Quote Originally Posted by Craft (Cheese) View Post
I never really felt bad about what happened in DA2 because I was never responsible for what went wrong. The most emotional investment I could possibly have is in emphasizing with the NPCs, and good luck with that. I could sortof get into Merrill and Aveline (at least until Act 2 where her character arc just sputters out and dies) but no one else, really.
I suspect that the real problem is that the Bioware model of RPGs is spectacularly unsuited for making a tragedy. The main characters - even those of the Shepard variety - are essentially personality voids, and the entire supporting cast are almost entirely defined in their relation to those main characters. Sure they all have some mega-cool backstory, but once you show up they do pretty much squat without you telling 'em to. This makes it pretty hard to do anything tragic to the protagonist, who doesn't actually have emotions, and the supporting cast is too agency-deprived to be an interesting tragic focus either. While you don't need a tragic flaw to be a tragic hero, some degree of physical and emotional activity probably is. Neither protagonist or supporting cast manages to combine both.

And it's not like they can let you make a super-tragic choice. On the rare occasions when one of the outcomes isn't a showcase of how totally awesome the protagonist is, they still get out unscathed. They have to, since inflicting a mechanical penalty on the player is bad design, and it's hard to inflict emotional trauma on a character black hole. Actually doing something tragic to the lead as a result of player choice requires both that the lead is enough of a person to do something tragic to, and that the player had a very different understanding of how decision making worked in game.

Right now making choices in a game is about determining how to be badass. In a tragedy it's about choosing how you fail.

Oh, look, it's Spec Ops: The Line again...