Actually, is canonical that female warden can’t have children. Is one of the reasons there are few female wardens in general, the only one who ever had a kid was the elven mage who birthed Alistair, and it was a very particular case, since she lost the taint in a fight with a deamon or something equally strange (book descripted).
The fact that female Warden are barren is a dialogue option too with Alistair, but only happen with a human noble and if she is to be queen with Alistair. Kids are simply never mentioned in non king!Alistair romances.
Agree about the rest. Not a fan of the “female character = having to endure sexism and misoginy at every angle” thing.
Fair enough. I know that bioware did end up saying that the ending credits slides aren’t canon for DA:O. However, I don’t recall there being anything other than speculation from the characters. Until Morrigan comes along with her hell baby plan, I’m pretty sure Alistair thinks that all wardens are completely barren. Even the men. He ends up talking about a couple of senior wardens that have children but only prior to taking on the taint. I’m basically speculating that it’s possible just because of the vagueness of those slides, which again are probably not considered canon. Just thought you might find it interesting, never the less.
I remember the writers confirmed that, since the kid would be killed by the taint in the mother body, no female warden could end happily a pregnancy even if she ever brcame pregnant, while with the father being tainted would make reproduction hard but not impossible.
At least, that’s for now how things are, or should be, since DA is quite famous for build and destroy its own lore like, at every game, book, or comic
Speaking of DAO, the city elf prologue is gender dependent. The same things happen, but you see it from different sides.
If you’re a female, you get abducted by a noble who wants to r*pe you, and then you carve a bloody path out to escape. If you’re a male, your bride-to-be gets abducted, and you go rescue her.
While I’m not opposed to some difference in the storyline due to societal or other setting-based reasons, there is one thing that I will always fervently oppose: When the narration changes the main character’s reactions or makes assumptions about your thoughts or actions based on your gender. I do not want to be told that my character behaves a certain way determined by gender, or to be pigeonholed into a stereotyped personality without getting to choose it myself.
Very pleased by the results of the poll. I feel that the majority of the player’s experience while playing the game should result from the character that they make. I value the way that the game reacts to the character I create in one playthrough specifically as opposed to another. This leads to a lot of fun things like replayability. Difference between created characters is what allows these to be games rather than novels.
I disagree with half of this. I feel that playing a game that allows you to play a character which is able to defy prejudice against them based on the kind of character you’re playing is really cool, given that the prejudice makes sense in the game’s universe. Along these lines, I don’t think that the game should make any stat checks harder based on gender either.
I’m not sure if authors tend to avoid making separate branches of dialogue because it’s difficult (understandably) or because they’re worried about offending their audience. A lot of the time, I see that responses in dialogue and in narrative are made to be general with little difference between gender. If we have the option to choose our character’s gender, I would personally prefer this choice to be made meaningful rather than be there for the sake of appeasing the player’s imagination. I understand, though, that this sort of thing is hard to keep up with because of code.
This is getting into somewhat divisive territory, I know… I do realise that successfully fighting back against oppression can be empowering, but the existence of that oppression basically ends up meaning that straight male players end up with an easier, oppression-free game, while gay, female, or other minority players end up being forced to fight back, which is not something I think is fair.
Frankly, I like “defy oppression” thropes, but I’m quite tired of the oppression being the usual sexism and misoginism against always the same groups.
It’s refreshing when a game doesn’t discriminate the sex of my own character, and I find it a little sad, because I should not feel like is the norm that my female character must have a harder time than if she was male.
I really don’t think that characters receiving different dialogue or scenes bases on who they are makes the game harder for the player (perhaps excluding examples where this may actually become directly offensive to the person playing). I’m not saying that I would want games to vary in difficulty depending on the gender…etc. of the character, because that isn’t really fair.
I’m mostly just referring to dialogue/scenes that make sense in the game’s universe relative to what your character is. I kind of just meant the oppressive thing as an example; it could also be positive responses. My only point is that I like it when the game responds to who I’ve made in relation to the game’s lore, as this gives me more investment into the game.
When I mentioned that playing as an oppressed character who overcomes it all is cool, I’m not saying that the difficulty should be scaled up for these characters. Just that if you are playing as such a character, I think it’s more interesting when the npcs respond accordingly (through dialogue or whatever). Unless it makes sense within the circumstances, I just don’t like it when it seems like the gender, race, and anything else you’ve chosen for your character ends up seeming pointless (with the only difference in-game being left to your imagination).
For me, this is where the problem with big changes lies. Games don’t have to import biases/societal structures from our world, but they often do. So when NPCs respond to the MC’s gender (or sexuality, or race), it tends to be reflective of (often negative) experiences that players have IRL (if you’re not playing a cis het man).
One of the things I enjoy about choice games is being able to play someone like myself, but having to deal with marginalization on the same axes as I do in real life is not really fun for me.
I will add that, when it comes to flavor text, I think Heart of the House did this pretty well. e.g. when you’re a trans or nonbinary character, you have the option to tell a non-binary NPC who has just been misgendered, “I’m sorry that happened; people say silly things about me sometimes, too.”
Having said that, would I have preferred they weren’t misgendered in the first place? Yep. It leads to a character moment for the person who does the misgendering, which is also not my favorite trope, but (in this case) it does make some sense and is less gratuitous than it could be, since the person who does the misgendering is actually a demon from a different plane.
I don’t know, my guy. I think it detracts from the narrative. Besides, it’s tired as hell to have to sift through, say, violent misogyny instead of a nice narrative. I can understand why someone might want that but you can look at history books, fantasy and sci fi, and pretty much any genre of book, movie, comic, etc to find that with no problem.
Sometimes a bitch just wants to read and insert themselves into a game without having yo unpack sexism that they might already deal with IRL every day (which is likely to a certain extent since I would assume a lot of women would like to play as themselves.)
Edit: after getting caught up with the entite convo, I don’t see how it would be possible to have the choice of being an oppressed class have meaning without it either being harder to do a certain thing or limit an option for said character. As it stands, it would just end up being flavor text in that case. That or random scenes of like oppression that not everyone wants to read.
I think minor changes are cool. I only think it’s bad to change it drastically because it’s a lot of work, and it would take the author even longer to finish writing and coding the game.
I don’t see the problem there, honestly. The quality of a game correlates with the time spent working on it and the amount of content put into it. I don’t have any problem with waiting a long time for an author to code their game.
Drastic changes between paths are more interesting to me than multiple playthroughs that feel identical.
Of course more content is good, but there usually is a time where people can get tired of working or be overwhelmed with making a game with many different paths. Look at how many ambitious games on this forum that haven’t been completed. I think it’s better for a writer to have a complete game.
That’s true. I think that an author should only put in as much as their individual ability will allow and that their game doesn’t necessarily need to have everything possible inside of it to be quality.
Still, I disagree with believing drastic changes like ones found in gender routes shouldn’t at least be kept in mind. The best published games have routes that veer from one another, in one way or another, and their example should be followed.
I would guess that nobody would argue that good games shouldn’t have routes that change significantly. But, given finite time and energy on the part of the writer, would you rather have a game that offered rich and varied routes because of choices you made about your behavior, or because of what sex you are?
Why not both? The quality of the content provided by the author doesn’t rely on the simplicity of the choice that it’s provided by, does it?
You mention finite control on part of the author, though. Fine, maybe the author simply cannot put the code into both types of change. I believe it’s still contextual in this case. In one story, maybe gender WOULD provide interesting enough changes to make it’s significance worth it. This would not be the case in most, so I accept your point.
As I say, ideally we could have everything be a rich tapestry of choices. In practice, one must triage and make choices about where to spend time.
I don’t think we’re really talking about simplicity–a behavior choice could be as simple as “I save her” v. “I do nothing as she drowns”–that’s not really more complicated than picking a sex.
Choices are usually pretty simple, to my experience. The energy comes in fulfilling the promise that the choices imply.
Finite time and energy, yes, definitely. And I don’t think anybody is arguing that there are stories in which stuff like sex and gender and eye color and whatever wouldn’t be interesting. I can totally imagine that!
Maybe I’m just sleepy today, so the finite energy of the author is upmost on my mind.
Oh, well. Tally Ho and Midsummer are some of my favorite games from the company. I think you make very good use of the finite energy available to authors.
Yeah, I think we agree on most of what we’re discussing by now. It all depends on context.
I do realise that successfully fighting back against oppression can be empowering, but the existence of that oppression basically ends up meaning that straight male players end up with an easier, oppression-free game, while gay, female, or other minority players end up being forced to fight back, which is not something I think is fair.