45 réponses à ce sujet

[In Exile]

Shephard united the galaxy against a threat no one wanted to believe was real. The Warden united the lands to help get past their petty problems and tackle the danger that would kill everyone in the world if left unchecked. The Inquisitor is looking to be quite similar. 

 

Hawke, on the other hand, got to decide which of his friends he killed or slept with. Any other choice has zero consequence or deviation from one scene to the next. Oh, and picking which mooks you kill in between the two final bosses (Mage mooks or Templar mooks). 

 

Because I was given no circumstances which made me stop and think about what was right or wrong, I never was forced to put myself into Hawke's shoes and develop the character further. It was a flat, boring experience. World-changing choices aren't the only way of doing this, but a choice has to have weight to cause us to ask hard questions. Do I let the Anvil be destroyed to prevent anyone further from being enslaved? Or do I risk the dwarves of Orzammar losing the one tool they have to prevent becoming an extinct race? Those are hard choices. And DA:O had a lot of good ones. Granted, some of them had backdoor Third Options that made things rainbow and sunshines, but it still pushed the question in the forefront. I had none of that with Hawke, in large part due to the lack of real choice given to the character that I felt invested in.

 

Hawke got to decide whether or not the military leader of an entire nation survived, whether to create the most powerful abomination in centuries, whether to bring about the genocide of hundreds of mages, whether a Dalish clan gets wiped out, and (depending on your DA:O choices), whether Bhelen succeeded in exterminating Harrowmont's line. That's pretty important, in the grand scale of things. 

 

On the other hand, the Warden decides whether people get to know about the potential magical remains of Andraste, whether Eamon has his entire family alive, whether a circle gets exterminated, whether a Dalish clan gets wiped out, who rules Ferelden, and who rules Orzammar, and whether the anvil of the void exists.  

 

Really, the only two things the Warden does that Hawke doesn't, in terms of decisions, is directly pick 2 rulers. 

[Fast Jimmy]

Hawke got to decide whether or not the military leader of an entire nation survived, whether to create the most powerful abomination in centuries, whether to bring about the genocide of hundreds of mages, whether a Dalish clan gets wiped out, and (depending on your DA:O choices), whether Bhelen succeeded in exterminating Harrowmont's line. That's pretty important, in the grand scale of things. 

 

On the other hand, the Warden decides whether people get to know about the potential magical remains of Andraste, whether Eamon has his entire family alive, whether a circle gets exterminated, whether a Dalish clan gets wiped out, who rules Ferelden, and who rules Orzammar, and whether the anvil of the void exists.  

 

Really, the only two things the Warden does that Hawke doesn't, in terms of decisions, is directly pick 2 rulers. 

 

Hawke only gets to decide about the military leader if you pay for the DLC, to be fair. And I'll give you the Sominari - he's big talk, if lore can be believed. 

 

The Mages die, whether Hawke sides with them or not. Orsino and Meredith see to that, either way. 

 

The Harrowmont line is of the most insignificant consequence imaginable. If Bhelen is king, no claim by Harrowmot's family would stand a chance.So what does it matter? 

 

And killing Dalish... I'm pretty sure Congress did that two years ago when it had the most unproductive legislative year in US history. Everyone wipes out a Dalish clan. I do it before I eat a bagel in the morning.

[Sylvius the Mad]

The problem with the Save Import isn't that it results in only one world state, it's that the world state l it has to revert to is narratively much weaker than one where a canon was chosen and a choice could be actually explored for its ramifications past the surface.

This is the most important part of the save import argument.  The problem isn't that we're stuck with just one outcome.  The problem is that stories in between those outcomes are less interesting.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Your dislike for DA2 an love for DA:O is dully noted please join the queue with the rest of the haters

This isn't a DA2/DAO thing.  DAO just happens to have a good example of a big choice (the Anvil).  But DAO is also constrained by the save import much as DA2 is.  You can't make big changes in Ferelden in DAO.  You can't actually free the mages.  You can't make yourself King.  You can't LOSE to the darkspawn.

 

If there were no save import, DAO could support endings wherein the Blight isn't defeated.  It could support endings in which no King is chosen and the nation descends into a war of succession.  It could support endings in which Alistair and the Warden do go looking for the Orlesians, and then only defeat the Blight after Ferelden is destroyed.

 

But because all of the endings need to look fairly similar in order to be able to build a sequel with a save import, nothing that big can happen.

[Giltspur]

In Gaider's head I'm sure he has several conflicts in mind that already have their origins decades in the making, all of which are independent of anything we'll do.  For example, DAIV will probably involve Qunari stirring up some trouble in Tevinter or Seheron.  And that's going to happen regardless of what we do in Orlais and Ferelden.  The world cares about more than our hero.  They can focus on those conflicts.

[Jorji Costava]

A set character is much different than an open ended one. MUCH different. Geralt's faults and his overall indifference to politics makes the nihilistic outcomes a pill that can be easily swallowed and watched with entertainment as much as chagrin. That's not true for every character that could be made. Geralt is a reflection of the world he lives in, but without having a way for a blank character to interact with the world, it makes the character blank as well.

 
First, I'd question the assumption that if you have a blank character, the only way for that character to meaningfully interact with that world is to enable world-changing decisions. But beyond that, if you don't like the Witcher example, then I'll just go with another: Planescape: Torment, a game that features little to no world-changing decisions, and which is focused almost entirely on a personal quest of identity, but which still allows a wide variety of role-playing styles and interactions with the game world.
 

Because I was given no circumstances which made me stop and think about what was right or wrong, I never was forced to put myself into Hawke's shoes and develop the character further. It was a flat, boring experience. World-changing choices aren't the only way of doing this, but a choice has to have weight to cause us to ask hard questions. Do I let the Anvil be destroyed to prevent anyone further from being enslaved? Or do I risk the dwarves of Orzammar losing the one tool they have to prevent becoming an extinct race? Those are hard choices. And DA:O had a lot of good ones. Granted, some of them had backdoor Third Options that made things rainbow and sunshines, but it still pushed the question in the forefront. I had none of that with Hawke, in large part due to the lack of real choice given to the character that I felt invested in.

I don't agree with the idea that deciding who to sleep with or what companions to kill don't constitute meaningful choices, provided they are contextualized by the story properly; not saying DA2 did a great job of this (in general, I don't think video games do a great job handling romance), but it can be done well. Some of the best stories ever made, after all, are about things not much more earth-shaking than who's sleeping with who. Like I mentioned before, DA2's main problem in this regard was that it engendered the wrong set of expectations: The whole "rise to power" structure of the story and the business about being the Champion of Kirkwall led to expectations that Hawke would be comparable in influence to the Warden; when that didn't happen, frustration set in.

But beyond that, there is, as you mentioned, plenty of middle ground between world-changing decisions and deciding what to eat for breakfast in the morning. Consider the case of Marcus Luttrell, dramatized in the recent Lone Survivor movie (didn't see it, but I'm familiar with the scenario from ethics textbooks). In Afghanistan, Luttrell and his company were discovered by some local goatherders; some of the soldiers wanted to kill them for fear of having them alert the Taliban to their presence, but Luttrell decided to release them. Within hours, they were ambushed and everyone on the team but Luttrell was killed.

If the decision over what to do with the goatherds doesn't seem meaningful and morally complex because it wasn't going to decide the outcome of the war, then I don't know what to say. On the other hand, if DA incorporated a scenario like this, it doesn't seem likely that future installments would have to acknowledge what decision was made. This is the kind of middle ground that can be exploited to create morally complex scenarios that require role-playing without having to deal with the headaches of world-shaping choices.

[In Exile]

Hawke only gets to decide about the military leader if you pay for the DLC, to be fair. And I'll give you the Sominari - he's big talk, if lore can be believed. 

 

The Mages die, whether Hawke sides with them or not. Orsino and Meredith see to that, either way. 

 

The Harrowmont line is of the most insignificant consequence imaginable. If Bhelen is king, no claim by Harrowmot's family would stand a chance.So what does it matter? 

 

And killing Dalish... I'm pretty sure Congress did that two years ago when it had the most unproductive legislative year in US history. Everyone wipes out a Dalish clan. I do it before I eat a bagel in the morning.

 

I was talking about the Arishok - that's not DLC related. If you turn over Isabella, he's not dead (though he might very well be removed anyway since he failed at his job again). 

In terms of the mages, there's a difference between genocide/survival, though I think it's actually Asunder that renders that decision moot. 

As for Harrowmont, well, a living pretender in Kal Sharok could certainly cause problems for Orzammar down the line. Bhelen wants to kill them all off for a reason, after all. 

 

As for the Dalish, well, just because everyone gets their shot at wiping one out doesn't mean they don't count.  

[Dean_the_Young]

Part of my issue is that I just don't much care for the world-shaping decisions even taken on their own terms, independent of the save-import mechanic. I always like to joke that the plot of Mass Effect is analogous to having a highly trained Navy SEAL single-handedly decide how the conflicts in the Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, etc. get resolved, and I don't think it's much less silly in the case of DA.

 

I hope you don't mind if I steal this, osbornep.

[bairdduvessa]

three words "fog warrior build"

[Fast Jimmy]

osbornep, on 20 Jun 2014 - 9:33 PM, said:

 

 
First, I'd question the assumption that if you have a blank character, the only way for that character to meaningfully interact with that world is to enable world-changing decisions. But beyond that, if you don't like the Witcher example, then I'll just go with another: Planescape: Torment, a game that features little to no world-changing decisions, and which is focused almost entirely on a personal quest of identity, but which still allows a wide variety of role-playing styles and interactions with the game world.

 

I'd argue Planescape is a very different beast, if only because the character you play can be defined however you want, but is still constantly faced with its past lives, that it has to deal with. I'd also point out that if PST was a sequel to a game where you played a previous life of the Nameless One that included the Save Import, the game would have been weaker for it, due to the very specific events and characters you encounter as a result of the choices made in another life. If the game had to take a "middle of the road" approach to these choices, then the setup of the game would have been much less intricate and gripping.

I don't agree with the idea that deciding who to sleep with or what companions to kill don't constitute meaningful choices, provided they are contextualized by the story properly; not saying DA2 did a great job of this (in general, I don't think video games do a great job handling romance), but it can be done well. Some of the best stories ever made, after all, are about things not much more earth-shaking than who's sleeping with who. Like I mentioned before, DA2's main problem in this regard was that it engendered the wrong set of expectations: The whole "rise to power" structure of the story and the business about being the Champion of Kirkwall led to expectations that Hawke would be comparable in influence to the Warden; when that didn't happen, frustration set in.

 

Eh. Okay, fine - but that still makes the decisions from DA2 rather pointless, since the romances weren't handled in a revolutionary way. Also, STORIES can revolve around "who is sleeping with who." Because the characters aren't being controlled by the audience. We can't yell at Romeo and tell him not to kill himself anymore than we can chose to have Hamlet not listen to the crazy ghost of his father. These stories are defined by their characters and their flaws. When making your own character and story through an RPG, you risk making your character mundane if you give no method of defining your character's flaws by answering difficult questions. It just so happens that some of the biggest questions to answer are also tied to big choices for others (such as picking a king or wiping out a village).

But beyond that, there is, as you mentioned, plenty of middle ground between world-changing decisions and deciding what to eat for breakfast in the morning. Consider the case of Marcus Luttrell, dramatized in the recent Lone Survivor movie (didn't see it, but I'm familiar with the scenario from ethics textbooks). In Afghanistan, Luttrell and his company were discovered by some local goatherders; some of the soldiers wanted to kill them for fear of having them alert the Taliban to their presence, but Luttrell decided to release them. Within hours, they were ambushed and everyone on the team but Luttrell was killed.

If the decision over what to do with the goatherds doesn't seem meaningful and morally complex because it wasn't going to decide the outcome of the war, then I don't know what to say. On the other hand, if DA incorporated a scenario like this, it doesn't seem likely that future installments would have to acknowledge what decision was made. This is the kind of middle ground that can be exploited to create morally complex scenarios that require role-playing without having to deal with the headaches of world-shaping choices.

 

What on Earth makes you think the game wouldn't have to acknowledge the decision? You killed all of your companions on one choice. ME2 did that with the Suicide Mission (not on one choice, though, but through a series of them) and the developers lamented it, saying "what were we thinking?!" when they tried to create  way for the sequel to be able to handle the consequences. 

 

Unless the game gives you a group of temporary, disposable companions to kill based on one decision. In which case... what does it matter? Who cares if they are dead? You won't see them again in a future title or later in the game, since the fact that they could all be dead means every second devoted to them becomes divergent content that fewer and fewer people will see. And Bioware is not (and cannot) be devoted to making limitless amounts of divergent content, as much as I or anyone else may want them to. 

[Fast Jimmy]

I was talking about the Arishok - that's not DLC related. If you turn over Isabella, he's not dead (though he might very well be removed anyway since he failed at his job again). 

In terms of the mages, there's a difference between genocide/survival, though I think it's actually Asunder that renders that decision moot. 

As for Harrowmont, well, a living pretender in Kal Sharok could certainly cause problems for Orzammar down the line. Bhelen wants to kill them all off for a reason, after all. 

 

As for the Dalish, well, just because everyone gets their shot at wiping one out doesn't mean they don't count.

 

Ah, my mistake. Although I think we will see in DA:I that the Arishok is dead, regardless, and that Sten has taken his role. 

 

And I doubt we will ever see Orzammar as a location or have it enter politics ever again due to the Save Import, so I doubt a pretender would matter, outside of head canon. 

 

And the Dalish will forever be a dwindling race, regardless of how many were saved or killed, because they have to be. Just like I expect the number of Mages the Warden and Hawke may have killed or spared will play a negligible role in DA:I, I feel the same will be true with the number of Dalish killed. That may seem like a self-defeating, self-fulfilling prophecy, but that's only because it's true.

[TheWhitefire]

Fast Jimmy: I think you're very wrong about the Arishok, using ME3 as a precedent for this with Wrex stepping up as a military commander for the Krogan. I think the decisions that are made based on who is Arishok will be little different (Qunari culture is conveniently very... Qunari), at best the hornless Arishok (His name is NOT Sten, it is Arishok) might be relatively more diplomatic than the horned Arishok. Might be.

As far as Orzamarr is concerned, I also think you're wrong here. After all, Orzamarr reclaiming deep roads doesn't mean the location of Orzamarr itself will be significantly changed. However, it might change a number of dialogue options. Will the reclamation and ethics questions of the Golems every be a focus of a game? No. But they shouldn't need to be, that was already brought up in Dragon Age: Origins. I also don't think that the issue of an Aeducan or a Harrowmont being on the throne will change much about how Orzamarr looks, just the ruler, and that's assuming the ruler would even want to visit with any future characters who come to Orzamarr.

Changes like the Dalish not being a dwindling race are not going to happen over night because a couple of important people maybe saved two clans. That's two people, in a world filled with millions. However, tales might be told of the brave heroes who rescued the dalish tribes of X and Y.

That said, I can see where you're coming from.

What I would like to see are more decisions that effect events later in the game, rather than relying on the save import to see the pay off of any decisions you made. Big decisions in the moment that maybe don't have many lasting implications that would necessarily come up in future games, but which are important in medias res, while limitting the big decisions to maybe one or two per game, so that their effects can be explored in future installments.

[Russian Berserker]

Enslave all mages? ... lol that's just  

[Jorji Costava]

I hope you don't mind if I steal this, osbornep.

 
By all means, go right ahead. Glad I could be of service.
 

I'd argue Planescape is a very different beast, if only because the character you play can be defined however you want, but is still constantly faced with its past lives, that it has to deal with. I'd also point out that if PST was a sequel to a game where you played a previous life of the Nameless One that included the Save Import, the game would have been weaker for it, due to the very specific events and characters you encounter as a result of the choices made in another life. If the game had to take a "middle of the road" approach to these choices, then the setup of the game would have been much less intricate and gripping.

I'm not sure it's much of a difference, to be honest. No character is ever completely a blank slate, after all. No matter what, your PC in DA:I is going to be the head of the Inquisition, is going to have as his/her goal stopping the Veil tears, and is going to somehow be "special" with respect to accomplishing this goal. Also, I'd argue that if PS:T was a sequel at all, it'd be a weaker game. Stories about amnesia tend to be frustrating when they consist of a character trying to figure out information the audience already knows; the element of mystery is gone, and we just end up waiting to learn the same information a second time.
 

Eh. Okay, fine - but that still makes the decisions from DA2 rather pointless, since the romances weren't handled in a revolutionary way. Also, STORIES can revolve around "who is sleeping with who." Because the characters aren't being controlled by the audience. We can't yell at Romeo and tell him not to kill himself anymore than we can chose to have Hamlet not listen to the crazy ghost of his father. These stories are defined by their characters and their flaws. When making your own character and story through an RPG, you risk making your character mundane if you give no method of defining your character's flaws by answering difficult questions. It just so happens that some of the biggest questions to answer are also tied to big choices for others (such as picking a king or wiping out a village).

 
Sure, you need to be able to define your character by making difficult decisions, but precisely what I have been challenging the entire time is the idea that difficult decision = decision that will shake up the setting dramatically. This is what I was trying to get at with the Luttrell example; it's a morally complex decision which allows your PC to express your values, but it isn't going to change the course of the war all by itself. I also don't think that creating your own character means quite the same thing as creating your own story: You can have your character act as you wish, but the game is under no obligation to make the world respond as you'd like.
 

What on Earth makes you think the game wouldn't have to acknowledge the decision? You killed all of your companions on one choice. ME2 did that with the Suicide Mission (not on one choice, though, but through a series of them) and the developers lamented it, saying "what were we thinking?!" when they tried to create  way for the sequel to be able to handle the consequences. 
 
Unless the game gives you a group of temporary, disposable companions to kill based on one decision. In which case... what does it matter? Who cares if they are dead? You won't see them again in a future title or later in the game, since the fact that they could all be dead means every second devoted to them becomes divergent content that fewer and fewer people will see. And Bioware is not (and cannot) be devoted to making limitless amounts of divergent content, as much as I or anyone else may want them to.

What makes me think this is the fact that DA is a very different beast from ME; every DA game has a different protagonist with a mostly different group of companions (sure there's the occasional cameo from previous games, but even these aren't really necessary IMO). Your decision in the Luttrell scenario will be of critical importance to your current PC, but I don't see why it would be of great importance to your entirley different PC in a future game. I also don't see why your companions or decisions wouldn't matter at all unless they matter to future installments; isn't it enough that they matter to the game you're playing? Why does "mattering" have to be present on the grand scale or not there at all?

[BlazinAces30]

What I would like to see are more decisions that effect events later in the game, rather than relying on the save import to see the pay off of any decisions you made. Big decisions in the moment that maybe don't have many lasting implications that would necessarily come up in future games, but which are important in medias res, while limitting the big decisions to maybe one or two per game, so that their effects can be explored in future installments.

If you do not have the save import how will the game be able to show the effects of either choice that can be made from said big decisions. If you choice option A and I choice option B; how will the game show you how your choice affected the game in future games. The devs might say that option C is the only choice that future games will show and have option C affect the world. With the save import the devs could structure the game-play, story more effectively with all said choices. If the save import engine is setup properly then I would see how option B affected the world, and you would be able to see how option A molded the story for you and me respectively to our own choices that were made in previous games. DA2 import system was not done properly with the short amount of time the devs had.    

[KaiserShep]

If I don't get to make meaningful decisions, I don't have much interest in playing the game.

I play these games to design and implement a character to see what happens. I do not play these games merely to be told a story. Making decisions describes, I think, the sum total of actual roleplaying gameplay.

 

I suppose this depends if meaningful only applies to "world-changing". To some people, the option to kill or betray a companion can be just as meaningful as selecting the king of some lousy dwarven city.

[In Exile]

Ah, my mistake. Although I think we will see in DA:I that the Arishok is dead, regardless, and that Sten has taken his role. 

 

And I doubt we will ever see Orzammar as a location or have it enter politics ever again due to the Save Import, so I doubt a pretender would matter, outside of head canon. 

 

And the Dalish will forever be a dwindling race, regardless of how many were saved or killed, because they have to be. Just like I expect the number of Mages the Warden and Hawke may have killed or spared will play a negligible role in DA:I, I feel the same will be true with the number of Dalish killed. That may seem like a self-defeating, self-fulfilling prophecy, but that's only because it's true.

 

Oh, I totally agree with you that all of these will be handwaved away and be totally meaningless for DA:I. I just don't think that DA:2 was quite as irrelevant on the ostensibly grand scale of choice ™ as you initially said, even though DA:O had more world altering choices. 

[Russian Berserker]

What is left is the Darkspawn, and the Qunari...and Flemeth

[I Miss Minsc]

Unless DAI  game does Really well on the consoles and fairly well to a much less important PC market.

 

It goes no where.

 

Also, Pre-Ordering a Game REMOVES the  motivation to make it Great.

 

 

 

"Mods Make the Difference"