395 réponses à ce sujet

[robertthebard]

Traitors are different from mere spies, particularly when they cause the death of your agents. Killing someone as a pragmatic method of dealing with a threat is not the same as murdering out of spite someone who is wholly in your power, has done nothing seriously wrong and presents no real threat.

The traitor is worse because they are a traitor, whereas many of the people we kill are simply defending themselves from the attack of the inquisitor.

My Inquisitor demonstrated mercy on many occasions. They always served the greater good. There was no reason for Leliana to think that they would in any way condone the murder of a captive

Except that spies and traitors are charged with the same crimes. Killing a spy w/out due process is not serving the greater good, it is serving one's desire for revenge. But you're totally correct, if we didn't attack those mages or Templars in the Hinterlands, they'd just wave and chat us up... Except that they wouldn't, would they? Neither would the Red Templars or Venatori we encounter later? That's sort of spiraling down into the ridiculous isn't it? When you have to go that far to justify a point, I'd say there's something wrong with the point.

[Draining Dragon]

Yes, because luck fogic.

[trooper11]

The inquisitor isn't some magician who can change her outlook entirely by ONLY ONCE picking the correct option to "unharden" her.

She has her own character development that can only be realigned by your inquisitor depending on a strict set of consistent choices.

 

She remains relatively hardcore no matter what  you do, but the main difference is that by the time she becomes the Divine (presumably much later), she lets go of the darkness and takes up the mantle of a radical but peaceful diplomat that Josephine so dearly wanted her to be like.

 

So honestly, I see nothing wrong with this approach and frankly it's completely logical.

 

 

Again, the issue is not whether Leliana was hardened before or not.  The issue is that a seemingly crucial choice comes down to one choice at the beginning of the game. 

 

You yourself say that its silly to think that the Inquisitor can affect her with a single choice, but you can flip that around too:  If you incorrectly choose at the beginning of the game, you have lost any chance of redemption later on, after many, many, many hours of gameplay filled with who knows how many choices along the way. I guess my biggest gripe is that taking the neutral choice in that first encounter is the same as directly encouraging her. 

 

I still think its reasonably logical to allow this to grow over the course of the game, allowing us to have more influence over Leliana as we get to know each other through dialog or missions. Real life is filled with those situations.  Wouldn't it make sense that if Leliana was already hardened coming into the game that it would take some time and several events to turn her thinking? 

 

Plus, if Leliana' was just focused on 'doing her job', then I would think it would be reasonable to assume she would follow your orders if you tell her not to kill the Chantry sister.  Instead, she quite literally lost control and ignored you, even insulting you in the process.  It felt strange to me considering the relationship we had built up since the beginning and based on the way I was leading the inquisition.

 

If only they had fleshed out Leliana's character more via dialog with the Inquisitor and a personal quest and allowed a bit more wiggle room early on in the choices you could make, I would bet very few, if any, would complain about it.

[Kelwing]

Well I got to the point where she ended up killing the Sister. I had done everything to soften her and she she still did it. I can't think of any choices I messed up that hardened her like that.

[trooper11]

Something else that I forgot to mention in all of this that led to my surprise in the way Leliana reacts to the Chantry sister situation.

 

I remember a war table mission that was called Double Agent.  In that mission, Leliana is tasked with hunting down the agent who is actively working with the Venatori.  The report comes back and instead of killing him, she agrees to let him live in prison in exchange for everything he knows. 

 

Events like that led me to believe she would be open to the same result going forward, instead she loses it.  I guess its a bit understandable she would be more upset in this moment because the one at fault has closer ties to her, but if Leliana was already truly hardened before that moment, why spare a double agent that was actively working with the Venatori?

[Nykara]

I do like this actually where your choices right the way through can have lasting consquences for your companions. Sometimes it truly does only take one bad choice to mess someone up, especially when you are a leader and especially someone who is already messed up.

[Lung Drago]

The thing I don't enjoy is how extremely binary the decisions and outcomes end up being. It only takes a single moment where you decide to take the more brutal choice for Leliana to go completely psycho. Doesn't matter how much you keep pushing her to reign in the cray, any single moment where you make that hard decision is all the excuse she needs to go completely ruthless. That sort of restriction just feels stupid.

 

There are very good reasons to kill the traitor at the beginning of the game. HE'S A TRAITOR. He's killed one of our own, and he's a huge threat to the fledging Inquisition. That doesn't mean you don't care. That doesn't mean that killing people is the best solution all the time. That doesn't mean that under different circumstances things would be different. 

 

But no matter how much you push Leliana to understand this, she still chooses to go full crazy at the end. 

 

It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't so extreme. After all I like Leliana to be a little ruthless. This isn't some chantry bake sale we're running here, this is the full on Inquisition. We have a lot of power and as such we have a lot of enemies, especially towards the end of the game when you do Leliana's quest. People will eat us alive if we're too soft. We need a spymaster who can make these ruthless decisions if we need to. Let's face it, that's part of what made Leliana so effective. But you can still be willing to look at other less brutal options when the opportunity arises. That's not even in the same ballpark as the deep end crazy ruthlessness where they take Leliana at the end, all for daring to suggest that maybe killing an enemy who has proven they're wiling to kill us is maybe not a bad thing.

 

A bit more middle ground would have been nice.

 

This. So much this. This Leliana "softening" thing is like an AND. If you made 1 1 1 decisions (soften her everytime) or 0 0 0 decisions (encourage her hardened side every time) you're probably happy with the outcome you get. Otherwise the writing and character of Leliana very likely comes off as a bunch of nonsense.

 

You have a choice at the beginning of the game when things aren't quite established yet that invalidates further choices down the line (leading you on, thinking you're making a difference but you actually aren't) and as countless people before me described, that key particular choice has plenty of underlying circumstances that alter the player's judgement or encourage him to withdraw from making a clear standpoint (not to mention the player might intentionally want to roleplay a person who has no opinion on the matter yet at all, which is what the "say nothing" response implies. After all, it's early in the game and we're in the middle of a big **** hitting the fan). There is a difference between a proven traitor and a spy. There is a difference between a person who is proven to be dangerous and a person who might be dangerous. That's one side of the problem.

 

Leliana is like a sinking ship. If you don't do absolutely everything in your power to babysit her into not sinking, she is going to sink. Which, mind you, can be by itself fine, as argued before. She has a history that justifies this situation. Problem is, by the time of the sinking, she now has a more developed relationship with the player character -now the leader of the organization she's a part of-, thus making the PC in part responsible for her actions. Since the writing and number of options fails here, your roleplayed player character turns into an inconsistent hypocrite who's apparently very okay with having a crazy, rogue, murdering, child-kidnapping Princess Stabbity instead of a reliable spymaster. You can't get rid of her! If she's going to dwell on a choice/non-choice the player character made/haven't made 40 gameplay hours ago; at the beginning of the game, when the player character is just barely not considered a fatal threat to the world (at least by some NPC's) and has absolutely no authority over her; so much as to ignore everything else that happens after and just act royally stupid, there should be an option to confront her. Tell her she's crossing the line and it has to stop. Kick her out if needed.

 

When my paragonish goody-two-shoes character ends up with a second Corypheus as his spymaster despite clearly trying to do the opposite on several occasions and there's not even the option to say something that matters anymore, it really tips me off something is wrong.

What's funny is that the game tries to babysit us by having the traitor dialogue choices have a yellow glow and saying they're important. It fails to mention that you're potentially committing to this choice for the rest of the game, indeed it would be worthwhile to mention that on a beginning-of-the-game choice that even alters the epilogue of the story and that has it's first consequence surface much, much further in the game.

[Wulfram]

I think a key thing that leads to a disconnect between the people on different "sides" in this thread is that the people who were already opposed to a "ruthless" Leliana end up getting a Leliana who appears much crazier than the people who were OK with Leliana being ruthless.

I mean, her killing an agent with the support of her boss is quite a different thing to doing so against their orders. One is fairly consistent with the whole "ruthless spymaster" thing, the other really isn't.

The other thing is that the game doesn't seem to really consider the possibility that the issue might have changed the relationship between Leliana and the Inquisitor for the worst. So Leliana has quite a lot of dialogue that assumes a friendship that from the Player's point of view isn't there any more - and this means that she comes off as utterly deluded and reinforces the impression that she's gone totally "princess stabbity".

[RVallant]

I think a key thing that leads to a disconnect between the people on different "sides" in this thread is that the people who were already opposed to a "ruthless" Leliana end up getting a Leliana who appears much crazier than the people who were OK with Leliana being ruthless.

I mean, her killing an agent with the support of her boss is quite a different thing to doing so against their orders. One is fairly consistent with the whole "ruthless spymaster" thing, the other really isn't.

The other thing is that the game doesn't seem to really consider the possibility that the issue might have changed the relationship between Leliana and the Inquisitor for the worst. So Leliana has quite a lot of dialogue that assumes a friendship that from the Player's point of view isn't there any more - and this means that she comes off as utterly deluded and reinforces the impression that she's gone totally "princess stabbity".

 

In short, a case of the writing team not thinking of 'everything'.

[songsmith2003]

I always remained silent when she discussed the traitor. My Inquisitor was new to the place and didn't want to step on any toes. Heck, at that time she was only another "agent" even if some referred to her as the herald. She didn't see herself as one of the leaders. Staying silent about something seemed the best option. Besides, a traitor in a spy network probably expects to be offed if caught. (Was this the same Butler who later disappears and is found dead in Crestwood? I'd like to know what happened there.)

 

Imagine my surprise when I later discovered that one small decision totally changed the way I expected her to turn out. Leliana is super unstable. If she existed for real in our day and age, she'd be due for some definite therapy.

[Personette]

The Leliana arc was the only one that made me feel like I'd been jerked around by the game--her behavior at the end seemed to come out of left field, and I did not understand how choices I'd made could have led her to the conclusions she reached. 

 

Other posters have pointed out how that early flag is particularly nasty--staying silent for whatever reason (at the beginning of the game, I did not feel confident telling my advisor what to do) does not equal approval. 

 

I really, really hated how helpless I was at the Chantry when she kills the sister. I hated that the only disapproving dialogue open to me, which I button-smashed as hard as I could, came out snide & complicit: "Well, you don't *have* to kill her." -- I've only run through this scene once & I am still mad about it. If I can't physically jump between them & stop Leliana, I should at least be able to make my Inquisitor express her anger & horror. 

 

I also think it's odd that, for example, with Josephine's sidequest. Josephine insists that she wants a peaceful solution, even if it's a lot more work. My inquisitor agrees, emphatically--unnecessary killing is bad! Extra work is fine! Then I go through, what, five or six War Table missions to get Josephine's trading status back. 

 

And somehow, this sends less of a message than keeping silent once at the beginning of the game? 

[ComedicSociopathy]

Oh, wow. Choices do matter after all. 

 

That suddenly sucks now. 

[Vivanor]

I registered my forum account so I could share on this topic as well, as it did concern me.

 

First of all, I want to make it clear that I am a big Bioware fan, and that I love DA:I so far, but when I reached the quest where Leliana goes ruthless it really unsettled me.

 

I really like Leliana, and I never wanted her to go down this path.

I do not object to the fact that your decisions can make this happen, or even that she is ruthless by default. I felt instinctively that both were the case.

My issue is that I have chosen soft, sympathetic, moderate, compassionate choices in every choice my Inquisitor has made, particularly to her, and then I get to this quest and she acts the same as if I had been telling her to kill everyone I came across.

 

I had no idea where I went wrong, and at first thought that maybe it was unavoidable, which sucked.

 

What sucked more was finding out that it was perfectly avoidable, but that the choice was so long ago, was so easy to make wrong, and was so easy to not realise its importance.

 

Seriously, I'm used to choices like this in Bioware games, but I never expected it so soon. Like others have said I didn't feel I had the place to tell her to spare the vile traitor so early on.

 

If It had been clear that there is NO WAY to soften her if I hadn't spared him, I would have.

If there had been anything mitigating about the traitor to suggest leniency was anything but an injustice to the dead people he betrayed, I would have.

If it had been later in the game, when I knew her better, and felt I could confront her on the issue, I would have.

If the result hadn't come 20 hours later I would have reloaded and tried again. Instead I have to go on with a bad taste in my mouth.

 

I'm on 360. I used the default world state, and picked similar dialogue options (compassionate, sometimes neutral) as well. The traitor I had her spare, but then I said "Killing him is a waste", because I thought she would be more prone to listen to me (since she's Spymaster, after all). When she was angry at the Maker for letting Justinia die, I said "People die", because its a thought she has to let go and accept. I let her retreat her scouts and I told her that our men aren't expendable. I told her to spare Natalie, but she ended up killing her anyway and said I have been flip flopping on her from the beginning. Did I mess up by saying "Killing him is a waste" and "People die"? Those seem like very small things to effect her in such a big way, especially if most, nearly all of my dialogue options have been compassionate. Maybe its a bug, since I'm on 360? Or because I used the default world state? 

 

I'm not saying I don't appreciate ruthless Leiliana--the character development makes sense, considering all the crap Justinia made her do. It just leaves a bad feeling in my stomach to see someone become so blistered and cold, especially when I had high hopes for her. I wanted to pick Leiliana, but I'm afraid she'll become another Corypheus; a shame, since she believes in equality for mages and wanted to make big changes. I guess Cassandra is the most sane option now...

[Falcon084]

I think they should have made the decision on whether you let Marjolaine live or die in DAO determine how she acts. It makes more sense and would mean that our previous choices matter.

[erikdlan]

I understood the intentions of the whole unhardening question in Leliana's quest, but I didn't like at all the way to implement the decission.

 

I think it would have been much better having a system like the one used for the Divine decission and having a hidden "unhardening score", a score related to the previous world state and the Warden's opinion on the matter, related to the dialogs in game they used, related to some war table missions (Leliana gives some extreme opinions there) and even to Josie's personal quest, because that is an in game situation where you can choose risking the life of Leliana's agents over a more peaceful solution. That way we would be hardening Leliana by asking her to do the same kind of things Justinia asked her to do, or we would unharden her by supporting the "niceness before knives" way of acting.

[Farangbaa]

Soften her up first, then tell her to kill the sister, and then go all soft on her again.

It's great. She gets all confused and angry, like she should.

[Ieldra]

My problems with the decisions about Leliana are twofold:

 

(1) That everything hinges on the first decision only, and especially that the neutral option is regarded as supporting the harder stance. It makes no sense at all that Leliana says "after everything you've said and done....." at Valence when things come to a head, because I said nothing in the first conversation and spoke against the the harder stance in the two subsequent ones. I did nothing to encourage her, not even once.

 

(2) In the first conversation, I'm a newcomer to the Inquisition. I'm important, but I do not lead, and it's not my business to interfere in how Leliana does her job. Later, I'm her boss, and naturally I'll take an interest in how she does her job and can justifiedly comment on it. And yet, those later conversations have no impact at all.

 

In my games, Leliana stays ruthless. Not because I like that outcome better, but because it makes no sense to interfere at the only point where I can make a difference. I don't mind the outcome, so it's not really a big thing, but the way this sequence of decisions works makes no sense.

[Personette]

I'm on 360. I used the default world state, and picked similar dialogue options (compassionate, sometimes neutral) as well. The traitor I had her spare, but then I said "Killing him is a waste", because I thought she would be more prone to listen to me (since she's Spymaster, after all). When she was angry at the Maker for letting Justinia die, I said "People die", because its a thought she has to let go and accept. I let her retreat her scouts and I told her that our men aren't expendable. I told her to spare Natalie, but she ended up killing her anyway and said I have been flip flopping on her from the beginning. Did I mess up by saying "Killing him is a waste" and "People die"? Those seem like very small things to effect her in such a big way, especially if most, nearly all of my dialogue options have been compassionate. Maybe its a bug, since I'm on 360? Or because I used the default world state? 

 

 

Yes, exactly! The game doesn't account for the ways that you might try to nudge or manipulate or gently lead.

 

I'm pretty sure I screwed up the scout dialogue after Haven on my first playthrough. I thought pulling back the scouts was fine, I didn't think our people were expendable, but then you get to the last dialogue choice that sets the flag & I remember thinking something like, "Well, apparently you're cool sending me out to risk my life every day...isn't that what we all signed up for?" & so picked the "they're soldiers" option, which somehow translates to "murder is cool, keep your knife sharp"? 

[Jymm]

Gahhh.  Just got to Valence after 175 hours of play time and was totally confused.  Had to go read on the internet to find out that a non-decision I made 150 game hours (AKA 4 real life months) ago set poor Leli to psycho irreversibly.  What a disappointment.  As a player I've always liked her character, and as a smart aleck elf inquisitor, she seemed like the much better choice for Divine.  I've been compassionate through the whole game, and I vividly recall arguing with her several times about her tactics.  But because I chose "say nothing" in that early scene, apparently its all for naught. 

 

I agree with so many others who were bummed about this.  I like meaningful choices, and I even like ones that don't rear their heads for a long time.  But this one doesn't resonate closely in the very first scene, and all the others along the way give you the illusion that you're making a difference when really you aren't.  Its extra sad because the characterization and dialog in Bioware games is so universally appealing.  It makes me care about the result and then I feel a bit cheated.

 

So... anyone got a save game editor that can "fix" this one? 

[JamieCOTC]

People wanted decisions that mattered ....

[Farangbaa]

Oh, wow. Choices do made after all. 
 
That suddenly sucks now.

People wanted decisions that mattered ....

It must really suck to be Bioware.

[Get Magna Carter]

I want some coherent link between my choices and the consequences - suggesting that a traitor who caused the deaths of members of the inquisition should be interrogated in case he has information which could save more lives does not mean "murder anyone who disagrees with you".

 

I do not like my choices to have no effect because of an earlier choice 50 hours previously

 

I do not like the idea of having to look up a strategy guide to see which choices should be made where (as in the Final Fantasy game where the best weapon can only be obtained if you did not open certain arbitrarily selected treasure chests earlier)

[Get Magna Carter]

As I understand it, to get "Nice" Leiliana you have to, in certain conversations with her, adopt a tone that all life is sacred, the inquisition mustn't ever harm anyone, the Inquisition's soldiers should be armed with flowers rather than swords, we should invite Corypheus round for tea and talk over his problems (he probably had an unhappy childhood).  Outside these conversations you can be as vicious and ruthless as the game allows.

 

So execute people who throw goats at your castle if you like and you can still get "nice" Leiliana.

But make any suggestion to Leiliana that the Inquisition may hurt an enemy and you'll end up with the "nasty" Leiliana when you finish her quest chain

[Jymm]

Oh yeah, and as a bonus, I just figured out that I can't prevent her from becoming Divine at this late state either.  So Leli's been reveling in her darkness ever since her personal quest.  My Inky went totally cold on her after that and tried to support Cassandra instead, but its too late for that.  My earlier support of the Mage Rebellion and the Gray Wardens has apparently sealed my fate.  Psycho Leliana wins the day. 

 

This is now the single most disappointing aspect of a game I've mostly very much enjoyed.  Sadness.

[Silcron]

Because of course a person would change her outlook on life depending on what a stranger told her to do or not do back when they were proving themselves. It makes perfect sense. For example that one guy I met on class the other day, I'd say his name but I don't remember it, told me that I had to stop using sarcasm. You can clearly see how I now follow this as a dogma.