What if the main story character is an NPC?

If they were going to do this I think they would still need to acknowledge the players to a pretty good degree though, even if they weren't the main star of the show.

I've seen over the years Blizzard having the complaints about WoW of the players being "kill stolen" by NPCs who were given credit in lore for raid bosses that we defeated.

In my experience most players don't like doing all the hard work and then having the game praise some random NPC for it.

Plus a main character that isn't us which I assume is a pre-defined character that we can romance would cause riots based on what gender that main character was. If they were female people who wanted to romance a male character would riot, or vice versa if they were male

Also escort quests are mainly annoying or not depending on the person being escort. If they can handle their own like Elizabeth from Bioshock it's not bad.

If it's Ashely from Resident Evil 4 I want to throw her into a dumpster, light said dumpster on fire, throw the dumpster into the deepest pit I can find, and then nuke the god damn thing from orbit if I have to listen to her shout "LEON HELP" one more time.

It's quite possible the game has a personal story that make you move around the open world and being a Freelancer just means getting quests to kill monsters and finding stuff makes sense.

Nice idea, reminds me a bit of the storyline in Skyrim when you follow along that rebel leader.

But I don't think BioWare is going to take any risks in such an important title.

It's just an example, one that motivates why we might be doing shitwork errands while still making sense, storywise.

Pick whatever archetype you prefer -- mysterious alien that you rescue from a crash, or a little lost orphan girl, or the avatar of the planet's spirit, or the Bavarian Illuminati -- doesn't matter. The larger point is, if the protagonist in an NPC, the story can be told and progressed more naturally, without trying to manipulate the player into playing the role the story requires. The NPC could be a very dynamic character -- think Indiana Jones or Diana -- that's in every scene or main quest stage that matters, out in the world kicking alien ass and taking names, and you're right there with the hero, either helping, hurting, or staying the hell out of the way, your choice.

...I still don't get why this is a protagonist role. Having another character's orders or problems driving the plot doesn't make them the protagonist. If you mean we will develop our characters in the context of being a subordinate , I can get behind that, but I don't see how this means our character is not the protagonist. It will still be our choices and our exploits that we follow even if there is another character making higher level decisions driving the plot.

To be fair, players are more cool with it when the NPC given credit has been contributing throughout the fight. In my experience, the annoyance over kill stealing is mostly directed towards NPCs that have done nothing and only appeared at the end of the fight to land the killing blow. This also applies to NPCs that alone gets the credit despite the players canonically having been present as an army that contributed and help make the kill possible. 

I see. If your definition of protagonist is, "the character the player controls", sure, what I'm saying won't make sense. And absolutely I believe that my character should develop through my interaction with other characters, NPC or otherwise, in whatever context makes sense, it doesn't have to be a leadership role. I just don't agree that the protagonist and the PC are necessarily the same thing, from the point of view of storytelling.

Consider Tony Stark in the original Iron Man movie. That's apropos, given the Javelin suits. Do you agree that Tony Stark was the protagonist of that movie? Say we translate that movie to a game, story beat for story beat, shot for shot, explosion for explosion, no change to the plot at all. The only thing that changes is that somehow, through some hand wavy method, hidden video or whatnot, Pepper Potts gets to see every scene that the audience sees, even when she's not in the scene herself. The character you control as a player is Pepper Potts.  Your actions are more-or-less limited to what Pepper does in the movie, though you might have total freedom in making choices that aren't plot important, like what to have for breakfast.

Are you the protagonist in that scenario? Has the story been made less interesting in some way if you are not playing the protagonist? I'll grant you, it might not be a very interesting game to play, but you can't argue the story itself is somehow damaged or made uninteresting by not playing the protagonist, given the way I set it up. It's the exact same story as the movie.

It might be the same story, but it would be a much worse telling of that story.  Because you've just alienated your audience, the players, who are annoyed at being stuck as some side character.  Your protagonist is now some annoying prat with a stupid beard who the game is annoyingly obsessed with and keeps trying to force you to focus on, leaving you baffled as to why they lumped you with this lady.

What you could do is something like the Star Trek:TNG episode "Lower Decks", which tells a story from the point of view of some lower ranking officers on the Enterprise.  But the key is, that for that episode those characters are the protagonists, the cameras follow them, mostly, and they get the character development.  The normal main characters are still doing what they normally do, but they're not who the story is interested in for once.

Do you mean like Yuna in final fantasy x?

The player character was still a main character and a protagonist but was protecting another main character yuna the chosen one character who had the special power needed to defeat the bad guy.

I think the character your playing is pretty much always going to be a protagonist because your seeing the story from their point of view and their always going to be a main character because their the character onscreen the most (usually always). But you can have more than main/major character, so yeah we could have an npc whose also one.

Not being in charge makes sense for a multiplayer game. But i think i'd prefer there being no chosen one, pc or otherwise. Theres plenty of ways to get involved with a main plot without destiny or special powers. Given the nature of this game and the word 'freelancers', because we were hired to is a perfectly good reason.

I'm pretty much neutral on there being another protagonist whose an npc or not. As long as I'm involved in the plot and not just passively watching.

I think we've found some common ground for understanding based on what you said in the post immediately before this one, but let me go back to your earlier reply and elaborate a little more and answer your question here.

It's a burden because my degrees of freedom in interpreting my PC are restricted to what the story demands. If my character conception, at CC time, doesn't exactly fit the role the story has waiting for me, I'm going to be pretty frustrated.

Let's use DAI as an example, since it's familiar to both of us. What if, during WEWH, I wanted to rule Orlais myself? Shouldn't I be able to arrange for assassinations, exile, or imprisonment for all three contenders, leaving the throne open to me? Or maybe I just want Briala on the throne, front and center? Or maybe I want Orlais thrown into civil war, with no ruler at all, so my Fereldan buddies can invade? Or maybe I don't want to go to the Winter Palace in the first palce and let Orlais sort itself out? No. I'm confined to the choices written for my PC. If I had conceived of my character at CC time as a comedic clown, who accomplishes things through humor only, never violence, how does the game help my realize that concept? It thwarts it at almost every step in WEWH.

Of course, games can't support every choice imaginable. I'm not saying every game should have some strong AI that can adapt to any random choice. But why must the choices be so severely limited in WEWH? There's not a single selfish, patriotic (to Fereldan), comedic, romantic (seduce one of the contenders), etc., option allowed. Who's to say that those choices don't make a better story for me, in that moment?

It seems to be a law of nature that, the stronger and more impactful the story, the fewer degrees of freedom (fewer choices and less variety of choices, particularly at the extremes) allowed the player. This is the player agency vs. story conundrum.

That's not to say I don't like the story as written for WEWH. I just don't want to be the protagonist of that story every single time I make a run through WEWH. Been there, done that. Let me be someone else for a change, wandering the grounds picking pockets and generally making a nuisance of myself, all as a distraction, or furthering the goals of the Inquisitor (an NPC in this scenario, mind you), or maybe solely for selfish reasons.

So here's a radical idea. Consider a game where complete runs make sense, like Skyrim and DAI (it's not clear to me that "run" makes sense in the context of Anthem, it might be an evergreen world, with no beginning or end for a given character). That game has a "default" main story, with a plot and character arc, as you would expect. Your first run, your PC is the protagonist of that default story and you get to experience the full story. Great, even if you stop playing there, you got a good experience. But let's say you decide to do a second run.

In your second run, you can either be the protagonist of the main story again, or, a supporting character, who can influence the character arc of the protagonist, deflecting the default arc into another path, at your option. The plot changes under your influence. You know how the story is "supposed" to go, since you experienced it in your first run, but your choices nudge it into a different path. If you want to insist that your PC is the protagonist of a new story in that case, and the NPC "leading role" is just some other character, that's fine -- I think that's mostly a matter of semantics, as long as we understand each other.

(This isn't an entirely original idea. Nier:Automata has multiple "runs" built into the game, with multiple endings. Route A to Ending A has you play one character of a duo. In Route B, you play the side-kick through the same overlapping timeline, and see some scenes you didn't see in A, because the side-kick was pulled away to deal with some problem off-screen. In B, you get to see what that off-screen problem was. It's neat!)

The point is that, now, as a supporting character, you can disconnect from the main story altogether if you want. It will run it's own course while you do your own thing. Or, you can influence the story by choices you make, deflecting it into a new path. Maybe a happier outcome, maybe a darker one. Nothing is sacrificed in terms of the main plot, but now you get a different point-of-view on the story, maybe see it from a different character's point of view, or different location. Maybe you operate behind the scenes to change the outcome of some encounter, maybe you don't do any of that.

I think all that is feasible with today's technology and budgets. More degrees of freedom for the player, including opt-ing out of the main story altogether, without sacrificing that story, since it has a life of it's own in the game.