13 réponses à ce sujet

[Arys Dayne]

I really have a problem with the way the whole "bombing the chantry" thing works out.
If you do the quest where you have to get the reagents for Anders to allegedly make a potion to separate him from Justice, afterwards he asks you to help him enter the chantry undetected. If you investigate further about that before telling him yes/no you learn that there is no potion, that it never was about separating Anders and Justice. And Anders refuses to tell you what he's going to do in the chantry.
I knew right there what he was up to. So where is the "I'm going to stop you crazy lunatic right here!" conversation option? When he did blow up the chantry later I didn't think "No Anders, what have you done?!" but rather "I knew it, and I couldn't stop him because... this is a game and there was no option to do that." This really broke the narrative for me.

This whole "I need to get into the chantry but I won't tell you why, oh and you just got some reagents for me which coincidentally sound like they could be used for fire/explosion" thing is pretty obvious. But Hawke is either unable to put one and one together or doesn't care?
Why aren't we allowed to try to stop him when he asks for help getting into the chantry? Just let him escape as soon as Hawke tries to stop him, so he can blow up the chantry anway. Or let him tell some not totally suspicious story to Hawke about why he needs to get into the chantry, like he needs to get some additional reagents from there for his potion or he needs to talk to someone in there in private.

[Vukodlak]

Because its a key plot point in the story, if you skip that last companion quest it still happens. Your the champion of Kirkwall not god. You can't control everything. After the further investigation, you certainly had the choice as to help him or not.

You do have a choice, for Hawke, but you can't make choices for other characters outside of battle.

[staindgrey]

I completely, 100% agree. I want some sort of Wrex-on-Virmire scenario where I have to either talk him down or kill him because I fail to reason with him. When the Chantry blew, I thought I'd ruined everything by trusting him. Then I ask around only to find out that he blew it up everywhere else, too.

Can't a revolution be sparked without the building and all those innocents dying? Can't Hawke actually lead the revolution? For all of this emphasis on the Champion, it seems like he/she actually had only a minor role in the final result of things. Hawke was deemed the Champion for everything done with the qunari threat, but as for the mage/templar battle and the aftermath, I felt kind of useless.

[Arys Dayne]

Vukodlak wrote...

Because its a key plot point in the story, if you skip that last companion quest it still happens. Your the champion of Kirkwall not god. You can't control everything. After the further investigation, you certainly had the choice as to help him or not.

You do have a choice, for Hawke, but you can't make choices for other characters outside of battle.

You have the choice to help or not to help him. But there was no "So you want to blow up the chantry? Try doing that when you're DEAD!" option. For the player it's not to hard to figure out that Anders wants to destroy the chantry, but Hawke doesn't get it?

Really, at this point, if you know what he is going to do, the three sane choices are:
a) Talk him out of it
kill him
c) hand him over to Cullen
But none of that is possible.

And the story could still easily have worked that way. If you try to talk him out of it, you don't succeed, you only think you did. So he still blows the chantry up. Yay for even more betrayal. If you try to kill him, he escapes and blows the chantry up. And if you give him up to the templars, he escapes and... blows the chantry up.
So the story works out the same way but at least you tried to do something. As it stands now Hawke is either unable to figure out what Anders is doing (which basically means he's stupid) or doesn't care.

Modifié par Arys Dayne, 12 mars 2011 - 11:13 .

[SmokePants]

So, you're saying BioWare should put more spoilers in the dialogue options. Player characters should always have a dialogue option that draws attention to a major plot twist -- even one as obvious as that?

In Mass Effect, should Sheperd have had an option where he says, "You know, I bet Sovereign is a Reaper", just because the player may have strongly suspected it?

[Arys Dayne]

That wasn't really a plot twist, it was rather obvious if you took the time to talk a bit with Anders.

There could have been an conversation option like "I can't let you do that" which only shows up after you have gotten the reagents and after you investigated about what Anders was going to do in the chantry. Then it wouldn't have been a spoiler, because at that point it was obvious what he was up to.

Or the easy solution: Don't make it that obvious that Anders is going to do something bad. Have him lie and tell something which sounds perfectly resonable, so that neither Hawke nor the player suspect anything.

What was the point in making it that obvious anyway? Making it possible to find out that Anders is up to something really bad without adding an option to at least try to to something about that doesn't make sense. The hero overlooking something really important might work in a book or a movie, but not in a RPG.

[Husudu]

I felt that the chantry blowing up regardless of what you did was needed. A mage needed to do something drastic to force change. You wanted choices?? how about the hundreds of mages being turned tranquil over the course of the game the only choice i wanted was to bash some templars heads in sooner.

The fact is if Anders didnt blow up that chantry the rebellion wouldnt have started everything would have stayed the same. Meridith would have talked to the chantry mother and she would have tried to play the mediator but in the end it all comes down to some one had to do something. i agree with Anders blowing up that chantry they offered no help to mages and its that bs religions fault that mages are locked in towers secluded from the world.

[Volourn]

I don't about thsi quest, but there is a LOT of chocie and a LOT of consequence in the game. Probably the most in *any* BIO game by far.

[SmokePants]

If it's not a plot twist, then it's a plot fulcrum. They made it obvious, because they wanted the player to have the choice to knowingly help him or not.

If he had admitted outright what he was going to do, then I would agree that some lip service would have to be paid for Hawke trying to actively stop him. But he never admits it, you can't prove anything, you can't watch his every move, and hopefully Hawke would grant some benefit of the doubt to the people he closely associates with. And if Hawke chose not to closely associate, I don't think that quest would even appear.

I don't have a problem with it. You don't know for sure what's going to happen until it happens.

Modifié par SmokePants, 12 mars 2011 - 01:12 .

[Oneiropolos]

Actually, there's several crucial points where choice does not matter except in a token way. And everyone assumes -someone else- couldn't have done it if we talked Anders down. Maybe even Anders being talked down but it being too late because one of his associates in the mage underground stole his ingredients and did it all instead. So everyone looks to Anders to blame, but a slightly different scene plays out where Anders tells you how he -didn't- do it because of what you said. It could still lead to an even MORE tragic having to kill him because everyone is demanding justice and Anders is the one out there. Or the templars themselves trying to execute him and you having to decide right there which side you take. There's lots of ways the story could have went that STILL wouldn't have altered what the public believed happened (And so the Seekers only know that version until Varric explains the difference) and they wouldn't have changed that war would come between the mages and the templars. It just would have let you actually DO SOMETHING about it.

And Leandra's death was really well written and tore my heart out, but I'm exceedingly bitter that even if you use ways to practically get there immediately, you can't stop it. What, them NOT killing your mother off would radically change the story? It's not like any sane person can look at Hawke and go, "You know, we've killed off her father, her brother, and her sister's dead/or lifespan greatly shortened... Hm. God. She has to be the most chipper person on the planet right now. Let's kill off her mother so they grasp that Hawke really is a sad character." Hawke fought at the Battle of Ostagar, witnessed that moment of despair, saw their own king fall, then lost their entire village, spent a year as an indentured servant, and loses all of their family except Uncle Gamlen. Honestly. I get the argument of "But Leandra's death gives a balance to how bad blood mages are"... but I would have felt that if I had stumbled in JUST IN TIME To save my mother from the blood mage. It'd still be "You went after my -mother-. DIE." I still immensely disagree with the complete lack of option in that plot development and in Anders. There's a few other frustrating moments, but those two topped the list as needing seriously fleshing out and look at alternative things the players could have done for even a slightly tweaked outcome. I trust in Bioware's ability to pull that off, if it was any other company I'd be agreeing with the sentiment that they just were trying to tell a story and we just have to go along with it. Bioware has demonstrated things don't have to be like that in the past, so maybe we're a bit spoiled, but we also can't be blamed for being disappointed in those elements. I still love the game, not as much as Origins, but I do love it. I just feel it may have needed a little while longer in creation even though the wait would have killed me.

[YamiSnuffles]

This was the one choice (or lack thereof) that drove me insane. It was obvious the whole game that Kirkwall was heading toward a meltdown. So, while I felt mostly powerless, I at least felt like I could help some people. However, considering I romanced Anders, I felt crushed by this lack of choice. Considering I fought for mages at every opportunity and everything else, I think he should have trusted me enough to tell me his plan. I knew he was going to do something terrible but there was nothing I could do about it. I just wanted the opportunity to help him. I was the Champion, I think I could have started a war on the Templars (and I would have had absolutely no complaints starting something with Meredith). My voice holds a lot of weight. I would have gladly taken the choice to start all hell if I could have stopped Anders from doing something terrible.

Modifié par YamiSnuffles, 12 mars 2011 - 01:30 .

[Tim_Hamilton]

The idea of Dragon Age II is that Varric is telling the story of Hawke.. If Hawke helps Anders thats part of the story that you "play" IF Hawke does not help Anders or any other character for that matter Varric Cannot or will not include that quest in his story.. it does not mean Anders could not manage on his own some how, as we all know the team members have their own lives and homes and jobs outside of bandit slaying and cave plundering. When I first played I did not side with Anders, and it made complete sence that he blew the chantry up in my play through.. When I did my second play through I realised Hawke had a hand in how that played out..

You have to imagine your self as the player at your desk, or on the sofa as BEING VARRIC.. YOU are telling the story of hawke and hawke alone...

[Icy Magebane]

There was a part where you could say "there was never any potion, was there?" I would have followed that up by, "Give me the ingredients. NOW." And then blasted him with a lightning bolt if he didn't comply. Oh well. The game forces a lot of the plot... that's just how it is. The only annoying part is that DA2 often gives you many options that end up leading to the same place. It makes you think that you're doing things differently, and in a sense you are, but I fail to see how so many things are inevitable, regardless of how you approach the situation.

[DrowNoble]

SmokePants wrote...

So, you're saying BioWare should put more spoilers in the dialogue options. Player characters should always have a dialogue option that draws attention to a major plot twist -- even one as obvious as that?

In Mass Effect, should Sheperd have had an option where he says, "You know, I bet Sovereign is a Reaper", just because the player may have strongly suspected it?

That is not the issue and you are missing the point.  I agree that blowing up the Chantry shouldn't have been done in a cutscene that I had no control of.  In my 1st playthrough, I didn't even deal with Anders until I lost Bethany in the Deep Roads, so I never snuck into the Chantry, never got him any reagents, nothing.  Yet, at the end he still somehow blew up the Chantry.

Bioware did amazingly well in Mass Effect, but is fumbling a bit in DA.  The Chantry "had" to be blown up?  Why?  Anders should of initiated some dialogue that I would have options to either help him, stop him or whatever.  Taking a major plot point and just forcing it to happen regardless of my choices defeats the whole purpose of a game where Bioware WANTS my choices to have consequences.