mikkeneko:

Was ruminating (for various reasons) on the size of Hawke’s house in the game. It’s described as the Amell estate,  and various background codeces describe the Amell family as being a fairly major noble house in Kirkwall before their fall from grace – major enough that they were contenders to be Viscount, among other things.

Yet the part of the house that Hawke inhabits from the second act onwards is honestly… pretty small. You’ve got an entrance hall of pretty small size, a moderate living room, an upstairs area about the same size, and then two bedrooms – Hawke’s and his mother’s. And that’s it. Bigger than Gamlen’s crappy lowtown apartment, sure, but in absolute terms not very big.

Call me a snob, but I wouldn’t call that an estate.  More like a townhouse. 

I can think of a couple of explanations for this discrepancy. The first is that I’m simply spoiled by modern notions of expansiveness and space, and the space described by the Amell estate is actually quite generous by the standards of size and space for the day, especially in a crowded city. But that doesn’t completely add up. We see other Hightown houses during the course of the game. The De Launcet’s house is much bigger; Fenris’ house is much bigger. Hightown, being the remnants of Tevinter magister residences, seems to be quite expansive. You
would think, if the Amells were really that prominent, that their house
would be at least as big as theirs. Furthermore, there’s an enormous  wine cellar/basement complex under the house, that extends all the way to the Undercity; you could fit the upstairs of the house into that space several times over. How can it be that they have all those wine and storage cellars, and yet no kitchens?

The second is that there’s a level of Video Game Compression at work. Much the way we can assume that Anders treated more than one patient in his clinic over the course of seven years, and we can assume that there were more than about ten people in the Chantry at the time of its destruction, perhaps the Amell estate is actually bigger than what we see. It’s a pretty common phenomenon in video games that the ‘friendly’ areas (and friendly populations) are dwarfed in size many times over by the ‘dungeon’ areas. You don’t need to spend an hour traversing through the peaceful parts of the city just to visit the vendors (I’m looking at you, Hightown Market,) you put everything you need fairly close together and save your rendering space for the active game areas where things actually happen.

The third possibility is the one I inadvertently suggested a few paragraphs up. Maybe the Amell estate is actually just that, a townhouse.  A place for the Amells to stay while they’re attending to business in the city, but not their primary residence.

If that’s the case, then there ought to be a bucolic Amell estate somewhere out in the countryside, with rolling acres and a sprawling stone pile of a mansion. Probably decrepit and abandoned for years after the fall of the Amells, maybe avoided on suspicion of being haunted! I think this would be the perfect  location for Hawke and Anders to settle down and raise their mountain lion and baby dragon family, don’t you?

Where were they gonna put the sibling? Sibling was supposed to move with them before they go poof after the deep roads.
Where do Bodhan and Sandal and Orana sleep???
I’m gonna agree with all of this and say the developers hid the “unnecessary” bed rooms etc, but they have to exist right? Surely hawke has a kitchen???
But out of the way estate for Hawke to hide with anders (or LI of choice…) Is awesome and I completely agree.

Headcanadian accepted!!!