David Gaider asks: if a future sequel of Dragon Age required making a previous decision canon, would

hm i am surprised most voted for "not if the story was cool" cause cool is pretty subjective.

right out of my head i personally just hope that at least these won't be canon:

- leliana being hardned
- morrigan sleeping with alistair and especially loghain (just no)
- bethany dead (she was too cute sorry)
- not helping isabella
- nathaniel not being a grey warden witout letting him redeem his families guilt
- not helping sten and letting him being hardned




still not a fan of what they did with velanna and especially anders/justice...

I'll go with "not if the story is cool". A well written story and characters with a canon path ensure progress / development.

BioWare’s problem is they have to keep track of so many plot threads that it’s become a hindrance to their characters, story and even universe.

Pick a canon decision and stick to it.

I agree from what I have seen Playing DA there is nothing that's needs to be cannon? Me3 well yes they screwed up the ending so there will need to be a cannon ending SOoooooooo, Bioware suck it up and do what you have to do to continue Me serries. I won't judge stuff happens BUT! learn from it.

I'd be bothered because at the very least, I don't think there's a single (major?) story choice in any ME/DA game that I don't think Bioware can weave around to acknowledging. It'd be their deliberate choice to canonize it and ignore the past. I know they can and will often *functionally* and *practically* ignore the past, but literally doing it is their optional choice that they really really don't need to make.

For DA worldstates, I'd prefer some wacky imagination if need be. I actually love the Leliana lyrium silliness as long as the writers have it on some level of priority to address it in a cool way later.
For ME3 endings, I'd prefer that if there can't be more substantial consequences, a sequel-game that must default to a path (say, Destroy), sets it up in a way that other paths very well happened as well, but it all led to this one-path-but-hybrid outcome, acknowledging your choice in the little ways that budget allows.

I just don't think its impossible to recognize any choice. They're all things we do that had outcomes. Bioware can calibrate what those outcomes are and how respectful they are to our agency, but they can always do *something* at *some point*, even a point they can't even forsee today but could be an amazing experience many years from now.

And with the time gaps between games in the timelines, there's really no excuse to at least minimize the effect of choices while acknowledging their existence and allowing these choices to potentially mean bigger things later on. To me, there's little reason to turn it into *nothing*, even if there can often be reasons to make it just a little slightly-adjustable-text-blurb for now.

If Bioware wants, say, a wrecked and rebuilding post-ME3 galaxy, I'd prefer that rather than canonize Destroy and nothing more, that instead there's a sort of mystery of what's exactly happened in a time period since, that has resulted in a largely-Destroy-like result but also includes elements of Control and Synthesis and takes nods to what may have happened since those endings as well - it just happens that Bioware needs to tell a story of a 'wrecked and rebuilding post-ME3 galaxy' more than explicitly 'post-Destroy'. The former allows much more storytelling opportunities anyway; if you chose Control, maybe there's little adjustments to choices now that wouldn't be there if you chose Destroy. The overall narrative has its core that rarely get swayed, but there's acknowledgement that you wanted some sort of outcome from your Control choice. You may not get all you want, but the writers get tested to explore what they can do that reflects what you wanted.

I don't love everything Trespasser did about unifying several major choices in DAI. I get it, but I don't love it. But they still personal-canonized (recognized) the DAI choices. Recognizing, allows future opportunities that de-canonizing does not, or at least doesn't do as easily and comfortably. I know there's a general route they want several major characters, factions like the Chantry and Circles, and events to go. Okay! But it is nice if writers and designers are put into the place where they should explore what our choices mean for these things, and ideally, split some effects off into very different feeling experiences. They can't do everything. They may have to ignore a thing for a while. But its nice to know we made a choice, and it did things in a certain way. I think a more conservative (while reforming) Chantry has the opportunity to have certain outcomes happen, while a reforming (while still conservative) Chantry can do the same. Why make it all the same by a default? Let us have the fun. That fun doesn't have to be immediately mindblowing, super expensive, or a whole other quest path. The fun can be in the nuances of conversation, or the aesthetics of an area, or the political tones in a storyline, or it can even be almost nothing at all, until a future game that cares more about it.