Thanks Wormerine, your answer is really interesting and in-depth and I appreciate it. It was a very interesting read. I have to imagine that my perspective is heavily impacted by DA:O being my first choice-driven rpg where my choices really mattered. But also it might be that I'm just the sort of person who doesn't tend to try the really out of the box approaches to things. Because I would never even think of attacking the caravan guard in PoE, and my knee-jerk reaction to the idea is to find it weird that someone would. But again, how much of that was the dragon age games shaping my expectations and behaviour? I love both PoE games, but I love them and Dragon Age for my ability to characterise my player character, to make them really feel like mine. I've said a couple times on this forum that I've given my characters in PoE entire personal arcs completely separate from the game plots and felt entirely supported by the game. And in DA:O I've been making more and more complex characters in it. To contrast BG3, there have been conversations where I straight up didn't have an option to say something that I thought would fit my character. I think that I'm with mrfuji13 in the end, and that DA:O is still a crpg, but it's a matter of scale and where they applies their focus, and DA:O opted to focus more on giving you breadth to define your character and the choices your character can make that the game can then support, rather than letting you do potentially anything and having to deal with it when the game can't really make that choice meaningful.
