I got to thinking about this while testing some functions in the Keep. Currently there are 5 save slots available, as the team behind the Keep has stated. People on the forums and on twitter have asked about being able to delete those states after importing to DA:I, and while that is possible to do I am wondering why people would do that. It also shows how potentially limiting 5 may be.

For example, let's say we have created 5 import-ready world states built from the first 5 of the 6 origin stories in Origins. We *could* import the first then delete it to make room for the 6th origin story, but since the Keep is going to be used for future titles, we really need to keep it so we can update it later with our play-through details from Inquisition. If we delete it now, we'll have to remake it in its entirety later for Dragon Age 4. This won't matter much for people who do not do multiple play-throughs of games - and there are many who don't - but for those who do, this may be fairly limiting.

Even with a modest number of world states to import into Inquisition, this number could blossom quickly, especially with the way Inquisition looks like it will encourage multiple play-throughs in order to see all the content (even more so than the previous titles). It looks like there is a lot of content that is branched based on the player's decisions, and it will be harder to just reload and make a different decision this time with the way some of the timed missions look like they will work (this is only supposition from how things look right now). Content will branch even without the timed missions, though.

An example of only 2 play-throughs of Origins and 5 of DA:2 (WS=World State), if you set up your first 5 world states prior to playing Inquisition:

                           
So.. from the above, unless you didn't want to save a certain Inquisition play-through for some reason, you'd have to delete something after the 1st play-through if you wanted a second Inquisitor using that first world state. This is just an example.

Based on the current limitation, we should probably plan on only having one Inquisition character per world state, or only enter our first couple of beginning world states to keep some open slots so we can have multiple Inquisitors per world state.

I hope the total of slots available is increased later.. perhaps it is just a limitation imposed for Beta. The ideal, of course, would be to have unlimited slots, although I'm sure they have to think about the strain on the server at some point. Not only could someone have the above scenario with wanting one world state per origin, but someone may have used an Origin play-through in multiple DA 2 play-throughs, resulting in a multitude of world states from only one Origins origin. Have I lost you yet? :)  Carry that forward to Inquisition and you're looking at *many* world state permutations, so pre-planning our world states might be a good idea.

I'm definitely not bashing the five-slot limit, as I'm sure there will be a ton of people on the web site creating their world states and this will require a boat load of server space to accommodate. Upping that limit to 10 doubles that boat-load, and making them unlimited might be impossible (especially with the number of play-throughs some people have done in both games - I've heard of people running through Origins over 25 times). I'm sure they'll find a happy medium number before launch, but it still applies that we'll need to pre-plan a bit in order to get the most Inquisition play-throughs possible.

Then again, if you only played through the first 2 once and don't plan on playing Inquisition more than once, then you're golden :)