223 réponses à ce sujet

[Tevinter Rose]

I always play "renegade" and I don't ever remember being penalized for it. I just hope we have more interesting morally grey choices in DAI.

[CrabbyCrackers]

I would want more renegade choices with more consequences. But i wouldn't feel like it wasnt real if i had most of my companions being okay with it, because i want to believe that more people are morally good or at least try to be. So one or none at all is fine with me.

[HTTP 404]

you could say that mass effect 2 had a cast of unsavory characters.

[pengwin21]

I find choices in Dragon Age (particularly 2) more of a political opinion than necessarily Light Side/Dark Side anyway. You can argue about Mages/Templars, Celene/Gaspard, the Dalish, the Chantry, the Qun whatever being good or bad, but it's not so clear cut in game. I think there will be a fair diversity of opinions among companions.

[chrstnmonks]

I don't think renegade players will have too much to worry about. I think DA is pretty good about this. The only game where I can think of that this is really a problem is games like Baulder Gate and others that have a clear morality.

[AlexiaRevan]

 

Not all heros have to be all clean and goody 2 shoe. A hero can also be that person who is willing to kill anyone who gets in his way or opposes him, in order establish order.....which would help in his cause to save the world/land. A Hero is a person who is willing to let the village burn, in order too keep forces alive and well to fight a much greater battle. 

That...is something . I doubt you can use the 'Hero' tag on someone . Exemple in Neverwinter Night 2 , the Sorc dude did this..and he certainly wasn't called a hero . 

[Devil's Avocado]

We don't know enough about the new companions to judge who seems 'good' or 'evil'. if you ask me, these companions are the most morally ambitious cast we've had yet and probably when you first meet them, they're very grey in nature and based upon how you play your inquisitor they could adjust accordingly unless you do something that ticks off their pet peeve and don't bother explaining yourself. Something tells me if you had Loghain for the whole game, he won't be so tolerate of evil acts as one would think despite him being a villain.

[Magister Caedus]

I don't think renegade players will have too much to worry about. I think DA is pretty good about this. The only game where I can think of that this is really a problem is games like Baulder Gate and others that have a clear morality.

That's true with anything D&D based. Good and Evil aren't simply philosophical concepts, but actual quantifiable  characteristics.

 

That...is something . I doubt you can use the 'Hero' tag on someone . Exemple in Neverwinter Night 2 , the Sorc dude did this..and he certainly wasn't called a hero . 

I always thought of Ammon (warlock, rather than sorcerer - at least as far as gameplay. Lore-wise he's probably multiclass sorcerer/warlock, or wizard/warlock.) as the most heroic of all NWN2's companions. Other than Zhaeve, he's the only one who actually does anything worthwhile.

[darkiddd]

 

Not all heros have to be all clean and goody 2 shoe. A hero can also be that person who is willing to kill anyone who gets in his way or opposes him, in order establish order.....which would help in his cause to save the world/land. A Hero is a person who is willing to let the village burn, in order too keep forces alive and well to fight a much greater battle. 

 

A hero is by definition someone who puts the well being of others before his own no matter what, a hero doesn't compromise his principles. What you described is an anti-hero, someone who bases his decisions on pragmatism for the "greater good". A renegade is an anti-hero, a paragon is a hero.

 

I think Blackwall may agree with many renegade decisions, he is a grey warden and grey wardens are mostly anti-heroes, people who must defeat the darkspawn at any cost and by any means necessary. But he has also left the grey wardens to serve the inquisition so he probably is looking for a more idealistic agenda.

 

Sera seems to be the rogue with a heart of gold, it says something like that in her profile so if you screw the weak for the "greater good" she is gonna be pissed.

 

Cassandra serves the chantry and the divine but even if she is a zealot she is not extremely idealistic, she has a more direct approach to things and wants to get the job done even if some decisions make collateral damage, I think we will argue with her more if we try to save everyone that if we don't.

 

Iron Bull doesn't give a **** about the weak and the oppressed. Give him fun and demons to kill and he will follow you. I don't know if he is the best or the worst qunari we have met.

 

Cole is weird and distant, I guess he doesn't completely understand morals and is learning, he wants to protect people but he is unsure about what he is and how the world works so he may be easily swayed to the Inquisitor's way of doing things, if he doesn't freak out first.

 

Varric same case than Sera.

 

Vivienne seems to be a renegade and one of the most conservative squadmates, I think she wants to keep the status quo so she won't like decisions that could change that, she is smart and knows how to play in the court, too soon to say but her connection with empress Celene may be relevant, specially if we don't support the queen.

 

Dorian seems to be a nice guy. As a tevinter mage he wants to free mages from the oppresion of the chantry. He seems to be the Anders of Inquisition but not so emotionally emo and obsessed with the problem.

 

Solas I honestly don't know, I think he will be more renegade than anything else but I may be totally wrong. One thing is sure, if you screw the Dalish he will get angry.

 

So for a renegade party Cassandra, Vivienne, Iron Bull seem to be safe choices and maybe Cole and Solas are too. No character will be white or black so I'm sure it will also depend of the situation.

 

It makes sense that the party is in general more heroic than anti-heroic because the Inquistion is an organization that has appeared out of nowhere in desperate times, the people who form it are different from the rest and want to change things for the better. Anti-heroes who follow don't usually volunteer for these kind of things because they only care about themselves. 

[TheGusWho]

We don't know enough about the new companions to judge who seems 'good' or 'evil'. if you ask me, these companions are the most morally ambitious cast we've had yet and probably when you first meet them, they're very grey in nature and based upon how you play your inquisitor they could adjust accordingly unless you do something that ticks off their pet peeve and don't bother explaining yourself. Something tells me if you had Loghain for the whole game, he won't be so tolerate of evil acts as one would think despite him being a villain.

 

Agreed - it's kind of weird to start complaining about this when a) the last two games in this series don't really penalize you for being an a-hole (in DAO you could just buy everyone's affections, and in DA2 you gained rivalry, which were as good/better than friendship) and the whole point of the game is to eventually save the world and c) we've already seen multiple examples of where the Inquisitor can be a heartless dick. I mean, remember waaaay back in 2013 when we first saw the mission in that one fortress, and you have to choose between saving your base and saving the helpless citizens? The Inquisitor chose saving the base! Which is a pretty "renegade" decision, and other than Varric getting slightly snarky about it there was nothing else that happened.

 

It seems like you're complaining that the companions won't automatically like you no matter what you do, which: yeah. People don't always approve of every choice you make especially when it ends up killing other people.

[DiscoGhost]

if your a true rebel, you dont care about the man bringing you down.

 

on a side note, i notice you make alot of threads that just really complain. please stop. 

[TheJediSaint]

if your a true rebel, you dont care about the man bringing you down.

 

on a side note, i notice you make alot of threads that just really complain. please stop. 

But in Inquisition, you are the Man.  Does that mean rebels have to bring themselves down?

[pengwin21]

That's true with anything D&D based. Good and Evil aren't simply philosophical concepts, but actual quantifiable  characteristics.

 

I always thought of Ammon (warlock, rather than sorcerer - at least as far as gameplay. Lore-wise he's probably multiclass sorcerer/warlock, or wizard/warlock.) as the most heroic of all NWN2's companions. Other than Zhaeve, he's the only one who actually does anything worthwhile.

 

Ammon doesn't fit very neatly into the D&D alignment system- his ingame alignment is Neutral Evil, but one could argue Neutral or Chaotic Good for him as well.

[AlexiaRevan]

 

I always thought of Ammon (warlock, rather than sorcerer - at least as far as gameplay. Lore-wise he's probably multiclass sorcerer/warlock, or wizard/warlock.) as the most heroic of all NWN2's companions. Other than Zhaeve, he's the only one who actually does anything worthwhile.

I'm not discarding what he did . But how he was perceived by society . A player can fall in love with the guy and find his actions as heroic , while another find him a Tyrant . And a society..if I recall..they didn't see his actions as heroic , no matter if the player agree or disagree . 

That's what I mean . 

[katling73]

You should go and have a look at Patrick Weekes' Twitter. He's been doing an AssQuisitor play through, which seems to be a renegade sort of thing. He may have already lost Cole. And Solas and Varric look to have both yelled at him but Iron Bull doesn't seem to care. So it looks like different characters will react in different ways if you want to go renegade. Which is how it should be.

Oh, and to have a poke at your village analogy. Sure, you can sacrifice the village for the greater good but perhaps sacrificing that village means that surrounding villages will be pissed off at you since you've shown yourself to be uncaring as to their fate and they will not sell you food and other supplies and may actively work against you. Every decision should always have its consequences and callous decisions do tend to draw negative consequences more often than 'paragon' decisions.

[Aimi]

Niccolò Machiavelli

 
First of all, it's not particularly clear to me that there's any value in what Machiavelli had to say about war and politics.

Secondly, you're misattributing an opinion to him when his real thoughts on the issue were decidedly more complex. Most of what modern observers view as "Machiavellian" thought is a collection of cherry-picked statements from a book in which Machiavelli wrote things that contradicted the entire rest of his literary oeuvre and political career. This unfortunate problem is the result largely of the inability of certain French commentators on the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion to understand what the man had to say, combined with their need to scapegoat somebody for the horrendous state their country was in. They blamed it all on "Machiavellian" politics, and the name stuck.

Thirdly, this aphorism-chucking is about as useful as a marzipan marital aid. Typing out names or quotes without context proves nothing. Even if the comment is relevant, the philosophical underpinning of it isn't there. It's like when angry white teenagers start mumbling about Friedrich Nietzsche and the Overman. They don't really understand what they're talking about, or why anyone else should care.
 

Okay, so I have a fighting force of 1000. I need this force to fight a greater battle in the coming months. However, in the current, there is a town that is being ravaged and many good and innocent people need your help. If I ignore their plea and march on, how is it bad for me in the long term if I still have my 1000 strong fighting force to fight the big battle later on? How is it better that I lose men helping out this village, which will make me weaker as a force when I try to fight the big battle at the end?
 
Sometimes being too good can lean to unfortunate results.

 
Your example isn't about "good" and "evil", or even about "pragmatic" and "idealistic". Your example ties into a fundamentally amoral military debate on operational art: when to avoid battle and when to seek it. On the one side, there's the ideal of conserving forces for a decisive battle by not risking them in lower-priority engagements. On the other side, there's the ideal of "not one step back" and fighting for every yard of ground that the enemy contests.

Neither of those scenarios is reached in practice. There are always legitimate theoretical arguments in favor of conserving forces for a "decisive battle" or "decisive moment", and there are always legitimate theoretical arguments in favor of actually using troops where they appear to be needed.

In the Franco-German War, French and German artillery doctrines were quite dissimilar. The Germans tended to favor immediate use of their guns: as soon as infantry made contact with an enemy force, corps commanders would push forward their artillery reserve, form a gun line, and blast the French out of their positions by firing in direct support. By contrast, the French army favored a Napoleonic tactic for their artillery: keep it concentrated instead of dispersing it among the corps, so that the army commander could mass it at the decisive point in the battle and win there by sheer weight of metal. The problem with the French approach is that battles don't really have obvious decisive points. At Spicheren, Vionville, Gravelotte, and Sedan, there was no general crisis on the lines: just steady pressure. The French artillery was never decisively massed; the German artillery wiped it the hell out. The united German armies went on to win that war, and their victory created the modern German state.

The point there is to illustrate that saving troops and resources for the big important fights is not always a good choice; a series of steady, unspectacular victories all across the board is often (but not always) the correct solution. Saving your resources for a fight that will 'eventually' happen doesn't help anybody if 'eventually' never comes, if that fight doesn't end up being decisive enough, or if you overestimate the requirements for that eventual battle. Fighting for that village is a useful morale booster (especially if you win, which seems likely), it saves that village for your forces, and it probably hampers the enemy's plans.

Conversely, of course, it can also be smarter to concentrate instead of disperse, and to save up for the important fights rather than take everything that comes at you. There are historical examples in favor of this viewpoint as well. In 1940, Allied armies in France and Belgium famously parceled out tanks to all their units and spread them out along the lines. The Wehrmacht, on the other hand, concentrated its armored strength into Kleist's panzer group, hammered its way through the Ardennes, and drove a wedge between the Allied armies in France and Belgium, winning the campaign.

Saving up for the decisive fight, or stringing together a series of little victories that add up to something greater: both approaches can be valid in certain circumstances. But again, the difference between the two is not generally a moral one. (It depends, I suppose, on your conception of morality...)
 

I find choices in Dragon Age (particularly 2) more of a political opinion than necessarily Light Side/Dark Side anyway. You can argue about Mages/Templars, Celene/Gaspard, the Dalish, the Chantry, the Qun whatever being good or bad, but it's not so clear cut in game. I think there will be a fair diversity of opinions among companions.

Generally, yes, choices in Dragon Age games have been framed in ways that do not delineate one option as morally good and the other option as morally bad. "Paragon" and "Renegade" (or "dark side" and "light side") are not particularly relevant here.

[BloodyTalon]

Dragon Age has never struck me has one of those good vs evil titles of biowares, even me  wasn't extactly black and white.

All the grey in dragon age suits it just fine. About the only real evil move is that thing with the anvil of the void, or using the blood ritual to improve your health by letting the mage waste all those slaves. That was the only real black and white choices I saw inorigins at-least.

 

DA 2 on the other hand was well, who where the good guys everyone struck me has guilty of something in some way, save maybe the guard captian who follows the pc around.

[Jazzpha]

Whew, someone finally pointed out that The Prince is a piece of satire intended to troll the **** out of an ineffectual Medici prince, because Machiavelli was a staunch Republican. Thanks, Eirene. I thought I was going to have to tackle that one.

 

If you want an Italian from that period who actually was a brutally philosophical pragmatist, I think you should be looking up Francesco Guicciardini-- the most "Machiavellian" (in its misconstrued, pragmatic meaning) Italian of Machiavelli's period, whom almost no one knows was ever even alive. Check out his "Ricordi Politici"-- those're a trip.

 

OT, I think the worst that will probably happen if you're a brutal hardliner the whole game is that pure idealists (e.g. Varric) might possibly walk out on you at some point, or just hate your guts. I doubt BW would completely hamstring you for choosing a course of action they allow you to take. That would just be asinine.

[Dr. Rush]

Bioware really needs to write another Khem Val. Really good evil companions are rare and Khem just makes playing an evil character so much more satisfying.

 

"Khem, eat these weaklings."

[Giantdeathrobot]

Ammon doesn't fit very neatly into the D&D alignment system- his ingame alignment is Neutral Evil, but one could argue Neutral or Chaotic Good for him as well.

 

That's because the DnD alignmenent system often breaks down as soon as your character is more than a one-dimentional stereotype. Most of the NWN2 ones don't fit, pretty much all of the MotB ones don't save One-of-Many, and let's not even get into Planescape: Torment where Vhailor is the only one to really, consistently act by his alignment. You can't really want character depth, then want to stick an easy label on them, especially when that label includes such concepts as Good and Evil in big letters.

 

Ammon is of course a prime example. Guy who uses dark powers and unsavory tactics, but whose endgoal is still to stop the world from behind destroyed by NotSauron. He doesn't really fit any alignment at all.

[aTigerslunch]

I'm aware that Sera wants a city to play in.  She wants order to the chaos so she can go back to pilfering or whatever she really likes doing.  Good and Neutral tend to jump into saving the world anyways where as most evil ones wont care, as long as they get the best deal in their own survival. They might make deals with demons left and right more than worry about saving anyone else. More power the better in this sense.

 

 

Following Patrick Weekes does sound good for those that want evil.

[Eternal Phoenix]

Morrigan was a cold hearted sorceress who doesn't mind murder. Same applies to Zevran, an assassin. Shale also doesn't mind killing innocents so that's an entire party you could make of people who didn't care if you murdered innocents in Origins.
 
DA2 only gives you Isabella. Contrary to Giantdeathrobot's list, the rest hesitate upon killing innocents so they hardly qualify for a "renegade play-through." He's also got it wrong on Lelianna and Sten being evil. The former was a murderer in the past but whines if you murder anybody during Origins and the later abides by a strict sense of principles and a code of honour, condemning you if you strike down unarmed people, he is also remorseful for killing the family (which happened because he went berserk and loss sense, not because he rejoices in bloodshed).

 

I don't think Inquisition will allow us to make a full party of evil characters like in Origins who don't moan if you kill somebody innocent. Cole, Iron Bull and Sera seem neutral at best.

 

 

I don't think renegade players will have too much to worry about. I think DA is pretty good about this. The only game where I can think of that this is really a problem is games like Baulder Gate and others that have a clear morality.

 

Renegade doesn't automatically equal evil. Baldur's Gate also allowed the character and the party to be neutral and you had a fair share of evil, neutral and good companions. That's what the OP is getting at here, Inquisition's seemingly lack of evil companions and its focus on "morally grey" and good companions instead.

[n7stormrunner]

short answer: yes, it will.

 

longer answer: this is dragon age not mass effect you shouldn't be worried about petty things like picking a color to stick with.

 

long answer: picking stupid evil choice because lol evil is fun will probably backfire horribly, as it should. for the most part it looks like it more political then good/evil. hopeful the days of everyone at their worst is over now that we're out of kirkwall.

[Eternal Phoenix]

short answer: yes, it will.

 

longer answer: this is dragon age not mass effect you shouldn't be worried about petty things like picking a color to stick with.

 

long answer: picking stupid evil choice because lol evil is fun will probably backfire horribly, as it should. for the most part it looks like it more political then good/evil. hopeful the days of everyone at their worst is over now that we're out of kirkwall.

 

It never backfired in Origins. DA2 allowed you to be ruthless at best rather than evil. The Warden gets to murder far more innocent people just for lulz than Hawke gets too. Also, yes I agree, siding with the mages in DA2 was the evil ending.

[Spectre Impersonator]

Again, saving the world isnt always about being goody goody mr. clean. Sometimes in order to save the world, you must make a string of "bad" decisions in the short term in order to  yield a much greater result.

Your provided example was Knights Of The Old Republic from 2003. What does that have to do with "punishing" renegades in Dragon Age?

 

Neither Dragon Age game allowed you to make easy "Light Side" choices all the way through.