AngryFrozenWater wrote...
Playing a game which involves magic should not punish the player for using a mage role. I will look at that in more detail.
I am not a fan of the whole mage versus templar idea altogether. BW is unwilling to let the player have a story in which he or she has a totally different experience based on the side chosen. Every quest needs to be the same and only minor dialogue chances in the form of rationalizations are allowed. Both DA2 and ME are examples of this BW trend. Good story telling went down the drain because of that mechanism.
I don't mind having a linear story, as long as it doesn't involve fake politics. I rather fight a threat that can be slain than fight for a preset abstract cause. The mage/templar/chantry conflict is such an abstract cause. No matter which side you will be on, the mages are a lost cause, because the system in Thedas is based on the idea that mages are evil by default (Tevinter as its most extreme example) and that templars need to suppress mages. The chantry is designed to keep that system in place. Thus, playing a seeker would force the player to conform with these ideas. The outcomes of such a role are already set in stone, even before the writers dream up a story.
If playing a mage is supposed to be fun then a mage needs to be able to really win. So, forget those sides, please, and get us a story in which those sides only play a minor role in the background. But I don't think that will happen. The cliffhangers in DA2 pointed to a fake political story.
Now look at my first sentence in this post. I deliberately circumvented the word "class". And I bet BW will do the same and abandon the class system in DA3, because it looks like the conflict is going to play a major part in DA3. And that means the mage as a class has to go. Players want their class to be recognized in the game and that is too expensive. We already saw that mages were able to use the staff as a melee weapon, so why not go one step further? BW will use Skyrim as an example of a game that has no classes and sells well. After all, who can object to a classless system when over 12 million people bought that game? The difference is that BW will be doing it for the wrong reasons. It is not to improve gameplay, but to force the player to a role in their dull story with predictable outcomes. It is also cheaper to implement and that is probably even more important to BW.
Agreed.
If you can be a mage in the story the effects of being a mage should be noticed in the game. Thedas has 'rules' about mages. When playing a mage in DA these rules do not seem to be in effect for your character.
What is the point of introducing a certain point of view if this is not adressed to by the game? In DA2 you could pick 3 choices but they overall let to the same outcome with just a slightly different ending. Kind of an anti climax in case of the closure of Hawke for me.
The story as been told so far is in fact complex and can be told from a lot of different angles and point of views. In the end however all those angles and point of views are swept under the carpet to lead to a series of 'bossfights' and the departure of Hawke to an unknown destiny.
TES as a story is pretty simple, so is the witcher. There is much less known about all the other things that are going on in those worlds iow they are not made important for the sake of the story. The story is mostly written around the fixed PC. I enjoy those games but when I played DAO I liked it for other reasons. Thedas as a world is what appeals to me. In DAO we were introduced there and got a taste of the problems going on there regarding darkspawn, different races, old gods, political systems etc. The warden had a mission that had to be dealt with. More freedom in the way I could play the game.
Maybe it's just me getting my hopes up for a continuation of the story of Thedas in DA2 and evolving further. It didn't really imho and I am dissapointed about that. If you choose to make sequels in terms of continuing a story through the eyes of another PC then you should do that, and when you play as a mage this should have consequences for the story overall.
Of course you can argue that the mage/templar conflict is the result of the ending in DA2. The scraped dlc is what should have handled that. Now this is being used for the next installment. This means that the start of the story will be about that. And as written by AFW this is a pretty abstract cause. To make this as a story work there needs to be a different outcome depending on the side you choose.
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