Anyone else ridiculously happy that ME A will be a Ryder family affair?

yep.

Hopefully that will change in the new game.

Hmm, I guess you could say that I'm cautiously optimistic. I think the dynamic could be a lot fun and it could add to the story. However, I'm very leery. Aside from DA2, families in BioWare games generally don't do very well. Sadly, sometimes BW writers fall into the fantasy trap of creating families in order to create "painful drama" later on. I don't want the twist to be that Papa Ryder is some sort of villian. Nor do I want to kill off siblings on something as arbitrary as my class selection.

Now, having a standoff with Papa Ryder ala Wrex on Virmire could be interesting, but I don't want to be forced to kill the character. Or worse, have Papa Ryder redeem himself via suicide, something that's happened at least three times in the ME:T.

Not really. I say this because of how poorly I thought the Hawke family was done: one sibling is unceremoniously killed off for no real reason in the tutorial area before we even have a chance to connect with Carver/Bethany, then the surviving sibling only sticks around for Act 1 before being killed off/carted to the Gallows or Wardens and we can't even visit them at the Gallows, then Leandra is killed off too (Hawke really should've warned his/her mom about the killer).

When it came down to it I felt Hawke had more of a familial attachment to Varric and Aveline, surprisingly I did feel like Hawke and Gamlen were family but he was the only one who came off that way for me since he didn't die or disappear.

I do hope that the Ryder family gets alot of interaction between one another, as much as a companion if not more, and that the sibling isn't killed off or separated from the Player Ryder (likewise for any other living member of Ryder's family).

What do you mean by that?

I got what you mean, but in ME lore chances of something like this happening are practically zero. We had something like this with Miranda, but she was illegal and unique experiment. In the end writers don't want to risk and tend to create relatable society for their protagonists.

I can't explain how much I don't want to have the story change depending on which gender your character is. It's a crime against roleplaying. I don't want a "fresh perspective", I just want to play as the character I want, and I shouldn't be punished with a different story I may not like as much as the other just because I play as that character.

And Maker forbid gender changing your personality and roleplaying options

Well that's depressing Hopefully that will change!

But shouldn't any change in the personality be up to the player, not the arbitrary fact that the character is the brother or sister? Of course different characters should have different personalities and react to situations differently, but I think we the player still need full control over this. It's the only way for agency to roleplay. I'd be disappointed if I was playing through as female Ryder and had a reaction to something that I thought was really great, only to find out that my male Ryder wasn't able to react the same way if I so chose. It takes away from what control I have over the character.

I don't think you can compare the player character of a video game with other kinds of writing. There has to be a degree of flexibility and leeway there to allow for roleplaying, so that we can (hopefully) choose how we want to react to things instead of being forced into one thing or another.

Now how other characters react to us is a different matter. There was some dialogue with Eve in ME3 which you only got as a female, and sometimes squadmates would talk to you in different ways. That's something I'm fine with, because it's coming from people that we don't have any direct control over. The only thing I don't want is being railroaded into a certain type of personality just because the game already decided that for me.

Edit: I read your posts on the other thread and I get where you're coming from. I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to them having different backgrounds (though again, if we could choose these along the lines of the spacer/survivor/war hero backgrounds in ME1 it would be even better). I wouldn't even mind if the other sibling had a 'default' personality if you interact with them during the game. The only thing I don't want are forced differences in playing one or the other.

As I see it, a work of sci-fi that doesn't include some elements you can't intuitively relate to isn't worth the name. It may be a reasonably enjoyable story, but as a work of SF it will be boring. As for today's issues, there are some I view as yesterday's issues (racism, for instance), and I'd rather see them relegated to the wastebin of a fictional SF universe's history. It's annoying enough that we have to deal with that crap in RL.  

Back when I used to play paper roleplaying games, I got to play either preset characters (mostly happened during role-playing conventions) or custommed characters. For me roleplaying isn't necesseraly playing a character just the way I wish them to be. I had to keep in my mind their core personality and try and make them react according to this, not the way I think I would have in their situation (even if I admit it's sometimes hard to not infuse them to much with our own personality), and that's what I found interesting. I don't need to have complete control over my protagonist. It's just an illusion in videogames, anyway.

I would argue that having siblings as protagonists is far from arbitrary. It is far different from having alternate versions of a same character. It should change the game at its core concept. There's just no sense to announce there will be two protagonists if they're just going to essentially be alternate versions of one another. One: I consider this borderline false advertising, two: it's terribly poor writing, three: it's more cost-effective to have simple alternate versions of the same character with one or two specific line here and there to make us believe they are supposed to be different than really making two different protagonist with everything that it implies.

Besides, it's not like we've ever had complete control of any of the characters BW has given us, only in my headcanon can I have a Volus-obsessed necrophile N7 space pirate Shepard with a fabulous haircut à la Johnny Bravo. They will always react within the parameters given by the game. A player's appreciation of said reaction is entirely subjective. Some will like them, some won't and BW can't pander to us all.
The only difference here, if it's indeed what they are doing, is that there is going to be a second set of possible reactions to compare them with (not that I think they will be overly different, mind you. I'd settle for subtly different). And there seems to lie the crux of the problem we seem to have. You're afraid one character will react just the way you like, but that exact same reaction won't be available to the other protagonist. But you see, that's still playing with the mindset that one should be an alternate version of the other. It's understandable. It's what we're used to, but I hope it won't be it for all the reasons I have already listed.



I wholeheartedly agree with a degree of flexibility (maybe even reach) in character's personalities (not only the protagonists, by the way, I'm all for character evolution, which is the primary reason I saved Ashley from Virmire everytime except once, for variety). I'm not advocating for set and immovable personalities, quite the contrary. They should be evolutive, if that game aims to be a RPG of any description. What remains to be seen is to which extent will they be flexible. However, even in RPG, two different characters should have their own (starting) personality. That's absolutely not something that should be an exception for videogames specifically.



This is my gut talking here, so it's to be taken with a grain of salt, but I doubt the Ryders will have starting personalities and backgrounds as set and defined as Geralt, and even him, we can chose to play him as a greedy, murderous asshole, or a nice guy trying to do what's right. I can't see BW adpoting the same approach as CD-Projekt for the Witcher's series. It's a Mass Effect game after all. I expect something more along the lines of Shepard than Geralt. I could be wrong of course, but I strongly doubt it.

You will have to define 'forced differences'. I'm unsure what you are referring to, I'm afraid. Do you mean the other sibling making the exact opposite decisions than the chosen protagonist?