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Well, not for content or format, but, I've been thinking...

Especially in light of the many changes coming to DA2 and people's worries, justified or not, how nice would it be to have something they can point to and say 'here, this should give you a good enough idea'. Well, they can kind of already do it with regard to the narrative in as far as they have Leiliana's song.

But far more sensible would it be to sell little foreshadowing standalone adventures (in the vein of the aforementioned Leiliana's Song) which give players an impression of the tone, style of narration, gameplay variations and so on. This does suffer from the main problem that the players won't currently have any engine improvements or updated graphics and such that come with the next game in their DA:O for the plugin to work to its full extent.

One way to address that would be to patch DA:O's engine up to function as a sort of DA base client and all current and coming games as mere plugins. I mean, the technology is already there via the Other Campaigns option for DLC and player-made modules. They'd just need to make sure to keep their engine up to date and backwards compatible.

While handing in extra content after the fact, and baiting people with exclusive gear to replay the original game, I plain think it would be just as sensible and rewarding to use DLC to foreshadow the next game(s) in line and use the same kind of exclusive gear to actually incentivise players to buy the game when they get around to it.


Now, aside from the potential impossibility of doing this technically, there is one simple risk: Players might hate the foreshadowing DLC and not buy the main game it goes along with. On the upside however, you will also get players who are on the fence or would have waited for a nice price version but enjoy the DLC enough to want to actually buy the game at full price. I'd wager the gains would outweigh the losses, and the lack of wild speculation and tear shedding on the forums would be a nice bonus.

Lastly, it'd serve as a seamless and continuing ad campaign for that particular upcoming game if you structure your narrative right. Tell a different view on events unfolding in the main game through the eyes of an unplayable NPC, then end it with the hint that there's a major PC decision to follow right after these events, at the same time explaining why the story can't be told any further and getting people more interested in the story and the game itself ('it's YOUR choice what happens next, DA player').


Yes, I'm very iffy on the technical stuff, but even without flowcharts and exit polls, I'm pretty certain this'd work well.


Of course, the Devs might aleady have something like this in the pipe if it's technically feasible. I'm very likely not the first person to come up with this idea after all.