DA4 - dual protagonists?

Wait, is this whole you not wanting the Inquisitor back just because you have a grudge about DAI not doing playersexuality?
There is no threat to canon.

To answer the integrating choices question, really most choices become inconsequential since the next game will be taking place up North in Tevinter while the previous games were in the South so at most there would need to be a few lines of dialogue referencing them. The choices that would impact this game would be few enough that it could be handled well and easily. Just use the Dragon Age Keep to integrate them all. 

Well good because as I said there is no threat to canon or even an implication of it if the Inquisitor returns. 
Wow, what a petty vindictive person you are if you doing this is just to get back at other players just because you couldn't romance a character. 

I'm not really part of your conversation here, but I've noticed that you're getting a bit defensive whenever anyone talks about not wanting Inky to return (other threads too). Maybe you should step back and let others say their opinions without getting angry about it. =\

I wander if we'll have the Keep at all. It seems too much work to integrate and reference all those 'minor' choices for three games in a row put together. I think it would matter for example who was made the monarch Anora or Alistair to put it briefly into a codex entry or have some character mention in one line dialogue, but it won't really be big in history if you've returned the sword to Sten. Maybe it would have a simplified version of the Keep?

I've just finished act 1 in DA2, and only getting one foot into this conflict, so I wander, does it change his attitude and Quinari policy towards humans depending on the terms he had parted on with the Warden? I imagine he might have some dialogue line whether he might marginally comment on whether he found any person of worth during Ferelden travels, but would it change his behaviour or make it easier for Hawke.

Ah that is COOOL! XD I always want my Origins characters to become someone great and I'm glad Sten isn't a villain after all.

This did get me thinking (to my spoilers doooom since I'm only starting DA2 and Inq) how this topic deserves a separate thread.

In regards to The Witcher 3 being used as an example of a way to do dual protagonists in an rpg, allow me to retort.

The Witcher 3 is a great game. I don't think it is hyperbole to describe it as one of the bet RPGs of all time. And out of the gaems that have used dual protagonists to great effect, it is to my knowledge the closest to a Bioware-style rpg that exists. But there are various key differences that separate it from Bioware's formula that I think lessen the applicability of using it as an example or blueprint for how to do dual protagonists in Dragon Age.

Big thing is that both playable protagonists are prexisting set characters with defined personalities and a prexisting relationship - the relationship being that of an adoptive parent and child - to base their interactions and motivations around. Yes, Ciri hadn't been shown in the previous games but she was a major character in the novels the games are based on and act as an AU sequel to so they had that preexisting history to go on. They have defined backgrounds and histories and defined abilities and playstyles. You can cutomize Geralt's appearance slightly - styling his hair and beard - and have some freedom in customizing his playstyle, but that's fairly minimal and there's little to no overlap between him and Ciri, who's abilitie are set in stone. You can select branching dialogue options for both of them during their playable sections but these are mostly either/or options compared to the 3-4 that Bioware usually gives you. Their individual nemeses' - Geralt vs the Wild Hunt and Ciri vs the White Cold - are deeply intwined storylines, but the primary emotional arc of the game isn't about these two vs their adversaries, but between each other; can Geralt be a good enough father to Ciri to prepare her for her destiny or will his protective instincts ultimately hold her back?

This is obviously a very different scenario from the Inquisitor being playable alongside a wholly new protagonist. The core conflict would, according to the pro-inquisitor crowd, be between the Inquisitor and the Antagonist, Solas, thus making the new protagonist extraneous to that. The inquisitor's past is too varied and detached to make creating a new character out of whole cloth who has a preexisting relationship with them to be anything but a monumental effort on the part of the designers, and for it to be compelling from a narrative perspective. The only way that works is if the second "protagonist" is one of the Inquisitor's party members.

Alternatively the dynamic between the two characters could be based on their conflicting, competing ideas on how to deal with Solas - one being in favor of redemption vs the other wanting to kill them. But the issue there is that the Inquisitor gets an option on how they want to deal with Solas; if the new character's decision is determined by automatically being the opposite of that, that takes away agency from us and will feel artificial. I also don't know how you get a new character without the Inquisitor's pre-existing relationship with Solas to be in favor of redeeming him from the get-go. And again, if they both agree on how to do it, then from a narrative stand point they're superfluous as main characters.

You also have the issue that in the Witcher, it is the returning protagonist that carries the bulk of the game. That works because we're being introduced to the new character through the lens of the returning character's relationship with her. Which as we've established, we can't really have here either way.

Then from a technical standpoint, they're completely different ballparks. Geralt has one set voice actor. Ciri has one set voice actress. Geralt has one model with minimal customizable parts. Ciri has one model with one alternate outfit. The inquisitor, at the very least, will have four potential voice actors and eight different models they have to work with. A new protagonist would have at least two of each. All significantly more customized and variable than Geralt & Ciri's. The Witcher is also a game built and balanced around solo character combat where as Dragon Age has always been built around party-based combat. Geralt's abilities are set even if you can customize his playstyle, and Ciri's abilities are locked down. A Dual Protagonist DA4 would have to account for two protagonist that could be any combination of three different classes with significantly more variables than The Witcher had to content with.

Also, Geralt and Ciri's set personalities also means that when Geralt finally catches up to Ciri, she is demoted from playable character to NPC and her dialogue goes from being under our control to predetermined as we interact with her through Geralt. We've seen how well Bioware handles that set up with Hawke's cameo in DAI.

So we have a situation where we have two characters when we cannot base the core emotional conflict of the game around their relationship with each other, and trying to make the core emotional conflict about their relationships with the Antagonist is complicated by having that relationship be to some extent, determined by us, the player, thus potentially rendering either of the characters redundant. And on top of that a laundry list of technical reasons why it's unfeasible.

Yes, CD Project pulled it off with Witcher 3, but there are a multitude of distinctions between the kind of game they made and the kind of game Bioware makes. The formula that they used to succeed isn't doable with the tools Boiware has at their disposal, in my opinion.

The conflict between dual protagonist can be handled mostly by the Keep, decisions made there. My Hawke behaved pretty well to form in DAI, they even let you interact with them and ask questions, filling in some blanks. At the very least they can do this much for the Inquisitor without reinventing the wheel.

In Mass Effect Andromeda, they teased a concept of having your sibling become active when the player character is injured. This is almost dual protagonist, and was one of my favorite moments in the game, to be honest. After the sibling was asleep for 99 percent of the game, to be able to play them in rescuing the other one was a cool idea, one I wished had showed up more.

Instead of a NPC follower like Hawke in Inquisition, make a large running side quest threaded through DA4 that would tie in with the main story featuring the Inquisitor. Roughly 10 percent of the game, to make it worth the extra resources. Newcomers would get nifty extra story featuring a character they can just make however they want, and those of us who do want our character to have resolution can get it.

They did tease us the slides, you know. The picture of the Inquisitor with the prosthetic arm crossbow thing . . . their adventuring days may not be over after all . . .

This brings up a good point. An argument against the dual protagonist concept is the whole "how would the two interact" which is a valid concern but they could have it where the two never actually interact, at least not directly. They could use middle people to communicate. For example Dorian has that magic crystal that lets him talk to the Inquisitor. What if while playing as the Inquisitor we talk to Dorian and then it transitions to Dorian relaying the message to the new PC and likewise the new PC can do this to Dorian then transition to Dorian relaying the message to the Inquisitor. 

I liked DAI plenty at the time though less upon reflection, admittedly.

But I adamantly and absolutely refuse to play another game with the Inquisitor as a playable protagonist in any capacity. If Bioware goes in that direction then I'll sit out however many games it takes them to get it out of their system.