@jadegl: Agreed. I never got the sense that Sera was running the Red Jenny spy empire, just that she was a part of it. The Red Jennys appear for all intents and purposes to be a medieval fantasy Anonymous rather than a medieval fantasy CIA like the Seekers.

edit: With 15 minutes to think of the similarities between the mix of sophomoric pranks and legitimate espionage, the decentralized nature of their authority, their use of a thieves' cant heavy in jargon and the political and "hacktivist" nature of their motives... I almost think it was intentionally designed. Is Sera supposed to be a fantasy grey-hat?

Iron Bull was okay, I liked him, but never thought he was amazing. Everyone else seemed to go nuts for him. He was on my dragon killing team, if not my main group, and I didn't mind him and had fun with his story. If I had to pick a best character it would likely be Blackwall or Dorian though.

I'll also never understand how anyone likes Sera, maybe I didn't play with her enough to get any real sense of her beyond the infantile and annoying, but I was so done with her after her introduction and her constant banter whenever I killed someone. Something along the lines of "you should write the inquisition was here on their butt!". Every. Single. Kill. I saw her story to the end, but never saw anything that made her any more likable.

@csl316: Everybody is entitled to their opinion, but I feel you are doing Wrex a major disservice by comparing him to the likes of Iron Bull.

@jadegl: Yes, the whole thing is supposed to be this anarchist decentralized underground movement that spontaneously takes action when needed, but Sera can definitely kick them into action and make decisions about what to hit, she just doesn't know who's in it or what they're doing. Presumably some other people (but not all) can also do the same in other cities.

But her management skills aren't the fun wrinkle, it's her political views. She keeps expressing them very childishly, but she has a very developed view of the abuses of DA's feudal system. If anything, Sera is the closest to a contemporary social democrat. She cares about power for the people and thinks collaborative power can get things done at a grassroots level. Childish as she may seem, she has figured out democracy before anyone else on Thedas. Not the only hint that she's a lot more intelligent than she seems. She also talks a lot about having learned things by doing, and everybody is surprised at how good she is at archery with very little training.

The political allegory is one of the fun things in the game, actually, and unlike the Qun being weirdly functional communists since the beginning, Sera is a new element to that puzzle. Also, she's funny and calls me Shiny.

I personally don't think any of them should have been able to pick any of the characters from the game, as none of them played more than what like 10-15 hours of it. None of them even saw the characters quest lines out. So how can you say any of them are best new character, if you didn't even finish the game, see the full character arch?

However, I don't mind they picked Iron Bull. I'm just glad this game got some love from them at all. Because its my game of the year.

@noelveiga: Basically...

@sterling: I think you hit the nail on the head there and what more, your description there is pretty much this entire year's GOTY deliberations summed up to me. There's a number of categories that I feel just weren't given the attention they deserved, to the point where I wonder why they even bothered. They're dishing out best story awards to a game only two people of the lot even touched for example. I feel like they'd have been better off settling on a number of candidates for each category early on, and then making sure everyone played those games, or they should've just stuck to more general categories which even an outsider can appreciate, such as "best looking game", "hottest mess" or "best music", etc.

I think GOTY is a riot, especially around Giant Bomb, just a ton for everyone involved, but it is somewhat hard to take their awards seriously when they're so being so blatant about their disinterest for said awards.

Oh, and it's THE Iron Bull, people. Come on.

I like GOTY because they just talk about games and what they love most and hate most about them. It's just a solid week of marking out over video games. I also think it's aided by it being a few months after most of these games have been played, so they've had time to swish the game flavor around and see how it tastes.

I really wanted them to do that Best of the Generation podcast, because I wanted to hear what 5-7 years of hindsight adds. It's not really the games you love in the moment that matter, it's the games you look back on most fondly.

Yeah i don't really get it either, i may be biased because the way Dragon Age characters have been designed for the last two games has made me just kind of hate everyone.
I'd vote Shit Bot, purely because i can't think of any characters which stood out to me this year.

Edit: I'd still say Shit Bot (still fun to say), but notable mention for Clover who was added to Payday 2 recently, i really like how she turned out, they even gave her a Shillelagh.

@sterling said:

Seriously? Weren't you flipping tables and dropkicking people who liked the game? I distinctly remember seeing forum posts from you decrying Inquisition as a shit show. Unless that was someone else with a Sterling avatar...

@oldirtybearon: No that wasn't me. I'm the highest poster in this games forum, and ya some negative about bugs, but no hate for the game. Has to be someone else with the same avatar. I love this game. Have since day one.

@sterling: Well I'm glad you enjoyed it. I enjoyed it too. For the most part.

@sterling: I think Jeff saw the entire game but didn't play it.

Most game campaigns are under 15 hours. Movies tend to be under 2 hours. It doesn't take long to know if you like a character. The idea that they need to commit 60 hours to someone to know if they like them is ludicrous. I should hope that's not how you decide you like people in real life.

I got Dragon Age: Inquisition for Christmas and honestly, there's no better praise I've read for the game than all of the differing opinions in this thread over who the best character is. That speaks to a breadth of characters that are potentially appealing to different people.

@bargainben: Did you even play the game? Do you know how his character arch ends? Blackwalls? This game doesn't give you even half the info or breadth of any of the characters until late game, aside from a few. Sola, Iron Bull, Blackwall, Sera, and Cole all have very late game developments and much more is revealed about them. So yes, its ludicrous to say you played the game for 15 hours and like the character. Because you don't know hardly anything about them. And comparing that to real life is just stupid, and I hope you actually realize that. By your logic me playing Persona 4 for 15 hours and saying Tohru Adachi is the worst character of the game is okay. Even though I have no idea who that character really is, or knowing that characters full impact on the game? That just makes no sense to me what so ever. You can disagree all you want, and play games however you want, but the logic is flawed to me.

@sterling: Jeff got to Iron Bull's character quest where he has to make a big choice and based on that and what he and the others thought of Iron Bull, he made it on. Why are you getting angry? Blackwall is still a dullard for the first 30 hours even with the revelation. Putting 80 hours in doesn't change the fact they enjoyed Iron Bull from the beginning. In fact, he's the only character that starts good and has a compelling character quest which makes him more interesting. Most either start bad and get good later (Cassandra, Blackwall), or start good and have a kind of boring character arc(Varric, Vivienne) and some are just kinda bad the whole way (Cole, Solas). You can disagree if you want but that you want to discount their opinion because they didn't get to the dinner scene at hour 70 or whatever is nonsense. Be reasonable. You're saying some "you cant have an opinion on FF13 until you get to Pulse" kind of stuff. Like, that's now how this works. They don't owe you to put the amount of time in that you did and even if they did there's a good chance they still would think Blackwall or Cassandra or whoever you thought blossomed in hour 60 was not at all interesting.

Broken Age is super short, its literally half an adventure game, and you immediately have an opinion on most characters in that game. Borderlands is super long but similarly, you have opinions on characters immediately. And granted, those characters don't arc like DA characters but hey, first impressions matter. I kind of think if your first impression of any character, regardless of what's exposed later, is indifference, you've written your character poorly. And I felt a good amount of indifference to half the cast, and half of that half got interesting later but not more interesting than the people I liked to begin with.

And keep in mind again, nobody was impassioned about this category so it seems superfluous to argue about it. Truth is, based on the segment, no character really moved them that much or they're not actively looking for good characters, that's not what they play games for. The category went by so quickly because very likely no character really hit them that strongly this year. So Jeff went "Iron Bull seems alright, he's got them horns and an eyepatch I'll bring him up" and that was that.

@corevi:

Oh, yeah, and there's that, too.

The metric is all wonky and drives me nuts, but maybe that's on purpose. I really do like that she has a theme song and that she suspects it's the medieval fantasy equivalent of getting a mixtape.

You just reiterated my original point, so why then are you arguing with me? Oh, you put your own spin on what I said and thought I was arguing against Iron Bull. I see. You missed the part where I think the whole thing is stupid because no one cared and no one argued against the only three people that actually played the game.

If that's all you think of Iron Bull you really haven't been paying enough attention.

Agreed, thought he was the worst new character in the game but whatever, I usually disagree with there best new character categories (how the hell did Francis York Morgan NOT win?)

They at least got Wheatly right.

Iron Bull is cool but holy crap Vivienne was in the running for a minute? She is so awful. "Oh my mages tower was cool and I had a lot of power so clearly all mages towers are super rad and we should bring them all back and any mage that doesn't like it is a whiner"

Like. How am I supposed to like someone who is literally the best video game representation of privilege?

Also Cassandra is literally Ashley from ME1. Which is great cause Ashley was my girl but still.

@defaultprophet: My least favorite thing about her character (and the main character as well) is that so many of her dialogue lines feel too much like something I would actually hear from a 20-something in 2014. I'm not sure how else to explain it, but quite a few times in this game, a character will have a quip that reads to me like a highly upvoted reddit comment or something. Really really took me out of it every time that came up.

As soon as I killed a dragon and Iron Bull freaked out (in a good sort of hey lets go party way) I kind of fell for the big guy. Something about him is so freeing. Yes, he is simple, but he defies stereotypes and is a very pure, honest character. Sera, however, got on my last nerve just about immediately. I absolutely loved her voice actress, but she was such a pain in the ass that I couldn't stand her. I was so happy to replace her with Cole - who I originally thought I would hate.

Somebody in this thread mentioned Blackwall and I have to agree fully. Blackwall's story, as a whole, is so incredibly interesting that I'd love some sort of DLC which explores it a bit more, kind of like what they did with Leliana in DA:O. I'm probably the only one who feels that way, though. Still, he was a fully fleshed out character with a lot of deep, but ultimately hidden qualities. In a way, he reminded me of the character I wanted so desperately to create in Origins, but never could.

Good job, you made an old man smile after a long days work with this one.

I personally cast my vote for Dorian. My main group was/is Sera, Iron Bull, and Dorian...bunch of goddamn contrarians.

Either way, I think the vote for Iron Bull was a vote in general for the strength of the party members in DA:I. I think their personalities are the most memorable part of the game.

I haven't used Iron Bull much and when i have he's been pretty boring. While I really liked Dorian and Cassandra and their stories/evolutions, when I had Viv, Sera and Blackwall in my party their banter was non-stop delightfully entertaining. So many great characters though. I have to agree w/the poster above and say the characters and getting to know their stories and quirks is the most memorable thing about DA:I.

@defaultprophet said:

You're not. Plenty of people didn't like Morrigan in Origins, and plenty more hated Anders in DA2. Not every party member is supposed to be someone you like; some of them BioWare expects you to downright despise. Personally, I thought Vivienne was a baller. She took absolutely no shit from anybody and I appreciated that. Couldn't stand Sera, though, and I was mean to her every chance I got.

That's kind of the great thing about these games, you know? Different people react differently to different characters. It's like, a cornucopia of differences.

Iron Bull has some great scenes and moments. Seriously he is just crazy if you take him to fight a dragon. Some of his celebration drinks get pretty funny too. He isn't the best character in the game... but I do kind of feel like he might be the "new" character I liked the most. Dorian maybe a close second.

How many can you name that definitely are not into gay bondage?

I'm only slightly irritated in that Vivienne was basically dismissed instantly because I think Vinny confused her for Cassandra.

Thinking about it my game is always bugged and I almost never get any party banter. It cuts off often too, probably why I don't have many feelings for any of the characters. I liked Solas the most probably.

@oldirtybearon: yah I took every opportunity I could get to bring Vivienne down a peg because she was annoying and condescending to everyone constantly. Both her and Dorian act like they're better than everyone which is why I stopped dragging either of them along. Solas was a creep but at least he was informed!

Yeah I guess, I was just confused on why she would be the 2nd best new character in the series. Like almost everyone else is better.

I do like The Iron Bull, however I think most of the party characters are decent. I really like Blackwall, Dorian, Varric, Cassandra, Bull and Solas. Personally I'm not huge on Cole, he's just a little too odd (and I hate the dual dagger AI). I also don't really like Vivienne. Sera is weird. I kind of like having her in my party for the banter but I really don't like 1-1 interactions with her and more cutscene-y type stuff. I find I generally took her along while doing stuff like collecting shards. I just about never took her on story or companion based missions.

When building my party I was always torn and switching it up (I am a mage) but eventually Blackwall became pretty common. I'd always bring either Solas or Dorian, then the third member was either Varric, Sera, or Bull (for awhile I went no rogue). I did occasionally throw Cassandra in there but once I specialized in Knight-Enchanter I found her and Bull really fell out of my rotation. It was normally Blackwall and myself slashing people up with whoever I chose for my mage and archer sitting back.

Iron Bull and Varric were the two best characters in the game. Don't be crazy. You should be more upset that the game was left off the site top 10.

Iron Bull was fine, I wasn't shocked at him being brought up. I think Dorian is way better though. I disagree with people calling Iron Bull typical Bioware, since he wasn't a simple brute like Grunt or Wrex. He sometimes talks poetically and in general, he doesn't come across as dumb or simple-minded. I would've chosen Dorian or Cassandra if she counted as new.

Viv didn't deserve to be brought up. She's awesome in combat, probably the best person in the game, but her personality is VERY boring/plain.

Dorian and Sera were the best characters in the game. Iron Bull was almost too likable.

I came to appreciate The Iron Bull towards the end, but I still lean more towards either Cass or Dorian.

Still, I'm glad that they gave the game some recognition after so completely dismissing it from best story.

I changed his wiki page name to The Iron Bull, because he likes an article in front of it.

It's good to see I'm not the only person who thought Blackwall was awesome.

Blackwall is a pretty weak character until you learn about his past. Iron Bull stands out to me because he's a Qunari that actually likes to talk about himself and his culture, which we haven't really gotten in the past games. Also, he's sympathetic to the Qun and the culture even though he's strayed from them to strike out on his own. Torn between the tradition that he was brought up in and the new life he created for himself... I thought it was a good story.

Sera, on the other hand, is overrated.