155 réponses à ce sujet

[Sylvianus]

Well, maybe. xD
I didn't know the child was a boy to be honest.

[Lavaeolus]

EJ107 wrote...

On the other hand people everywhere were praising Harrowmont. Making the decision based from that I can see why the majority chose Harrowmont first time. Bhelens case was just not put forward the same way, or at all, if you didn't happen to find and speak to the three or so people who actually support him. 

All I remember is really one guy praising Harrowmont, and that was that tavern bloke who said he seemed more "forgiving". Aside from that, the majority of people seemed to tell me "god I wish those bastards would chose someone already".

[BlueMagitek]

Well, I believe the rule is :

Child is gender of the noble - > Nobility
else
LOL Casteless

[Urazz]

Sylvianus wrote...

EJ107 wrote...

Sylvianus wrote...

Yes, there are people who tell to you that Belhen is a visionary who defends the non-castes, supports trade with the surface, that he is a reformist, strong, and he is not afraid of the assembly of nobles. Simply few people pay attention to what his supporters say because of overt violence he uses.

I've played through Origins twice and the only time I ever saw these mentioned was when somebody told me that he he is attatched to the casteless mother of his child, or something along those lines. That was the only time I heard anything about his relations with the casteless, and I don't remember hearing anything about wanting to open up trade with the surface.

On the other hand people everywhere were praising Harrowmont. Making the decision based from that I can see why the majority chose Harrowmont first time. Bhelens case was just not put forward the same way, or at all, if you didn't happen to find and speak to the three or so people who actually support him. 

There's at least one merchant  in Orzammar who supports Belhen, ask him why he supports Belhen, and why he doesn't like Harrowmont. The way the merchant is portraying negatively Harrowmont is pretty much what will happen if he becomes King by the way. 

But I agree that Harrowmont was maybe portrayed too positively compared to Belhen...

Yeah, I talked to that merchant as well and he pretty much was supporting Bhelen for the opportunities his policies would allow to make more gold.

I think the Bhelen/Harrowmont choice showed that it's the type of morally ambiguous choice that we want in DA:I.  Neither side is the good choice.

Harrowmont  was the good honorable man that follows tradition but it was dwarven tradition that is slowly killing off the dwarves in the first place.

Bhelen is pretty much a villain for the most part but his overall goals for the dwarves are admirable but it is his methods to get to those goals that are reprehensible.  You pretty much have to choose between the two choices but I tend to always pick bhelen all the time now in my playthroughs in DA:O.

[KENNY4753]

well thiws thread has gone off track quite a bit (Thank David and heroism)

So I picked Harrowmont on my canon. There was just something about Bhelen that disturbed me. Then I happened to try the Dwarf Noble Warden and realized my gut was right. I regret nothing.

Just curious but how many Dwarven Noble Warden players picked Bhelen?

[Cainhurst Crow]

I would rather have something like dragon age 2 than the dwarf king example. If you spared the mage in dragon age 2 trying to track down the killer, he ends up showing up while your confronting the serial killer and turning on you unless you pass a persuasion check. You see it in game, and you don't see it coming when it happens, plus there are multiply ways it can play out.

[Urazz]

KENNY4753 wrote...

well thiws thread has gone off track quite a bit (Thank David and heroism)

So I picked Harrowmont on my canon. There was just something about Bhelen that disturbed me. Then I happened to try the Dwarf Noble Warden and realized my gut was right. I regret nothing.

Just curious but how many Dwarven Noble Warden players picked Bhelen?

It really depends on if you look at the big picture more than how much of a villain a person is.  No one has said that Bhelen is a good guy, just that he has good goals.

In the epilogue slide, pretty much ends up causing the dwarven people to thrive but is basically a dictator.  Harrowmont is honorable and the like but ends up keeping the dwarves on their slow self destructive path.

[KENNY4753]

@Urazz I am not saying which choice was better. Clearly Bhelen is better for the Dwarven people from the epilogue but from my Wardens POV I felt like Harrowmont was honorable and would live up to his word and aid with the Blight (which was the Wardens goal for going to the Dwarves). I felt like it was just lip service from Bhelen and I didnt trust him.

[Patchwork]

In my first playthrough I had Zevran with me so Bhelen got the crown for lack of a better option. Turns out the elf knew what he was talking about.

[Boycott Bioware]

The unexpected out comes will become expected if overly used. If i have expected that Bioware will make "choose to do good will result bad", i will choose to do bad to get good result

For me, what important is not the result, but what happen along the way, challenge of principle, challenge of morality, challenge of sentiment....no matter what the result is

And i don't like "the end justify the mean" in every choices

[SamFlagg]

I would also suggest that a fair amount of people would be ok with more of the "For the greater good" style of choices, where you don't have the protagonist having to burn down an orphanage or anything, but perhaps you have to have an army group fight a delaying action that is hopeless for them but will cover a retreat of important forces or some such. Where your options are sacrifice said group of men, or suffer some significant casulties amongst the group you are trying to protect.

Ideally the way you would balance this is make one choice more emotionally advantageous and one choice more tactically advantageous, while neither of them resulting in you feeling like your Hero was a monster for picking one option over the other, but a choice had to be made.

On a related note, I'm sorry Kaiden,but you were with the bomb and Ashley was with the Salarians and the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.

[Ieldra]

Sylvianus wrote...
Meh. I think some people are just upset because the " nice guy ", wasn't the hero, the marvellous king they expected him to be because he is "noble ". I was myself convinced that Harrowmont would have a marvellous outcome. I was so glad I was wrong. ( and I chose him in my first playthrought )

Me, too. I thought "In no way will things go well with Bhelen as king." The important thing is, the only actual reason we tend to think that is because we're coinditioned to think that bad methods can't get good results, and indeed in most stories it's exactly that way. Here it wasn't, and I ended up with a nice surprise.

I like the unexpected outcome for this reason: it subverts conventional storytelling logic and sends the message "No, you actually don't know that going with the lawful and upright option will get you the best results.". 

Having said that, Bhelen's political goals could've been presented better in advance. Then choosing Bhelen would've been an obviously pragmatic choice. That would probably have been better, as long as the outcomes remained the same - the point being that Harrowmont was a bad choice.  

[TheKomandorShepard]

Harrowmont wasn't good guy i think this choice is more lawful netural vs chaotic neutral and because lawful part Harrowmont is seen as good guy i play good hero so i have mega problem with that it's seems no good solution in this quest for good guys.Ultimately i chose Bhelen because i played chaotic good character and i perefer casteless fate was changed and ridiculous traditions too.

[Sable Rhapsody]

Qistina wrote...
The unexpected out comes will become expected if overly used. If i have expected that Bioware will make "choose to do good will result bad", i will choose to do bad to get good result

That's what we call metagaming.  And if you want to get the most optimal outcomes for quests, that's fine.  But it's not the storytelling's fault for being "expected" if you choose to game the system.  After all, there's really no such thing as an "original" story.

If the journey's more important to you than the result, just play your character and don't metagame.

Modifié par Sable Rhapsody, 27 juin 2013 - 09:34 .

[Ieldra]

@QIstina:
What I mean is that there shouldn't be a recognizable pattern, so that we can't predict the outcome purely on the logic of "Ok, we'll do the right thing and trust it will go well" or "Ok, we'll do the bad thing and trust it will go well" because the last 10 decisions were of that kind and I gamble that the next one will be, too.

Or, in other words: neither the player of the principled hero nor the player of the pragmatic anti-hero should be privileged to expect he'll be catered to.

Edit:
I also don't want that every decision is balanced in the way that every option has bad and good consequences in equal measure. That would feel contrived. What I want reasonably balanced is the set of decisions in the story which affect the big picture, and the set of decisions in the story as a whole.

Modifié par Ieldra2, 27 juin 2013 - 10:22 .

[Boycott Bioware]

That's what we call metagaming. And if you want to get the most optimal outcomes for quests, that's fine. But it's not the storytelling's fault for being "expected" if you choose to game the system. After all, there's really no such thing as an "original" story.

If the journey's more important to you than the result, just play your character and don't metagame.

If Bioware always keep doing the same thing, i could expect it, even without metagame, because like Iedra2 said about the pattern. Whenever going into making a choice scene, i would expect choose good will result bad and otherwise.

What the game really need and if it can be done is "the butterfly effect", so the writers must keep questioning themselves about "what if?", and so we may get random result

DA:O still have that "what if" things on most part...example "what if the First Enchanter dead?", "What if Wynne is in the party but no Mages left in the end?", "What if Wynne is dead but the Circle is saved?", "What if the companions hate/love the player character?", "What if the player character dead in Ultimate Sacrifice but everybody hate/love him/her?"

DA2 have no such thing

[wright1978]

Yep loved the way the Harrowmont/Bhelen choice consequences were the inverse of the standard. .
I'd be happy for there to be a similar curve ball in DAI, to keep me as a player on my toes..

[Dirgegun]

I, personally, didn't find that the Bhelen/Harrowmont decision was unexpected. It was unconventional in how the pleasant character wasn't the best choice, but not unexpected. Harrowmont was a nice guy to know and talk with, and my Warden even sided with him at the start because of that, but as I played and saw the casteless, heard about the candidates, and learnt about the politics my Warden chose to put Bhelen on the thrown. She wanted to help the casteless and that was who she thought would do just that.

You also gotta remember the culture Bhelen has been brought up in. Politics are ruthless, people are killed/challenged for the smallest of 'crimes'-- just look at the Dwarf Noble origin. You come across a moment like that when this one dude wants to go ape on a scholar for writing something that 'dishonours his family' in a book. Even though what the scholar wrote was simple truth and history.

Bhelen is a product of a ruthless society, and he has some balls to meet it head on and want to drag it to a more progressive future. He's not a nice guy. Far from it. He's not the only dwarf that isn't, though. Hell. Trian was a jerk too. He was just a more traditionalist jerk.

[Ieldra]

Dirgegun wrote...
I, personally, didn't find that the Bhelen/Harrowmont decision was unexpected. It was unconventional in how the pleasant character wasn't the best choice, but not unexpected. Harrowmont was a nice guy to know and talk with, and my Warden even sided with him at the start because of that, but as I played and saw the casteless, heard about the candidates, and learnt about the politics my Warden chose to put Bhelen on the thrown. She wanted to help the casteless and that was who she thought would do just that.

You also gotta remember the culture Bhelen has been brought up in. Politics are ruthless, people are killed/challenged for the smallest of 'crimes'-- just look at the Dwarf Noble origin. You come across a moment like that when this one dude wants to go ape on a scholar for writing something that 'dishonours his family' in a book. Even though what the scholar wrote was simple truth and history.

Bhelen is a product of a ruthless society, and he has some balls to meet it head on and want to drag it to a more progressive future. He's not a nice guy. Far from it. He's not the only dwarf that isn't, though. Hell. Trian was a jerk too. He was just a more traditionalist jerk.

It may not have been a surprise that Bhelen broke with some of the restrictive traditions of his culture, but that he would be what Orzammar needed to the degree he was, compared to Harrowmont, that Orzammer would benefit from his kingship so much more, that was surprising. In hindsight, it's easy to see that Bhelen works because you can't be king of Orzammar without a degree of ruthlessness, even more so if you're also progressive, but I didn't see it in advance.

Or it may be that I was deceived by the conventional story logic which usually favors the principled, and simply didn't give the evidence the weight it deserved. If so, I want to be deceived some more.

[deatharmonic]

I agree in principle though I think there's a fine line between an unexpected consequence and tricking the player. basically if an unexpected consequence occurs it needs to make sense, so after the event has played out you should be able to connect the dots and realized why its happened. As opposed to surprising consequences unfolding merely for the sake of surprising the player.

[SeptimusMagistos]

I don't really like random consequences, since they cause me to think about decisions less, not more. After all, what's the point of thinking about what to do if the outcome of any choice is totally unpredictable?

Bhelen/Harrowmont could potentially be a good quest for another reason - it has layers. From the surface it seems totally obvious that one should support Harrowmont, and only a more in-depth investigation will reveal some of the good reasons for choosing Bhelen. The problem is that Bhelen's behavior suggests he will inevitably bungle whatever he tries to do, to the point where his success feels like a miracle.

So in other words: random unforeshadowed consequences are bad because they kill the incentive to think about decisions, consequences based on things you can pick up if you pay careful attention are good because they encourage that type of thought.

[Boycott Bioware]

SeptimusMagistos wrote...
I don't really like random consequences, since they cause me to think about decisions less, not more. After all, what's the point of thinking about what to do if the outcome of any choice is totally unpredictable?

Life is unpredictable, that is why it is fun...

Then because of it is unpredictable, there is regret, there is surprise, there is sacrifice, there is adventure, there is chances and there is hope

Yesterday is a memory, tomorrow is a dream, today is a gift....

Modifié par Qistina, 27 juin 2013 - 03:29 .

[Eveangaline]

I like long term consequences you couldn't have foreseen, but if things just seem random in the short term that doesn't make much sense.

[MadCat221]

My prediction for DAI if we go to Orzammar...

If Bhelen is king: Chaos in the streets as the nobility finally rebels against Bhelen for all his efforts to curtail their self-serving overinflated sense of entitlement from stifling Orzammar.

If Harrowmont is king: Chaos in the streets because the succession crisis after Harrowmont's assassination is even worse than the first one.

[Sable Rhapsody]

Qistina wrote...
Life is unpredictable, that is why it is fun...

Stories aren't life.

Stories (for the most part) are expected to follow something like a coherent narrative, with causes and effects, motivations and outcomes.  Things don't have to be spelled out or blatantly obvious by any means, but when the story's finished, it should all make sense in hindsight.  If things DO happen randomly, that randomness should serve a larger narrative purpose.  (For example, Sirius's death in the fifth Harry Potter book).

And I know experimental fiction exists.  We're not talking about that kind of story.  BioWare's stories follow a more traditional path of exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution.