Role of Inquisitor and Inquisition in DA4

I mean sure why not, when one person disrupts the balance of a society, the world, the whole universe, a lot of '' random nobodies '' are involved in that and any of them would have a very understandable motive to stop whoever is doing all the disrupting. And sometimes the disruptor has sick god powers that make it incredibly hard for those people closest to them (who would probably have the clearest and biggest motivation) to get involved without McGuffins or Deus Ex Machina. Though I'm sure whatever the story of DA4 is, there will be plenty of McGuffins and Deus Ex Machina. 

I don't see why not? Obviously familial ties will always add context, but whatever ties Inquisitor has with Solas varies in their depth from player to player. 

At the very least the story would have been very different but personally I agree with you, Luke (or Leia) was the only one who could do this. Vader would never have tried to save some random guy from Palpatine; it was seeing the suffering of his child and hearing his plea for assistance that returned him to the light.

Ahh '' POWER OF FWENSHIP AND WUV 👉👈 '' now that's lovely. I mean that's what it'll all boil down to and even you recognized it.

Yeah, the 70 bucks you'll be keeping in your wallet won't matter much. 

But is Solas and Vader comparable in any way. Like are we really going there?

Ever since the prequels, which explicitly tell us that Anakin willfully murdered a roomful of children, I reject the notion of Vader being "turned good" in Return of the Jedi, and I think he should have been executed, and I don't really care who pulls that off.

But I don't dispute that people might have valid reasons for wanting to see the Inquisitor again, they're just not anymore valid than my reasons for not wanting to see them again (ie, they suck and are boring), all these arguments about how stories "work" are really just assumptions. The only *real* reason anyone wants the Inquisitor back to deal with Solas is for their personal catharsis. Which is totally valid, but I'm a selfish dickhead and I don't care about other people's catharsis.

Yes yes BioWare employed a lot of lazy tropes that caused a lot of players to develop certain expectations.

THE THING IS

... they also did that in DA:O and DA2. There are dangling plot threads from both those games that are yet to be resolved and, given the significant time gap at this point, probably never will be. In fact, Hawke was initially planned to be the protagonist of Inquisition, after the DLC in which Corypheus was introduced signalled *very clearly* to players that Corypheus was still alive. Lots of players expected Hawke to return as the protagonist in the next DA game and were disappointed by the lacklustre cameo.

But you're not really vexing yourself about that. Because you played DAI first. You never had that emotional connection. But you DO have an emotional connection to the Inquisitor, which is why you want them to be the one to defeat Solas, and so you come up with arguments about how stories work, to try and seem objective.

THE THING IS

... The time gap between DAI and the still mostly hypothetical DA4 is now about three times longer than the gap between DA2 and DAI (almost 10 years, compared to the previous 3-year gap). A *significant* portion of players coming to DA4 will not have played any previous DA game (especially if they play primarily on console, which is how most people around the world play video games, if they play any at all) and they should not be expected to, because introducing barriers to your fandom/audience is poor business practice, and really just a shitty thing to do.

You say you struggled with Inquisition due to a lack of context which... okay. But now you want DA4 to assume everyone playing it is familiar with the cast of a 10-year old game, and you SPECIFICALLY say you don't want "a bunch of introductions". Essentially, you want to make DA4 even less accessible to newcomers than DAI was to you.

Seems unfair. But that's just me.

I can't say I really give a shit what Martin writes about, but I have not said anywhere that people *can't* create dense sagas with decades between instalments that require audiences to consume every single one in order to understand the story, if that's what they really really want to write.

It's not what I want to read however, and the proliferation of dense, continuous sagas in the genre is one of the two big reasons I don't read much fantasy, a genre I otherwise love.

It's also not what Dragon Age was billed as. From day one, it has always been the history of a world in a period of great change, not the chronicles of Special Specialton and his sidekicks.

I'm actually not remotely interested in what other people understand or care about. I never wanted to continue the plot of DAI to begin with, and I don't care about the Inquisitor's arm. I want a new hero that I can make gay, and new digi-bois that I can gay kiss, and I know that runs counter to the desires of a bunch of people who want boring things like CONTINUITY and CLOSURE and I DO NOT CARE.

At least I'm not snobbishly pretending that my personal wants are "what is objectively best for the story and the financial future of BioWare ACKSHUALLY".

Ah yes, the 'plot'. Ancient wizard returns from millennia-long slumber and attempts to ascend to godhood and destroy the world by assaulting the barrier between the physical and spiritual planes.

Never heard that one before.

I honestly won't be too miffed if the next DA4 protagonist isn't the Inquisitor. After all, all of the DA games prior to this had different protagonists so is it really too surprising that the trend will continue for DA4? But seeing how we can reasonably assume Solas to be the major antagonists (or at least one of them), I hope they use the 'blank slate' protagonist to its fullest capability to flesh him out. Namely by allowing the character to investigate or at least interact with the idea of Solas as an antagonist.

With the Inquisitor, Solas is pretty much doomed to be primarily viewed through the lens of a "former Inquisition member". while there are flavors of that simplified viewpoint ranging from 'traitorous bastard' to 'sympathetic ex-friend', the Inquisitor's history with Solas alone dictates the general shape of what that character can perceive them as. But a completely new protagonist? Sure they lack that history, but that can actually be a benefit if the writers take advantage of it. We don't even need to meet Solas himself initially, we just need to deal with the remnants of his actions and how other factions perceive him. Let players ask the question we were never able to ask about the Elder One before his assault on Haven where he monologued his ultimate goal: "Who is he really?". Let us view the answers of others before we come up with an answer of our own.

Qunari: Solas is a dangerous cultist who deluded himself into thinking he's a god
Elf: He's a freedom fighter who wants to improve the lives of elves!
Magister: He's like us in a way. He has power, conviction, and the wherewithal to use it. But as far as society is concerned, he's just an upstart.
Inquisition: We called him an ally once...and that is precisely why we are obligated to pursue him. -Insert flavor text based on Trespasser ending-
A Dwarf: Looks like a bald egg to me. Nothing special.

Depending on how they set up the whole thing, they can create an antagonist dynamic that far surpasses Corypheus's initial introduction as 'I came in, destroyed Haven, and you shall know that I want to RULE THIS LAND AS A GOD!!!' spiel.

I don't like the Inquisitor, I'm not even going to pretend to having any intention of buying DA4, so I really don't care one way or the other. But it seems to me like what people are proposing is along the lines of making something like Infinity War and following it up with Endgame, only none of the Avengers show up. You can do it, but narratively it's a big WTF moment. Not what you'd reasonably expect. Again, I've got zero fucking stakes in this. Has Bioware taken entirely too long to release a sequel to Inquisition and has thus made Inquisition entirely irrelevant at this point? That's Bioware's problem, not something the fans should have to deal with. Bad business practices are the company's job to deal with, not the customers.