Kieran as a party member - Yay or Nay?

JUST

Yeah, default Keep not having Kieran is probably the death knell for his chances

As a great fan of Morrigan I would love to see him again. Irrespective of whether it is possible or not.
I also like the vision of how Kieran might look like in the future:



(by Aug Kaiju/artstation.com)

He reminds me a lot of his mother; and (to me) everything that is linked to DA:O and the "good old days" of the franchise is much appreciated.

The devs would never make Kieran a party member, for obvious reasons.

But for the sake of the argument, I do think he has potential. Just think about the way he's lived, always having to hide his real background and growing up with an absent father.

nay

While I do think Kieran could be an interesting character to have in the party, there are way too many problems -- the biggest one obviously being that he doesn't even exist in a decent number of world states, but even beyond that, there are so many variables about him even if he does exist that I'm sure actually having him as a party member would present a major headache to the writers. I wouldn't be surprised if there's another small appearance for those world states that have him, though.

The removal of the old god soul from him in DAI was no doubt because they couldn't use the dark ritual as a major plot point due to it not always happening. But they can add urthemials soul to the already big power pool of mythal or solas and then maybe it will be mentioned while their doing whatever they were going to do with their immense power anyway. Removing the soul also makes less variation between the versions of him should they wish to use him again. As an adult, instead of being a man with an old god soul, he is a man who carried an old god soul for the first 10 years of his life.

I would tend to agree that Kieran is still too quantum to be a party member however.

Its not just whether he a ) Exists, or b ) Doesn't. It's who his father is a ) The Warden, b ) Alistair, or c ) Loghain. If The Warden then was he a ) romancing Morrigan, or b ) only doing it for the Dark Ritual. And if it was romance theres the question of whether a ) The Warden followed Morrigan through the mirror and helped raise Kieran, b ) let her go, or c ) stabbed his mum. And of course whether he is a ) Half-Dwarf, b ) Human, or c ) Elf-blooded Human.

'Shared a mind w/ and Old God for ten years and rasied by Morrigan alone' Kieran and 'Normal Boy Raised by Morrigan & HoF Together' Kieran wouldn't be the same all grown up I expect.

The Bethany/Carver thing was dependent on a choice you made in the same game, not one made three games ago, and they weren't full game length companions. You only had them for act I. Loghain too was only available for part of the game, you couldn't get him until after the landsmeet, essentially the final act. It would be alot of work to make a full game length companion with 2 different versions of themselves and alternate dialogue variations for both versions based on history, and have an alternate full game length companion for worldstates they aren't in. That's like 3 companions worth of writing for one party member slot.*

(If they ever did do a mutually exclusive choice between two full game length party members I'm guessing there would be just one version of them, not quantum, and it would be more likely to be a story choice you made in the same game.)

Then there's the fact that he can be a half dwarf. Last we were informed they don't default to looking human like half elves do, they're shorter then humans and thus he will need two models, possibly adjusted cinematics, and if he's touching things/ people - different animations.

These things are a big problems with companions who have the largest amount of content in the game and whom we get to know better than anyone else. But they wouldn't be such a problem were he an npc cameo. Someone with a smaller role who we didn't get to know so well. We wouldn't need to broach details of his life like who his father is or how he was raised, he wouldn't need as many animations/cinematics, there could be two different versions of him but because they are minor npcs instead of major that wouldn't require nearly so much writing/recording/time. And similarly the replacement character/quest would also be more managable. Its just easier to handle so much variation in a character if they're only on screen for a short time, like one quest/questline, vs a character who can be onscreen constantly like a companion.

*They could try to do something to make the two Kierans more similar of course, like "Oh! OGB Kieran has amnesia and has forgotten all about the things he learnt from urthemial and what it was like! He's completely normal now!", but they'd still have other different memories. Like I imagine normal Kieran might've had an easier time making friendships with the other children who were around at the palace when Morrigan was being Celenes arcane adviser. And there'd still be the other variations, like whos the father, whether they helped raise kieran, tried to kill her, what race he is, possibly whether or not his mother drank from the WoS...

But if your going to start taking away parts of what makes kieran who he is just to make him work as a companion then you should possibly ask yourself if its worth all this work (removing parts of him, working around the differences, adding a whole replacement character) or if your better off just making a new companion who tells the sort of story you wanted to tell but without the quantum baggage.

^ But that's probably more a question for the writers.

I'm not sure I agree that the Old God Soul is likely to be forgotten about.

Bioware's already gone to the trouble of creating an area of the Fade that you only access if you did the Dark Ritual in Origins, and a cutscene taking place there in which the Old God Soul is dramatically removed from Kieran... or two, if you count the variants of the scene that reflect your decision on the Well as different cutscenes. Why wouldn't they go a bit farther to make it possible to tell the difference between world states where the Dark Ritual happened, and world states where it didn't?

i want more morrigan, and i'm assuming if she'll be around so will kieren, so sure it will be nice to see more of him, but not as a companion, too many variables.

As long as the HoF isn’t culled in some lame ass story bs I really don’t care if Kieran is brought back at all but if Morrigan is brought back BW is gonna have to address the Warden/Kieran especially if they intend to make Morrigan being possessed by Flemeth/Mythal I hope whoever is writing Morrigan doesn’t butcher her.

I'm biased since I'd like to have a young man I could romance as a party member. That being said, and regardless of Kieran's canon status, is it so implausible for him to have inherited his mother's (and Flemmeth's) affinity for magic? The 'Force' is strong in that bloodline.

There would be a strong likelihood of him being a mage, although there was no mention of this in DAI but that could be simply because Morrigan was careful to impress on him how he needed to keep it secret. However, Kieran is different from the rest of his family by virtue of being a boy. Flemeth always had daughters. It is not clear why this should be. Was it just coincidence or was she in some way able to influence the sex of her baby? If the latter, was the reason because only the female members of the family inherit the magic? (I don't know why this should be but it is Thedas so there doesn't have to be a logical explanation).

With regard to having only daughters, you will recall that this was apparently also true of Andraste's bloodline, which is why there could still be descendants of her out there without necessarily knowing it. In fact, it almost seemed like they were hinting at something with respect to Flemeth and then along came Kieran, which blew that theory out of the water. Incidentally, whilst Yavana was stabbed by Alistair that is no guarantee of her death bearing in mind whose daughter she was/is and she had been around for several hundred years prior to that. There were apparently other daughters of Flemeth in the Planascene Forest (between Kirkwall and Cumberland) and in the Nahashin Marshes (in western Orlais). So what became of these latter two? Yet Flemeth apparently favoured Morrigan over these as the "inheritor".

So, even if Kieran isn't a possibility, I doubt we have heard the last of the family of Flemeth. I'm sure they were originally intended to have a part to play in the future plot, although it is possible that with the departure of most of the original team, this aspect could have been dropped.