163 réponses à ce sujet

[HowlHowl]

There's no question about it, Dragon Age II, or "Broken" Age, has more than its fair share of missteps, bad designs, shoddy mechanics, and annoying shortcomings(one city and one mountain...really?), but I often see it thrown in the pixelated faces of the wrong "people". I see a lot of hate for Hawke. Especially when the idea of DAIII being about a third new protagonist is thrown around. I mean, A LOT of hate. But why? Hawke, after all, isn't a specific character so much as a slot to be filled. The whole point is that you choose what exactly makes Hawke worth watching. That's sort of one of the aspects of "role-playing". When you blame a blank character slate for DAII's much-too-short story, lacking environments, and, well, lacking everything-else, you show the worst kind of nerd rage, the most dangerous kind of nerd rage, blind nerd rage. Yes, the writing could use improvements, and yes, relationships and personalities in DAII are rigid and much too linear. But DA:O had that same problem. Hell, everything Bioware releases has that problem.

For example:

Alistair: Good-looking mostly clean-cut white guy who likes to rebel against a higher authority(the chantry) because they restrict his oh-so red-blooded freedom.

Anders: see Alistair. Replace "chantry" with "circle".

I just don't see where all the Hawke hate comes from. Just because he/she is the link between you and an arguably disappointing installment, doesn't make him/her the problem. I'd at least like to see Hawke's story finished(properly, not like DAII's half-story) in DAIII so that whole "WHERE IS HAWKE, ONLY HAWKE CAN FIX THE WORDL!" schtick wasn't just nonsense that DAIII has to sidestep around. But seriesly, if you hate Hawke because you think he/she is a crappy protagonist, I have some bad news for you and your imagination...

[xkg]

... ??? ... yeah, I'am listening. What bad news do you have ?

[kromify]

alistair red blooded? i didn't see that coming...

imo people hate not having origin stories. hawke is the best viable target

[HowlHowl]

kromify wrote...

alistair red blooded? i didn't see that coming...

imo people hate not having origin stories. hawke is the best viable target

I can agree on that front. There's no reason for BIOWARE to have forced Hawke to be a human from Lothering but to make him/her more like Shepard from ME. And that is a terrible reason.

edit: And Alistair is totally red-blooded. Born a bastard, raised to be pious within reasonable grounds, hates luxury and being treated like anything but a normal warrior, has an affinity for light sarcasm despite answering to the same folksy supersititions as everyone else. Even his hair! He's basically Nathan Drake in armor. Average white guy on every level.

Modifié par HowlHowl, 02 juillet 2011 - 08:20 .

[HowlHowl]

xkg wrote...

... ??? ... yeah, I'am listening. What bad news do you have ?

Oh. I figured everyone would get it. Well, as I was saying, if you think Hawke is a crappy character, it's because you made Hawke a crappy character. The choices are limited, yes, but if you compare them to any non-Bioware RPG you find that the slot Hawke fills is much more open for personalization than most RPG protagonists.

Modifié par HowlHowl, 02 juillet 2011 - 08:22 .

[xkg]

HowlHowl wrote...

xkg wrote...

... ??? ... yeah, I'am listening. What bad news do you have ?

Oh. I figured everyone would get it. Well, as I was saying, if you think Hawke is a crappy character, it's because you made Hawke a crappy character. The choices are limited, yes, but if you don't compare them to any non-Bioware RPG you find that the slot Hawke fills is much more open for personalization than most RPG protagonists.

It is not about "getting it" - more about being clear on the subject so later you can't say - "that's not what i meant"

[HowlHowl]

xkg wrote...

HowlHowl wrote...

xkg wrote...

... ??? ... yeah, I'am listening. What bad news do you have ?

Oh. I figured everyone would get it. Well, as I was saying, if you think Hawke is a crappy character, it's because you made Hawke a crappy character. The choices are limited, yes, but if you don't compare them to any non-Bioware RPG you find that the slot Hawke fills is much more open for personalization than most RPG protagonists.

It is not about "getting it" - more about being clear on the subject so later you can't say - "that's not what i meant"

I didn't leave any holes for that. Hawke would not be a bad character for any reason other than bad characterization on the player's part. I say what I mean, sir. No backpedaling.

[erynnar]

HowlHowl wrote...

There's no question about it, Dragon Age II, or "Broken" Age, has more than its fair share of missteps, bad designs, shoddy mechanics, and annoying shortcomings(one city and one mountain...really?), but I often see it thrown in the pixelated faces of the wrong "people". I see a lot of hate for Hawke. Especially when the idea of DAIII being about a third new protagonist is thrown around. I mean, A LOT of hate. But why? Hawke, after all, isn't a specific character so much as a slot to be filled. The whole point is that you choose what exactly makes Hawke worth watching. That's sort of one of the aspects of "role-playing". When you blame a blank character slate for DAII's much-too-short story, lacking environments, and, well, lacking everything-else, you show the worst kind of nerd rage, the most dangerous kind of nerd rage, blind nerd rage. Yes, the writing could use improvements, and yes, relationships and personalities in DAII are rigid and much too linear. But DA:O had that same problem. Hell, everything Bioware releases has that problem.

For example:

Alistair: Good-looking mostly clean-cut white guy who likes to rebel against a higher authority(the chantry) because they restrict his oh-so red-blooded freedom.

Anders: see Alistair. Replace "chantry" with "circle".

I just don't see where all the Hawke hate comes from. Just because he/she is the link between you and an arguably disappointing installment, doesn't make him/her the problem. I'd at least like to see Hawke's story finished(properly, not like DAII's half-story) in DAIII so that whole "WHERE IS HAWKE, ONLY HAWKE CAN FIX THE WORDL!" schtick wasn't just nonsense that DAIII has to sidestep around. But seriesly, if you hate Hawke because you think he/she is a crappy protagonist, I have some bad news for you and your imagination...

And your very point about people and their imaginations could be used about people and their Wardens being boring, and not as engaing as well (not that the Warden wasn't voiced). It wasn't the dialogue choices and no voice, rather the player's lack of imaginations?

Um, I dislike Hawke because she was a flat paper doll who was BioWare's character so much so that I didn't have a lot of room to imagine her personality. She was a milksop who let everything happen around her or to her, but never really had the ability to make things happen. I dislike Hawke because she can only be Happy, Sneezy, Douchy, or have Personality Affect Disorder.

I dislike Hawke, because she is the railroad car on the tracks at the kiddy park. I dislike Hawke because she was a Fed Ex messenger and a shill for being used by her companions (they had no reason to stick with her, or respect her). She wasn't exceptional in the way that my characters were who became Grey Wardens.  I mean, I don't see Duncan recruiting Hawke to the Grey, she is just not that great. She's, lets face it a premade, railroaded, linear schmuck who goes into a coma for three years at different times whle the world falls apart (well except the city, it never changes).

And actually, dislike is too strong a word, I am ambivilant about her. I neither hate, nor like her. I can't decide if I would ****** on her to put her out if she was on fire. By the time I got through trying to overcome my apathy for her, she would be a pile of ashes. Such is the meh I feel for her. 

I feel more for the companions than I do Hawke, because she was never had enough perceived space given to me by BioWare to use my imagination for Hawke and flesh her out.  Why bother using my imagination for her? BioWare just wanted me to use her to get from one movie scene to another. She was a vehicle to get to the cut aways for the story BioWare wanted to tell (yes the Warden was too, but the Warden was a bumper car not a kiddy train).

edited for clarification.

Modifié par erynnar, 02 juillet 2011 - 08:38 .

[Persephone]

Well, given how much I am enjoying this mistake and Hawke, I have little to complain about in the character department. (DAO however.......)

[kromify]

HowlHowl wrote...

kromify wrote...

alistair red blooded? i didn't see that coming...

imo people hate not having origin stories. hawke is the best viable target

I can agree on that front. There's no reason for BIOWARE to have forced Hawke to be a human from Lothering but to make him/her more like Shepard from ME. And that is a terrible reason.

edit: And Alistair is totally red-blooded. Born a bastard, raised to be pious within reasonable grounds, hates luxury and being treated like anything but a normal warrior, has an affinity for light sarcasm despite answering to the same folksy supersititions as everyone else. Even his hair! He's basically Nathan Drake in armor. Average white guy on every level.

they did it because it suited the story and to save time, not make hawke like shep.

nothing you described i would attribute to red bloodedness...  

[Giga Drill BREAKER]

I don't hate Hawke, I hate DA2 and I hate that bioware seems to think innovative and awesome means dull and boring

[kromify]

i should mention the annoyance i felt when she didn't say what i wanted her too; what the options implied she would say. i'd honestly prefer to go back to an unvoiced character so that i can make them my own, rather than my spin on a pre-made template.

[Addai]

HowlHowl wrote...
Oh. I figured everyone would get it. Well, as I was saying, if you think Hawke is a crappy character, it's because you made Hawke a crappy character. The choices are limited, yes, but if you compare them to any non-Bioware RPG you find that the slot Hawke fills is much more open for personalization than most RPG protagonists.

Well, no, you had a fixed background and a PC voice which fell into three definable personalities.  This PC can't ever do much or accomplish much, so those fixed things had better be stellar.  The VO was not as bad as I'd feared and the dialogue was okay, but the development of the background was such thin gruel that I didn't even care about her story.  To compare it to ME, I find Shepard a bland character, but at least she can go out and be badass and save the universe.  Hawke is both bland and ineffectual.  I don't even think her friends like her that much.  They don't call for three years at a time, after all.  Varric is just a gentleman in his telling.

But, I don't really hate Hawke.  She's just meh.

[Aaleel]

kromify wrote...

alistair red blooded? i didn't see that coming...

imo people hate not having origin stories. hawke is the best viable target

Man if I see "It's not Dragon Age 2, it's people wanting more of Origins" one more time I'll scream.  This is not the answer for everything.

I'll take peoples' word they made great Hawke's, personally I didn't find Hawke interesting at all.  Did problems with the game cause Hawke to be guilty by association, maybe. 

But at the same time, I still wanted to play through Hawke's first year and see how I made my underworld name, and why I decided to stay when the Blight ended.  I wanted more interactions with my family, more mission dealing with my families history.  So maybe I didn't like Hawke because of that, who knows.

But to say if someone didn't like Hawke they have no imagination or missed Origins I think is nonsense.

[alex90c]

HowlHowl wrote...

xkg wrote...

... ??? ... yeah, I'am listening. What bad news do you have ?

Oh. I figured everyone would get it. Well, as I was saying, if you think Hawke is a crappy character, it's because you made Hawke a crappy character. The choices are limited, yes, but if you compare them to any non-Bioware RPG you find that the slot Hawke fills is much more open for personalization than most RPG protagonists.

It's nothing to do with us making Hawke a crap character during our games, it's the fact that he does NOTHING for ten years besides being a delivery boy for people who are actually slightly relevant because he can't do any damn thing himself. Plus the VAs suck, damn F!Hawke being a posh ******.

[erynnar]

I dislike Hawke, because as Addai said, she is bland and ineffectual. Hell, her "friends" even liked the dog better! At least the dog got invited to the Hanged Man for poker night.

[Maria13]

@ Addai & Erynn

So agree. Hawke is a numbnuts compared to the Warden... Sorry but it's true.

[HowlHowl]

erynnar wrote...

And your very point about people and their imaginations and their Wardens being boring, and not as engaing as well (not that the Warden wasn't voiced). It wasn't the dialogue choices and no voice, rather the player's lack of imaginations?

Um, I dislike Hawke because she was a flat paper doll who was BioWare's character so much so that I didn't have a lot of room to imagine her personality. She was a milksop who let everything happen around her or to her, but never really had the ability to make things happen. I dislike Hawke because she can only be Happy, Sneezy, Douchy, or have Personality Affect Disorder.

I dislike Hawke, because she is the railroad car on the tracks at the kiddy park. I dislike Hawke because she was a Fed Ex messenger and a shill for being used by her companions (they had no reason to stick with her, or respect her). She wasn't exceptional in the way that my characters were who became Grey Wardens.  I mean, I don't see Duncan recruiting Hawke to the Grey, she is just not that great. She's, lets face it a premade, railroaded, linear schmuck who goes into a coma for three years at different times whle the world falls apart (well except the city, it never changes).

And actually, dislike is too strong a word, I am ambivilant about her. I neither hate, nor like her. I can't decide if I would ****** on her to put her out if she was on fire. By the time I got through trying to overcome my apathy for her, she would be a pile of ashes. Such is the meh I feel for her. 

I feel more for the companions than I do Hawke, because she was never had enough perceived space given to me by BioWare to use my imagination for Hawke and flesh her out.  Why bother using my imagination for her? BioWare just wanted me to use her to get from one movie scene to another. She was a vehicle to get to the cut aways for the story BioWare wanted to tell (yes the Warden was too, but the Warden was a bumper car not a kiddy train).

I would say no, it wasn't the lack of dialogue choice. Hell, Wardens had significantly more choice than Hawke. What DA:O lacked in dialogue effect and the Warden's voice, it made up for with giving the player the choice of different actions for different reasons. Take the ending of DA:O, for example.

Would you feel the same way if you could choose to make Hawke a dwarf or an elf? Are you ambivalent toward Shepard of ME too, and the Warden? Based on what you say, the problem with Hawke is that Hawke has no chances to be special, not that Hawke is incapable of being special. Pulling from the point I made above, there are no true multiple endings for DAII, only one. It was more like a prologue, unfortunately. It's true that none of the companions had any reason to respect of accompany Hawke, but that's not Hawke's fault.

Take the meeting with Varric; Hawke gets pickpocketed, Varric helps her out and they start a partnership. Or take Anders, who Hawke meets by hearing that as a Grey Warden he just MUST have an amazing exact map and keys and guides to the Deep Roads below Kirkwall, so she kills three templars and Anders joins(deus ex machina, much?). Those meetings and those relationships, in all their lackluster botchedness, are not the Hawke character's fault. That's plot, and bad plot at that. Now, if Knight-Commander Meredith was about to enslave Anders for all eternity when Justice emerges, and Hawke beats the living Hell out of Anders to snap him out of the exalted fury, or kills Knight-Commander Meredith, your choice, Anders would thank her for possibly saving his life and join him. If DAII had that kind of plot, I doubt Hawke would get as much heat for being boring, because she isn't in the middle of a boring story in which only boring problems and boring solutions arise.

She is a Kiddie Train, no doubt. And the Warden is superior because as least the Warden was a Bumper Car, right? But it's not Hawke's fault she was put on a track, is it?

[sphinxess]

HowlHowl wrote...

xkg wrote...

... ??? ... yeah, I'am listening. What bad news do you have ?

Oh. I figured everyone would get it. Well, as I was saying, if you think Hawke is a crappy character, it's because you made Hawke a crappy character. The choices are limited, yes, but if you compare them to any non-Bioware RPG you find that the slot Hawke fills is much more open for personalization than most RPG protagonists.

This is my smoking robe - I like it. Think I will hang out in my estate for the next three years while Kirkwall goes to hell

Modifié par sphinxess, 02 juillet 2011 - 08:56 .

[HowlHowl]

kromify wrote...

HowlHowl wrote...

kromify wrote...

alistair red blooded? i didn't see that coming...

imo people hate not having origin stories. hawke is the best viable target

I can agree on that front. There's no reason for BIOWARE to have forced Hawke to be a human from Lothering but to make him/her more like Shepard from ME. And that is a terrible reason.

edit: And Alistair is totally red-blooded. Born a bastard, raised to be pious within reasonable grounds, hates luxury and being treated like anything but a normal warrior, has an affinity for light sarcasm despite answering to the same folksy supersititions as everyone else. Even his hair! He's basically Nathan Drake in armor. Average white guy on every level.

they did it because it suited the story and to save time, not make hawke like shep.

nothing you described i would attribute to red bloodedness...  

A less boring protagonist would have suited the story too. Anders' little light show at the end could have been a mage Hawke's doing if Bioware let it be so, and the story would not have been broken, in fact, it would be the same story with more excitement to it.

Are we...talking about the same thing?

[por favor]

How can you "make" someone a bad character if you only have THREE dialogue options? It's not like you have room to personalize Hawke in the first place.

Aside from that, Hawke is a servile chore boy.

Edit: his/her dialogue was also annoying. 

The end.

Modifié par por favor, 02 juillet 2011 - 08:57 .

[Persephone]

por favor wrote...

How can you "make" someone a bad character if you only have THREE dialogue options? It's not like you have room to personalize Hawke in the first place.

Aside from that, Hawke is a servile chore boy.

dun liek.

DAO didn't really offer so many more options, in fact, in DAO, clicking on THREE different responses in the same dialogue (Reloading) led to NPCs saying the exact same thing, no matter WHAT the Warden said. 

[HowlHowl]

Aaleel wrote...

kromify wrote...

alistair red blooded? i didn't see that coming...

imo people hate not having origin stories. hawke is the best viable target

Man if I see "It's not Dragon Age 2, it's people wanting more of Origins" one more time I'll scream.  This is not the answer for everything.

I'll take peoples' word they made great Hawke's, personally I didn't find Hawke interesting at all.  Did problems with the game cause Hawke to be guilty by association, maybe. 

But at the same time, I still wanted to play through Hawke's first year and see how I made my underworld name, and why I decided to stay when the Blight ended.  I wanted more interactions with my family, more mission dealing with my families history.  So maybe I didn't like Hawke because of that, who knows.

But to say if someone didn't like Hawke they have no imagination or missed Origins I think is nonsense.

Your point about wanting to see more of the first year is exxactly what I'm talking about. In DAII, unfortunately, you have to make up your own story for that first year. Bioware's laziness, or incompetence(I don't know which at this point) in that right is what makes Hawke seem boring. But he/she doesn't have to be. Granted, I'm not saying it wouldn't be much better actually playing that out and getting the chance to make real decisions, I'm saying Bioware dropped the ball, so Hawke's true self is the responsibility of the player.

[KnightofPhoenix]

I dislike Hawke, because he was projected in a world I found dull, in a story I thought was worse, with a role that I thought was useless and would not make much sense unless I play an irresponsible playboy.

I could not change any of that in the game.

[HowlHowl]

por favor wrote...

How can you "make" someone a bad character if you only have THREE dialogue options? It's not like you have room to personalize Hawke in the first place.

Aside from that, Hawke is a servile chore boy.

Edit: his/her dialogue was also annoying. 

The end.

The Warden barely got any kind of reaction from anyone. MOST of the characters you could interact with that weren't in your party ended up dead by the end of the quest or didn't respond to your statements any differently.
Most RPG characters don't even get three dialogue options.

Chore boy? How does any of that separate Hawke from almost every RPG custom character ever?

Seriously:

Japanese RPG:

Man: "Hey I'll give you this amulet if you kill the rats in my basement."
You: "No, I'm the chosen one. Give me the damn amulet."
Man: "Nah. In fact, I'll go sell it. That way this one part boring quest can turn into a two part boring quest."

Western RPG:

Hot Chick: "Hey I'll join your team if you go steal this thing from a merchant guy."
You: "What? No. I'm a badass with a mod to make my hair look good. Just join me."
Hot Chick: "Nah. Now your only romance option is a gay Spanish elf."