Persephone wrote...
KnightofPhoenix wrote...
Xilizhra wrote...
So, as your Hawke has none of that going for him and simply is a lazy fool in your own mind, stick to him and try to avoid sweeping generalizations to other Hawkes. I suspect the hostility will decrease; I wouldn't even be in here if I didn't feel some blows aimed at my own Hawke.
The game does not allow you to play any other kind of Hawke, except via headcanon, which you yourself said that you think is more important than the game itself.
I don't care about your personal Hawke. I am talking about Hawke as presented in the game.
ROLE playing. Imagination. I do this in LARPS, Table TOP RPGs and character based RPGS.
I agree the kind of role playing you are describing occurs, and belongs in, media types such as table top rpgs. but a video game is an interactive media; the point of role playing in video games is to create a character, make up that character's personality in your head, make in game choices based on said character's personality, and have the game react to those choices and present you with consequences for those choices.
The problems with Hawke - [insert IMO disclaimer here] - is that I cannot create him as a character, he is already well defined in terms of background. Labelling decisions as direct, angry, sarcastic is somewhat patronising, and prevents me from choosing a dialogue option with a different inflection in mind - once I see the angry icon, I think of myself saying that line in an angry tone, whereas I might have preferred to have used a sarcastic tone. But then this is a problem in the inherently flawed voiced character, and isn't really Hawke's fault.
Furthermore, there are several places in the game where I
really want to do something, and am left with an incredible feeling of frustration when Hawke stands there gawking, while Mother Petrice walks away, or worse, when I am forced to run away at the end of Act 2, when I am roleplaying a self destructive blood mage who would rather have taken all the Qunari down with him than run - but there you go, Hawke running away without a bit of player input. And you might say it would have been an incredibly difficult fight, but in Origins when confronted by Ser Cauthrien we are given the possibility of victory, even when it would have been simpler to have the Warden knocked out in a cut scene. I accept that player agency is limited in every game, but in virtually no other game have I seen so many choices that should have been presented to the player, and the lack of those choices is what damned Hawke as a character for me. Obviously this is a highly personal thing, as different people may have felt that Hawke acted in line with their wishes. There is a user on these forums who disliked that he was forced to join the Wardens for example, so this kind of thing is present in both games - I just feel that the problem is more prevalent in DA:2.
And finally regarding the consequences of your choices; in most rpgs there are no time skips, so the designers don't have to worry too much about this sort of thing. But if you are going to include time jumps, there is no reason not to show how the world has changed - whilst I suspect very few on these forums would class them as rpgs, Fable 2 and 3 were magnitudes better in this regard than DA:2. I mean what actually changes during seven years? Hell, Fallout 3 changed the world state
for a dlc based on your choices in the previous game.
All in all, I think Hawke is a failed character in terms of role playing mechanics.
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