#and to be extremely clear i'm not saying 'it was a dev artifact' as a defense of the shortcomings it imposes

[anneapocalypse]

This wasn't even a decision that the devs made willingly but one forced upon them by the game's planned release in 2013 (which they later were able to get pushed back, so that they could add features they'd wanted to add all along--more on that here).

This is a facet of the game's troubled development I return to a lot because I do believe it's at least part of the reason for the Inquisitor being written the way they're written, and I do think that its impact on the game's storytelling and overall player experience is not positive.

So much about the way the Inquisitor is written and voiced makes a lot more sense when you remember that they were originally going to be limited to a human from a noble family and the other backgrounds were only added later. From the Inquisitor's sort of muted, milquetoast personality to the limited reactions to certain things and people, it makes perfect sense if you assume that like 80% of that dialogue was written for a human noble character.

Like Hawke has a much more lively personality than the Inquisitor but a lot of Hawke's dialogue options would still feel very strange and confined if you tried to apply them to an elf, a dwarf, or a qunari, you dig me.