I'm fairly certain that the next Mass Effect will have a human-only protagonist, considering that N7 is a strictly human-only organization, but this shouldn't have any effect on the Dragon Age franchise, which is basically comprised of different shades of fantasy humans.
Is the next protag an N7 again?
BioWare sucks at finding balance. Hawke failed too much, the inquisitor never fails. They should have made a game where the protagonists have ups and downs, tragedy and loss but also triumph. Balance. Inquisition would have had a dull story no matter who you played as.
If the inquisitor had been human only, I think people would have hated the game even more than people do now. Bioware was trying to make this game the polar opposite of DA2, which as a failure. One of the reasons I despised that game, aside from the bland setting, was Hawke. Hawke sucked. DAO had established the series as a world where you had the option to create your own character. I'm not just talking CC, but who they are, where they came from, how they interact with the world. The Warden was YOUR character.
As opposed to Hawke who was Bioware's character. Some nobody from Lothering who becomes a nob in Kirkwall, and your mom dies. I had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do Hawke. I was only there to push buttons in DA2. Even Hawke wasn't that well developed, and that was a game where you could only play as human. I played as human mage, and nobody seemed to care about an apostate running around. "Hello?! Anybody? Anybody at all care? No? I guess not." So I don't believe that the resources only going to one race only would have made DAI better.
The one thing that people who have lots of criticisms about the game actually praise is the ability to play as different races, and seeing the differences in interactions.
In general, I am not a fan of playing humans in fantasy/sci-fi games, unless the story establishes a strong reason why the PC must be human. Mass Effect did a good job with that. DA never has. A dwarf fan will have just as strong an argument why the dwarf backgrounds in DAO are the "strongest" as a human fan will. My response to human fans in DA will always be, "Fine, you think that human backgrounds make the most sense. I think that human backgrounds are boring. That's as valid as reason as your own to play the race of your choosing."
See Shepard made sense, because they established him as the protagonist throughout a series. DA was so much different and the changes between DAO and DA2 were very jarring for me. Nut just the change from a unique character to a medieval Shepard, but its art design as well. Being a noble is so damn boring in these games. However, if the human would have been a Tevinter; odds are I would have been happy to take a crack at it. Way more interesting in my opinion.
Apart from the fact that the Inquisitor does have moments of failure, it's not particularly clear to me how BioWare's writers are supposed to find some mythical objective 'balance' anyway.
Eh not really. The only failures I really see are the impossible choices we are given at times. Save the mages or save the templars. We are successful at saving whoever we attempt to save, but the others a hung out to dry.
A bit of a yes and no for me.
Yes worth it because I generally hate playing as a human. It was one of the things I couldn't stand about DA2. This is why I have no desire to play say, The Witcher series. At least in DA games you can choose to be a female. That's a plus LOL.
No because to me, it did feel like it was a bit "tacted on". I also did not like the introduction of Qunari as a playable race. I don't believe that race is fleshed out enough yet for that. I have a hard time thinking anyone would do anything but behead them after Kirkwall.
In my perfect DA:I game, Humans, Elves, Dwarves would have a much more interesting and in depth story given their race within the game. Qunari wouldn't be playable for a good while yet. I'd be okay with sacrificing some of the things in DA:I such as ... bottle collections for more fleshed out race impacted stories and have each of them be very different from the other.
Disclaimer: This is just my opinion and we all know everyone has them. Your mileage may vary 
In general, I am not a fan of playing humans in fantasy/sci-fi games, unless the story establishes a strong reason why the PC must be human. Mass Effect did a good job with that. DA never has. A dwarf fan will have just as strong an argument why the dwarf backgrounds in DAO are the "strongest" as a human fan will. My response to human fans in DA will always be, "Fine, you think that human backgrounds make the most sense. I think that human backgrounds are boring. That's as valid as reason as your own to play the race of your choosing."
That is a fair point. DA:I, in my view, does establish its story as human-centric, despite the option to play as a different race.
Is the next protag an N7 again?
Concept art has featured N7 soldiers, so the assumption is that is likely to be the case.
I don't think all the extra races were worth it.
The only two inquisitors that feel like they have any kind of connection to the story is Trevelyan and Lavellan. I played through the game as Adar but the entire experience felt tacked on, nothing more than pure fanservice. I haven't played dwarf, but I can't imagine it being any better than qunari.
I would have prefered cutting away qunari and dwarf, allowing for a deeper roleplaying experience for the inquisitor who now always actually feels relevant.
Eh not really. The only failures I really see are the impossible choices we are given at times. Save the mages or save the templars. We are successful at saving whoever we attempt to save, but the others a hung out to dry.
That is a fair point. DA:I, in my view, does establish its story as human-centric, despite the option to play as a different race.
Concept art has featured N7 soldiers, so the assumption is that is likely to be the case.
Bioware have emphasis on "exploration", I have feeling we be scientist. Gordon Freeman in space. N7 can be scientist, or N7 just solo military.
I don't think all the extra races were worth it.
The only two inquisitors that feel like they have any kind of connection to the story is Trevelyan and Lavellan. I played through the game as Adar but the entire experience felt tacked on, nothing more than pure fanservice. I haven't played dwarf, but I can't imagine it being any better than qunari.
I would have prefered cutting away qunari and dwarf, allowing for a deeper roleplaying experience for the inquisitor who now always actually feels relevant.
I haven't played as a dwarf of quinari soI guess it makes sense that I don't get a tacked on feeling. Lavellan is actually done pretty well in my opinion. The Quinari choice is a bit strange honestly.
Haven gets destroyed, the Inquisition gets bloodied, and you have to retreat deep into the Frostback Mountains. That's a defeat.
When people complain about Mass Effect 3's forced defeats, they look at the battles against Kai Leng. A moderately skilled player could totally trash Leng - pin him down, zap his shields, burn his health without even needing to use medigel. He was not a super challenging opponent. But as soon as Shepard and Leng's fight moved from gameplay to cutscene, Shepard lost all her combat skills and got instantly beat. This was regarded as poor writing by much of the player base, and rightly so.
The fundamental problem is that to inflict a defeat on the player's character, the game's designers need to take the ability to achieve victory out of the player's hands. In Origins, for instance, after defeating the ogre at the top of the Tower of Ishal, your party is ambushed by a couple of random darkspawn archers and instantly beaten, only to be saved by Flemeth. Any player, had she had the opportunity to fight those archers in actual in-game combat, would have blown them away. Instead, you get wiped out by randos. Lovely. By comparison, the fight with Ser Cauthrien in the Arl of Denerim's estate presented players with an opponent only the skilled could defeat, and left multiple paths for a player to either defeat her or be defeated/submit.
Taking the ability to achieve victory out of the player's hands can be okay, if done convincingly. The Tower of Ishal defeat was not convincing at all. Neither was Leng's victory on Thessia. The Object Rho fight in Arrival was a bit better - it allowed a sufficiently skilled player to defeat all the enemies before being forced to succumb to Reaper mind powers anyway - but still a bit annoying. Haven is probably the best such defeat yet: the player is confronted with plausibly overwhelming force and is required to offer herself up in a gambit to distract that overwhelming force from an evacuation. There's still some whining about how my Inquisitor wouldn't have lost to Corypheus and his dragon, but it's not nearly as intense as before.
I completely understand the desire to insert the narrative hook of overcoming defeat, and to avoid the sense that the game is an unending march of success after success. But games - well, these sorts of games, anyway - aren't movies or books, they are also competitive activities that involve player skill. A game writer can't draw on the narrative power of defeat as easily as she would for writing a book.
You make some fair points. Honestly the reason why I kept the wardens in the main story was due to the belief that I needed wardens to kill the Archdemon.
Same as others have said. Human boo boring. (Especially noble humans, every time, augh.)
I already am human, and having Hawke always human made different playthroughs bleed into each other since there wasn't any variable backstory to draw from. They didn't feel like individual people so much as one person of ambiguous gender with a serious personality disorder.
I agree that having ONE race would allow from more content elsewhere, especially cutscenes (since they'd only need to be animated once). But since the majority of people stick with the familiar choose human, any game without race options will go human. Like DA2 did. And I'm not really okay with that.
For all my playthroughs, I played humans only three total times in DAO - one of each gender for the throne, and a mage Amell to run off with Morrigan. Otherwise all my warriors were dwarves, all my mages were elves, and rogues were either (usually dwarves though, because elves are starting to be almost as boring as humans these days).
Wait, if you don't like to role-play, why are you playing a role-playing game?
I have a elf playthrough that I stopped about a third of the way in because it just didn't feel like I was playing an elf. There's really nothing uniquely elven about her, except a few dialogue lines here and there. I don't recall any interesting, valuable, or unique she said in the Exalted Plains or the Temple of Dirthamen. From what I've seen of Dalish Inquisitors on YouTube, the dialogue at the Well of Sorrows is exactly the same as a human except for a line you choose when arguing with Morrigan over who should drink from it. You don't even get a reaction when Abelas tells you that Mythal was murdered and that Fen'Harel had nothing to do with it.
It's worth it to some players, but I don't know what we lost in terms of story to make room for extra races, so I can't say if it was worth it in those terms or not.
See Shepard made sense, because they established him as the protagonist throughout a series. DA was so much different and the changes between DAO and DA2 were very jarring for me. Nut just the change from a unique character to a medieval Shepard, but its art design as well. Being a noble is so damn boring in these games. However, if the human would have been a Tevinter; odds are I would have been happy to take a crack at it. Way more interesting in my opinion.
For me, human Shep worked because the story arc centered on humanity making its fledgling steps into space, being accepted by the wider (alien) races, and THEN saving the world.
A human-only hero in DA has not worked for me because the premise from the start has nothing to do with the human race as a whole; the premise is "What happened?" >> "Let's fix it," >> "Oh no, we better save the world." Anybody can do that. Anybody does not mean human-only. There's no reason why only a human can save the world from the Blight. There is no reason why Hawke does whatever his/her story is...watching the Chantry blow up and being useless in general? There is no reason why only a human can bear the mark. The Inquisitor acquired the mark through chance. So personally, I think the idea of a qunari mercenary being the hero is just as valid because in the end the inquisitor is the inquisitor because he/she just happened to be at the right place at the right time.
From what I've seen of Dalish Inquisitors on YouTube, the dialogue at the Well of Sorrows is exactly the same as a human except for a line you choose when arguing with Morrigan over who should drink from it. You don't even get a reaction when Abelas tells you that Mythal was murdered and that Fen'Harel had nothing to do with it.
Isn't this supposedly bugged, not WAD?
The only thing I think that's supposed to happen is that you're not supposed to be asking who Mythal is (or what the Temple is or whatever the line is), and if you're Dalish (possibly only for Solasmanced characters) Solas is supposed to beg you not to drink from the Well. I haven't heard anything about bugged reaction dialogue when Abelas tells you about Mythal.
Is the next protag an N7 again?
Protagonist armour have N7 logo. So 99% yes? No one know.
My impression is since the story was originally written with a human in mind, human Inquisitors tend to be the most fitting from a narrative perspective. Everything between attending the Conclave, becoming the Herald of Andraste, and partaking in the Game feels genuinely more organic with a human Inquisitor.
It's opinion, I won't deny that. But it's one that appears to be shared by many.
As I said earlier in this topic, that's like saying the Human noble warden is the only viable origin to play because the origin has a direct effect on the main stories plot of the story.
It not more organic with humans, it just that it effect there culture more, just like with elves. That does not make the story better to play as a human or an elf.
My first playthrough was as a female qunari mage. Perhaps she didn't have as much investment in the whole templar/mage/chantry storyline as the human inquisitor but she was still fun to roleplay as.
No certainly was not worth it, if races was the result of the year extension, it was a wasted year extension
I don't think all the extra races were worth it.
The only two inquisitors that feel like they have any kind of connection to the story is Trevelyan and Lavellan. I played through the game as Adar but the entire experience felt tacked on, nothing more than pure fanservice. I haven't played dwarf, but I can't imagine it being any better than qunari.
I would have prefered cutting away qunari and dwarf, allowing for a deeper roleplaying experience for the inquisitor who now always actually feels relevant.
I would not say that. It sound more like you want the game to sit and point out your qunari for the entire time. Much of want in the game make sense for a land that has so little of them living there. Who would make or sell armor for them? What would impact there culture there? What even is there culture? We're playing person who is stuck between 2 culture, one they don't understand and the other that shuns them. The way I see it both qunari and dwarves have it better because they are not constraint nor have bias views like the human and dalish. They have a chance to look at everything in a neutral view unbiased view with out the dogma and bias the human and dalish have. They are the best ones to start a middle ground and be an arbiter.
Same as others have said. Human boo boring. (Especially noble humans, every time, augh.)
I already am human, and having Hawke always human made different playthroughs bleed into each other since there wasn't any variable backstory to draw from. They didn't feel like individual people so much as one person of ambiguous gender with a serious personality disorder.
Can we please stop with the humans are boring stereotype? Its complete bull. If a person does not have the imagination to roleplay a human than thats their own issue. I've had no issues playing ANY of the races and and have had fun equally with them.
If it wasn't so trendy and popular to hate on anything human right now, the majority of the people would NOT be doing it.
It's worth it to some players, but I don't know what we lost in terms of story to make room for extra races, so I can't say if it was worth it in those terms or not.
That was precisely my original point. I feel quite a bit of story may have been sacrificed to make room for the additional races. Surely they didn't just add them in; they had to sacrifice something in order to accommodate them. That's a reality of game development in general.
I never quite got the humans-are-boring thing. In and of themselves, any race should be able to have an interesting story to tell.
If anything, I thought the Dalish origin in DA:O was the most boring of them all, which is ironic since it's the only one that has an element that becomes a much bigger deal later in the series, as opposed to the City Elf, which was easily one of the most satisfying to me, right up there with the human noble. Dwarf commoner's pretty good too.
Can we please stop with the humans are boring stereotype? Its complete bull. If a person does not have the imagination to roleplay a human than thats their own issue. I've had no issues playing ANY of the races and and have had fun equally with them.
If it wasn't so trendy and popular to hate on anything human right now, the majority of the people would NOT be doing it.
I wouldn't say it's "trendy". Personally when i'm introduced to a world with various races I like to try them instead of humans. It's not that I hate them, I just feel like it's just not my cup of tea. Playing as a human feeling boring to me, but I respect people who like playing as humans. However, to have the choice of only being a human in a DA game I don't agree with.
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