Wardens Nightmare redux

[Philogosten]

I always thought that it seemed weak that everyone else gets a personal dream/nightmare that keeps them trapped

as they are happy in the false reality. So then why in mine is Duncan in mine? Shouldn't he be in Alistair's as he was like a dad to him? I hated the guy so why would the sloth demon put someone I want to attack as the person trying to pacify me? that makes no sense. Why not have it be something that makes sense like the wardens love interest trying to do that? It would make a lot more sense to try to trick us using someone they love. Throw in a dialogue where the warden can choose to say that they know that it is not their love interest because they are acting out of character like what happens in Morrigans with Flemmeth.

 

[Thandal]

Well, Duncan is one of the few characters bound to have been in every Warden's past. They obviously didn't want to use any of the Companions, so all the other likely candidates are "origin-specific". (Except Daveth and Ser Jory, I guess...)

[ripple]

I always thought that it seemed weak that everyone else gets a personal dream/nightmare that keeps them trapped

as they are happy in the false reality. So then why in mine is Duncan in mine? Shouldn't he be in Alistair's as he was like a dad to him? I hated the guy so why would the sloth demon put someone I want to attack as the person trying to pacify me? that makes no sense. Why not have it be something that makes sense like the wardens love interest trying to do that? It would make a lot more sense to try to trick us using someone they love. Throw in a dialogue where the warden can choose to say that they know that it is not their love interest because they are acting out of character like what happens in Morrigans with Flemmeth.

 

I am guessing that, in an ideal situation where the developers had sufficient time and resources, the warden would have gotten a fade sequence specific to their origin. Considering the amount and type of stuff that were cut from the game during development, I'd say this isn't so bad. They did try to do something like that during the Urn of Ashes quest, albeit it was extremely brief.

Edited February 12, 2016 by ripple

[sapphim]

I can guess why they wouldn't have wanted predicate the Fade sequence on love interest: it sounds practically impossible to handle as far as I'm concerned. There's not really an explicit romance "lock-in" in Origins the way there was in 2 and Inquisition, unless you want to count something like +100 Love which tends to happen very late in the game and requires completion of that companion's sidequest. It's really easy at lower approval levels to get ninjamanced or even end up with multiple ninjamances, so based on the order in which you checked their flags there's a strong possibility you'd end up with a different companion than you were expecting, which would be disorienting. On top of that, the Circle quest tends to be done pretty early in the game, from what I gather. There's a strong possibility Zevran won't even be recruited by that point. And some people just aren't going to romance anybody in a given playthrough. So once you've done the work of creating four completely unique scenes you'd still have to create a fifth fallback for the likely quite common case that whatever requirements you set just won't be met at that point in the game.

 

Creating an origin-specific fade sequence might be theoretically better but that balloons the work from five separate scenes (four love interests + fallback) to six. I don't disagree that the devs might have done so if they could, and it would certainly be more immersive (most of my wardens felt toward Duncan anything from antipathy to open hostility, though there were exceptions) but I can still see why they would cut that early as an acceptable loss. There's no guarantee a character will feel any more positively toward their place of origin than they would toward Duncan and the Wardens, after all, and completing it and Urn of Sacred Ashes within short order of each other runs the risk of making one or the other feel like a rehash.