David Gaider wrote...
There are indeed certain things that would be made much easier, story-wise, by simply establishing canon and proceeding from there. No doubt about that. It's the reason the vast majority of games don't have such continuuity between games, and arrange matters so that such continuuity wouldn't even be relevant.
Thing is, you'd lose something too. Yes, perhaps we'll never be able to take this to the ultimate point everyone imagines this to be-- where all those decisions branch out until they create a player's own personal storyline, completely divergent from everyone's else's and where every decision has complete relevance between games... but is that really necessary? Even if there are only select points of influence, that's really no different than in a single game itself. It's a question of maintaining the illusion.
Maybe someone feels that illusion hasn't been kept, and can't be kept unless their every decision is kept sacrosanct. And they feel that, if we can't do it, we shouldn't even try. I get that, and there are certainly days when I feel exactly the same myself. But there are also those for whom the illusion makes the world and the story so much more theirs, and that's not something they're apt to get anywhere else. They don't necessarily want to be told a story so much as they want to be part of it. Isn't that the ideal, here?
Ultimately, regardless of the arguments, it's a trigger that Dragon Age has already pulled. I suppose one could argue we could un-pull it, as we've done with some other pretty fundamental points of design... but I'd say this goes beyond game mechanics and is more of a promise which would be pretty hard to unmake now.
There are plans for how we're going to do the import thing, which I'm not at liberty to discuss. All I'll say is that the goal is to do it better... not to scrap it.
I would be very excited to see if this import feature is REDUCED, then. LIke, canon is set for 95% of prior game choices, and only a handful of big (or small) choices will be carried over.
Likely, this is going to happen anyway, I would think. With future console generations, many people are going to not have their imports (even if backwards compatibility is possible and copying the save file will allow this, I can still see a LARGE segment of the population not bothering and starting from a pre-rendered background that closely mirrors their decisions). There's only so much you can choose in a pre-set background (likely there won't be every decision, from every game, expansion and DLC in your vanilla background option). And if it is an interactive comic, it will be even less data to transfer, since it would require an actual frame/scene for each decision, like if you found Asala, if you got Oghren back together with his girlfriend, if you completed the Red Jenny quests... hardly likely.
But, like I said... reducing all of the clutter, focusing on just a HANDFUL of choices, creating real, deep content to those choices and just ignoring all the rest could be something that is sustainable and doable. And could, hopefully, give the level of detail that many players set the bar for.
If your plan involves that, cool. If not, then cool as well. But I just feel like its a resource hog for litle payback for the players, as nothing will ever be as large-as-life as they wish it would be and its constraints to writing have to be sizeable.
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