I've said it before and I'll say it again: this wouldn't be a problem if BioWare stopped carrying over plotlines, villains, and supporting characters. DA:O was a self contained story and the end was full of closure. I felt satisfied with the warden's story being done. DA2 then brings in a parade of cameos just for fanservice and spends most of the game setting up a mage templar war that they abandoned in DA:I in favor of a generic "ancient evil wizard tries to destroy world." DA:I as a base game wrapped up the story completely and I had no desire to continue. I thought the inquisitor was a boring character that was too restricted in personality (probably overcorrected because of Hawke's extreme mood swings and often cartoonish behavior). Before Trespasser I was ready to be done with DA as a series but then Trespasser came out and tore up that conclusive ending by making your former companion betray you and become the next big bad, your character loses an arm because of him (which made me excited at the possibilities of playing a less than perfect hero who isn't a god and has some real physical and emotional trauma to work through), vows to stop him, and plots secretly in the basement to that end. All of that points to a new game with the inquisitor as the protagonist but oh no. By BioWare's logic, all that setup for a continued story was supposed to be a conclusion and was meant to shelve the inquisitor...what?

I still believe that they maimed the inquisitor as an excuse to cut them off as the protagonist while still making Trespasser good. It was apparently meant to be obvious that the inquisitor wouldn't be the hero anymore (because a crippled hero? Who'd want to play that amirite gaiz?). Setting up a story, giving the protagonist a strong motivation only to randomly replace them with some nobody (but keep the same plot and villain and several companions and NPCs) is just bad storytelling. It would be like having Luke get his hand cut off in ESB, learning Vader is his father, Han needs to be rescued, and in RotJ Luke is gone and there's some random new protagonist in his place confronting Vader, Saving Han, etc...If Trespasser had been the story of anything other than a BioWare game (a book, a movie, a different studio's game) then nobody would expect a new protagonist. Everyone would expect the inquisitor to continue. We only accept this because of BioWare's golden rule of "new protagonist each game."

If each games was separated by time like TES or was set in a different country with a smaller and more localized conflict than "save the world" then it wouldn't be a problem. If this was the case we could actually learn new lore about the world which I don't feel we've done much of since Origins. They claim Thedas is the protagonist but they haven't been doing much to flesh it out and have been focused on companions and generic plots that could be done in any country.

The size or amount of things to do wasn't the problem for me (and like the person above, Fallout New Vegas is one of my favorite games of all time). My problem was that out of all the random things to do out in the world, I only found 1 of them worth doing (crestwood main quest) but the game's power requirements system forced me to do over 100 random tasks and quests I had no interest in. I also got the impression that they neglected the story (and side quests) in favor of the visuals and map building.

Is the forum closing trending on Facebook for anyone else?

Yeah it's the second from the top for me

OP is a sexist asshat who hates men and sees women as poor weak little flowers who couldn't possibly defend themselves.

All the Bioware employees looking at this thread and all our dirty, negative words we have to say about Bioware. All the negativity... the toxicity... all the vitriol pooling in this thread. Those Bioware people are probably like "See? SEE?"

 

Well guess what: this is not without reason. Look what you did. YOU did it. You said "bye Felicia." You mishandled all the exceptions. Don't use this as proof. Acknowledge the effects of the causes. It is consequence. *gestures* 

Let's be real, no one from BioWare is reading this thread.

If there was ever a reason to shut down the forums, for me, it would have been because "romances" were becoming bigger than the actual games and it was all a bit weird. I mean they are basically all the same, agree with them until they give you a quest, complete it and then dry hump them. Yet there was a huge sub section of people that got obsessed with them above all else. If they were happy enough letting awkward dry humping overshadow the actual game for all those years then I don't see the point in closing the forums down now. It just feels like weird timing.

For me personally while the things I liked such as story, dialogue options, sidequests, etc...kept getting weaker the one thing that stayed good IMO was the companion characters and companion quests and romances are an extension of those characters. It means getting to know them better and getting more content with them. What should we have been emphasizing instead of romances? The weaker elements? The things like combat and graphics that I don't care much about and can't really be discussed at length anyway? I think if they didn't want people to focus on their romances they should have made the other aspects of their games stronger in recent years.

I just would not qualify as any of that as 'casual' games.  To me, Casual games imply a whole different genre.  And to me a game where you can spend upwards of 150 hours in that game's world, and has any sort of story, and makes you 'think' is not a casual game.  

I've known people to spend hundreds of hours playing candy crush so that's not exactly an indicator for me. I'm not saying BioWare's games are completely there yet (though they have made facebook games) but IMO they are heading in that direction. I remember EA had made a statement some time ago that games were too hard and they wanted to make their games easy to appeal to new players. I also feel like the stories have been more watered down lately and they did not make me "think" or have any kind of moral dilemma.

Casual games?

Easier games, "streamlined" features, unwillingness to "punish" players with negative consequences for a "bad" decision, seemingly less effort put into storytelling and roleplaying options vs visuals and flair, dark themes toned down, etc...Obviously you're free to disagree with me, this is just how I feel and I could be totally wrong.

It's a sad thing to hear and I doubt Chris and David are the only ones who feel that way but rather since they're no longer BioWare employees they're able to actually voice those opinions. The community has definitely had some toxic members and posts going way too far but as someone who's been a forum member for 6 years I have to say that I've found most of the people here to be reasonable if passionate. I myself have often been very critical of BioWare's past few games but I've always tried to be fair and reasonable, backing up criticism with examples, reasons I didn't like X, and suggestions for improvement as well as making sure to list the things I did like. I've known since ME3 released that the devs had been chased away for the most part but I had assumed they knew there was good here as well as the toxic extremists. People having civilized debates, thousands of pages of speculation, art, appreciation of characters, hope for future games and DLCs, hilarious memes and screenshot fails (and free cupcakes in thanks for advertising the female inquisitor )and so on. I'm sad to be wrong, sad that they seem to have painted everyone with the same brush and decided to nuke us all from orbit rather than getting some volunteers to moderate the forums. (Heck, I would have volunteered )

Why?  

DA I was successful.  ME 3 was successful at least from a sales POV and there's little reason to assume ME A won't be successful.  Granted EA is weird and granted ME A could flop but I would be a lot more worried about BWs fate based on how well or not well ME A does.  All this Cassandra screeching is a bit...weird. 

Well maybe not "shutting down" exactly but rather dissolved, and the remaining employees and resources redistributed between different EA divisions. Possibly the bulk going into making strictly facebook and cellphone games. So many key employees leaving the company, the increasing push towards more casual games with required online interactions, the forums being completely deleted, EA's focus on the bottom line above all else and their track record for absorbing and demolishing other studios in the past, etc...doesn't give me much faith that BioWare as we've known it is long for this world.

I haven't posted regularly since they shut down Off Topic, since they're shutting down the forums I don't see the reason to be civil anymore.

That was sarcasm addressing BioWare's behavior on Facebook and Twitter. I agree with you.

Nefla, I need you to know you are my favorite. My favorite! I have watched you from afar.

No, there response on Twitter is to BLOCK you, and then not respond at all unless you kiss their assholes well enough.

What a wonderful way to give feedback, I can totally see why the forums are being killed in favor of such a stellar and reasonable system!

i wld really like to kno how much does it cost bioware to keep this place alive ?

 

That said it seems impossible to me you (bioware) would put offline all the ressource links the community put out together that you were unable to provide to your player base...

More than half the usefull info on mass effect games is on this board ... How could you put it down ?!?!?

Their response to this on facebook is to keep copy/pasting "if you have questions about a game go to the EA Q&A HQ " their response on twitter is to not respond at all.

I'm also one of the ones who think BioWare might be shutting down after the newest Mass Effect.

Well BSN, we'll die as we lived: embroiled in heated arguments and ignored by the devs.

I really don't know how people can only now feel that way about MEA. That's how I've felt about it ever since they announced they didn't have the stones to address the ending to 3 and were instead going to burn the lore to the ground by moving the series to another galaxy. It's pretty rare you screw up so badly so that you have to abandon an entire galaxy.

Yeah, ME3 as a whole (not just the ending) was what killed my love of Mass Effect. Since the day I beat ME3 (2 days after it was released) I've never been able to touch the first two games which I loved let alone care about any new games in the series.

My orbital sockets seem to be malfunctioning, there is liquid seeping out.

If you all are truly so sorry and sad for us, then prove it by not shutting this place down and tearing everyone apart from each other. 

I doubt any of them have any more control over this decision than I have over the prices in the store I work at.

Also T_T

There's a variety of angles that it can come from.

 

Post release, as someone that works in QA, seeing the issues that I cannot help resolve weighs on me because part of me feels I've let people down.  (not the fan's fault, but is something that weighs on the mind for sure).

 

As someone that tried to be active in community building, it also meant not ignoring obvious transgressions.  I remember when the Cullen thread received dozens of pages of porn image links spammed into it, and I felt I couldn't ignore it and went through cleaning up the thread and banning those responsible and investigating alt accounts and the like.  I could have ignored it, but that probably would have been more mentally worse for me.  I think I went to bed around 4 AM that day.  I could have just closed/deleted the thread, but that was what the trolls wanted so I didn't want to just take the easy road out.

And maybe I need tougher skin?  I'm probably not the best judge of that.  I don't think I had soft skin, just more that my armor wasn't impregnable and for better or worse me posting somewhere was a lightning rod for people to derail threads to get my attention and vent their frustrations at me.  So in that sense given enough time it just became, if not "stressful" then certainly much less fun.

I don't know if you know me, but I've always had the utmost respect for you and the effort you put in for us here. I'm glad you're with us for the end

It feels really weird that Bioware is telling us how much they value our feedback while simultaneously pushing us away.

 

It partly feels like a business move, like this is some how going to empower Bioware to have better control on the feedback and narrative of their games launching. I'm not sure if that adds up, but it seems like in the wake of the DA2/ME3 catastrophes, BSN was ground-zero for negativity, and I get the impression that they don't ever want to risk being a toxic cesspool like that again.

 

I also get the impression that many Bioware devs are genuinely disgusted with these forums. Its weird, because we're basically being told, take your suggestions and posts to Reddit/Twitter. Why are our ideas or posts any inherently more readable for the devs on another site? Has this forum community really become so repulsive to devs that my opinions here are unreadable,  but the very same opinions posted on reddit are more palatable?

 

Lastly, maybe this is an effort to purge or rebuild the Bioware fan base. That probably sounds drastic. But wiping out a community so that a new one can replace it is a pretty good way to get rid of all the old and crochety users (like me) who only stick around to be critical of Bioware.

This is exactly what I think it is.

Looks like I came back here in time to see the death of the BSN. These forums represent the hardcore fans, the past. Social media like twitter represent the new and casual fans who won't complain or ask for anything, the future. BioWare has already in many ways been moving away from the hardcore player and in the direction of the casual player for years. I've loved these forums for what...6 years? I've enjoyed talking (and sometimes heatedly arguing) with so many like-minded people, speculating on upcoming releases, pooling scoured tidbits of knowledge together, being able to vent my disappointments, squeal about the things I liked, etc...Maybe it's for the best. I've already been on the precipice of leaving BioWare games behind completely after being so disappointed by DA2, ME3, and DA:I but the one thing that keeps me thinking "well maybe the next one will be different" is the BSN, the hope of other fans, the consolation of being able to talk about my fears to them, and my general enjoyment of the people here. Such a huge, active, knowledgeable, passionate group that is unrestricted and able to go back and forth with posts the length and depth of novels is something you can't find anywhere else. I won't join those other random casual and restricted discussions on social media websites I don't use and don't care to. One the forums close, BioWare will pretty much be dead to me. This was the place I got information (and player hype) about their games and since my opinion has become so low over the last few years I won't have any reason to seek out information on if they're making new games, what they're about, when they release and so on. If they end up being good I won't have any way of knowing.

Anyway, my actual list for DA:I

The good:

-The improved visuals and character expressions/lip syncing

-The map design was beautiful

-Best character creator BioWare has ever made by FAR (minus the hair, facial hair, and most eyebrows)

-The voice acting is top notch as usual

-Being able to play as a non-human (this is incredibly important to me!)

-The inner circle characters

-The romances

-The entire sequence from when the breach is closed to when the PC is named Inquisitor

The bad:

-The lack of balance in the story, the inquisitor and inquisition have one single setback in the entire game which ends up being a huge boost for them 5 minutes later in that they get an upgraded fortress and only 1 minor character dies. The player might also consider the choice between Hawke or the warden friend a setback but it doesn't affect the inquisitor or the inquisition. They steamroll over everything else with ease, the inquisitor is the bully and Corypheus is the helpless guy getting thwarted at every turn.

-The non-companion sidequests. 99.9% of them were shallow, boring, and useless IMO. I enjoyed the Crestwood one somewhat the first time (though not as much as BioWare's side quests in other games) but the others were mostly pointless chores. I want interesting quests with interesting NPCs that I can feel something for. Either sympathy, rage, humor, or whatever. I want side quests to have choices/multiple ways to resolve, dialogue options (besides "what do you need?" and "no") it doesn't have to be anything world shattering, it doesn't have to affect the rest of the game, I just want more opportunities to ropleplay and define my character and fun, more in depth quests that help build the world, lore, culture, etc...

-The power requirements system: Not only did it not make sense story-wise (how would finding a bunch of lost rings, skinning bears for your own personal use, etc...make you ready to storm adamant fortress, etc..?) but it forces people who hate the shallow and grindy sidequests to do around 124 of them in order to complete the story (more if you want to unlock optional zones) it had me beating my head against the wall in boredom and frustration.

-The war table: The amount of real time it took to finish the missions was ridiculous, the gathering ones got you barely any materials, and the interesting little story snippets just reminded me that there were no interesting side quests like that out in the world for me to do. The inquisitor was off picking berries and finding lost pantaloons while the random grunts did political espionage and other cool things. I was jealous.

-The combat system: while it seemed cool in theory, it was totally broken for me. There was no reason to limit you to 8 skills in battle when the previous games let even consoles use the radial menu to use ALL the abilities. Then I had the hold position command which NEVER worked even once, the tactical camera that respects terrain, my companions often ignoring commands I gave them despite nothing blocking them, long range characters immediately running in to shoot dragons from 2 feet away rather than staying at a distance where I put them, etc...

-Loss of the healing specialization: it didn't make the combat any more tactical, you just spam barrier and guard instead of heal and it took away that roleplaying option

-The cameos and returning characters: I hated this in DA2 and I hate it in DA:I. It makes the world feel small, especially when it seems the characters are shoehorned in for fanservice (Morrigan, Alistair/Loghain, Varric, Hawke, Cullen) when new characters would have served better or are a writer's pet like Leliana and are given increasingly more importance and relevance than they deserve so they can be put in every game.(also Liara from Mass Effect)

-Lack of evil choices/roleplaying opportunities

-No ambient soundtrack(and no, I don't count the 10 second blurb that plays once an hour), I was alone in silence with the sound of my footsteps and the occasional river or chirping bird and it drove me nuts! I know some people don't like ambient music but that's why there are sound sliders in other games T_T

-The distant camera when talking to NPCs or sometimes companions. It made me feel so detached and was so impersonal. I can't relate to a little ant with no face and no personality, especially when they're having me do something like collect elfroot rather than something interesting that teaches me more about the lore, culture, world, etc...

-The typical and cliched plot: ancient evil wizard trying to destroy the world, special snowflake chosen one is the only one capable of stopping him.

-No interesting NPCs outside the inquisition's inner circle and almost no NPCs to talk to in general. The ones you could talk to just sent you out for their lost goats and rings.

-The non-linear plot. (not just a DA:I thing but made more obvious since there are no enjoyable side quests and less RP opportunities to distract me) I think BioWare should move to a linear style of plot so they can write a tighter and more interesting story where each part flows into the next and builds on the previous. The way they do it now means it can only be "go to point A, B, and C and recruit forces" and "go to A, B, and C and stop self contained evil action" in any order. The way they currently do it means it feels very disjointed and doesn't feel like one solid story. Also since you can do the parts in any order it waters down the mentions or effects each can have on the next, often to zero.

-The DLC that made the inquisitor interesting(trespasser) and made me want to play them again was made to "tie off" the inquisitor as a protagonist and though it was written as a call to action, a beginning, sequel bait, it was apparently supposed to be a conclusion.

The ugly:

-The hair: oh maker, it's completely awful! Graphically it looks like it was imported from a last generation console (especially jarring compared to the very nice skin, eye, and fabric textures) and most of the styles look like they were chosen by someone who has a genetic disease that made them permanently bald and has only ever heard stories of hair but never seen it. You have half the styles as some form of bald or crew cut, a handful of feminine styles but with non-removable sideburns added, a mullet, an attempt at copying Miley Cyrus, a bunch of male pattern baldness/shaved pointy temples and the only style imported from previous games wasn't something popular like Leliana's style of hair, Anora's hair, etc...it was that one absolutely horrible granny looking hairstyle with the too-short straight across bangs that remind me of the three stooges. The Qunari were actually much worse than the rest of the races since they only had what, 3 hairstyles? 1)The baby-in-the-bath mohawk that's like an inch tall, the sad attempt at corn rows that are way too big and so poorly textured they look like melted tootsie rolls stuck to the head and 3) The pringles guy/schoolmarm look with a weird center part and a tiny malformed bun.

-The male elf bodies. Not only do these poor guys have obvious man-boobs but their upper arms are completely broken and being sucked into their torso.

-The lack of variety in clothing. Your character only get a few variations on the same armor for their class with a few extra sets here and there (only the warden one looks good IMO), the Qunari are especially restricted and can hardly wear anything. Players are also no longer able to wear mage robes though they are in the game being worn on NPCs.

-The Skyhold outfit (oatmeal long underwear) and the ball outfit (manly nutracker)

With Connor i never saw the dilemma there is no problem to travel in the circle while someone else can kill the child if it cause troubles in the meantime,i don't see why the PC is necessary to kill one single child?

Have you ever done the kill Connor route? You have to fight demons. Nobody in the town would have been able to do it and if given that warning "we're leaving, but if Connor acts up ___ is going to kill him" Isolde would definitely have tried to smuggle him out. The whole killing him choice is also not about the PC being necessary to kill Connor, it's about not wanting to take a chance of letting an abomination that has killed many people already run wild for even one more day. If you're roleplaying a templar type character or someone who knows the dangers of magic and demons you wouldn't take the risk of leaving him alive.

It must be said that Hawke forges deeper in the Deep Roads than anyone had at that time gone, and recovers a huge hoard of treasure that makes him/her rich. I mean that's a pretty hefty personal goal achieved there, lifting yourself from squalor to splendour through being willing to risk a really long shot to make or break. She also defeats the Arishok (potentially) in personal combat, ending the siege, saving the city and again potentially in a way that saw the Qunari leave peacefully with the tome. Yes, your companions help *but that is not a bad thing!* Its very good that DA2 gives them their moments to shine, and its handling of banter and letting us know in cutscenes that they have been up to stuff on their own is the best of any Bioware game.

 

The problems facing Hawke were largely treated sensibly for once, constantly ensuring that you can't just rock up with a greatsword and solve everything with an afternoon's violence. There is nothing proactive that she could have done. She warns the city about Petrice and her faction being fifth columnists, and without mounting round the clock surveilliance on them, what else could she do? The Qunari could only be removed by force (which the city is unwilling to do), or by returning the Tome (which Hawke could not have known about since Isabella and the Arishok don't consider it her business until the crisis actually starts). And with the Mage/Templar incident, again there is nothing they could do. She has no authority over the Mages or Templars, but she can start to apply her influence to support one side or the other. There is no silver bullet for an argument as old and bitter as this - unless you really are willing to pull the trigger on a nuclear option as Anders is.

 

As to whether they could have stopped Anders, well in a similar fashion to Merill it was a case of hoping the person could overcome their problems, The situation with Anders is unusual to say the least and nobody in the party (or even the whole city really) could claim much insight on his merging with Justice. And the thing is that Anders has wild mood swings - some days he is particularly zealous, but other days he is calm and cheerful and more like his old self. Considering all he does to help the party (particularly if he saves Carver/Bethany), and his friendship with Varric, the party hope he can eventually master himself. He's done a lot of good for a lot of people in his clinic, and took a big risk showing his face to the Wardens in the Deep Roads for Hawke's sibling. Plus do we ever really believe our close friends can be capable of such awful deeds? Others may say it was obvious, but we rarely ever see it coming from so close (look at the Warden and Morrigan for example - she was clearly up to something, Alistair continually says so, but they don't do anything about it because... they're still a team at the end of the day.

 

I'm not saying that DA2 does everything right. But Hawke is a more human protagonist who has victories and defeats, and that makes for a far more credilble story IMO. People point to the defeats, because they aren't used to having them at all. But Hawke saves the city plenty of times, uncovers plots by blood mages to infilitrate the Templar Order, foils terrorist plots to gas the populace, gets rich by risking big, winning big, becomes Champion etc etc. I felt like I lived a life, saw great and terrible things happen, and most importantly I felt like I *was* Hawke making the decisions and making them in the tone and with the personality I wanted her to have. I had good times, sad times, exciting times, and things happened in the city that I felt mattered. I can't say any of these things about DAI, and if Hawke had been allowed to return as the Inquisitor it would have made so more sense considering (as she even says herself) Corypheus is her responsibility - the Hawke bloodline is tied to Corypheus and she should have been the one to see him finally defeated. It made no sense to bring back all the major NPCs and party members from DA2 who were most closely tied to the plot, install Corypheus as the main villain and then change protagonists to someone completely different, who only says about 3 lines of conversation to Cory and who has less interesting and dramatic interaction in the whole game than Hawke did in one scene of Legacy!

 

Even if I agree that DA2 was slanted more towards the 'Take that for trying - life sucks and you lose again! Bwa ha ha!' I would argue that Bioware were becoming so reknowned for their pampering and puffing up of the player's ego, that an extreme correction was needed to bring things back down to earth and try to break people of this power trip juvenile wish to be awesome all the time. If nothing else, DA2 was different, and an experimentation to break their usual formula. Now, so was DAI in many ways, but only in the sense that it returned to familiar old themes and pampering of the player's ego but in an even more rushed and unearned way than they did before. All due to the curse of the modern lowering of attention spans and the general decline in standards of storytelling that IMO have characterised this gen.

 

There's no easy answer to my ideal DA3. I wouldn't have retconned the missing Warden and Hawke as being a red herring in the end. That plot strand and Stroud's warning that something was already happening that he couldn't talk about, were a good launching pad for any number of stories. I would have started with a mission where Varric is the main character, where he seems to be running from Cassandra, but eventually you see they are working together and at the end of it track down Hawke etc. Hawke becomes Inquisitor, and throughout the story we learn what she and the Warden have discovered is going behind the scenes, but that somebody has to solve the current crisis of Mages and Templars etc.

 

I'd be looking to make the story much longer. Build up to the Conclave, working at resolving the Mage Templar disputes. But also have plot strands where they are trying to find out who is behind unusual events behind the scenes. Basically make Act 1 of DAI into most of the game, and only reveal the true threat towards the end, have a big confrontation al la Haven to end, and whilst your forces are  buying time, have your party track the villain Corypheus to the temple of sacred ashes and have the events there happen in the finale. Have an Empire strikes back style ending where all seems lost, but see that Hawke survived, and the main goal of Corypheus was foiled, and have Skyhold be unveiled as the new base just before the To be Continued.

 

I'm not in the business as you can see of complete rewrites. The fact is that this was the narrative direction they were going in, and I think writers have to support and try to make it work. Just saying 'Oh it would have better if the game had been all about surf boarding or set in Rivain with you playing as a Qunari sex therapist' isn't helpful. I simply would have tried to write the story and structure it better, and in a way that made more sense. But all of this is off the top of my head anyway - if I actually had been writing it then I would take the time to decide exactly what to do. I'm just giving a flavour of what I'd do with the current narrative. As it stands, its too rushed, and only Act 1 is any good at all. The rest might as well not even be in the game.

I disagree that people felt Hawke was a failure because he or she was somehow a more realistic protagonist and anyone with a criticism just wants to play as a god-like figure. I feel characters like Lee from Telltale's TWD are much more realistic and relatable than Hawke (or the inquisitor). I did like DA2-obviously not in the same way you did, I thought the story was very weak but I really liked the characters. I think it was a good concept: "a small group of close friends and family and their day to day lives and adventures over the years" but the execution fell flat in my book. I mostly felt like an errand girl who was too frustratingly stupid or complacent to act on obvious clues or to go out and try to make changes in the city her way without someone else directly ordering her to. It starts with her home being utterly destroyed to the point where nothing may ever grow there again, she can never go back. Then we proceed to her younger sibling being killed while she stands 5 feet away making a derp face rather than trying to intervene or the monster being so strong that they are all forced to run. She gets to the city and she's poor and unwelcome and her uncle sells her into "indentured servitude" (my first playthrough I thought Gamlen was selling her and Bethany into prostitution for a minute with the whole "work off the debt" line lol). Life goes on, chores are forced on her, the rest of her family drops like flies, her lover treats her like crap (again not sure about Merrill), everyone bosses her around, nobody listens to her, she has no autonomy, I'm honestly surprised they didn't kill off the dog. But hey she killed some crazy people and got a nice house...yay?

Personally if there had been a second game with Hawke as the protagonist I would have wanted something entirely different than the conflict with Corypheus DA:I had. I'd have wanted a real game about the mage-templar war that was set up in DA2 and not a single quest early on in the game that ties everything up and tosses it aside.

For a game with Corypheus as the antagonist, I would have wanted a new character (as we got) but not one who is some super special snowflake chosen one. I agree with you that I'd want the conclave to have built up and I would have wanted to explore it however right from the beginning I would be making major changes. First of all, I wouldn't have the conclave explode and I wouldn't have the protagonist gain a magical rift-closing hand (if rifts were involved in the game I'd want them closed through hard work, rituals, etc...that anyone with skill or enough manpower could do). I'd want Justinia to step down from the chantry and become the leader of the inquisition. I would have the conclave involve an assassination attempt on her that was meant to look like either the mages or the templars did it and renew the conflict between them. I'd want the main character to have a hand in thwarting that attempt and offered a position in the inquisition for it as a squad captain rather than the leader which makes much more sense. You already use a small strike team at all times, you never command platoons of troops on the battlefield, never strategize, never formulate your own diplomatic strategies and goals. This way when you're being ordered to go somewhere or do something (though as in the actual game you can choose how) it makes sense. It also makes sense that a cog in the machine would be put at risk where it makes no sense for the only one with the magical McGuffin hand to put themselves in danger all the time.

I'd want Corypheus to actually be smart and effective and for him to keep his warden body for most of the game. My idea was that he'd be secretly manipulating the mages and templars against each other, making them a huge threat to the regular people of Thedas and riling up the populace against them. He could still have the wardens under his control both though his mental coercion and from tricking them into thinking they're defending the people. He'd use the good will generated by the HoF ending the blight so recently and painting the wardens as neutral and selfless heroes again to weasel his way into power, using the fear of the mages and templars the nobles and royalty would have.

You'd set out in the beginning to try and stop the mages and templars and to broker peace but for each incident you'd run across you'd notice things weren't quite right, and eventually start to see connections and evidence of a guiding hand behind the chaos with the mages and templars having no idea they were being used. When you finally realize it was the warden Larius/Janneka behind it is when Justinia gets assassinated for real and the protagonist and the inquisition is (credibly) framed. The different inquisition cells could be hunted down one after another (some of whom you'd have previously gotten to know, worked alongside for a mission, etc...) and executed as traitors. The remaining inquisition becomes a shadow organization. I'd want the heroes to be able to use strategy, manipulation, subterfuge, guerilla tactics, disguises, etc...at their discretion rather than just steamrolling everything though I'd want you to be able to attempt to brute force your way through certain situations where it would be ill fitting and be "punished" for it with an appropriate outcome (which might sometimes only be an extremely difficult battle that you could feel satisfied at having won).

I agree with you that game devs play it way too safe in recent years. Games that have choices (such as DA:I) make every choice equivalent with none "punishing" the player for making the "wrong" choice. I like to roleplay and discard my meta knowledge and I LIKE when things don't turn out all sunshine and roses sometimes. My favorite scenario for Redcliffe in DA:O is killing Connor because of how heart wrenching it is and the guilt it adds. "Was there another way?" "Could I have made it to the circle tower?" I liked in Deus Ex: Human Revolution where if you get that software upgrade your special abilities are disabled by an enemy and the fight is much harder but if you don't get the upgrade you can sit there and gloat while she tries to her her override to work. I want to be able to sacrifice and have it actually be a sacrifice rather than a sacrifice on paper but you keep all your money, troops, companions, limbs, whatever. I remember before DA:I came out the devs mentioned that there was some quest dealing with the Qunari that was almost impossible to succeed at while playing a Qunari inquisitor. That sounded awesome to me but that kind of thing didn't make it into the game

The part in DA:I that I thought was really well done was from the time they close the breach the first time to the time the hero was named inquisitor. It was the only part that felt tense, emotional, desperate, etc...but then unfortunately right after that you get this huge awesome fortress that is never in danger or attacked and you have no more setbacks the rest of the game. There are quests I liked as stand alone quests but they felt more like sidequests than part of the main plot. I wish BioWare would switch to a linear style of storytelling.

After DA2 I was really interested in playing a game about the mage-templar war that was set up but they threw that idea away in favor of the generic "ancient evil wizard wants to destroy the world, special snowflake chosen one stops him." After Trespasser I was really interested in playing a sequel as the inquisitor who now had been made interesting (IMO) with the loss of the arm, the betrayal of a companion, the fall from grace as the inquisition is dismantled or gelded, and the working in secret to stop said companion but that has been tossed away too in favor of a random new protagonist. I feel like the next game is going to be just as bland as DA:I

I don't know if I've said it before, but you gals are allright