Dragon Age The Veilguard Wishlist (Official Thread)

What I want more than anything else is the opportunity to play a Tevinter loyalist, someone whose sole ambition is to rise to the top of the magisterium and bend the empire to their will. This is going to get wordy, so TLDR: video games are an interactive medium and this manifests as choices, such as siding with mages or templars, but choices are only meaningful when they have a true alternative. Playing nice in Tevinter (of all places!) is a pointless experience unless you also have the opportunity to play nasty.

To begin. Letting Morrigan drink from the well in Inquisition is a choice without consequences for you, the player. If you refuse, you are still handed a powerful ally to fill exactly the same role. The same is true of the mage/templar decision, at least in Inquisition. The equivalence of the two sides is repeatedly emphasised: both commit atrocities, both can be sympathetic, both have better and worse sides, both can make powerful allies, both can help close the breach, etc. So equal were the two sides, in fact, that the decision between them lacked consequence. Either way, the breach is closed. Either way, you get Dorian and Cole on board. What seemed to be a meaningful choice between polar opposites does not lead to markedly different behaviour in the plot.

Compare to Broken Circle in Origins. The decisions made at the climax of this questline determine outcomes for Wynne, Redcliffe/Connor, Dagna and the endgame. One decision could deprive you of your best healer, or force you later to kill a mother or her son.
But we can do better. To my mind, the person who faced the most consequence-laden choice in all of Dragon Age thusfar is Branka.
Picture the scales. On one side, golems. A lost art. Perhaps the most powerful weapon against the darkspawn. A means to save not just her city, but her entire people (and during a Blight, everyone else). But the cost. Her family, her friends, countless more besides once she gets the Anvil working. Branka was prepared to sacrifice anything – and anyone – to achieve her goal. One could argue that she never appreciated the scale of the cost, but a cost it was and would continue to be as long as she used the Anvil. That’s the kind of decision I want to see more of: ones where you aren’t handed a commensurate result regardless of the path you choose, ala Morrigan and the well (or even Branka and Caridin forging the same crown). Ideally, both choices should sacrifice something. If Branka had refused, gone home, she would have kept her house, but lost her access to the power that could save dwarfkind. She could have saved her family, but possibly doomed Orzammar in the long run. That was the choice she faced.

Branka wasn’t a deliberately nasty person. The best villains never are. Almost nobody does bad things for the joy of doing evil, they do it because they see some profit, whether financial, political, hedonistic, whatever. The bad practices common in Tevinter (slavery and blood magic to take two obvious examples) aren’t practised to cause suffering, they’re practised because they grant some people power over others. That’s the banality of evil.
So it stands to reason that the player character should, if their choices are true choices at all, be able to take advantage of morally questionable routes to power. Here’s a Branka-like, very simplistic example:

You are in an isolated country manor and Solas’ forces are surrounding you. The lady of the house has promised you her support in a vital vote in the magisterium, not to mention a good word with the Archon, if you get her out alive. You are heavily outnumbered. The lady knows a ritual that will temporarily grant her great power using the lives of her household slaves, but she needs you to wield the knife. If you refuse, you will fight at a significant disadvantage, one of your companions is cut down while protecting the lady, who herself may not survive. If you agree, how many do you kill? The lady gains some power from one, then another, but the only way to win “without any casualties” (her words, naturally) is to sacrifice them all. In so doing you climb that little bit higher up the pyramid, but lose any possibility of compromise with Solas (or Sera, for that matter).

Dragon Age thankfully lacks a morals system, but I’m going to use the words “evil” and “good” here to illustrate my point. The “good” option, to refuse the offer, comes at a cost. You lose friends, social standing, money, influence. Perhaps you gain sympathy in the enemy’s eyes, perhaps the surviving slaves flee to the enemy and tell your story. You gain something, and keep the moral high ground, but it came at a cost. The “evil” option, however, is the banality of evil par excellence: you don’t murder these people because you want to, you do it because it benefits you. Branka would sacrifice as many people as it took to reach her objective.
This is Tevinter in microcosm: power at a cost (borne by someone else, if possible). It would be frankly irresponsible to visit the home of Thedas’ bogeymen, to play as one of them even, and not have the option to play their way. With all the associated costs.

After consequence, my second point is choice. It’s very hard to be invested in anything unless I choose it. If Broken Circle or A Paragon of Her Kind hadn’t given me a choice in how to resolve them then I likely wouldn’t care so much about the result. Wynne might not be a valuable and endearing party member whom one could foolishly lose, but an inevitable result of the quest, just another Daveth or Ser Jory. Pushed onto you as far as the plot wants, and then taken away with just as little choice in the matter.

Combatting Solas is probably inevitable, but how we go about it is not, and here is where I want a choice. If we’re pushed into the role of reformer, redeeming Tevinter from within ala Dorian and Maevaris, then the plot becomes unresponsive, in the worst case scenario, predictable. Tevinter is pulled, kicking into the light, its better elements finally rise to the top, slavery is abolished and the nation stands ready to fight side by side with Orlais. None of it will matter unless there is a dissimilar alternative. Siding with Dorian and Maevaris means nothing without the option to crush their movement in the service of a more powerful patron. A true Tevinter loyalist would fight Solas by seeking power, rising through the ranks of the magisterium, maybe become the black divine, tranquillise their enemies, smash the Qunari, and bring about not a Tevinter reformation but a resurgence, leaving the empire poised to annihilate anything and anyone thinking to, say, destroy the world. Even Orlais would probably accept that as an acceptable price.

A Tevinter reformation, like saving the mages or destroying the Anvil of the Void, is only truly meaningful if there is an alternative. I don’t want to be a revolutionary because, for example, my family enemies just happen to be staunch traditionalists and joining Dorian’s reformation movement is coincidentally both morally sound and politically expedient. That would be lazy, and those two things should never align anyway.

Choosing to reform Tevinter, or not, should influence how the game is played. Just like choosing mages or templars should have influenced the options available to the Inquisitor (like restricting availability of healing magic or lyrium, for example, both of which would influence gameplay). And if we don’t get to make that choice then I’m not sure how I’ll manage to be at all invested.

I never said Dragon Age should be like Witcher or Skyrim, I only said that they need to improve animations and combat design, because they are sucking on those essentials of action oriented games. They can learn from Witcher and Skyrim not copying Witcher and Skyrim.

Yeah, this trope is all fine and dandy is boys love manga, fanfiction and gay porn but I'd rather not have it in my high fantasy games.

To be fair, it's the right accent from Origins.

I honestly don't know where they got the accents from though.

Solas and Abelas are actual ancient elves who know the Dalish Language in it's entirety. Neither of them have welsh accents.

Fereldan = England (english Accents)
Antiva = Spain/Italy (spanish accents)
Orlais = France (French Accents)
Tevinter is essentially rome, but Dorian/Felix/Alexius/Corypheus speaks Common same as anyone with the usual British.
Cassandra has a nevarran accent. It's not welsh
Isabella had no accent and she was from Rivain.
Sebastian has an accent, is it welsh? welsh-ish? Scottish? Irish? And he's from Starkhaven.

But the Dalish clans are a literally nomadic people who never stay in one place too long. Yet all of Sabrae clan have, at best, a Starkhaven accent as if they've lived in one place long enough to HAVE an accent, and the Sabrae clan has no history of being in Starkhaven. My understanding of the clan is they they were a mostly Fereldan Brecillian Forest and base of the FrostBack Mountains clan that only moved across the sea to the Free Marches because of a BLIGHT

No, They were still playing around in DA2. What you got in DAI is what they're going to go forward with in DA4.

I thought the Dalish went from having American accents in DAO to having Irish accents in DA2 and DAI. Except Merrill. She's Welsh. And Solas is Welsh too, but not Dalish.

I gave my male Dalish Inquisitor the American voice because I thought the English one sounded waaaay too posh. (Then again HHP is my least favorite VA for the Inquisitor...)

There wasn't a consistent pronunciation for elvan words yet. They didn't set in stone what the dalish elves sounded like until DA2. From that point on EVERY dalish elf had the welsh accent.

All I'm saying is not being able to use that accent for my dalish character frustrates me. I understand completely why they didn't do it. But it distracts me to the point that i cant enjoy playing a dalish character. It also bothers me that a dalish can ask Morrigan "Who is Mythal?"

People are REALLY nitpicking me on this...

I would prefer if my dalish elf didn't sound American or English. Is this acceptable?

I just meant the Dalish don't all use a Welsh accent. I didn't comment at all on what the voices for PC should be? It's just the accents for the Dalish are weirdly inconsistant for their clans now I think about it, you have Irish accents from different regions that are very different, appearing in the same clan.

English is pretty much the planet's main language of communication. We want to feel we're in a different place with different people because we hear english all day every day. accents changes it up without changing the language.

More weapon types (especially for archers and mages who are basically limited to one each) as well as much more flexible equipment requirements are something I'm a strong advocate for