Something that has irritated me for a while now about Bioware games in general, and to some extent most modern developers' perception of the player-role is the notion that the player should be the most important, successful and idealized role in the game. Obviously you are the center figure, a protagonist and the character that interacts in the game's world by the player's command but I think there are some misconceptions that work against Bioware's idea of granting you player-gratification.
Gratification is important for games. If games is nothing but hard work or trial and error you might as well turn it off and do something else because you play to be entertained and to experience something and often to escape. But you start crossing the line of gratification if everything is a reaffirmation of how great the player is, and that's been an issue since Mass Effect 3 and DA:I. Sometimes the protagonist is downright Gary-Stu/Mary-Sue like because they have zero flaws, accomplish everything and all their cohorts just stroke their ego by telling them they have no chance of being as good as them or that they "don't know how you do it" -- it becomes too much, and characters aside the protagonist diminish in importance or competence in the story.
The gratification comes from the simple process of achieving things as a player in the gameplay, from shooting people in the head to finishing a mission, succesfully getting your romance or making a choice that saves the day, but there's such an opportunity in having a character who succeeds at everything for character development but Bioware consistently discards the idea or they simply haven't discovered it.
Say the goal of Andromeda is to gain resources and colonize humanity and the game-design teaches the player to collect some kind of fuel and kill some bad guys. Completing all these objectives will be gratifying to the player as s/he can feel their character growing and the plot moving along with it, but instead of being told by the NPCs or the world that "It's the pathfinder, he's amazing!" what if people were skeptical of him? What if you're confronted by a squadmate telling you "I think you're obsessed with this, what drives you to do all this?" that would ask the question of who our character is as a human being, and that will only add depth to it and thereby another sense of gratification that feels genuine.
There's nothing worse than the sense that you're always doing good by completing objectives and then have NPCs tell you that you're amazing for it. By having addictive gameplay objectives and making the NPCs question the actions of the player you're enhancing the link between gameplay and story and it makes the characters feel more grounded and realistic. Note that I bolded the word "addictive". Even with simple objectives like completing levels in a game, gameplay is often based around the player's obsession with the gameplay and "addictive" has negative connotations. I'd say that's a big opportunity to address as a story-element.
More importantly, you can't have a good character if he has no flaws, and a flaw does not mean to mope about your failure and getting sympathy for it, it means doing something incorrectly and being oblivious to it, and that makes the character human because humans are fallible and never perfect. Otherwise it's a sensationalist fantasy, a Steven-Spielberg movie, it's superficial and dishonest. That gives the supporting characters a chance to feel just as valid and important as the protagonist himself whereas the protagonist is just the most essential player in the story.
What do you think, and do you agree or disagree?
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