Consider: Maevris is romancable... but only for dwarf PCs. That said, I also think dwarf politics are going to come back into play, because we know they have a pretty strong presence in Tevinter; the new Archon's been elected and it's not likely that we're gonna have a repeat of the choosing a Divine/Choosing the Ruler Of Orlais [or Fereldan or Orzammar] but it's not out of the question either, especially if it's couched as 'Dorian's political group gaining power and the PC cementing it with this choice that ends up allowing us to free the slaves of Tevinter'. Outlawing slavery/staging a slave revolt is definitely going to happen though. With as much emphasis has been placed on Tevinter and its slaves, they can't not do that, because the opposite is forcing the player into condoning it. It might be built off the backs of Dorian's movement and Solas's, because it's set up like a custody battle of the elven slaves, but there's going to be something where we end up destroying the institution of it in Tevinter somehow, either via violent revolt or through political fuckery.
I want... to be able to import my Inquisitor and play him. T____________T LET ME HAVE AN ANGRY AS HELL DISABLED HERO, BIOWARE, YOU COWARDS
i mean i would be in favour but then i would feel the need to import and play all eight of my quizzies and that would essentially prevent me from creating anyone new and trying out the new romance squeezes, and it's very important to me that i be able to kiss e v e r y o n e
What if.... what if you get to import your quizzy and play them for certain segments, and they stay a party member you kind of switch between them and New!PC who is sort of their protegé in a way Kind of like Duncan's relationship with the warden only without dying bc if bioware kills my inquisitors there will be WORDS
Unfortunately, Bioware has explicitly stated that DA, unlike Mass Effect, isn't about one particular character but rather the world as a whole. We have never played as any of the previous heroes and I doubt they will start now. We might recreate our inquisitor a la Hawke in DAI, but not play as them. I love the idea of Mae as a dwarf locked romance omg. If they made her dwarf male only romance, I wouldn't even be mad. I also want to romance a dwarf tho. And have a female dwarf party member.
i need to actually play Awakening so i can properly meet sigrun, aka the Only Lady Dwarf Companion Ever srsly just. more dwarf stuff, bioware. more dwarves to kiss, more people dwarves can kiss. dwarves are excellent
I am super excited for more dwarf stuff. We've had so little lore relating to them that I'm just really really curious
Sigrun is also notably like the One Dwarf Girl appearing in DA games who isn't super femme'd up, and they didn't even make her interests too feminine to counter the gruff exterior and massive legion brand either. Love angry Legion scout. love her lots
How does everyone approach the roleplaying aspects of DA? I personally pick choices I agree with my first playthrough, then in other playthroughs see other options, eg. side with the mages first, then try the templars. My characters are not really characters per se, as much as choices that I want to explore. Are there some options you cannot force yourself to make, regardless?
Never say never. :V If a game developer doesn't say "No, it's never going to happen," it's a possibility - they phrase things in open-ended ways for exactly the reason that they might change their plans. I want it to happen for two reasons : one, to wrap up all the loose ends the Inquisitor has post-Trespasser (especially one in a relationship with Dorian, and even more especially one in a relationship with Solas), and two, to spite everyone who acted like it was a foregone conclusion we'd get a new protagonist in DA4 because the Inquisitor is disabled now, not because of anything the developers said. This doesn't mean I expect it to happen, or even hold out much hope for it - but I still want it. :P I am usually a coward and play a character that ends up a mushy people-pleaser for my first playthrough, which honestly isn't very fun for me but I get anxious about potentially upsetting pixel people. On subsequent playthroughs I make characters with distinct personalities and motivations to explore possibilities with, because imo that makes for a more cohesive narrative and makes the story different enough each time for me to want to stick with it. If I approach it in a "For playthrough A I will choose these particular choices, and for playthough B I will choose the other choices I didn't make" it doesn't feel as much like an actual story to me, if that makes any sense. I'll never sacrifice the Chargers, and I'll probably never make Gaspard emperor without Briala being the power behind the throne.
I usually have a set character personality archetype more than a specific choice line when going into it; the first time ends up being mostly diplomatic inquisitive types because I Want To Know The Lore, but subsequent playthroughs I tend to pick a personality and then pick an LI and build my game around that. My first playthrough of DAI actually caught me off guard with that--I'd meant to romance Cassandra but Dorian came out of fucking nowhere and swept me off my feet. As for choices I could never make... It turns out, when I did my Bad End Playthrough, that keeping Cullen on lyrium was too much for me. Probably didn't help that the game makes you pick that option multiple times to keep him on it--picking once and forgetting I might have been able to do, but having to coach him into staying addicted multiple times was beyond me.
(Also seconding Desire For Disabled Protag, at least partly out of spite--if Bioware had the balls to make a level specifically dealing with a non-combat-capable disabled character that had to hobble through the ship in a pseudo-stealth mission, I don't wanna hear 'but they don't have a hand so they can't fiiiiiiight' when it comes to the Inquisitor. Narratively, I feel like they left off a lot more like Shepard at the end of ME1 than Hawke or the Warden at the end of DA2/DAO, and it could be a neat switcharound given that MEA moved to a new protagonist. More likely, we won't get the Inquisitor back, but I think that the loss of the arm, especially given that we see prosthetics in use and have an enchanter and an artificer attached to the Inquisition, would be a weak cop-out for a reason why we don't get the Inquisitor back. At the very least, they should play some role in the game. Unlike the Warden, they can't die at the end.)
THiiiiiiis. My tiny one armed potato elf needs to burn down everything! Her story is not done yet!!!! I usually start with an oc that I'm okay with being sort of bland, so I can get a feel for how I think the most satisfying story will go. I think I'm sort of the odd one out in that I don't actually have many playthroughs, I think only three (Mercy Amell, Mara Hawke, Ren Lavellan; Rhanna Tabris, Molly Hawke, Nasrin Adaar; Greta Aeducan, Nicolette Hawke, Teifi Lavellan), and even of those three Mercy, Mara, and Ren take up 95% of my brain space with regards to DA. So I usually start by going through the game once with a character that I sort of develop along the way. They're usually pretty nice and idk, they grow organically but are never super compelling. Then moirail and I, having played it or most of it, talk about where we want to take our shared universe and what sort of character dynamic we want to go for with our protags and how we want them to fit into the macro story we have going. Then we proceed to sperg about that universe unrelentingly for, well it's been four years since DAI and we /still/ talk about it regularly. Eventually we have a good handle on the characters. I also don't necessarily limit myself to how I played the game with a character the first time. Like I realized a few months after the fact that no, it was actually way better narratively to leave Hawke in the Fade instead of Stroud, so boom retcon'd. It's not necessarily the most elegant method...
My first PC always develops as I play, after that I generally have a direction I want to take, although the characters still sometimes surprise me and I'm open to changing aspects of them as seems to fit. I am also quite happy to go 'actually it didn't really happen that way it happened this similar-but-different way', though I don't usually change the basic fabric of the story. The one exception to that is Rosamunde Hawke's universe where a whole bunch of people are still alive that are narratively dead, and there are like three children running around by act three. That all came from post-game retconning roleplay with @IvyLB though. I tend to. Want to mack on every love interest available. This is why I have eight quizzies. I can't kill the Chargers, I can't keep Cullen hooked on lyrium, and I tend to shy away from being outright actively cruel to npcs, and doubly so to companions, because I am a soft child. In Origins I would also be pretty unwilling to cull the entire circle tower, kill Connor or taint the Ashes. I also don't really want to exile the Wardens in inq, but I plan on doing so in my solas-mancing playthru because Iokaste does whatever Solas says in a mildly unhealthy manner. In 2 I've taken a few more nastier choices, mostly via siding with the templars, but I still don't really play cruel characters, it's just not particularly fun for me when the reactions aren't totally within my control.
I have vague ideas for characterization planned out ahead of time and work through that for deciding on choices, specs and Love Interests, BUT I am Big Roleplay DumDumb at heart so sometimes I get super ambushed by strong personalities. For example, my first Warden was initially supposed to be a sweety darling angel child I got about... halfway through the Magi Origin before I had to admit to myself that Meraud is a Grade A Manipulative Bitch with rather Strange Notions Of Morality. And I was like 'Aww okay, so she never showed her true face in the circle and all she did there was a lie' Nope, she genuinely does love Cullen in her own extremely dysfunctional and awful way, those flirts were not just playing with him like a cat. Also she's a devout believer in the Chant of Light but hates everything Orlesian. Turns out she's a Blade of Hessarian now. But also the Power of Blood stuff isn't realllllly blood magic so it's fiiiiiiine. I don't even know. Meraud why are you this way. She ended up having super defined hardlines and motivations and anchor points that were so different from her original characterization sketch that I made the Inquisitor of her playthrough basically the woman meraud pretended to be towards the wider world before she became Warden-Commander. But Brejan is still a good bit different from even that. And so on. Though I, too, refuse to annul the circle, sacrifice the chargers or keep cullen on lyrium. It won't happen. Nope. Bye. the only exception of the pre-sketch-left-to-develope is that my first inquisitor is the character i made for a DA RPG party, with slightly modified backstory, because it fortunately worked out that Atish'an Dirth'enfenim was from wycome anyways and could have easily been picked up by Clan Lavellan. She is my angry sphynx cat murder child and I love her, she is so fucking pissy about everything. so pissy. She is a bit different from the original incarnation of the character but the two are rather similar in more ways than is normal. I really want her to get closure because she romanced Solas and she is so pissed at him she cut all her hair off and took on the byname Da'Fen, or more poetically, the wolf who hunts wolves. let ym sword hoarding gremlin daughter drag this man over a field of hot coals for his sins.
Oh also i have by now amassed an army of auxilliary characters fitting in with and around various playthroughs and shared universes and occassionally I contemplate doing a run through Inq with some of them or at least giving the character creator a whirl, though I've only settled firmly on giving Marisela a chance to mack on Josie For Realsies. Also I tend to inflict children on everyone because I'm apparently just like that. Brejan and Cullen have four children. in that universe Cullen has another spouse with another three. He has a pre-existing oopsie kid with Meraud he doesn't know about. I just love giving people kids. A few of these kids are definite contenders for Maybe Possibly DA4 Protag If That's A Thing We're Doing.
I've discovered that I can do anything after sacrificing the alienage elves for 1 (one) constitution point. I haven't sacrificed the chargers in a playthrough yet because it's the "bad end" for the Iron Bull. I also don't like how the quest feels like it's ok to sacrifice 200 communists on a boat because I don't personally know them. The quest's outcomes makes sense from a character standpoint, but...
For DAO my first Warden was Liesel, who was a character I used for all my previous MMORPGs and who had two characteristics: Heroic Dumbass alignment and black hair. I had no previous knowledge of any of the lore or anything, so I played a couple of origins to get a feel of it and settled for the Mage origin with a Heroic Dumbass Liesyn Surana who has a complicated relationship with the Chantry and is sort of pissed by her predicament in life - and after that I followed choices that I agreed with and that fit the Heroic Dumbass ideal. Then I built her backstory and personality kind of organically as I was learned the lore; I thought it would be fun if she were from Gwaren and had a sort of idealized view of Loghain before The Betrayal (tm) after reading the books, for example. I always end up replaying DAO with her because I genuinely dislike the combat with other classes, and sometimes I change a few of her choices so it's not the exact same game, but it's. it's almost always the same game. DA2 and DAI went along the same lines - I had a general idea of how I wanted the character to be (DA2 is Anxious Familyperson and DAI is Dalish Priestess With A Chip On Her Shoulder And A Nose On Everyone's Businesses) which led to a mix of choices I agree with and choices I don't - I made some concessions for the Templars in the beginning of DA2 because my Hawke was a mage who didn't want to raise too much attention, stuff like that. Other than that, I end up making a character for every romance because it feels weird to romance more than one person with the same character, except Garnet Hawke, because gee Garnet, how come your mom lets you have two girlfriends (i ship merribela and there's no reason Hawke can't get in the middle). These may develop into other people, and sometimes I end up playing padding characters in my fanfics, which are. very many of them. I can never side with Cullen in Broken Circle or get him back into Lyrium, kill the Dalish in the Brecilian Forest, or side with the Templars in da2.
