The Blanketfort (crying and throwing up) - The Official Solas Thread [Spoilers]

I'm not saying that including the personal aspects of the Solas plot will alienate new players. I'm saying having the sole protag be someone whose entire emotional arc they didn't experience firsthand will. Out of all the people who will play DA4, how many will have played Trespasser? Not even everybody who played DAI will have experienced Trespasser. As far as plot events and Solas' evil plans go, a new hero can get caught up with in-world infodumps and stuff - like we did with Corypheus. But the highly personal conflict can't be front and center by default the way it would be for an Inquisitor. There's just a lot of baggage there, and not only emotional. The Inquisitor's famous in Thedas and every in-game character will have an opinion on their exploits and its effect on the present world. To be forced to play a character who you're always hearing about, who did things you didn't play through would be confusing at best, irritating at worst.

And this is exactly what happens in Mass Effect, but again ME was marketed as a trilogy. And even so, they've had to make consistent efforts to mitigate new player overwhelm by simply leaving out most references to past events that weren't imported from old game save states, or by merging outcomes from highly divergent past choices. Example: the Rachni return in ME3. Another example: If you didn't play the Arrival DLC, they don't bother to inform you in ME3 that Shepard blew up a Mass Relay and killed 300K batarians, which is a pretty big fucking deal. Now, they do make mention of it in my playthrough, but I was aghast at how lightly it was dealt with, and that my Shep had so little visible emotional fallout. The same goes for a romanced Thane's death. For most players, it's very moving. But Thanemancers experience Shep's interactions with him in ME3 as confusing, distant, and in my case amnesiac to the point of being bizarre. Why? Because not much additional content was added that was specific to a Thane romance. That's horrible storytelling, but it's what happens with carrying over a single protagonist who could have gone down different paths which all have to be accounted for. They committed to a three-game protag with the first ME game, so they had to deal with it, sometimes very clunkily. I think the decision to have DA's non-recurring heroes was influenced by that.

I'm also not saying Bioware never follow up on big outcomes or emotional payoffs, of course not. But they have also regularly fudged continuity for game design reasons. Example: a murdered Leliana's resurrection. It's significant to a lot of players, but not the majority of them. And I believe the sole followup to that pretty extraordinary event is some text in the epilogue of a DLC. Even though Leliana is a significant character, part of her story that was personally significant to a minority of players was left out of the main game altogether.

Again, the plot with Solas and the Veil is still going to be there. The personal conflict will also be there, but for some, not all. And so it probably can't be the central conflict of the story, even though it sure will be central in my headcanon. Bioware does have to stop writing for new people at some point, and they do. They have to juggle both sets of needs. I'm not going to pretend I don't want something different from them, but I'm thinking I'll be disappointed in that regard. If I'm wrong, though? I'll be much too happy to be bitter that I lost this argument

I'm not saying that including the personal aspects of the Solas plot will alienate new players. I'm saying having the sole protag be someone whose entire emotional arc they didn't experience firsthand will. Out of all the people who will play DA4, how many will have played Trespasser? 

You won't be playing as the inquisitor again. 

You won't be playing as the inquisitor again. 

The Inquisitor isn't always in the same state, unless you're referring to the state of merely existing and having known Solas. And when the player stops playing, the story doesn't stop, but sometimes bits of the story get left out for those players. That is how Bioware has done it. The story, in this case, isn't just the Inquisitor's story.