Yeah, there's a really good case to be made for that being what's going on in DA2 in particular. Hawke's whole thing in Act I is trying to make enough money to safeguard themself and their family. In theory they could have stopped there if the Qunari situation hadn't blown up, and there does seem to be a sort of narrative assumption that just getting to live peacefully as a wealthy noble in the Worst City Ever is something the player would view as a desirable win condition, and having that repeatedly yanked out from under them will feel like a profound tragedy. And I have definitely seen player reactions that bear out that assumption!
Of course, there's also the difference in targets. If you just want money to protect yourself, you can get that from anywhere. If you want to change the status quo, you have to directly attack (or at the very least inconvenience!) the people responsible for it. And Hawke does make most of their money in Act 1 eliminating other undesirables. There's no option to follow Mark Twain's advice of robbing your church. (And then this gets into the rhetoric of video games - if this were a Bethesda title, you absolutely would have had that option, though it wouldn't have been laid out as a Choice so much as just a thing that you can do if you want, and thus there wouldn't be much textual attention to the implications.)
Hawke's whole thing in Act I is trying to make enough money to safeguard themself and their family. In theory they could have stopped there if the Qunari situation hadn't blown up, and there does seem to be a sort of narrative assumption that just getting to live peacefully as a wealthy noble in the Worst City Ever is something the player would view as a desirable win condition, and having that repeatedly yanked out from under them will feel like a profound tragedy. And I have definitely seen player reactions that bear out that assumption!
...this makes me really wonder at the idea of an AU where Act 1 gets things stabilized and there's no further escalation.
Choice games keep flinging you at situations where you have to pick, because that's the gameplay, but a lot of meaningful choices aren't about being forced to pick between two big things but choosing to engage or not, but game designers seem to look at that as you refusing to play the game at all.
And the DA series already has the idea of a living world and stuff chugging along if you fail to deal with it, it just usually does that within the frame of you missing the sidequest or having to pick between things to deal with given a time limit. It wouldn't be that hard to let people get somewhere comfortable and faff about decorating their house and maybe a bit of gardening with their time while ignoring the rest of the city. Fiddling while Rome burns is itself a choice!
That is a very weird but very interesting mental image! Yeah, the thing about games that love Big Choices is that the way they present those choices usually has little to nothing to do with modeling how people actually end up going down the paths they do in life and way more to do with highlighting the underlying high-level concepts. In the Trolley Problem, you throw the lever or you don't, you don't stand around in shock trying to make sure you've really understood what you're seeing, or start making excuses to yourself about how you couldn't get there in time anyway, or decide that someone else can get there first, or that it's someone else's job to get there first, etc.
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