Ryder Confirmed to be Brother/Sister

If I remember correctly, they said at E3 that character customization will be handled differently this time around, as will choosing the main protagonist.

Do you think it is perhaps the sibling switching off to different questlines, so were jumping back and forth between them?

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I've noticed some posts (up thread) about the possibility of playing multiple characters in the same play through.  A novel idea. But, it comes
with two major weaknesses, from a RPG perspective.

1. Leveling and skills
By the end of 10 hours of play, each of your swapped characters will not achieve their full leveling opportunities.  You just got yourself two
weak characters that will get killed in no time. Game progression, story arc, character leveling and combat balancing go hand in hand. Think
of what your level/skills/attributes stats are if one is a Soldier Class and the other is a Biotic Class.

2. Character development and impact on the game world.
A RPG allows you to choose a character and a class. In turn, you have an opportunity to mold the character that though game progression
gives you choices that either impacts your squad members or the world (NPCs, missions... etc).  Switching back and forth  can negatively impact
your available choices and/or influence.   For example: You have insufficient attributes skills for a successful diplomatic mission objective.

Any other thoughts on this or counter argument?

This can all be resolved by automatically leveling up your inactive characters, like it was done (I believe) in DA:O (was it though?) or (this I'm certain about) in Neverwinter Nights.
Plus, nobody designs the game in which you may mess up to the point you can't proceed.

I think that family ties are somewhat secondary. It's a video game and you just won't care about your virtual family solely because they will tell you this or that textured grid of triangles is your mother or brother. What makes you care about the character is the exposure the character gets.

When you play a game like Beyond Good & Evil you start to care about Peyj because of the continuous interaction with your protagonist and the chemistry between those characters, not because you're told it's your uncle. The same goes for any companion in any game, including ME squadmates. A character being an assumed emotional hook when this status is not justified in the game (like for example in DA2 where the relationship with your sibling is lukewarm) doesn't add to the overall experience, but rather detracts.

i guess i'm in the minority of not wanting to go back and forth with protags.

It's as if you didn't play games. In DAO and NWN2 teammates you didn't use were given the experience needed to level up to current "team level" and then you did the leveling-up yourself. Plus you can't possibly believe that auto-leveling (which was always the option in BioWare titles for quite a while) would actually give you a horrible character that would make the game difficult.

Taking momentary control of an NPC in combat to assign tasks is not the same thing as switching between protagonists.

edit: ninja'd 

now that's an idea i can get behind. 

This is how it should work, indeed, but game developers and moviemakers still assume that you care about someone just because you're told they're family. Fallout 4 is a good recent example. I *was* motivated to go after the child, but not because he was family, but because I was intrigued by the mystery of the abduction and angry that these people had...well...I guess "stolen from me" captures best what I felt at the time. 

I can 100% say that, at least for me I hope the Brother/Sister thing is a early game choice not a we can swap at will in game. I've always disliked that, ultimately results in me not feeling any real attachment as a 'this is me'. Granted I play characters in these games I make up, I don't really go at is as a 'what would I do' (usually, anyway). Games that give you the option to swap inevitably force you to swap at certain points. And if I don't have a 'main' character that'll I dunno, be a detriment for me story wise.

That said I was speculation that early on we may play as the Father as an intro to the game, maybe after selecting our class (before making our face) and the father mimics that? But that was more an idea based off time skips. I think it's far more likely we always play as our character and the into to the game is the heavy 'family time' when it's back int he Milky Way/Earth.

I have a feeling there will be at least some of that going on prior to the ARK launchs. Kinda curious what they meant by a 'theres a trick to that' with the gender of our character. It may just be it's the whole Sibling thing as 2 distinctly different people (like FO4) vs 'same person but gender swaps' like every BioWare game to date... I mean that's technically a 'trick' just not enough of one for me to of used that word for it.

Then again they've been super cagey about all of this so they probably didn't wanna give that way till they finally got to showcase the game play.

edit:
As an aside, playing Joker in ME2 was awesome. That is easily my favorite temporary character swap ever. But we where Shepard 100%, and that swap didn't take away from that like a 2nd shepard and trying to keep track of which Shep talked to who or any of that nonsense.

Could be, but I think that we choose a sibling at the start of the game for the rest of the game and play through the story where our story is played out in parallell with the other sibling.