual just so I could get through the combat faster, and I've honestly never done that in any game before.

 

If I do end up replaying it again, it would be because there actually were a lot of good roleplaying opportunities and decisions in the game, and I think it would be interesting to replay it with a character from a very different background with different goals from the character I played it with. Maybe a dwarf, or a mage of some sort. With the two voices, I would probably be able to do another playthrough or two on that basis, so that's good.

 

Now, if some sort of mod or patch or whatnot were to come out that would fix all or most of my complaints with the combat and/or game mechanics, I'd happily replay it. I'm not expecting that to happen, though, so I'm not expecting to replay it for a long time if ever. It seems as though DA:O will remain the only game in the series that I enjoy replaying, albeit DA II and DA:I for extremely different reasons (DA II due to the lack of roleplaying opportunities, only one voice, no real decisions to be made, and so forth; DA:I due to the incredibly annoying combat and no real variation in character build). I continue to find this rather sad, because DA:O was hands-down my favourite post-Infinity Engine/3d game, especially in terms of gameplay, and I really wish I could enjoy DA II and DA:I anywhere near as much.

 

Anyhow, for now, I've got a replay of Icewind Dale II on the back burner, and I've yet to finish Pillars of Eternity... and both of those games are an incredibly large amount more my thing in terms of gameplay.

I'm not always particularly observant myself, so that has definitely happened to me. If it's possible, and I think my character wouldn't have noticed, I don't choose those options -- but it's not always possible.

 

To be fair, it's not just the dialogue wheel (and I say that despite how much I dislike the dialogue wheel in general). That's been happening with dialogue options in RPGs for as long as I've been playing them, at least. Sometimes the writers think something is really obvious, I assume, but it's not at all obvious to a portion of those playing the game, and then you run into that situation. It's probably pretty hard to avoid from the writer's point of view. I've definitely had it happen when planning face-to-face campaigns that I think the clues I've laid are perhaps even too obvious, but the PCs never even pick up on them (or get obsessed with an entirely different notion and disregard all the evidence). It's one of those things that is, so far, an innate weakness of CRPGs no matter the model of dialogue, because you can improvise around that and go with the flow in a face-to-face game, but you have to stick with the original assumptions made in a CRPG.

There was a little bit of that even in DA:O, but I do feel that it's been getting more pronounced as the series goes on. It's rather annoying to me, because not only are the classes being separated and pigeon-holed much more on the one hand -- there are many things that you can't do as a warrior or rogue now that you could do in the first game -- but they're all becoming flashier and more reliant on abilities that really require quite a lot of suspension of disbelief. Personally, when I play a warrior, I prefer to play somebody who uses their skill with weapons to defeat their enemies, but somebody who has inexplicable supernatural powers with those weapons. I do generally prefer playing melee characters (well, melee characters with backup ranged capability would be nice), so it has been bothering me.

 

You can easily have non-magical classes be highly useful without giving them magical seeming abilities, but apparently that's not what most people want (or it's not what game developers think most people want -- hard to tell).

 

Back in DA:O there were a lot of different ways to make an effective character from each class, including different weapon styles and reliance on different stats. Where they all equally effective? No, but it was entirely possible to make a very good character in several different ways. That wasn't possible in DA II, and it's not even possible to make a differently built character at all in DA:I. It really does take a lot of the fun out of replaying the game for me, and a not insignificant portion out even playing through the game the first time. 

Edit: this forum is for violent, 18+ games and it ***'s out bad words? Pathetic.

It is rather odd when you look at the current flagship series, both Dragon Age and Mass Effect, but keep in mind that this forum is also still for the older BioWare games as well as the ongoing series, even though they have all been relegated to the legacy area. Sonic Chronicles is rated E, and Jade Empire is the only one of the games in that area that's rated M -- the rest are rated T. As weird as it is in the DA and ME areas to not be able to use words that appear in game, the filter is forum-wide, and as such it needs to work for those other games as well.

DA:I already had quite enough MMO-style elements to it, indeed more than I would have liked (particularly the general feel of the combat, and the filler quests). I would be ill inclined to play it if it actually was an MMO, full of an absurdly large number of people compared to the story who were mostly bearing names that clearly didn't remotely fit in with the game world and who weren't even trying the slightest bit to roleplay.

 

Yeah, no. No way. There's a reason I don't play MMOs, especially not those set in any universe I actually care about at all.

I still hope that they will eventually at least give an option for this. It would be, for me and many others, so much more enjoyable -- and also rather easy to implement. However, I no longer have any real expectation that they will. It's clearly not what the mass market wants (or at least, the vocal segment of the mass market), and that appears to be the main concern. 
 
Given that the voiced PC appears to be unfortunately here to stay, I can only hope they keep up with expanding the number of options and the array of choices. It'll still be a shackle with regards to roleplaying, but a shackle with a fifteen foot chain is an improvement over a shackle with a five foot chain.
 

This is a subforum for the DA franchise, which now has a voiced protagonist. They aren't going back. So how do you propose that they cater to both types of fans in the DA franchise? They can't provide a toggle in a single game as the games are designed around the use of voice, such as by showing the paraphrase on the dialogue wheel and also showing the full face of our PC during cinematic conversations, something that DAO did NOT do (we got an over-the-shoulder view of our conversational partner).

They definitely could do that if they wanted to. I would quite honestly be happy with even just a toggle to specifically remove the character's voice. It wouldn't take that much to have an optional mode where you skip from the line selection to the next time an NPC speaks, and would have much the same effect as the old method. That would render the paraphrase to be the dialogue in effect, and that would work fine. Would it skip some extra animation sometimes? Yeah. Would I care? No.

Do I think they will do it? No. They've said they won't do that. I wish they would, though, and I'd quite honestly be willing to pay for it as a DLC if they decided to come out with that option. I'm sure at least a decent number of other people would as well.
 

It's kind of important to note that Bioware never had a purely silent protagonist, you had ample dialogue options in BG1.

Shattered Steel is the only one where you literally don't say anything.

 
No, this is entirely different. Baldur's Gate, and indeed Dragon Age: Origins (and pretty much everything in between), had a few set samples of text that triggered in situations like battle or upon selection. They let you choose between several, and essentially served as a sort of "choose what my character sounds like" option, more like picking the character's hair colour than anything else. They were fairly easily ignored if you didn't like any of them (and often there was even a "no voice" option, and if not, it was very easily modded in).
 
That's entirely different from actually having a voice actor read every single line the PC has. Sound clips add to the flavour and don't limit your imagining of how your character is saying the dialogue options. The inflections that the voice actors gives to them definitely do limit roleplaying. That's the biggest problem with voice acting, even larger than not being able to chose the voice to fit the character (having two options in Inquisition was an improvement in that regard, and I do hope that keeps improving if the voiced PC model is going to be used going forward). The manner in which one says something is extremely variable and unique, and it really hinders roleplaying to have that all chosen for you.
 

You can beg all you want, they will always reply no. That's not what the majority of their players wants anymore. They want a voiced character. If you don't like it how BioWare deals with their games anymore, I suggest you try new companies. You'll probably enjoy playing games such as Pillars of Eternity or the recent Baldur's Gates enhanced ports.

 
Pillars of Eternity is great, but it's just one game, and it doesn't help much for people who both do want to play more Dragon Age games and would much rather that they'd stuck to the unvoiced character model. The enhanced editions are also nice in that they make it easier to run Baldur's Gate on different machines and add a few new things, but they really don't count as new games... especially to people who have already been playing the games since they came out originally, and never really stopped.
 

We could have silent movie renaissance. It won't happen. But it could.

Movies and RPGs are two very different things. If you're comparing movies to game genres, adventure games are much more similar, and it makes complete sense to have those be voiced. The CRPG equivalent to silent movies would be to go back to 8 bit 2d graphics with a small sound range.

 

This really isn't about progress or lack thereof. It's about a design choice, and choosing whether to cater to people who really want to roleplay their characters as much as possible or to people who would prefer to simply control their characters. In a way, the choice of words can say it all -- player character versus protagonist. So far, silent is still the best option for the former, whereas voiced is clearly superior to the latter. Short of having the option for both, I see no way to reconcile the two.

I have never cheated in any BioWare game from Neverwinter Nights on. I haven't had any real desire or reason to.

 

In both Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II I have used cheats very frequently, but for one specific reason: to give sufficient XP to new party members to level them up to the point that the last party member died at. I like to play both of those games through with a full party and make a new party member whenever one dies, so that's the only really sane way to go about that; otherwise you end up with one character much higher levelled than the others, and it really doesn't work out. I've also occasionally used cheat codes to solve pathing problems. So yeah, nothing I'd consider really cheating per say, but using cheat codes, yes.

 

If cheats would solve any of the annoyances I have with gameplay in DA II, DA:I, ME 2, or ME 3, I would... but unfortunately, they wouldn't. As such, I've no wish to use them.

What they chose actually worked out pretty well for my first/'canon' Warden. He would've wanted to try to end the Blights and cure the taint, if possible, so going off on some mission to do that was fine. However, he would probably also have tried to help out against Corypheus more, and he would definitely have been interested in all the stuff going on with the Fade.

I found the wheel in Inquisition to be an improvement from DA:II, because the icons were somewhat more helpful and there was often a greater variety of options. I had better luck picking options that fit my character. However, it wasn't really much of an improvement in terms of actually knowing what your character was going to say, although the outcome previews did help in some circumstances (circumstances where it was telling you the intention of the line; it annoyed me in circumstances where it was telling you how other characters would interpret it, essentially).

 

I'm still not fond of the wheel. I just want to know exactly what my character is going to say and, preferably, how they are going to say it (if that's not left to my imagination) before I pick the option. It's hard to pick character-appropriate responses when you don't really know. Still, since the wheel was somewhat improved in DA:I, I do hope that it'll continue to improve if they continue to stick to it.

 

Perhaps the best thing in DA:I as opposed to DA:II was that it didn't try to pinpoint your character into one of three types due to your responses. That really didn't work very well in DA:II.

Almost without fail, throughout all the games I've ever played, the playthrough that I consider to be canon for any sequels is the first one. As such, this usually ends up being whoever my first character romanced, if anyone. The Dragon Age series is actually rather unusual in that, thus far, all of my first characters have romanced someone; it's not something that always ends up being the case. (Subsequent characters often enough haven't.)

 

Origins: Zevran. This was a male city elven rogue.

II: Fenris (friend path). This was a male warrior.

Inquisition: Josephine. This was a female Dalish warrior.

 

Aside from the fact that they all ended up being same-sex romances, I'm not seeing any sort of pattern. That's not too surprising, since my three characters were very different from each other (and would definitely not have made those same choices in each other's shoes).

I prefer combat mechanics, and mechanics in general, to be both complex and at least somewhat grounded in reality. As such, I vastly prefer DA:O's combat to that of DA:I. After time and reconsideration, DA II's combat is in the middle, yet closer to DA:O than DA:I. Honestly, I consider the mechanics of Baldur's Gate to be fairly simple, but that may just be because I was already so used to AD&D when I played it. It's really not that complex, though, and it works beautifully.

 

There are several things that were stripped in DA II that make me still prefer DA:O's mechanics greatly over DA II's. It was much easier to differentiate a character, build multiple types of character with the same character class, and so on. Skills and stats were also better. While my initial impression of DA:I was more positive than that of DA II, I realise now that was contrast -- there were large improvements from the roleplaying side of things in DA:I compared to DA II, but there were also large steps back in regards to combat.

 

As far as my ideal combat system goes... Rolemaster is the closest I've found yet, although I still throw some house rules on that. In terms of computer games, BG/IW/etc. are my favourites mechanically. I actually really enjoyed DA:O in terms of mechanics as well as everything else; it's thus far the only activated ability system that has that distinction.

 

Short answer: complicated. By far.

From that perspective everything is metagame.
To me is not metagame since i knew the ability of those two Gw and i knew that they would have been able with the help of the PC to reach the Archdemon.

 

Anything that relies on information that your character wouldn't have is metagaming, yes, by the way the term is typically used in roleplaying games. It's about separating player knowledge from character knowledge.

On that note, I would argue that there is a difference between selfishness and self interest. The latter is doing something in your own best interests and I don't think something is selfish unless it harms others.

 
Indeed. The two are commonly used interchangeably, so I assumed that a least some people in this thread have been doing so.
 

Which was suppsoed to be Riordan the man who was already going to die anyway.....

It's entirely possible that your Warden would rather come up with a way to keep that from happening, too. What if your character is concerned about there being no senior Grey Wardens left in Ferelden, for example? After all, neither they nor Alistair have much idea of what's going on. It could be quite valuable to get at least some good advice about the whole thing, even if Riordan doesn't last more than a year or two after the final battle. Obviously, from the player's perspective, Riordan's clearly a fairly temporary mentor kind of guy -- but there's no reason that your character has to think that way (and I'd argue, it's more likely that they wouldn't).

At first I would have said definitely yes, but perhaps not? It's not so much the simple sets as how hard it is to figure out what's going to be said ahead of time, which I did feel was usually more of a problem in DA II than in DA:I. I don't have any problem picking different options for different situations, so I never felt like I had to always take the aggressive options to keep a consistent character.
 
I do, however, consider creating and developing one's character's personality from scratch to be a strength of a game, not a weakness. All three of the games have fairly thorough backgrounds for your character, although DA:O has the most different ones to chose from and DA II the least, so the difference mainly comes down to the ability to pick appropriate dialgoue options.
 
The personality key actually ended up being the worst problem for me, because it didn't catch on to the fact that my character was generally aggressive/angry towards most people, but generally friendly/nice towards certain people. Therefore, sometimes he ended up acting character one way or the other in long animations, which was frustrating.

 

I definitely feel that the oversimplified preview snippets hurt it, but that's not the same thing as the aggressive/friendly/sarcastic option set. I did appreciate having more options than that again in DA:I, but generally speaking, one of those three broad options can fit the situation. For me the problem came in trying to use that to lock in to a character personality rather than those being the three options.
 

It's the Inquisitor that's more open ended. And it's shitty. Only slightly better than Bethesda games. Which makes me wonder, why turn Bioware into something it wasn't? They're known for writing stories (THEIR stories). Not sandboxes and platforms for me to swim in my own ideas. If I wanted that, I can write my own stuff and take out the middle man. I don't understand the need to buy someone else's stuff, and then say "Hey this mine. How dare you impose your vision?!"

 

I'd argue that BioWare's strength has been to create a strong story and background while still allowing you to fully create your own character (or more than one if you go back as far as Baldur's Gate, if one so chooses) and fit them into the story, and that they've been going away from that more in recent years with the more set protagonists. Two sides to the same truth, I suppose; the trend has definitely been changing, and it's a question of what you think of that.

 

The way I look at it is that you're buying the game because you want to play in the world the developers created and play through the story, and have fun with the gameplay. You're buying a roleplaying game because you also want to do all that with your own character, probably multiple different characters on different times playing through the game, rather than the same preset protagonist every time.

Asking around and observing the state of affairs in Orzammar does give the impression that Harrowmont, if elected, will keep things as they are and that Bhelen might shake things up a bit. Since the state of the Dusters was of much more concern to my City Elf Warden than that of the nobles, he decided that Bhelen was clearly the better choice, as that might give the dwarven commoners more of a chance. He also had a tendency to be swayed by his companions on any issues he felt he was out of his depth on, so Zevran arguing against Harrowmont was part of why he made that choice. Mostly, though, it was that the dwarven commoners were the only people he'd encountered who he felt had it worse off than the elves of the alienage, so if there was any chance to change that he felt it was worth taking.

 

Most of the rest of my Wardens have sided with Harrowmont, however, believing him to be the more honorable candidate. My first Warden cared a lot more about intentions and results than he did about honour, and that hasn't been true of the others. The Dalish elf just didn't care about politics at all, and he flipped a coin. I don't remember which way that ended up going, since my first Warden is the one who I've been using the world state of for successive games. I also had one Warden (an elven mage) who just sized the two up, made a flash judgement that Harrowmont was weak, and decided to support Bhelen because of it. She didn't bother trying to justify most of her decisions.