Ryder too soft

Purple Hawke was great but not every character can be purple Hawke.

After plugging in 60 hours, I've come around from my initial impressions of Ryder.

And I am actually able to mold and roleplay him into what I envision him to be. I notice that when choosing the more professional, straight-laced answers, Ryder can commit autodialogue that compliments this tone and dosen't stray too far off. All the snarky quips (they turn to more dryer ones) die down after the 10 hours and you get a firmer grip of the dialogue.


I even see the "gray" tone in choices the more you go forward which I found refreshing when the game wasn't dictating to me that one opinion/choice was more righteous than the other. I found gratefulness in the removal of the Paragon/Renegade system, which I loved and had no problem with in the OT and was sort of dissapointed it didn't return.

I can focus my Ryder as a pragmatic, somewhat detached individual looking to follow his father's footsteps who's ultimate goal above all else is to make the Helius Cluster a viable home for 20,000 humans, by any manner which in makes this possible. I can actually mimic Shepard in a way.


I think I've finally gotten what Bioware is intending with what people are calling "soft", indecisiveness, or a lack of authoritative confidence.

we're supposed to grow with Ryder as someone who was just a shadow to his father's side and essentially on a family space vacation, to in the blink of an eye, straddled with the most mind-boggling responsbility anyone could ever entirely sit down and come to closure with. Ryder is premature in virtually all accounts of life in relation to the field he's put in, and he has to deal with this immediately and with no option to back out or run. He's not fit to be Pathfinder, but he is.

I realized why in pre-release interviews Bioware  stressed  that this is a hero's journey.


I think the same way Shepard's hardened authority is a result of his experience, is why Ryder's contemplative, undefined self is such an unremoved part of the characther you feel as though you have no control of.




Both Shepard and Ryder are charathers with predetermined base personalities, btw. I hope no one in here thinks Shepard was entirely malleable.

I will say though, Ryder's personality baseline to be constant joker doesn't get any  passes from me.


And I wish the male VA had a strictly neutral, nondescript tone. For those he said he sounds like a peppy NPR broadcaster or somethin...  you hit the nail on the head.


Meer's Shepard worked PERFECTLY because there was nothing intonanted from anything he said.

I never played DA2, if that's supposed to be a referrence. Ir's rather in the handling and not in the premise. The kind of words they make your character say or the number of interrupts or absence thereoff.

Apart from the fact that you can't really see what your character is about to say. there are some cringeworthy jokes hidden beneath a seemingly normal reply. So bad actually that even your sqadmates go ugh when your character delivers their lines. So one can't say the devs weren't aware of that.

Some youtuber, I think it was YongYea, even compared some of the game's conversations with a sitcom and underlayed the ingame footage with canned laughter. I think it hits the nail on the head. And that's not to say, you can't insert humor. I have no problem with the Nomad banter, but I sure have a problem when it's used in the most inopportune moments.

I'm not sure, are you on your first playthrough? Most of the times, you have to make a conscious choice to not get facepalm. Or you just got lucky. That's only posible if you already know what's lurking beneath an innocent looking option. And it diminishes your reply options even further. There are some replies I avoided like the plague when doing my NG+ run.

It's accurate to describe it as Whedon-esque imho, a fact that I recognized shortly after I started playing it.  Buffy and the gang carried a huge responsibility and saved the world time and time again throughout the BtVS series, but they never allowed the weight they were carrying to define who they were.  Yes, they got ultra-serious at times, but still managed to retain well-rounded personalities.  I find it a nice change of pace from one-note characters defined by their role.

I learned quickly NEVER to pick the left side answers to anything. I'm not even reading them because even if it sounds ok written it's NOT at all what comes out of Ryder's mouth.
The only time upper left is fine is when there's only two choices and it's just a normal emotionally appropriate response.

My problem isn't so much with Ryder sounding like a complete moron when I have options (professional pick is fine by me) it's the brain dead auto dialogue. It's either a really bad joke or a question asked in the tone of a ten year old boy talking to an adult.

There is NO way you can avoid the disconnect. Or pretend Ryder is a mature confident person. I made mine look very young on purpose to match the ridiculous tone o the game. So at least there is no constant visual disconnect...

My best Ryder was female, mostly emotional\ casual when talking to the crew and proffesional\ logical when talking to everyone else.

Young girl trying to keep her chin up when surrounded by strangers, but being her actual helpless self when around people she could trust. She doesn't even think that she's a hero material, but she has an AI in her head that does everything for her and she succeeds because of it. As she keeps getting praise for SAM's achievements, she gradualy gains (undeserved) confidence in her abilities forgetting that without this invisible computer het journey would end before it even started.

Not the type of character I would ever choose to roleplay as, but it's coherent and makes sense when you get smacked with another portion of auto-dialogue. I didn't finish this playthrough though, didn't want to do Veold\Havarl boring quests again.

dude no. Nothing changed from Tim in me and the one that planned those labs. The did those thing before he was indoctrinated.

What you're leaving out is that people who don't like it are stuck with one or two reply options if they don't want to cringe. I also learned not to use certain iterrupts, since they're on the same lines. Which reduces your options even further.

I never felt that way over the writing of any previous Bioware game.

True, but there were moments  where I'd be  utterly  afraid of choosing the Casual reply ( which I think is the designation of all the facepalms) but end up surprisingly pleased at what comes out.

Or picking a Logical dialogue and finding myself severly unimpressed.

Sometimes "Professional" is even the lamest option.

I ended up learning to infer what exactly i wanted out of my Ryder as time progressed. I actually study the options and try to figure out what will come out if I pick "Casual" or "Emotional"this time around instead of last time around.  It wasn't me going autopilot and and choosing "Professional" automatically in a way I  chose "Renegade" over "Paragon" back in the OT.  

Having just shot someone in the arm so they fall to their death into a pit of lava, I am still struggling to see this supposedly soft Sara.

I've finished one playthrough and not started another, so it's not as if I knew what to avoid. I might've just got lucky I suppose.