7 réponses à ce sujet

[Time4Tiddy]

I'm curious what everyone thinks will be the "canon" ending for this game.  Obviously any sequel will need to have a history based on one of the possible outcomes. 

Personally, I'm guessing it will be this:

PC - Human Noble Male, father of Morrigan's child (assuming she was romanced and ended in love with you)
Alistair and Anora joint rulers of Ferelden, Alistair "hardened version"
Loghain executed as a traitor, killed by Alistair in duel

Thoughts?

[David Gaider]

If there are further DA games we could indeed go the route of having a canonical story, moving forward. We did that between BG1 and BG2, for instance. We can also go the route of carrying forward player choices, as well, though the challenges have been pointed out by others -- having choices being recognized and having those choices result in entirely different storylines, after all. There also would have to be a "default" even there unless a save game is required (which is unlikely), although that's not really canonical unless it applies to everyone.



Either way, I'm sure there will be some people upset because they would have liked some other way better -- there were some people upset that BG2 didn't carry over the party you had from BG1, for instance, but most of them got over it. There are advantages to either method, after all, and in the end the goal is to tell a good story.

[David Gaider]

Korva wrote...
Amen. "Good story" and "retconning player choice out of existence" simply do not go together in my book. If there must be a singular "canon" for the sequel, what would the point be in even pretending there is any choice at all in this game? 

Doesn't that presume that the player is using the same character? There seems to be a lot of presumption that we would do this, but that's by no means guaranteed (although I'm not suggesting it won't happen, before anyone completely loses their mind). Even so, the fact that it's "your story" doesn't really have to mean that it's "your story" for anything other than the one story.

Some people can make sweeping declarations about what we should or should not do in the future, and that's really up to them, but I'd be careful about doing so -- no matter what we do it will be in the interests of telling a better story. Suggesting that you won't play a future story simply because you enjoyed THIS story so much, no matter how AWESOME a future story might be seems a bit short-sighted.

[David Gaider]

Korva wrote...
It isn't about "sucking", either. If the situation could be remotely compared to movies, it would be more like ...

The Fellowship of the Ring: Aragorn is a tall white guy with a small beard and messy brown hair. He is straight and pines for the daughter of Lord Elrond. He is also secretly the last true heir to the throne of of Gondor.
The Two Towers: Aragorn is a bald, totally asexual black peasant woman without a drop of noble blood. She sees Arwen as little more than a useless doll who never gets anything done.
Return of the King: Aragorn is a metrosexual dwarf with a hobbit-fetish who plans to sacrifice the One Ring as well as his and Arwen's firstborn to Sauron to give him a new body to inhabit and conquer the whole world with.

That doesn't mean you can't do as good a movie about bald, asexual black peasant women or metrosexual evil dwarves as about the generic straight white male hero-guy. But it sure is jarring and irritating when a protagonist's very nature changes from movie to movie.

All three of your examples assume that they are a continuation of the same tale, broken up into three parts, and all have Aragorn as a common protaganist. Naturally if the movies are all part of the same story arc and share the same protaganist, it would be pretty jarring to suddenly change who that protaganist is. Neither of those things need be the case.

Also, we tend to offer the player options of who their character is. Is that not part of the point of DAO? Settling on a canon history is one thing, but going from allowing the player to be female and/or selecting their choice of appearances and sexualities to saying "in the sequel you will be an asexual black peasant woman" is something else entirely. When would we do that? It's a bit of reductio ad absurdum going on there, I'm afraid.

Modifié par David Gaider, 16 décembre 2009 - 10:54 .

[David Gaider]

Maria Caliban wrote...
BioWare,

Feel free to totally violate my character and my game if doing so means DA: The Second Coming is a better game. I have DA:O; I've played my 60+ hours. I've had my story. My story shouldn't get in the way of DA:TSC's story.

There’s a cartoon series I love called Aeon Flux. In the second season, Aeon died at the end of every episode but one. And you know what? It didn’t bother me at all.


In Divine Divinity, I played the Divine One as a female warrior with a great deal of rogue skills. In Divinity 2, the Divine One is a blonde male named Lucian. You even interact with him in the game.

Know what? It fails to bother me.

True enough.

I'm not suggesting which way we will or won't go, but as has been pointed out there are advantages and disadvantages to using the same player character/using a new character or using a canonical story/carrying forward player choices and there are numerous examples of both sides in RPG's that managed to do it-- and while there's always going to be a few people put out by whatever choice we make and claim they were violated (or, perhaps less dramatically, that they would have preferred something else) the important part when it comes to a series is a feeling that there is some kind of continuity that ties the titles together. Right now there are a lot of people emotionally invested in THIS story, which is great, and I recognize that it's hard to imagine how this story might be left behind without it being dissatisfying... my only point is that conjuring a worst-case-scenario in one's head probably isn't how it's going to turn out no matter which way we go. There are definitely strengths we've established and we'd be a fool to disregard them completely, even if not everyone is going to completely agree on what those strengths are.

[David Gaider]

Malsumis wrote...
Bioware ignores all the fan rants/wants/desires and does what's best for the sequels story. Which is what they will do. Why? Because they are a professional company here to make money, not to provide fan service to the few hundred militant fans that post here.

We enjoy fan service. Really, keeping the audience that we gained the first time invested in the series is a bit of a no-brainer, no? My only unease comes from the idea that some people seem to think that fan service entails taking their singular experience and making that the entire focus of whatever story is to come -- and that failing to do so is discounting their experience completely. That makes me nervous, but again I think it hearkens back to the emotional investment I spoke of earlier. It's like the people that were so invested in the BG series that they couldn't see past it when we started talking about DA initially.

That's what you get when you establish a benchmark, I suppose.

Modifié par David Gaider, 17 décembre 2009 - 12:41 .

[Mary Kirby]

What if we had this kind of canon ending?

[David Gaider]

thenemesis77 wrote...
So really your telling us that trying to carry froward from the first game is too hard?  That is really sad, you  just said ( and most people got over it) that  tells me that no way will you carry over the story and  that is tragic.

Err... if that's what you got out of what I said then I'm not sure that explaining myself further to you would be particularly useful. Sorry.