Bioware choices (here we go again)

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Didn't we just recently have someone from Bioware say how our choices will matter in Dragon Age: Inquisition?

Don't count on it. Read this very informative text about Morrigan: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/08/12/dragon-age-inquisition-s-morrigan-past-and-present.aspx

And this is the best part

Male players are given the option of conceiving a child with Morrigan themselves, but even if they refuse, the other Grey Wardens of the world may not have the same resolve.

And

?The most important thing for me when I wrote [Origins] was that at the end even if Morrigan loved the player, she had this thing that she believed in, that was so important that she would do it regardless of the player..."

The last big choice you get to make in Dragon Age: Origins doesn't even matter. It's the Collector base all over again. Fuck your choices, we'll just do what we want. But please, buy our game. It's all about you and the choices. Choices matter. Unless when they don't. But they do. And don't. At the same time. IT'S A MIRACLE!

 

[Lieju]

I always knew that. It was too big of a plotpoint to abandon completely.

But think of what their options with something like that are.

If they make the choice matter they'd have to downplay the role of the baby in the story, or write huge scenarios that differ a lot.

I don't think they were really thinking about how the choices would matter when they made Dragon Age...
These kinds of things need to be planned in advance.

 

[IllumInaTIma]

Well that's a shame... although, I've lost those save files long time ago so it doesn't really matter to me now.

 

[Zhukov]

*shrug*

I'm not really sure what people expect from this sort of thing.

Two completely different plots that depend on a choice you made two games ago? 'Cause that isn't going to happen. It would be a logistical mess.

Although, to be fair, Bioware do talk up the choice aspect more than it deserves, so I suppose people having inflated expectations is on them, at least partly.

 

[endtherapture]

Dragon Age wasn't meant to be this big trilogy where your choices matter as much like in Mass Effect 3, so I don't feel as betrayed, especially when the Old God Baby could be interesting in terms of story.

People just think Dragon Age is a trilogy, where you play the warden/Hawke every game, and your choices carry through to some giant final battle in Inquisition...when in fact they're getting all muddled up and thinking the game is Mass Effect...but it's not.

I can't imagine Alistair banging Morrigan if I said no though...maybe Riordan wanted some wild loving before the final battle?

The last big choice you get to make in Dragon Age: Origins doesn't even matter. It's the Collector base all over again. Fuck your choices, we'll just do what we want. But please, buy our game. It's all about you and the choices. Choices matter. Unless when they don't. But they do. And don't. At the same time. IT'S A MIRACLE!

Dragons Age =/= Mass Effect.

Your choices don't matter in Dragon Age. Doesn't say that on the back of the box, for any of the games, wasn't the selling point of the franchise. Bioware have made questionable decisions but this is not one of them.

 

[w9496]

What are they supposed to do? Have 2 massive and differing plots based on 1 choice made at the tail end of a game? It's simply not possible at this point in gaming. Maybe someday when an RPG gets a huge and inflated budget and multiple years of development time it will happen.

I was also under the impression that choice wasn't really a key point in Dragon Age. I can't speak for II, but having played Origins, it seemed as if I was choosing different ways to the same outcome.

 

[DoPo]

Dragon Age wasn't meant to be this big trilogy where your choices matter as much like in Mass Effect 3, so I don't feel as betrayed, especially when the Old God Baby could be interesting in terms of story.

People just think Dragon Age is a trilogy, where you play the warden/Hawke every game, and your choices carry through to some giant final battle in Inquisition...when in fact they're getting all muddled up and thinking the game is Mass Effect...but it's not.

Come on - Dragon Age WAS hyped as a big new series. Not a trilogy but whole series. Even the first game was called Origins to signify the series started. It's not an one-off game they suddenly thought to make a sequel for. They did all the lore and everything, even released books, a TT game and so on. It's what you do when you want a lasting franchise, you know.

What are they supposed to do? Have 2 massive and differing plots based on 1 choice made at the tail end of a game?

Or, and I may be talking crazy here, not do that, knowing fully well that the choice would be really hard to follow up.

I was also under the impression that choice wasn't really a key point in Dragon Age. I can't speak for II, but having played Origins, it seemed as if I was choosing different ways to the same outcome.

So, wait, when you're given really rather large choices - who rules the dwarves, what happens with the mage tower and so on, these should never be mentioned again? You do realise you're just confirming what OP said.

 

[hazabaza1]

Or, and I may be talking crazy here, not do that, knowing fully well that the choice would be really hard to follow up.

Ding ding.
The Bioware approach of "Make every playthrough of one game essentially the same because people don't replay much" is bad enough but don't bring in these giant possibilities at the end of a game just to end up with "no fuck u lol nothing matters 4 u"

 

[JediMB]

Or, and I may be talking crazy here, not do that, knowing fully well that the choice would be really hard to follow up.

Ding ding.
The Bioware approach of "Make every playthrough of one game essentially the same because people don't replay much" is bad enough but don't bring in these giant possibilities at the end of a game just to end up with "no fuck u lol nothing matters 4 u"

Indeed. It's better to have choices that are significant on a personal level. And the choices should exist for the sake of simulation/reactivity rather than solely to lock away content for later playthroughs.

There's an excellent video on the subject...

Spoiler: TUN: Choice and Consequence

 

[Imre Csete]

Well that will be interesting. The Ultimate Sacrifice was my favourite ending (best bittersweet ending done proper in a long time), have fun handwaving that BioWare.

 

[Random Argument Man]

I can see a way that it can work. If Morrigan made the dark ritual and you refused, she gets pregnant with another warden later on. However, her ultimate plan to get the archdemon's essence and make some sort of ultimate child doesn't work. The child turns out to not be completed and her plans backfires...

It would be a nice twist on the story. However, I'm not getting my hopes up for that.

 

[Joccaren]

What are they supposed to do? Have 2 massive and differing plots based on 1 choice made at the tail end of a game? It's simply not possible at this point in gaming. Maybe someday when an RPG gets a huge and inflated budget and multiple years of development time it will happen.

Witcher 2 would like a word with you.
Yeah, the plot converges eventually, but right from the end of the first chapter it changes based off your choices. You get an entirely different second chapter dependent on who you side with. It can be done, and it doesn't take a huge budget [Hell, the budget of W2 was probably less than even DA2 - estimates place DA2 at 40-50 million based off a NYT report, Witcher 2 is estimated at around 10-15 million based off some report or other that doesn't get specified - and DA2 was quite obviously on a shoestring budget, as evidenced by its quality]. It just requires a team whose goal is to make a game that is affected by the players choices, rather than wanting to tell a specific story, and make sure all players get basically the same experience despite their choices. Its a different design philosophy, and Bioware's is not one that has effective choice mechanics.
And really, all AAA games these days get hugely inflated budgets and years of development time, RPG or no. As said, estimates place the cost of DA2 at between 3 and 5 times the cost of W2, and it was in development for 2 years before being released IIRC. Skyrim would have had one mother of a budget, and was in production 3+ years, and a huge team working on it and it didn't do such a thing. Its not a matter of being unable to, its a matter of being unwilling to.

 

[endtherapture]

Dragon Age wasn't meant to be this big trilogy where your choices matter as much like in Mass Effect 3, so I don't feel as betrayed, especially when the Old God Baby could be interesting in terms of story.

People just think Dragon Age is a trilogy, where you play the warden/Hawke every game, and your choices carry through to some giant final battle in Inquisition...when in fact they're getting all muddled up and thinking the game is Mass Effect...but it's not.

Come on - Dragon Age WAS hyped as a big new series. Not a trilogy but whole series. Even the first game was called Origins to signify the series started. It's not an one-off game they suddenly thought to make a sequel for. They did all the lore and everything, even released books, a TT game and so on. It's what you do when you want a lasting franchise, you know.

Yeah it's a franchise, but not a trilogy. Your choices aren't really meant to carry over. I thought of it more as a setting that Bioware made so they could make RPGs without paying licensing costs for Forgotten Realms, Star Wars etc.

 

[AntiChri5]

Actually, there is a thread about that quote on the bioware forums. It's bullshit.

David Gaider (lead writer of Origins, DA 2, and Inquisition) said that if you didn't fuck Morrigan (or get a buddy to fuck her) then she doesn't get the juicy magic baby. Not in those words of course.

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/371/index/17133997#17134097

 

[AntiChri5]

For those too lazy to click on links:

I'm not sure where the "but even if they refuse, the other Grey Wardens of the world may not have the same resolve..." comes from. Speculation on the part of the article writer, perhaps? Regardless, if the player refused the Dark Ritual then it was refused. There is no Old God Baby.

He hasn't left himself the slightest amount of wiggle room there.

 

[Living Contradiction]

One storyline from the first game. One slice of plot where an NPC was shown to be headstrong, determined, and able to carry out her own agenda is not going to allow the player to have an influence on it. It is going to show that NPC has the capacity to not only act without the player's knowledge and beyond the scope of the game but also to act in a way that shows depth of personality and create an entirely new set of content for a popular piece of intellectual property.

And for this, people are getting preemptively angry?

Oh no. Bioware is exaggerating things again. They are clearly not worthy of all the good press and attention that their games receive. Quick. Head to the Internet and denounce them. [/elcor voice]

I hate to be a wet blanket, but player choice and control in a game are not, and never will be, universal. Even in games that make the player dictatorial, almighty, or god-like, there are events that lie beyond the ability of the player to change or influence. The reason for this is because, surprise, the game was not written by the player. The player is a character within the game itself (it's why the protagonist is called a PC, a Player Character) and however we as players are able to tailor our experience, in the end, this isn't our game. That's why the developer's name is on the game instead of ours.

The lead writer put it quite nicely himself in the sentence following our esteemed OP's closing quote:

The most important thing for me when I wrote [Origins] was that at the end even if Morrigan loved the player, she had this thing that she believed in, that was so important that she would do it regardless of the player. And I think that a lot of players expected that she would bend herself to do whatever they wanted because they've done the romance, gotten her approval up, and of course she would just sort of follow their destiny. But Morrigan has her own destiny. (emphasis mine)

Yep. An NPC is having the audacity to go around changing the universe without letting us influence her, despite our having jumped through hoops to win her approval. How dare she? How dare Bioware lead us on with deep and interesting character development that we cannot influence?

I'll tell you how: because they wrote it and we are playing it.

 

[endtherapture]

For those too lazy to click on links:

I'm not sure where the "but even if they refuse, the other Grey Wardens of the world may not have the same resolve..." comes from. Speculation on the part of the article writer, perhaps? Regardless, if the player refused the Dark Ritual then it was refused. There is no Old God Baby.

He hasn't left himself the slightest amount of wiggle room there.

Even if Alistair or Loghain don't do it, Riordan might have given in to Morrigan's charms. He was around at the time.

Old god Baby is too much of a good plot to just be ignored.

 

[AntiChri5]

For those too lazy to click on links:

I'm not sure where the "but even if they refuse, the other Grey Wardens of the world may not have the same resolve..." comes from. Speculation on the part of the article writer, perhaps? Regardless, if the player refused the Dark Ritual then it was refused. There is no Old God Baby.

He hasn't left himself the slightest amount of wiggle room there.

Even if Alistair or Loghain don't do it, Riordan might have given in to Morrigan's charms. He was around at the time.

Old god Baby is too much of a good plot to just be ignored.

If they had, the ending would have gone differently.

If you don't do the ritual, someone dies. Either The Warden, Allistair or Loghain dies the moment they slay the Archdemon. If the ritual had been performed without the Wardens knowledge that wouldn't have happened. We have direct proof of whether or not the ritual happened.

 

[endtherapture]

For those too lazy to click on links:

I'm not sure where the "but even if they refuse, the other Grey Wardens of the world may not have the same resolve..." comes from. Speculation on the part of the article writer, perhaps? Regardless, if the player refused the Dark Ritual then it was refused. There is no Old God Baby.

He hasn't left himself the slightest amount of wiggle room there.

Even if Alistair or Loghain don't do it, Riordan might have given in to Morrigan's charms. He was around at the time.

Old god Baby is too much of a good plot to just be ignored.

If they had, the ending would have gone differently.

If you don't do the ritual, someone dies. Either The Warden, Allistair or Loghain dies the moment they slay the Archdemon. If the ritual had been performed without the Wardens knowledge that wouldn't have happened. We have direct proof of whether or not the ritual happened.

Oh yeah I suppose so. Retcon will probably happen, keeping the Warden alive regardless and Old God Baby as canon.