peopleofthedas | DA3 Speculation Time!

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DA3 Speculation Time!

No, not too soon. The last couple days have had some interesting news for the franchise.

Bioware has announced that they are cancelling further DLC and a planned expansion for DA2, and moving right on to DA3. (edit to add, they have also said there won't be a DA2 collectors/legacy edition that includes the DLC, so if you were holding out for that....might as well pick it up next time you see a good deal).

DA3 will, apparently, be neither Warden nor Hawke related. And will draw from Skyrim. (Whatever that means...)

There are also hints it won't import previous games.
Let the speculation begin!

In a way.... I like the idea of not importing, since they have already said it won't be replaying your old characters. (please don't hurt me). I think it can work. There are SO MANY options now... it is almost impossible to do justice to all of the potential choices and still manage to string together a logical story. Now, the Skyrim thing gave me pause, since it stands out from previous Elder Scrolls games for one major reason: timing. Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion were basically set one after another. Different characters, but ultimately one cohesive timeline for the world. Skyrim is set several hundred years later.

A new game in the Thedas setting, a couple hundred years later, or earlier? No problem if there's no imports. If earlier, well... non-issue. If later... meh. You know the blight ended, you know about the Kirkwall Chantry. Those are constants. Anything more granular would likely be lost to time. For as much as we care about our characters, it is unlikely Random Future Adventurer will know or care who the Warden from the fourth blight was banging, or will have even heard of the Champion of Kirkwall other than a note in a history lesson, unless they're from Kirkwall. There's no reason to even mention any of them, except in the vaguest of codex entries.

I also like that they are going back to their history, as they said. I think the interest in the Baldurs Gate HD project has surprised them... and a return to that style storytelling would be nothing but good, IMO.

SO, what does everyone else think? Anyone see any good articles?

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If they manage to combine the plot epicosity of DAO with the character-driven writing of DA2? Hell yeah, they can take my money <3

I shall choose to remain somewhat sceptical about the "draw from Skyrim" claim, and if any new material about DA3 comes from EA's marketing people, I will take those with a huge dash of salt, considering how... misleading they can be about some things.

I personally like the "no import" idea, if only for the fact that the thousands of diverse choices will be pretty much impossible to implement for a game that will be ported to the console, unless they really want to write in about 3-4 discs worth of content. I like how Skyrim quietly makes references to previous games in some places (Sheogorath FTW), without choking us with TOO MUCH INFO.

Two things I WON'T want? Going back to "picking from a list of responses and the only way to hear your PC's voice is to mentally read out what you're going to pick", and the "staring at the back of your PC's head for most of the game" thing. They just don't work very well, IMO, considering how fleshed-out your companions are, even if the lack of a voice gives you more roleplay freedom.

There were some advantages to a fully-voiced character, but for me, the disadvantages outweighed that. Since I really didn't like female Hawke's voice, I only played male Hawke. Once I'd played Julian, that was his voice, and every time I tried to do another male Hawke, in my head, he sounded like Julian. I also HATED the "what you choose doesn't match the words coming out of the character's mouth". I made it work, but I wasn't crazy about the idea that my character was shaped by the responses, rather than choosing the response that I genuinely felt was most appropriate.

Edited 2012-03-30 02:21 (UTC)

It's funny, I felt that way with Hawke, too... but I never got like that with my Shepards. I also love love love Jennifer Hale as femshep, but was just OK with fem Hawke. I didn't dislike her, but nothing really made me sit back and go "wow, that was some fine voice acting!" (and I have had that in Mass Effect).

I also sort of wonder if it is the accent. That makes the Hawke voice sound more distinctive and unusual to my American ears, where Shepard is just a pretty neutral North American accent, not unlike my own and the voices I hear around me all day every day.
I would love to know if the reverse happens for anyone of the Brits among us. I never really thought of it like that before, but now I wonder...

Voice acting ability, more like. FemHawke is... good, but not WHOA good, if you catch my meaning. Whereas Ms. Hale has a spectacular ability to show emotion in her voice, and more importantly, make you FEEL that emotion (not that it's perfect, because her queen-in-heat mode is cringe-worthy).

MaleHawke is just so much better than FemHawke in terms of VA, that FemHawke just fades into the background.

The accent does affect things, though. FemHawke has a vague RP accent, which in my head makes her sound snooty by default LOL

Yeah - I hated that mechanic too. I mean, just because I like joking around with my friends, doesn't mean I want to start trolling random people. I like doing my roleplaying myself, thank you very much. But since they already announced that they were going to keep the wheel of WTF, it's going to be a deal-breaker. No DA3 for me :)

I really don't see why this can't be made optional. Just cut away the PC saying things and give me text to read. Wouldn't affect the rest of the game at all.

I loved when Sheogorath said Martin turned into a dragon god. I would like to think they hang out on occasion.

I think Bioware is done with the silent PC forever. The eight classes of fully voiced PCs in TOR was planting their flag pretty deep into the voiced-main-character camp, IMO. I don't know, the silent main character and non cinematic discussions are almost old fashioned feeling compared to other games. Everything is cinematic now. I don't think it was avoided in the past because of any design choices- just finances and technology. DAO was in development for years, when they started it I don't even think the 360 had been launched. Now every console and game-capable PC can handle cinematic easily.

Yes, it would seem that way, but I think it's sad. Cinematics are fine in an adventure, but not in a role-playing game, IMO. I like doing stuff myself, I like deciding what my character does and doesn't feel - I like imagining how they deliver a line. You know, role-playing. I liked hearing my Amell's lovely, smoky alto voice in my head, my Cousland sounded strong and clear. One Tabris snarled her line about her raped friend at the king, the other smiled and chirped it.

With a voiced protagonist these things are taken away from me.

I'm surprised at myself that I'm actually surprised by the no-importing thing. I shouldn't be.
But it's actually better, I think. For one, of course it couldn't be done properly. And then, I'd much rather not hear anything ever again about my Warden from the official side. I think I'd even be annoyed by being told what Hawke got up to after kicking off that holy war - and I don't even like her.

The only problem I see with setting the next story so far after the events of DA:O that no one even really remembers anything about the Blight and that chantry is that it couldn't really be called "Dragon Age" anymore. But hey, they'll think of something.

The one thing I would have desperately wanted for the next game was going back to a silent protagonist who'd have no chance of enraging me with the things she said, but seeing how David Gaider already declared that will never happen... I'll play it anyway.

So what I'm hoping for now is an interesting story, companions one can actually talk to, enemies that use special abilities, and a character I can at least somewhat form and relate to.
Honestly, I have no idea where they might be going, because it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense without the continuity. But I guess I'm not the only one who wouldn't mind visiting Tevinter.

But I do have to add that I love that "Drawing from Skryrim" article.

I'm really excited to see that they're planning to make the whole world change and evolve just as much as Kirkwall did over 7 years.

I really, really like that idea, too. I was so psyched when I read that Kirkwall was supposed to change and evolve over a decade to reflect Hawke's influence and the passing of time. It disappointed me that nothing actually seemed to change.
Even something subtle, like how the Thieves Guild in Riften gets gussied up as you become more successful, would be a neat touch.

I'll admit that I was being sarcastic, seeing how Kirkwall didn't change at all, no matter what all those refugees, templars, blood magees, and qunari did.
But if they should get it right next time, yes, that'd be actually great. I really hope they'll consider the amount of work that'll take to implement to be reasonable.

The part I don't like about the voiced protagonist is that they seem to be restricting us to playing as humans, since they went so far into adding different accents for races in DA2. I would love a chance to play as a dwarf or elf again. (In TOR they have one voice per class, not race. It actually works, too. But there aren't really any established accents with, say, Zabrak and Miraluka.)

For one, of course it couldn't be done properly.
Yes, this. They haven't managed a flawless import in DA2, ME2, ME3, BG2... I don't see them suddenly getting it right now.

The one thing I would have desperately wanted for the next game was going back to a silent protagonist who'd have no chance of enraging me with the things she said, but seeing how David Gaider already declared that will never happen... I'll play it anyway.

The funny thing to me is that when they announced that DA2 would have a fully-voiced protagonist, the devs flat-out said that was the wave of the future, and that only stubborn players who hated change would prefer a silent protagonist.

How many copies has Skyrim sold, again?

(And yes, Skyrim has other problems, like the crappy UI where the dialogue option you end up with isn't what you intended because the mouse tracking is so bad. But even that's better than, "Wait, WHAT did he just say? That has no relationship to the phrase I just clicked on!")

By now, I believe it's not only that they think a silent protagonist is only for stubborn people who like dice, I think they're so proud of their stories that they actually dislike the idea that players could really influence it. DA2 showed this, as well as, I guess, Mass Effect 3 (which I haven't played but read a lot about).If the story is great, why would you want to change it?
Honestly, reading those things now makes me wonder how they ever made DA:O. And as far as sales go, they wouldn't even have to look at the competition, they'd just have to look at their own games.

Re: ME3

95% of the game is good. Spectacular, even. Plot, pacing, combat, EVERYTHING is brilliant, and definitely makes it one of the best games of this year so far.

Which makes the last 5% of the game's story, with its massive WTF-ness, even more horrible in comparison.

To be fair, the teams involved in ME have NO relation to the DA team, and it's been said that Casey Hudson and Mac Walters (the head honchos of the development team and the writing team) have both vetoed the endings of ME without allowing the rest of the writers to give their feedback.

Someone I know who has some inside sources from the DA writing team did inform me that the writing pipeline for DA, as a whole, work very differently from ME's pipeline, so I'm not TOO worried about the potential for screw-ups.

First off, I'm feeling a bit silly for having brought ME into this without having ever played it.
It's just that what I read reminded me of what they'd been saying about DA2. I think there's a huge difference between "This could have been better" and "This is the exact opposite of what we were promised".
And while I'm aware that those two games had different writers, it makes me somehow uncomfortable to think that a company could believe that it's okay to market certain aspects of a game, like choices that matter, influencing the world, and personalised endings, only to publish a product that shows very little of those things. That's not even necessarily only on the writers.

But the good thing is that I really don't expect to love DA3 as much as DA:O; I'd just like to like it better than DA2, so I'm not worried, either.

ME is worth playing if you are an overall fan of the Bioware formula. If DA:O was the spiritual successor to Baldurs Gate, ME is the spiritual successor to KOTOR. Fantastic characters, a rich world, interesting choices with lingering consequences, good writing. Really, all around good stuff. Seriously, they made a bird/dinosaur looking alien into a major fangirl favorite. That takes some writing chops.

Just stop when you get to what my friends and I have been calling "The Elevator of Stupid" in the final game. Stop, invent an ending that pleases you, and never look back. You will be so much happier that way.

rofl "the elevator of stupid" I like that :D

^^this.

Yeah but there are no conversations in Skyrim. You don't have fully fledged discussions with anyone. The dialogue is stuff like:

Where can I find work around here?
Got anything for sale?
I'll do that job.

Almost every bit of player involved dialogue is about getting, refusing, or turning in quests. The few exceptions, like the long conversation with Paarthurnax, did feel strange and one sided because of the silent character. But for the most part it isn't like people are pouring their soul out at your feet while you stand mutely staring forward.

True. I just don't think that the silent protagonist is as much of a problem as the DA devs seemed to think it was, and the implementation of the fully-voiced PC in DA2 introduced a whole new set of issues.

I really think if they ditched the paraphrase and let you see something closer to what your character would actually say it would help.
This is such a polarizing issue I worry they won't ever hit on a happy medium that satisfies both sides.

this is what worries me about the borrowing from Skyrim idea. If they want a format that really pleases the customer, they should go back to their own roots instead of trying to adapt other companies ideas.

That would truly be the last straw for me if I brought DA:3 and found a straight up dungeon hack with a joke quest for a romance option. Seriously I'd swear off all bioware/ea for good including canceling my SWTOR sub. And that is saying something, because I absolutely love SWTOR. It is my last bastion of the awesome that was Bioware. *cries*

I want to think they will be throwing their all into DA3, if only because Bioware has to know they're in trouble. Fans ripped them into pieces over DA2, and they're getting it even worse for the ending of ME3.
I love Bioware. Fucking love them. Every game is installed on my system... going all the way back to BG. But right now? They are on some seriously thin ice with me. I want to hope DA3 is good because, if I feel like this, people who aren't as hardcore fans have got to be just writing them off completely. They have to know they're in trouble.

The part about that announcement I had noticed (and felt cranky about) was no further DLC. I loved Legacy, and although I didn't like MotA as much, I feel... cheated by the abrupt ending. I guess if it didn't sell it didn't sell, but I

I am cranky about that and it is increasing my state of pre-game skepticism. Perhaps I should be more trusting, I thought I would hate DA2 with the voiced character, and I ended up liking it as well or better than DAO. I loved it and would have happily lay down money to play more there, but I do seem to be in the minority. I haven't been at all impressed by their other media and am not terribly interested in buying it.

I was not as big a Skyrim fan as most of the rest of the people on the boards. Skyrim was full of people I didn't care about, I was mostly into making enchanted armor, once I had maxed that out it became too bothersome to finish the plot. I would be really sad to see any DA game like that. I don't know if they could have a meaningful narrative arc in an open world, so I am terribly leery of that idea. Even more, I am not very interested in multiplayer. I also don't want to play with other real people, I want to play with imaginary people I have some degree of control over...

I would be a little sad if they didn't draw on anything. They wouldn't have to do the quests they did in DA2, but they could at least throw in a couple of codex entries that reference the big things (who was made king/queen in DAO, how the mage wars turned out from DA2).

I don't know, no matter what they do, there are always screw ups with one or two flags along the way that import incorrectly, or choices that aren't addressed while others are, and people raise a stink. (when the Zev romance didn't import correctly into DA2 people were losing their shit left and right on BSN. I think seeing that is probably when the devs said 'yeah, maybe no more imports')
Personally, I would rather see them throw their all into making DA3 the best game they can instead of spending time and resources making sure the new game correctly acknowledges previous imports. Even the big choices were open ended, so that wouldn't be just a quick codex. If you include Loghain living or not, and Alistair drunk or Warden, there are something like nine or ten options just to determine the throne in Origins.

It's sad, though, that the better choice of action is not to do something people really liked because it's just so much work.
Looking through the toolset I saw flags that were being set upon certain conditions with developer comments like, "Don't even try to understand this, but it should work, I guess." Aside from being funny, this also shows why there were some things that just didn't work, I suppose. Some flags simply couldn't be referenced because they weren't spelled correctly. Those things can be fixed and have been fixed by people who love the games, but not by the developers.

That Zevran thing needed to check for what, 10 flags, maybe? Probably that is a lot, but that's what you get if you let people make decisions.
So, it probably really is better to give up on importing than continue to not get it right.

What they proposed was insanely ambitious. I don't fault them for having things get messed up, especially since the engine changed a bit between the first and second game. No one else really bothers with character imports, and it is generally for reasons like this. It feels more fun in ME, anyways, since you're actually still playing the same character. There is a lot lost in importing choice when you don't even have the same protagonist.

I guess I just fall on the side that says if the choice is having someone shovel through the Origins and DA2 code for 100 hours to get the flags right, or having someone spent 100 hours working on a new unique dungeon, I'll pick the latter every time. I would really have gladly traded the fanservice Alistair cameo for not using the same cave over and over again the last time around. I want more new game to play, not more references to games I've already played. In a perfect world, both would happen, but in the world of corporate EA overlords, time constraints, and budgets, they have to pick their priorities.

I think you're right. It is a terribly ambitious concept. And, to be fair, even if imports are done correctly, there's still a chance that people like me are annoyed because it could have been even more extensive... or because an NPC whose marriage choices were checked by the game happens to make a quip I dislike.
I'm not being sarcastic when I say it probably is for the best if there's no further importing because in this case, it might be better not to try at all than to try and fail.
I don't believe that many people would have truly hated it if there hadn't been any cameos of Origin's characters in DA2; it was only when they acted wrong or should have been dead that people took notice.

I would love to see the characterization and overall writing of DA, combined with the sense of being part of a larger world that I have in Skyrim. I'm having great fun running around with my Dunmer girl and pretty much taking over Skyrim one organization at a time, but a little more structure would have made things a lot smoother in the beginning. And yay, I can marry anyone I want, regardless of race, age, or gender, but it's kind of meaningless when I don't feel like I know or really care about the people I'm interacting with.

Also, ditching the traditional D&D-style stats list and class system. My main Skyrim character is a spellsword who happens to have an insanely high lockpicking skill. She's isn't locked into a single fighting style or type of armor (which does get annoying; I'm wandering around with two sets of armor in addition to the one I'm wearing.

I'm definitely with you on the no multiplayer! I like being able to save a game and shut down and not have to deal with asshats in pick-up groups. If I want a multiplayer fantasy game, I'll start playing Rift or Aion again, or just break down and play WoW.

I would love a more organic mixed class system. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Also, screw multiplayer. I used a save game editor to raise my war assets because I fucking hate multiplayer.

The thing I'm worried about is if they do make some comments on previous events, they'll just default to the official Bioware canon to avoid flags not properly importing. Which means you'll always have King Alistair and a dead Warden, a Warden Commander who works with the architect, and whatever is canon for Hawke. (Warrior who let Anders live? Something?)
I'd rather they ignore it completely, I was displeased enough at being informed that my Warden simply vanished.
I guess they could and will reference the mage war, that has nothing to do with anything we got to influence, at least.

Hmmm... I'm worried, really really worried...

I went through full out enthusiasm with Awakenings. Then I went to enthusiastic hopefulness with DA:2. I kinda went through a quietly desperately hopeful with bargaining tendencies with ME3.

I'm not sure I have it in me to forgive Bioware/EA anymore monumental screwups with the games I love. If they want to use us as guinea pigs for their artistic endeavors, I'd prefer them to do it with games like amalur. At least then the fans of the legitimate franchises won't be crushed every time.

For DA:3 I will watch quietly and wait. SWTOR has given me the boost of confidence in the company I need to keep hope alive. but... No pre-orders, no deposits, no holding out hope for an awesome collectors edit. Definitely no purchase with Origin.

And absolutely no money changing hands until I see good FAN reviews instead of relying on 10/10 reviews that they probably paid someone to submit.

I'll

Well, I suppose I'll do what I usually do and wait for the game to come out, then drop in price. By then, I'll have heard enough to know whether or not it's worth my time.

I do love the sandbox worlds of the Elder Scrolls games. I like being able to go anywhere I want, poke around in anyone's house, go into any store and so on. It's very freeing. I've played Elder Scrolls games for hours without ever once doing the main quest. I figure that's sort of an option rather than a requirement. *grin*

I haven't yet had a chance to play DAII, so I can't really reference it. I do want to see something of the awesomeness that was DAO. (That's one thing the Elder Scroll games do well.) I do want to have people I can care about, and I want choice. I want to be able to equip my companions as I see fit, I want to choose my race and class and abilities, and I want to actually make a difference in the game world.

Personally, I don't mind an unvoiced PC because I'm perfectly capable of supplying the voice in my head. Most of us have probably played many games where the characters weren't voiced. (Yes, children, there are old hard-core gamers.) I did like hearing people actually talk in DAO and Awakening.

Really, I'm not exactly sure what I want from DAIII (aside from an actual name for the game). I guarantee, however, that I will not be preordering. I always like to get more information before I actually plunk down my hard-earned money.

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