DA4 - dual protagonists?

I'd welcome a dual pc setup with the New PC taking up the majority of the game but the Inquisitor getting a few key plot relevent sections - like ciri in witcher.

DAI Hawke left me with the strong feeling that an returning protagonist has to give the player the option of controlling their dialogue wheel (they can't represent every pc personality/opinion but they can present options from which the player can choose the most apropos one), even if their an npc otherwise. If its not worth the resources to do that then its not worth bringing them back in person - not for an imersion breaking OOC experience.

I enjoy having a new pc each game, creating them, their personality, forming their new story and relationships, experiancing new parts of thedas with them. I feel like I'd be missing alot of what I enjoy out of this series if we didn't have one. Whilst I do see the point of people when they say the inquisitor should be involved with the solas plotline, with the whole stop him vs redeem him thing and the personal stake, I don't think they're needed for the whole game. The more trivial quests and plotlines that are also present in a game would be better suited to a newer pc, the inquisitor has nothing to prove, no need of minor gain, and no reason to stop and smell the roses or collect the minor quests. It would feel out of place if they did. And if they're supposed to be working from the shadows and using new agents and strategies then they shouldn't be doing anything too showey personnally either, less they give the game away.

Having a new pc for the larger chunk of content, being recruited as an agent or finding their own path to the MQ, and the inquiistor for brief significant sections gives the best of both. Allowing closure for the inquisitor plotline whilst still gaining all the good of having a new pc.

I hope Solas eviscerates the inquisitor

If the Evanuris get released and i very much hope i don't have to 'deal with' the true elven gods.

This. They wanted to close the Inquisitors story in Trespasser but in my opinion they did the opposite. I was fine with ending the Inquistitors story before Trespasser. Now for the first time, in the DA series, I'm not ok with how my characters story ended. And I wasn't even bothered by Hawke's "mysteriously disappearing" at the end of DA 2.

Agree. And some quest that allow player to control Hawk/Warden/Inquisition will be great.

I'm personally of the opinion that a dual protagonist scenario cannot work in a Bioware style game.

For a dual protagonist game to work - and some of my all time favorite games have multiple playable protagonists - you need a few different things that really boil down to one thing; the characters need to contrast with each other. They need to have different personalities, they need to have different outlooks, they need to have different goals. Ideally, they need to have different playstyles. If you have two characters that look the same, play the same, want the same things and have the same opinions on the world around them, then you have one too many characters.

I don't believe that the basic framework of a Bioware RPG allows for that, and any steps Bioware takes to enforce it is going to be met with hostility from the fan base. There are some small things they can do; maybe for character backgrounds they finally give us a human who isn't part of the nobility, for starters. But if they give us a character creator that doesn't let us make our new character into a virtual clone of the old one, you'll have people complaining about how the only like the options of one or the other and there' an artificial divide in resources. Our characters are going to be picking from the same three classes we always have and there will likely be nothing stopping us from building our characters to be virtual clones of each other in that regard, either. And if they divide up the powers you'll have people complaining about that as well.

And ultimately we'll be making choices and dialogue options and if our characters can't agree withe each other on everything, people will complain about how they've had their choices taken away and Bioware is railroading them with forced, artificial conflict - and I've lost faith in Bioware's ability to make that conflict come off as natural an organic regardless. And if our characters can't disagree, then again, one of these characters is superfluous.

That's not even getting into the question of resource management in regards to party members and lines of dialogue. They can only fit so many audiofiles onto a disk. If the two protagonists have the same party and take turns leading it, then the party members are only going to have half as many conversations with either of them, and if they have two different parties, then each companion is going to have half the total lines they would have had anyway. And then there's lines of dialogue from the PCs themselves; in regards to Inquisition, Bioware said that it would have been technically impossible for them to fit eight versions of every line of dialogue for the inquisitor on one disk. That's why instead of having each race have it's own set of voice actors they had two sets you could choose from. Even assuming that a new protagonist would either be limited to a single race or a single pair of voice actors regardless of race selection, that's still a lot more audio files to put in the game.

There's also the divide in character development; the Inquisitor has a whole game of established character development and built relationships with their companions. A 50/50 split would make the new protagonist very underdeveloped and shortchanged in comparison. But if you flip it to an extreme where the new protagonist has the lion share of the screen time I don't know how you wrangle a satisfying story out of a game where the core emotional conflict is centered around a character that gets a minority of screen time. This of course is playing with the conceit that the Inquisitor has to be involved to give the Solas arc a satisfying conclusion - something I don't agree with at all and that I personally don't want.

Also, the general impression I've gathered from various statements Bioware's released over the years is that they make these games under the assumption that the bulk of the people playing them didn't play the previous games, or at least didn't finish them. I don't know that a dual protagonist set up basing the core emotional conflict around the Inquisitor vs Solas is going to work for a game that the company is going to want to make accessible to a wide audience. I know that people who are deeply invested in that story don't particularly care about that but Bioware and EA are businesses with bottom lines so that is going to be something that factors into their decision whether you like it or not.

The games I've seen this work in don't allow you to create and build your own character and don't allow you to dictate what that character says and how they react to situations. These are elements that are an integral part of Bioware's formula.

Ultimately I don't think it's an idea that's technically feasible or narratively satisfying. Also I find that the whole idea is built around a compromise position by people who want the Inquisitor to return to finish off the story with Solas to offer to those who want a new protagonist. And ultimately I find that this is one of those compromises that ultimately ends up being the worst of both worlds. The people who want the Inquisitor to return get half the game they wanted, and the people who want a new protagonist get a bunch of unrelated superfluous fluff attached to half of a game they didn't want.

This is probably going to sound mean, but the fact that most commenters here seemingly only want the Inquisitor back so they can resolve their conflict (or romance) with Solas is one the reasons why I really don't want the Inquisitor back or then as a cameo. The Inquisitor is a satellite character to me whose sole focus and motivation revolve around Solas. That to me is not a great protagonist and one of the reasons why I want a new one is because hopefully they'll be interesting from the beginning and have an impactful backstory and dialogue options, which I thought the Inquisitor lacked in the main game of Inquisition.

I would love an AU inquisitor that can wash his hands.

If dual-protagonist means de-canonizing Trespasser then I would like the Dual-Protagonist. If trespasser is canon, then no, I don't want it.

Wait, where's this objection coming from? If the Inquisitor's not actually doing the fighting anymore, I think it's made fairly clear they don't intend to wash their hands of Solas.

I don't care so much as to who goes to see Solas, I care to get options that result in great changes to the world. I want the world that is permeable to spirits and demons, not the boring countryside with elves and dwarves.

That's the point. The setting is too vanilla in its current state, it needs something to be different from all the Tolkien spin-offs out there. Three games was too much already. Four is pushing it. At least then the fifth may be interesting. Who knew that from all their IPs it's this one they are going to drag on and on and on... Something needs to happen to justify the abrupt anachronistic changes they do each game and the settings needs a facelift. They are obviously not interested in medieval stories, so why they keep pretending it's still the same setting as in Origins, beats me.

Yep, I do. I was having heart's palpitations thinking I can finally play Arcanum-with-modern graphics sorta game. I was not opposed to urban fantasy, or muskets and rapiers settings or more martial arts with magic. Power suits is pretty much the only sub-genre I am not really into. Along with more bow-wielding elves and dwarves with axes. I think they do want it too, because they keep slipping in every century weaponry and décor into their medieval world. Two more games, and we'll be doing "everything goes" fantasy artfully blending chain-mail bikini with lace and machine guns.