Allow us to make "mistakes."

Skipping Leliana entirely is way simpler than meeting her and then trying to get her to leave you the hell alone, lemme tell ya!  My last DAO game, Loghain was on his own defending the gates, while I had Oghren, Shale, and Dog with me. I refused/kicked out everyone else.  

I certainly missed recruiting Leliana my first play-through. Somehow I totally overlooked the inn so never met her. It also seems easier to role play not recruiting either Sten or Zevran without seeming like a bad person. Same with Shale really. You do get the sense that it might be better if you do but there are clear role playing reasons why you wouldn't and they weren't in your log in advance.

I suppose though that in DAI it did make sense that people would want to contact your organisation. In DAO we were constantly on the move and since Loghain had cast suspicion at us, it was more likely we would just stumble across individual allies, other than the groups we knew we had treaties for, because even if people wanted to support us they had no way of contacting us. In DA2 we were based in a city and had a base of operations where people could send notes alerting us to their interest and it make sense that they would. Ditto DAI with Haven and Skyhold. There was no secret as to where we were and so people would seek us out. It made sense that Iron Bull would send Krem initially because he might feel his own appearance would put you off and he would not want to leave you to just stumble across him. Blackwall was someone they could have left to chance but at least Leliana gave us a reason to go looking for him.

However, I think the feeling is that having met with, say, Krem we should have then been able to say that we were not interested in recruiting mercenaries and that would have been an end of it. Ditto Iron Bull's personal quest. It is the fact that you can say you are not interested and yet it still remains in your log and impacts on the area when you visit it that seems the chief complaint. This is the "hand holding" that prevents you from making an early decision you might regret later instead of just letting you live with it.

Or, what if companions come to us? Like say, have them stationed near a Fade Rift fighting the demons or have a cutscene of them providing aid while you're clearing out a mission. You can choose to chat with them and decide if they're helpful enough to invite along or just say your goodbyes and be done.

Yeah, like if we got to see Blackwall protecting the farmers from demons rather than just hearing about it 3rd hand from a guy you may not even notice or talk to.

I don't like this idea at all. The events that make up the quest should be happening regardless of whether the PC is doing it. It should be possible to find quest items completely by accident (NWN did this).

If I want my character to lie about whether she's going to do a quest, that should be an option. Facts about the world should never change based solely on something my PC has said.

Sooo, DAI? 

When I look for solutions to these problems, I try to find solutions that don't require any extra writing or design complexity.

It's sad that the effort of Wing Commander 3 in branching story endings never caught on. If you screw up enough there were the unique missions on the "bad" ending path that were the hardest and probably best. Really gave you the feeling how humanity is backed into a corner and there is no hope at all. Basically you went down slow and painful but in a blaze of glory. And when you win all those tough missions, you lose the game.

Heh, in my first DAO run I didn't know who the companions are. I slaughtered Wynne the first time we met and then on my second run I was all "wtf?" when she joined. It took a third run to actually get all her story and dialogue.

Except that isn't "considering games for what they are", it's considering games for what you'd personally wish they were. What games are is a system of pretty addictive reward mechanisms that borrow entertaining and artistic elements from other industries in order to ensnare and hold the attention of the player for as long as it's at all possible, deliberately aimed straight at children, teenagers and more recently young adults.

I agree that the writers and video game developers aren't the ones mainly responsible for how these people have turned out so far. They do have some responsibility for it, though, and should at least occasionally be held a little accountable. 

Storytellers who "entertain" children with stories of nothing but ultimate heroism and villainy are at least tangentially responsible when those children grow up thinking that identifying villains and slaying them is how one morally relates to the rest of the world. They're definitely not the ones decapitating heads, pulling triggers and raping wives, no, but just because they can't sensibly be punished doesn't mean that their influence should be entirely forgotten or glossed over.

That said, my personal objection to this kind of storytelling is that it's just dumb, dishonest and uninteresting, and should be abandoned if Bioware has any interest in making RPGs for adults.

Uhm... Yes I can? Ideally, since you ask, I'd prefer for them to develop either appropriately sensible children's games or consummate games for adults. I complain because the weird hybrid genre they've created would be much more interesting if they hadn't clearly set it up to manipulate and exploit the egos of particularly lonely and emotionally vulnerable children for cash, and because that has been directly and horrendously destructive to people I know and care somewhat about. 

See? Separate but related non-binary thoughts on a non-binary issue. Imagine that! Look at all the cake I can both have AND eat, just by being a thinking, feeling person! It almost makes one appreciate our ancestors spending three-hundred thousand years developing complex languages for us to try to express our minds with, doesn't it?