@hexblooddruid replied to your post “obviously not every single one of davg's problems...”:
This is what drives me wild when I see people try to say that Rook HAS to be that way because of their position and goal. Like there are so many different ways to attack a problem, even in the limited space of an RPG made ten years ago. Like it could’ve been done if it was a priority.
i've drafted like five different responses to this but the long & short of each of them is 'Y E A H'
most often when i've seen defenses of why rook has to be Like That (GoodTM, nice, helpful, agreeable, unopinionated) it's more in the Macro scale of, say, caring about the companions' personal struggles, or wanting to keep the veil up, or not agreeing with solas. the other major defense is pointing to the bad ending as evidence of sufficient rp flexibility because the game does in fact let you ignore everything else and just focus on the main quest and lose out on hours and hours and hours of content and doom yourself/your factions/your companions.
but is that meaningful rp? or finger waggling at players for not playing the game the One and Only way it was supposed to be played (in much the same way that bg3 locks you out of tons of content if you don't do the grove Just Right [not necessarily even siding with the goblins but by trying to kill kagha prematurely])?
and like. I dont know if i necessarily need or want an Evil rook path, i dont think veilguard would've remotely thematically benefited for having Even More Vague Ontological Evil. But my god if rook's unassailable Goodness is purportedly the load bearing structure in veilguard's story, i sure would've liked to have had some meaningful ways to engage with what goodness is and what it might mean to different rooks who have different methods and different personal/ethical/political lines.
But we were never going to get that!!! because as you said, that was never the development priority for veilguard because it was incompatible with the direction inherited from morrison and the nightmarish release date pushback timeline devs were working on. fandom reverse engineering a purity of authorial intent & creative vision is what we call in academia a Generous Reading, but the material/labor/industrial confines under which the game was produced remain, and if the schreier article is any indication, those were the stronger determining factors in rook's personality & the broader lack of rp.
