Dragon Age Choices Still Matter As Long As You Care About Them

By 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Stacey Henley

Published Oct 1, 2024

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In the run up to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon Age: Inquisition launching, the Dragon Age Keep felt like part of the hype. Since Inquisition was launching in a new console generation, it couldn't just import decisions from past games from save files as Dragon Age 2 did with Origins, or as the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mass Effect trilogy did. So you had to go onto a separate, external website and manually make all your choices over again. At the time, it felt like playing a bit of the game early, even as we reflect on it now as a massive faff. But 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon Age: The Veilguard is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:doing away with it entirely.

When yo🐲u create your character in The Veilguard, you'll only make a handful of specific choices about the previous game, rather than going through each possible sc🅰enario. The idea is that you're only making choices that specifically impact The Veilguard, not filling in blanks for the sake of agency. As the game takes place in Tevinter, many of the decisions that would have impacted the region won't be felt in this game, and thus are not part of the choices.

We Can't Judge The Veilguard's World State Until We Play It

There are a few caveats to how I feel about this. On the one hand, this is clearly the less popular option, and I'm sort of glad BioWare is showing the chutzpah to do something it knows fans won't like because it feels that's the best direction for the game. The inclusion of the Dragon Age Council has always madꦗe me wary. On the other, it depends on why this decision was made, and why certain el🐼em✅ents were cut.

The thinking is to avoid wheeling out cheap cameos in the name of🐬 fan service. Again, a move I support. But did the direction for the game heading to Tevinter and dealing with a fairly separate arc (despite the continued presence of Solas) come first, and then the reduced World State choices come after? Or was there an early conversation in the conceptual stage where the team debated the logistical difficulty and potential restrictions of a more customisable world state, and thus the game's direction has been hamstrung by choices, rather than freed from them?

Certain core choices being missing from the equation, like the inability to select who you chose as Divine, seem to point to the logistics and restrictions having some bearing on the decision to largely limit the World State. But just as no one really considers scrolling through the Keꦡep as being part of their Dragon Age: Inquisition playthrough, Dragon Age: The Veilguard's proof is in a pudding that is still being cooked. It's harsh to judge what impact these choices, or their lack, will have on the game when it hasꦺn’t even launched yet.

The Point Of RPG Choices Is Not To Set Up A Sequel

What has perplexed me, though, is the rising sentiment that there was 'no point' to those choices now that we won’t see their ramifications. I just fail to follow that line of thinking. I loved Inquisition, but never made a decision hoping it m♍ight impact my playthrough in the sequel a decade from now. Every choice was made either for the betterment of my Inquisitor and their friends, or because I felt it was the in-character choice for them to make. The point of choices in RPGs is rarely to see these choices through to their universe-altering ramifications, but rather to immerse yourself in each character moment.

I felt the same way about Mass Effect. While I also don't like the rigid split of three endings made with your last moment of agency, I generally like the overall finale of the Mass Effect trilogy and the many conclusions it offers. The fact it all ends with the same choice should not mean that earlier choices didn't matter. I've beaten the trilogy three times and made two different decisions across those runs, three if you count the fakeout Refuse ending. I made those choices not because I think they are the best meta-game choices, or because I wanted to see how they impact Mass Effect 4/5/The Next One Depending On If Andromeda Counts, but becau♑se they were right for that particular Shepard.

We're going to continue to see long gaps 𓆉between sequel entries, and that may mean fewer choices get carried forward into the next entry. That's probably not going to be a popular decision, because we w𝕴ant our choices to 'matter'. But they still do matter. They matter at the time we make them to the characters we make them for.