....the toilets? The elderly? The sick? The STD Clinic? (I'm betting Skyhold would need one of those)
Or the butterflies? Or OMG the cows that make all the cheese they eat!!! Wow, that's ruined my belief in the entire lore now, ruined, totally ruined.
EDIT - Wait, some smartarse will say they use the druffalos....fair enough.
Well, actually, "Where are the cows?" is a good question, because there were "normal" animals in Origins, and "normal" animals are certainly mentioned as existing.
For instance, Origins had normal dogs, as well as war dogs. There were cats. You could see normal crows (not those weird ravens with red or orange around their eyes), normal ground squirrels, etc. There were halla--which were a little smaller than a horse, but not anywhere near as small as the ones in DA:I. You could really imagine them being ridden on. But most importantly, there were cattle and pigs. Honest to goodness cattle. Mostly you saw them as oxen (for instance, with the trader in a random encounter during travel)--but oxen are basically steers (castrated bulls) with specialized training, so... still cattle. It might not mean much to most people, but for me it gave some life to the game, because you had the impression of people raising their livestock, of there being crows around because of the Blight and the wars, etc. And also I could still picture someone riding around on those halla, even now. Now they're goat-sized in DA:I and that would only be possible for a small child.
For a DA:I example, the fennecs we see are referred to as "white foxes," so for them to be specifically "white foxes," that implies there are other kinds of fox. (Also why default to fennecs, which are desert animals? Just because they're cute? But they make no sense whatsoever in snowy areas...)
Also, I'm sure there must be ordinary rabbits somewhere on Thedas, because someone called the nugs "bunnypigs." I know the nug is more iconic, and perhaps it has somehow outcompeted rabbits in the regions where it's living on the surface. However, to call somerthing a "bunnypig," there need to be both bunnies and pigs...
They have time to sell us the ending of the game, but they haven't time to make children, a better CC, TO MAKE DECENT ANIMATIONS FOR THE NPC (I'm tired of see people in the tabern talking with sleeping npcs), more variety of armors, REAL NIPPLES (because the nipples of the game looks like a clown nose), decent animations for the Inquisitor instead of putting him the same of the random NPCs, etc.
They should adjust they priorities.
They did not sell us the ending to the game separately. They sold us an epilogue, similar to what Citadel might have been for Mass Effect 3, had it not had the ending it did. The base game, as is, is the whole game. Once you defeat you-know-who, that's the end of the game. Trespasser comes afterward.
Should Trespasser have been the true ending all along? It's debatable. Originally there was something planned in regard to Solas's plans and tracking him down, but time and budget did not allow for it to be added. I doubt it would have been done as well if it had been added then, given time and budget constraints. The unexpectedly good sales, along with popular fan demand, are the main reason we got Trespasser at all. Thus, I am in agreement with the developers that it's an epilogue, or a bridge between DA:I and the next game (like Arrival for ME2), but at the same time I think it added enough important info to the game that more of it should have been hinted at in the main game, at the very least. You could certainly consider DAI complete without any of the DLC at all.
As for "real nipples," I don't really think that is anywhere close to the priority of just getting a good game out, and I kind of hope you're only mentioning that in jest. I'd be fine with it if there were no nudity in the game at all; we are years away from having models be so convincing that any nudity or animation while nude looks convincing, and it just encourages people to post things like "It's very important that the nipples look real!" Would much rather have a more cohesive game experience than more realistic nipples. In fact we could go back to 2D pixel graphics as far as I'm concerned, if the gameplay and story are good enough!
That is one of the major issues I had with the game. We are constantly told that the world has been devastated by the war between Mages and Templers, that the world is on the brink of collapse at any minute and only you can put it back together again but you never see evidence to back that claim up. Where are the dozen of refuges? The atmosphere of war? The consequences of the worlds choices? DA2 did a good job of illustrating the plight of people and you hardly interact with those NPCs.
In my opinion, I think children would have been a wonderful way to showcase that evidence. I'm not asking for unique models or even really showing them up close but using children as a narrative device would have added more to convince me that the world was alive and was in dire need of the Inquisition. OGB/Keiren is there so why not do the old copy and paste? That's all I'm asking really, its just the world felt so very isolated and empty in comparison to the other two games. It's very jarring when I first noticed that there where no children at all. And while yes I do hate this comparison ( and do enjoy both games) TW3 did a good job of making the world feel lived in and real.
I think children are just the start of it. Yes, we needed to see children other than Kieran. But we also needed to see more people and more settlements in general. I would like to have seen random travelers on the roads, perhaps merchants or refugees trying to flee the danger. I would have liked to see desperate people clinging to their homes in small towns despite war waging near their front doorsteps. These are things real people do, and these are things that would have made more impact.
On top of that, yes, we're told that thus-and-such has affected many people, but we are never really shown what it does. We hear about how the rifts are devastating, but almost all of the rifts we seal are actually in the wilderness somewhere. Granted, the demons surely travel--and probably we've left quite a few demons in the world as a result despite sealing the rifts. Even if it had been scripted events, it would have had more impact to see demons coming out of the rifts and attacking or threatening people.
I would have liked to see our various companions with children. Cassandra especially. She'd be so awkward. And Varric would be like the coolest uncle ever. 
But on topic: the absence of children was a little jarring, especially in the Hinterlands with the supposedly countless refugees we were helping. Unless the implication is that all the children died. 
Yeah, kids could have at the very least added to the ambiance of the various areas we did go to. Why no Dalish children, other than mention of a teen who ended up dead when we found him? Why no kids in the Hinterlands? With all the sex in Val Royeaux, one would expect there to be kids there, too, or at least those troublesome teens mentioned in some of the codex entries as peeing on the religious statues by the entrance! Instead, no children at all except Kieran.
Personally I think the main reason kids did not show up in game, is because once children are in game people will want the chance to be mean to them or see them killed. And I think, maybe, BioWare was trying not to have kids die on screen. That's actually kind of noble, but children did not have to die on screen to be present at all. So... I really don't know. I remember their reason for not having ambient horses in DA:O was because they hadn't coded mounts, but they knew that people would be demanding to know why they couldn't ride the horses if horses had been included. There may be some similar reason behind the lack of children, or as previous posters mentioned, it could just be a lack of animation and modeling budget, as compared to the budget and effort used to add in things like massive environments that didn't directly tie in to the main plot (yes still annoyed at that, even though I enjoyed exploring the areas. We had three deserts! That's a bit much...).
Something to remember while we're all complaining, though, is that the developers tend to work a tremendous amount of overtime and most of them get relatively little pay for it. I'm not even sure most of the higher-profile writers, coders, modelers, animators, etc. get paid that much better. So no matter how much we hope for from a given game, the chances we're going to get every single thing we want from the gameplay and story and all the ambient children, creatures, and animations as well are very slim.
Retour en haut
Anyway, also think the lack of children in DA:I was pretty odd and made the world feel less real. But Bioware does love to overcompensate. We had one child in Mass Effect, and that turned out... poorly. So there are none in Inquisition!
