28 réponses à ce sujet

[Srikandi715]

I'd been assuming that in this day and age, given the amount of memory that's available both on consoles and PCs, and advances in streaming technology, there's no reason to make a game which is organized into lil zones where you have to transition to a world map to travel between them.

But recently I read something which suggested that DA:O will do just that, which is a lil disappointing.

The article I read was a bit vague about it... of course you can HAVE a world map, and use it for fast travel, even in a game which is completely contiguous geographically... like Oblivion, or WoW. I couldn't tell from what I read whether that was the case, or whether you really will have mostly completely discontinuous overland regions.

Any info on this?

[Herr Uhl]

It is zoned, just like BG.

[Srikandi715]

Sigh... ok thanks

Next question: WHY? I can't imagine that there's anybody who thinks that's preferable from the player's perspective, and from the technical perspective we know it doesn't have to be like that anymore.

I guess the fact that the last few games Bioware made were space operas threw me off... makes sense to have map travel when you're dealing with different planets :/

Modifié par Srikandi715, 24 octobre 2009 - 06:34 .

[JMOR]

Look on the bright side, no elevators =)

[ghoulyg]

I guess it's worldmapped because the different zones you visit all have like different ecosystems. They would have to make like cuts when crossing from one area to another. I guess they wanted to prevent that.

Modifié par ghoulyg, 24 octobre 2009 - 06:44 .

[Jab0r]

Next question: WHY? I can't imagine that there's anybody who thinks that's preferable from the player's perspective,

Suppose we have two distinct areas, quite a distance apart, that look different. We can either



A. Have a "world map" transition that implies some time is spent travelling between them, or

B. Have an artificial-looking and immersion-breaking sudden change between the two areas, or

C. Make a long section between them that gradually changes, and make the player spend the time walking between them (which is boring).



The "World Map" seems like the best solution to me.

[Karl45]

Srikandi715 wrote...

Sigh... ok thanks

Next question: WHY? I can't imagine that there's anybody who thinks that's preferable from the player's perspective,

I prefer zones. I find running for 10 minutes through a pratically empty world(fallout 3/oblivion)inorder reach my quest destination is tedious.

[Srikandi715]

A. Have a "world map" transition that implies some time is spent travelling between them, or
B. Have an artificial-looking and immersion-breaking sudden change between the two areas, or
C. Make a long section between them that gradually changes, and make the player spend the time walking between them (which is boring).

D. Distribute your game story all over the world, and fill all of it with interesting people to talk to, places to see, things do find and quests to do. Like all the continuous-world games do.

You can't really make the argument that this is somehow impossible, seeing as many very successful games pull it off.

Even games like the Fable series, which have loading screens between zones (as a solution, I assume, to memory management issues on consoles), still have MOSTLY contiguous zones.

In the real world, btw, there are abrupt transitions, and there are gradual ones. The edge of a marsh or of a medieval walled city or of a forest or the boundary between a cultivated area and the wilderness are examples of the former. But game designers can model both kinds, as they've shown again and again.

Karl45 wrote...

I prefer zones. I find running for 10
minutes through a pratically empty world(fallout 3/oblivion)inorder
reach my quest destination is tedious.

If you thought those zones were empty, you weren't looking

Modifié par Srikandi715, 24 octobre 2009 - 07:04 .

[Ekardt]

Both consoles only have 512MB of RAM. You try working with that.



And BioWare doesnt make huge worlds cluttered with tons of "Go Kill X porcupines" quests, they make Story driven games, first and foremost, and the bigger the world, the more quests in the world, etc, the less focus there is on the main story.

And resources arent limitless; neither is disc space.

[Zagogulina1]

Srikandi715 wrote...

You can't really make the argument that this is somehow impossible, seeing as many very successful games pull it off.

It is impossible. Fallout3 map is about size of my town. Ferelden is as big as France. Not to mention that Fallout 3, Oblivion and many other open-world "RPGs" sucked.

Modifié par Zagogulina1, 24 octobre 2009 - 07:15 .

[Ekardt]

Zagogulina1 wrote...

Srikandi715 wrote...

You can't really make the argument that this is somehow impossible, seeing as many very successful games pull it off.

It is impossible. Fallout3 map is about size of my town. Ferelden is as big as France. Not to mention that Fallout 3, Oblivion and many other open-world "RPGs" sucked.

not to mention these games lack the character/story/ lore depth that Dragon Age has.

[Twitchmonkey]

[quote]Zagogulina1 wrote...
You can't really make the argument that this is somehow impossible, seeing as many very successful games pull it off.[/quote]It is impossible. Fallout3 map is about size of my town. Ferelden is as big as France. Not to mention that Fallout 3, Oblivion and many other open-world "RPGs" sucked.
[/quote]

This, pretty much. Except for the fact that FO3 and Oblivion were great.

[quote]not to mention these games lack the character/story/ lore depth that Dragon Age has.[/quote]

That's very untrue. The Elder Scrolls lore and major entities are very deep and developed, there are hundreds of in-game books which contain the lore and information about the gods and kings which are fodder for pages and pages of lore debates on the forums. DA may have an advantage in interesting NPCs, but we'll see. FO3 is a bit of a different case as the FO world is less continuous and draws less from the precedents its predescessors have developed.

Modifié par Twitchmonkey, 24 octobre 2009 - 07:21 .

[Gill Kaiser]

When dealing with open-world games, you either have to make the storyline less involved to account for the different order that the player may visit places, or you have to restrict the player's movements at specific points. Bethesda are the kings of open-world RPGs, and their games put much less emphasis on the story than Bioware's games. Bioware have gotten good at their method of storytelling and the specific amount of freedom offered to the player, so I'm quite happy with DA:O having the same system. In the end, having a fully explorable open-world requires tradeoffs in other areas, so it's purely a design decision.

[Ekardt]

Twitchmonkey wrote...

not to mention these games lack the character/story/ lore depth that Dragon Age has.

That's very untrue. The Elder Scrolls lore and major entities are very deep and developed, there are hundreds of in-game books which contain the lore and information about the gods and kings which are fodder for pages and pages of lore debates on the forums. DA may have an advantage in interesting NPCs, but we'll see. FO3 is a bit of a different case as the FO world is less continuous and draws less from the precedents its predescessors have developed.

Except mounds of the Oblivion lore contradicted itself  (such as two books listing certain events at completely different dates) You can tell they were lazy with it and just included it for the sake of having readable books in the game.

Modifié par Ekardt, 24 octobre 2009 - 09:26 .

[Twitchmonkey]

Ekardt wrote...

Except mounds of the Oblivion lore contradicted itself  (such as two books listing certain events at completely different dates) You can tell they were lazy with it and just included it for the sake of having readable books in the game.

I never said the lore was well-constructed or not contradictory, I'm not hugely into the lore myself, but there is a lot of it.

[minamber]

Personally I'm glad that DA's world is zone-based, because historically I know I've enjoyed such games (BG, Planescape Torment, Fallout, to name just a few) a lot more than open-ended games, especially the ones like Oblivion and Fallout 3 , where the gameworld was relatively small, with a lot of mostly empty space.

I say "empty" because to me having a combat encounter with the exact same enemies i've fought dozens of times before, or finding a cave almost exactly similar to ones i've already explored still means that that part of the world is empty of any meaningful, interesting content.

One day, someone will be able to create a game with a big, open-ended world filled with interesting stuff to do. However, that day hasn't arrived yet, even though Morrowind was fairly close. But then Bethesda went, imho, in a completely wrong direction with Oblivion. Fallout 3 is slightly better in that respect, especially since there's at least a reason for the world being mostly empty.

[pharos_gryphon]

I would imagine its zones are set up similar to Mass Effect, in that we've moved away from the individual building zones like in Neverwinter Nights, but each town will be a separate load up from a world map or somesuch. Personally I find it to be a happy medium for the two. Open worlds tend to be alot of empty space and a bit harder to design world content for, and every single little toolshed needing its own separate load time is ridiculous. At leas this way we get only the occasional one, it makes the game easier to handle for older machines, and by zoning in and out they can spawn different versions of the same zone. Town can be burned down rubble after X conversation takes place, etc.

[pylb_etajv]

From the technical perspective- it's definately not as easy as you make it seem, which is one reason why most games do not use a streaming open environment.

[Torrius]

I think it's just a different kind of content, and I don't think that open worlds have more content but rather different content. A game like Morrowind or Oblivion was wondrous in some ways... travelling between towns could be breathtaking, the encounters you could have could even sway you to not fast travel. At the end of the day with a game like Oblivion, you felt very satisfied even if you only got done a couple of long quests.



Games like DA and BG on the other hand force you to zone. You miss out on those wonderful little world discoveries, but if the amount of content is the same, how it makes up for it is that the places you arrive at are jam-packed with stuff to do. You get tons of plot surprises, lots of twists and turns, and at the end of the day while you didn't get to explore the world as much you will have had quite a bit more action and feel like you have accomplished alot more.



As player-made DLC happens, a world like Oblivion becomes wonderfully fleshed out and "real", even if the world seems slightly small. DLC with Dragon Age will allow for some truly great adventures that will zone you to more parts of a larger world and provide you with more "gaming" content. It's kind of like... many people like to eat corn on the cob, but there are some that would rather have it on thier plate. Oblivion is corn on the cob, the act of eating it is part of the fun, whereas DA is corn on the plate... you get right to the corn and aren't trying to gnaw off portions of it. If the content is the same, then think of DA's content as more "concentrated" if that makes sense?



Both games are/will be fun, and I hope both zoned and open-ended worlds will continue to do well and prosper.

[Kevin Lynch]

I'm a huge fan of continuous, "seamless" worlds and I always have a sliver of disappointment when an RPG I'm interested in playing cannot manage it. However, it's never changed my enjoyment of a game overall; I adapt to the loading times and carry on, with few exceptions. The Witcher, in its original release, had some atrociously annoying loading times; when you are entering and exiting buildings in a town repeatedly, those loading times really add up (this was fixed/changed in later patches).



It's all about how they manage the loading. If they keep it as unintrusive as they can, having limited loading screens and short loading times, then it's not going to have much effect on gameplay. That's only something I can evaluate once I'm into the game, though.

[Zilod]

personally i prefer seamless world, said that is actually quite the opposite, nowaday, with current graphic standards, is quite problematic to build seamless worlds than how it was in the past, even fallout 3 is not totally seamless but use various instances linked in a very smart way



about to have instances linked to "create" a bigger world...

personally it depends how it is done, is it like fallout 3 i'm all for it, but if is the usual climb the pass and you find a door to zone in a forest, cross the forest till a cave and you are in a desert... well imo is quite terrible, better to have a map and to select various areas of interest



i wonder if it will still be possible to do something as in ultima 5... ultima 5 was pretty smart, as the world was huge it was split in many smaller areas (ok nothing new about that), the interesting thing is that when you approached the border of an area it started to load the next area so it was possible to have an huge world whitout loading screens



something like that will be quite nice but, as said, not sure is still possible to do that efficently with the amount of data (and mem leaks ) that we have today

[Maria Caliban]

Srikandi715 wrote...

I'd been assuming that in this day and age, given the amount of memory that's available both on consoles and PCs, and advances in streaming technology, there's no reason to make a game which is organized into lil zones where you have to transition to a world map to travel between them.

Because doing so would be easy and not at all require a significant investment of time and resources.

[Xyan]

Personally, I prefer zone. It keeps the game in focus. When you are on a quest, you are on a quest. Sight-seeing, while enjoyable, breaks the immersion.

[BomimoDK]

please stop about the "BIOWARE RPG SHOULD BE=TES!!!" it's annoying and it let's me see that you've no experience with non-openworld rpgs... just leave it, people actually like the Worldmap stuff, openworld belongs in MMOs or games that pretend to be long when infact it's 90% traveling. sure there's hidden areas, but how much a mapper has the patience to cram in an open world is limited. with the world-map aproach there's no compromises, each region can be unique disregarding how that zone you were in just before looked.

[Mordaedil]

Okay, I think a lot of you people are confused. This isn't a matter of preference, it's a matter of resources:

Games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 have a large staff working with over 40-120 designers on their outdoor areas, while maybe a team of 4-12 writers. This is a huge difference and why the game can manage to build vast, great look outdoor areas, but when it comes to plot, it sort of falls apart. The game requires a lot of investment and in order to turn a profit at being sold for $50 a pop, the game cannot have too many designers working on it for the process of 3-4 years. If they do, they will no longer turn a profit, they will lose their investments and won't be able to eat.

Game Design is a delicate balance, and the Bioware team has had maybe, I dunno, 60-80 people working on it for a duration of 5 years? That's a long time and a lot of mouths to feed and they have way more writers than Bethesda has. They also have more voice-actor talents and more lines than Oblivion and Fallout 3 put together.

In the end, you have to consider they can only afford to feed so many area designers and thus we come to the custom imaginary unit called 'zots'. There simply isn't a good way to have both your open world desires, horses, a great story, 7 origins, unique armor appearances, 12 companions and various other things you want or that is in the game at the same time.

It's like wishing Jesus would give you a hug and then he turns the corner and says "Wish granted!"