555 réponses à ce sujet

[Poaches]

Nerevar-as wrote...

slimgrin wrote...

Estel78 wrote...

slimgrin wrote...

Who cares which platform sells the most?

Publishers do.

The cream doesn't always rise to the top. Thats why movies like 'Twilight' do so well. And why would you defend this? You must know crap games can sell like hotcakes so what is your point? 

The people who decide were money goes usually don´t care about the bussiness beyond getting money from it.

That doesn't justify crap as being good however...
Only, there is a lot of crap and more crap. Are you calling this crap? 

[Nerevar-as]

http://www.larian.co...11&nt=2&fpart=1

Interesting view of how the industry goes.  Starts halfway trough the post. Nothing to do with console-PC war.

Modifié par Nerevar-as, 21 août 2010 - 10:30 .

[Solica]

Nerevar-as wrote...

Solica, try to learn enough of the game to make your own mind BEFORE buying it.

I've been around a long time. Since BG1. (actually, since Colossal Caves and Dungeons) I tried making up my mind BEFORE, once. Then NWN OC  vomited me straight in the face. There was nothing on the forums that suggested to me that NWN would be crap. (Yes I would have bought it anyway with the other strategy, but I wouldn't have become so disappointed) OTOH people tried to convince me Morrowind and Fall Out 3 was crap. Two of the most brilliant games I ever played. Nah, the last game I'm going to buy from Bioware, is going to be pretty bad,  EA ownership and all. THEN it's finished.

[Nerevar-as]

Morrowind bad? I can understand were FO3 comes from even though I don´t agree, but Morrowind?



I don´t look to reviews beyond facts such as class of gameplay or technical issues, and also pay attention to the kind of games people who give negative reviews like.Someone who doesn´t like platformers reviewing a PoP game I skip, for example.

[DragonRageGT]

Solica wrote...

Nerevar-as wrote...

Solica, try to learn enough of the game to make your own mind BEFORE buying it.

I've been around a long time. Since BG1. (actually, since Colossal Caves and Dungeons) I tried making up my mind BEFORE, once. Then NWN OC  vomited me straight in the face. There was nothing on the forums that suggested to me that NWN would be crap. (Yes I would have bought it anyway with the other strategy, but I wouldn't have become so disappointed) OTOH people tried to convince me Morrowind and Fall Out 3 was crap. Two of the most brilliant games I ever played. Nah, the last game I'm going to buy from Bioware, is going to be pretty bad,  EA ownership and all. THEN it's finished.

Ever tried the multiplayer permanent worlds of NWN? They got me busy for some 5 years and they are awesome. Some are still out there! Oh, and NWN had a Demo. At least I played one before deciding to buy it. And it was just the prologue of the OC.

Now, you can do what I do. Find a friend that you know is going to buy DA2 or a lan house that will have it and test it first, =)

[Brockololly]

Another Gamescom preview (in Spanish):
http://ps3p.es/21827...e-dragon-age-2/

Looking at a quick google translation it is pretty much the same as every other preview...

[Elanareon]

MaxQuartiroli wrote...

hannibal555 wrote...

- You have to press constantly to attack, feels like old Diablo 1.

Not really good to hear...

Indeed, always hated button smashing games...

[Nerevar-as]

Brockololly wrote...

Another Gamescom preview (in Spanish):
http://ps3p.es/21827...e-dragon-age-2/

Looking at a quick google translation it is pretty much the same as every other preview...

They give a few more details. At least there is the first explanation of how skill trees work I see. Not happy about the cuscene deaths he mentioned, hope they are more like Daveth/Jory and not Cutscene Incompetence to the Max ones.
EVERYBODY I read has said combat is real time, but a dev said it was still autoattack. ¿?

[DragonRageGT]

Nerevar-as wrote...

http://www.larian.co...11&nt=2&fpart=1

Interesting view of how the industry goes.  Starts halfway trough the post. Nothing to do with console-PC war.

Thanks for the link, Nevevar. Somehow it felt very familiar. I can't swear it but I have the feeling of already having read that post, yet it is quite recent. Did you posted it recently somewhere else?

This is a developer talking! I think he is the Lar in "Larian Studios". How revealling!

Our target date for all of this is October 15th 2010, and undoubtedly small miracles will have to be performed to get everything out in good order, but I’m optimistic that we’ll manage, and I really hope I won’t have to eat those words.
Before I end this status update, I wanted to say a few words also about the bankruptcy of one of our neighbours, Playlogic, the next victim of this crisis which has been damaging our industry so heavily. I’ve lost count of the amount of developers that closed or downsized in the last year, but the number is huge, and I feel for all those guys, many whom I know, that lost their jobs, and are having a hard time finding a new one because there simply are less jobs available. We’re not talking a few jobs here, we’re talking tens of thousands of jobs. The fragmentation of the media landscape, the quality expectations from consumers and corresponding exploding development costs, second-hand games and piracy are all reasons which are being quoted, and while these are all true, one of the core issues for developers at least is very simply that invoices aren’t being paid in time when the developer was counting on those invoices being paid.

This has everything to do with our position in the game industry food chain i.e. at the bottom, and imho it’s pretty unfair. Having been in this industry for some time, I find that in general the development side is in general pretty efficient, simply because there’s a lot of economic pressure on it, yet it’s the side where the money comes last. The most upper layers, where the money comes in directly is probably the least efficient, simply because the money is available and can be used to cover up inefficiences, and I have serious issues with that inefficiency affecting so many independent developers who usually are the ones slaving day and night to bring their products to market.

It’s obviously something which is the case of all media industries, but it really is something that should change. I appreciate the work that is done by many in the publishing and distribution industry, but I also see a lot of redundant and often inefficient work being done, which doesn’t necessarily get optimized when times are tight. Rather the burden is placed on those lower in the foodchain. What I mean is that when the going gets tough, the jobs that probably contribute the least to the creation of games are the ones first protected whereas the jobs of developers of often succesful products are the ones first destroyed, just because of the direction of the money flow. In my opinion, and obviously I’m a developer, it should be the other way around.

Some developers managed to turn the tide, witness the success of Steam, and would we all have mechanisms with which we can reach consumers directly without having to go through the food chain to develop and publish our games, the slaughterhouse that has been the developer scene since 2009, would probably look quite different. Developers really could do with a high visibility portal, with high quality standards, but with very reasonable margins, to release their games directly to consumers, where the developer immediately get access to the income. It would be a welcome change to have a world wherein the creativity of a developer is not rewarded with the creativity of a legal department of a publisher that contrives various reasons not to pay the developer their share.

The typical strategy that has caused more than one independent developer to die in the last two years is pretty cynical. It basically boils down to – publisher/distributor owes a developer money. They don’t pay. The legal hassle starts, the developer finds itself in trouble because it was counting on that money. If the developer doesn’t have sufficient financial stamina to last for quite some time and pay the required legal fees (which are very high), the developer dies, the publisher doesn’t have to pay its royalties and problem solved (from the publisher point of view).

I find this obscene, and I can easily pinpoint the developers that died because of these practices, and it’s only made possible because the revenues from the sales of the game don’t arrive directly at the developer. I get sick when I see some publishers who I know engaged in these practices boast how they steered their company through difficulty times, because they did it by using illegal methods bordering on the criminal.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s not the kind of thing all publishers engage in, though it’s the kind of thing you see increase in frequency when publishers are under financial stress, and for a healthy gamesindustry with healthy developers, it should be something that shouldn’t be possible in the first place. And it would’ve avoided many talented teams from going under. It would also result in better games.

The upside of all of this is that those developers that survive do so because they learn to counter these practices, and I think that inevitably it will lead to a change in relationship between developers and publishers in the coming years. It’s just a shame that so many blood will have been shed unnecessarily during the maturation process of this industry, and legal blah prevents these practices from becoming public. There really should be a website dedicated somewhere to uncovering the dirt that goes on. At least future victims of those that are prone to this behavior would be warned then.

[Nerevar-as]

I mentioned it, but didn´t give the link. Got it from RPGWatch, and halfway down update post he went "off topic". In some older posts he also comments other "anecdotes" they had with companies, but have no links for that. Should be in the forum.

[andar91]

Elanareon wrote...

MaxQuartiroli wrote...

hannibal555 wrote...

- You have to press constantly to attack, feels like old Diablo 1.

Not really good to hear...

Indeed, always hated button smashing games...

Lucky for you that you don't have to click to attack every time.  The developers have confirmed it in this very thread.  Admittedly, though, I don't know if the autoattack works on all systems.  But he didn't specify when he said it.

[Elanareon]

AngryFrozenWater wrote...

chain25 wrote...

Here is the first impression of a German online games mag who was at GamesCom and had a glimpse on DA2.
For Google translation click here 
Dunno what to think yet ...

Thanks for that.

The article talks about the graphics and does not praise it. I really hope we don't get crappy textures again. DAO's texture resolution was bad enough. In 2011 it's time to use the graphics potentential that modern cards have. Anti-aliasing is something I like full support for as well. I am not asking for DX11 tesselation, but bringing the graphics up to date to current hardware is not that odd to ask.

If BW wants to reach that 10 million copies then it has to work on the graphics as well. I feel they now think that reaching a large market can only be achieved by targeting crappy hardware. I think that's a shame. What is called the enthousiast market (the people who buy high-end PCs) is a $9.5 billion market (2009). We are not talking about a small minority here. You can scale graphics features to support both less capable and high end machines. If their current engines cannot do that then their new games should really get rid of such aweful and outdated technology.

Edit: Added an additional argument in the last paragraph.

This is very very narrow minded thinking... Do you really think that all those 9.5 billion market only buy High - end pc for gaming? Besides, there was and article about devs intentionally not producing High end graphics because it is too expensive. The same reason why there isn't a new console versions of the Xbox and ps3 yet... Technology is developing fast, the economy isn't.

[Knifyx]

CoS Sarah Jinstar wrote...

Well at least they didn't totally Mass Effect it.

Wait for the third you'll see.

Modifié par Knifyx, 22 août 2010 - 02:09 .

[ENHbrometheus]

Any one else have that sinking feeling the auto attack issue will have an outcome similar to other situations like this? Where the devs insist it will remain in tact but then later clarify it won't.

[AlanC9]

Solica wrote...
I've been around a long time. Since BG1. (actually, since Colossal Caves and Dungeons) I tried making up my mind BEFORE, once. Then NWN OC  vomited me straight in the face. There was nothing on the forums that suggested to me that NWN would be crap.

Really? I remember a fair amount of suspicion pre-release, having to do with the lack of pausability and no party. Or am I remembering wrong?

[Hulk Hsieh]

They can't do without auto-attack if there's control switch among character.
Imagine that when you are controlling Alistar, Sten just stand there doing nothing.
That's what happens without auto-attack.

If they are going to remove auto-attack, they need to remove control switch, too.

Modifié par Hulk Hsieh, 22 août 2010 - 06:52 .

[Sylvius the Mad]

AlanC9 wrote...

Solica wrote...
I've been around a long time. Since BG1. (actually, since Colossal Caves and Dungeons) I tried making up my mind BEFORE, once. Then NWN OC  vomited me straight in the face. There was nothing on the forums that suggested to me that NWN would be crap.

Really? I remember a fair amount of suspicion pre-release, having to do with the lack of pausability and no party. Or am I remembering wrong?

My recollection of pre-release NWN was the the OC was intended only to demonstrate the game, with its core feature being the toolset and the capacity for DM-led multiplayer.

I don't like multiplayer, so I wasn't too thrilled about NWN's direction, but in the end I found it to be quite a good game (yes, even the OC - I replayed the OC and SoU just last year)

[DragonRageGT]

And of all that, the most amazing thing of NWN is the Community. And its community patch of couse. CEP brought NWN into a new level of awesomeness. The OC was fine, there was a demo for people to experiment the game before buying it and the xpacks were very good too. HotU rocks.



But the *emotes*, where the char would reproduce the action of our commands like *bows* *waves hello* *whistles* *smokes* *snores* *dances with wolves* *sings a tune to impress the audience* and the most impressive of them all... *spasms*.



If you never went into a Dragon shape and made him *spasms*... you haven't seen the most amazing NWN ever.



Plus the language tools where I would type something with my elf and it would display in "elvish" for players of other races to read and "translated" to other players elves as well. Same with orcish, draconish, dwarven, animals in general (only a druid/ranger could understand them).



Now, tell me another game that gave us all that! There will never be something like NWN Permanent World and not surprisingly, they're still out there. It is a real shame that Obsidian screwed up so hard with NWN2 that after over 1 years past release the mplayer was still not functional and I have no idea how it went from there. Stupid fraking SecuROM phisically destroyed two DVD-RAM drives of mine and I promised I would never touch that fraking game again. (It would not prevented me from playing even pirated NWN2. It just prevented me from watching any Movies DVD that I owned like the EE of the LotR trilogy which I had to import from the US only for a fraking rootkit stop me from watching it?)

[Bryy_Miller]

Hulk Hsieh wrote...

They can't do without auto-attack if there's control switch among character.
Imagine that when you are controlling Alistar, Sten just stand there doing nothing.
That's what happens without auto-attack.

If they are going to remove auto-attack, they need to remove control switch, too.

You mean A.I., which is never leaving any game. As for auto-attack, it is still in the game.

[Homebound]

I havent played DA2 yet, but I am fully confident that Bioware wont let DA2 be another generic fantasygame.

[DragonRageGT]

Just_mike wrote...

I havent played DA2 yet, but I am fully confident that Bioware wont let DA2 be another generic fantasygame.

If Bioware is half as confident as you are, they might release the demo for us to savour it or at least open a beta testing season before release. No developer or staff can do the **** we, crazy gamers, do and end up discovering a bug, glitch or whatever needs fixing. They don't think irrationally and illogically and do real stupid things as we can. Not as much at least, I guess.

[Krytheos]

I believe it was clarified earlier in this thread? Perhaps, that the 'no auto-attack' was an in-game bug, in fact. I think it was 'Seb' who said it, in fact; by the final release of the game it will be fixed, of that I have no doubt.

[Renessa]

Hi,
I was able to play the demo (PC version) at the Gamescom yesterday, and (I hardly dare to admit it in this thread ), I loved the combat.

It is not really hack 'n slash, as you can pause all the time, just like DAO, pick your target, pick your attack, do the same for your companion (Bethany and later also the brother (Garret?)) and then watch them spring into action. And I loved watching them. Bethany's fire attacks were really impressive and I loved Hawke's whirlwind attack or even better, his charge. The action is faster, you are closer to it, for me, it feels more immersing.

I was a bit surprised at the number of darkspawn Hawke could slay with one sweep of his sword, but once you get the cutscene with the Varric it becomes pretty clear, that he is telling the Chantry lady a tall story. After the actual intro I immediately noticed that Hawke had a number of skills less than in the beginning and the next fight felt more down to earth.

The conversation wheel feels a lot like ME. I don't really know, why one of the other testers thought it was dumbed down. I did not encounter a situation, where I had to make a really important decision, just the usual talk, where you set the tone of your interaction with companions or NPCs. I find the idea of giving a hint of the respective emotion behind Hawke's comments actually very clever, especially if there are more than just the three you encounter in the first few conversations in the game. It gives you more scope to vary your approach, as sometimes you might want to be serious, but later lighten the mood with some witty answer etc.

I did not recognize Hawke's voice, but it sounded very fitting.

So, was there something I did not like? Yes, the graphics. I get the new "style", I could just accept the background graphics, but I really did not like the character graphics. Everything looks more "drawn", almost a little bit like the Dragon Age comics, but I just felt it was a step back from the character graphics of DAO.

All in all, I was relieved, that DA 2 did not feel like ME to me (I love ME, but I don't want every game to be the same). In my opinion, it still had that DragonAge feel to it, although I realize, this is a bold statement, considering the short amount of time I was able to play the game.

Also a short word about the German game magazines reviews. I have the GameStar review right next to me and it is much more positive than it sounds here. After a very long and promising article, they present two opposing points of view, with one of the journalist sounding very much like the doomsayers here, but the other taking a much more positive outlook. So opinion is divided, much like here.

Personally, I stand with the optimists. When the EA guy came to tell us, our time had run out and we had to make place for the next group, I could have easily strangled him. I wanted so much to keep on playing and learn the true story about Hawke.

Oh, and thanks, Bioware, for that inflatable sword/spear. It actually drew the envy of quite a number of people!

[Brockololly]

Thanks for the impressions, Renessa.



I'm not very excited to hear about the graphics looking more "drawn" as you say...if its anything close to cel-shading, I HATE cel-shading. Combined with the other changes in combat and everything, I have very mixed feelings on DA2...

[andar91]

Renessa wrote...

Hi,
I was able to play the demo (PC version) at the Gamescom yesterday, and (I hardly dare to admit it in this thread ), I loved the combat.

It is not really hack 'n slash, as you can pause all the time, just like DAO, pick your target, pick your attack, do the same for your companion (Bethany and later also the brother (Garret?)) and then watch them spring into action. And I loved watching them. Bethany's fire attacks were really impressive and I loved Hawke's whirlwind attack or even better, his charge. The action is faster, you are closer to it, for me, it feels more immersing.

I was a bit surprised at the number of darkspawn Hawke could slay with one sweep of his sword, but once you get the cutscene with the Varric it becomes pretty clear, that he is telling the Chantry lady a tall story. After the actual intro I immediately noticed that Hawke had a number of skills less than in the beginning and the next fight felt more down to earth.

The conversation wheel feels a lot like ME. I don't really know, why one of the other testers thought it was dumbed down. I did not encounter a situation, where I had to make a really important decision, just the usual talk, where you set the tone of your interaction with companions or NPCs. I find the idea of giving a hint of the respective emotion behind Hawke's comments actually very clever, especially if there are more than just the three you encounter in the first few conversations in the game. It gives you more scope to vary your approach, as sometimes you might want to be serious, but later lighten the mood with some witty answer etc.

I did not recognize Hawke's voice, but it sounded very fitting.

So, was there something I did not like? Yes, the graphics. I get the new "style", I could just accept the background graphics, but I really did not like the character graphics. Everything looks more "drawn", almost a little bit like the Dragon Age comics, but I just felt it was a step back from the character graphics of DAO.

All in all, I was relieved, that DA 2 did not feel like ME to me (I love ME, but I don't want every game to be the same). In my opinion, it still had that DragonAge feel to it, although I realize, this is a bold statement, considering the short amount of time I was able to play the game.

Also a short word about the German game magazines reviews. I have the GameStar review right next to me and it is much more positive than it sounds here. After a very long and promising article, they present two opposing points of view, with one of the journalist sounding very much like the doomsayers here, but the other taking a much more positive outlook. So opinion is divided, much like here.

Personally, I stand with the optimists. When the EA guy came to tell us, our time had run out and we had to make place for the next group, I could have easily strangled him. I wanted so much to keep on playing and learn the true story about Hawke.

Oh, and thanks, Bioware, for that inflatable sword/spear. It actually drew the envy of quite a number of people!

Thank you for letting us hear your opinions.  It's nice to read a positive impression.