4 réponses à ce sujet

[Hurrrr]

Quick list of things I want that its too late for you to implement  

- Zero cut-scenes or interactive ala ME2
- Fable style ability to interact with the plebs
- Spells that have none combat uses, such as persuade in Kotor or the oracle spell from BG2.
- Id love a slightly more conventional RPG attire for the characters
- Get rid of the bullet board style sidequests. Invest in a back story and maybe inject some comedy or personality into them, assign them a decent cast of actors and let us pick the quests up in bars/brothels/streets/circle tower etc, I don't care just ANYTHING but that horrible system.
-  Make loot more interesting. It was so uninspired in DAO, world of warcraft had more interesting loot and it had to balance everything on a needles point, why be so strict guys? How about items like carsomyr eh!?
- Can we please have more personalities in the characters we meet? The party members in DAO were great, but the supporting cast were fairly bleh, for some reason it contributed towards making the world feel dreadfully static. 
- More variation in environments! DAO pulled off the dwarven area so well then made the elven gypsies look just like gypsies and the humans all lived in poverty except for a few bland castle environs. How about section on a boat? Or atop a volcano? anything!
- As opposed to a camp some sort of base camp that has upgrades to be made or whatever, I want to feel progression!
- Less reliance on "potting" for health. While I understand its a tried and true mechanic they work better when used in a tight spot and sparingly as opposed to as an extension of your health pool.
- Dont take it badly...but more interesting music please! 
- Fix the crafting system, something more alike that in KOTOR 2 would be ideal!

 

Modifié par Hurrrr, 30 septembre 2010 - 12:53 .

[David Gaider]

slimgrin wrote...
While I wouldn't disable vo's and floating damage numbers, I think making all the things Sylvius lists as optional makes perfect sense. Is it that hard to do? I've often wondered why more rpg's don't make these things optional. 

Because, as I've often said, the answer to every design issue is not a toggle.

Sure, it is on the forums where the answer to every disagreement on two features is to give everybody both. That way we all get along! But in reality that would still mean we'd not only have to do the work to implement both features but support both features as well-- if it's something that can officially be set, that means we have to test it and account for having that feature on/off works in every condition.

Is a toggle thus never the answer? Not at all-- sometimes features are worthwhile even if you must implement two versions of them. "Worthwhile" in this context must answer three basic questions:

1) Is there enough people who would use it to justify the work?

2) Does it actually make their game better?

3) Is the game still played the way we intend for it to be played?

If all three are "yes" then you get a toggle. Fair enough?

[David Gaider]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
Only the player can determine this.  You're not allowed to read our minds, remember?

But we can imagine if there's an audience for whom that feature would actually be beneficial. The point is that it actually does something beneficial, not makes the game actively worse.

Sure, there's always going to be some people who will say they'd like a feature. In a given group of people you'll find a few who will claim they want almost any feature. But in this case we have to make an educated assessment based on what we know about the game, not what they think they know about it.

Why do you even have gameplay objectives?  Does it matter how we play it?

Absolutely. If it's meant to be an action-focused game, we can't make provide an option to not make it action-focused. If they don't want RPG elements, we can't just turn those off. We have a vision for the game and we're not going to provide options to turn it into an entirely different game just because there's people who like options for the sake of options.

We have to support and test those features, like I said-- not just implement them. And thus we're only going to focus on the features that make the sort of game we intend for people to play. That doesn't mean that people aren't going to be able to play the game in various ways-- some people like games harder, some people like to tweak their options, some people like to take the persuasive route while others the action-first route and so on. But you still have to play it within the parameters we provide. We're not making a "dream-your-own-RPG". You play in our sandbox or you don't play. Period. As with any game.

Modifié par David Gaider, 02 octobre 2010 - 05:51 .

[David Gaider]

the_one_54321 wrote...
Yeah, that's what I got from it. My post was of the vein "fine, but be careful of the lines you draw in the sand. There are people that are more than willing to cross them." 

There are a lot of game developers out there. Each of the big ones have their list of strengths. "Action" is not one of BioWares. They'd do well to keep that in mind.

My post was in reference to making optional features and how we cannot (or will not, if you prefer) make options that fundamentally change the game's vision as we intend to present it.

As for drawing a line in the sand-- yes, I understand that. If you want to talk about the vision for the game in general, sure, not everyone's going to be interested in that vision. That's a given. My point was that we can't include something that changes it as a toggle. If we did make an action-only game (and we're not, but if we were) then that's the type of game we want to put out there. At a fundamental level, you either want to play what we're creating or you don't. We can't change the entire experience of the game as an extra option.

[David Gaider]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
And here is where the crux of our disagreement lies.

I figure you can just design such that some features are disablable (like the encoding of dialogue in separate files by speaker to allow the replacement or removal of one character's audio files at a time) through a script change or file swap, and if we screw up the game that's our problem.

No.

If we include a feature as something you can select, we have to support it. Do you honestly think we can say "oh we included it just for those who want it, sort of like a mod-- use it at your own risk?" and people would be understanding about it and give us "credit for trying"? Or do you think they might be upset at the bugs? Don't be naive. We already are dealing with a game that has so many variants and options it's difficult to keep it running smoothly as it is. We need to pick our battles.

Particularly with a new feature like the PC voice that you know will annoy a bunch of people, the option for experienced players to remove it would be wonderful.

A feature that is both part of our intent and the entire game is built to accommodate it? Just turn off the voice so your character mouths words he doesn't speak, and present that as a feature we intentionally included? Yeah, not going to happen.

I'd say this is a lot like disabling plot helpers in DAO.  That was a feature you ostensibly wanted in the game, but we could turn it off, and us doing so did break at least one quest (and significantly changed the gameplay of others).  But I'd rather play without it and have a broken quest than play with it just to make a quest work, and apparently there were enough of us to warrant the feature getting a toggle.

And as I said we do include toggles for things that we believe we can support and which don't harm the game. The plot helpers were a convenience feature-- we don't rely on them for you to finish a quest, and thus they're a good candidate for a toggle.

I'm not even asking for a proper toggle on most of these.  I just want to be able to turn things off without having to recompile your source code to do it.

No, you ask for options for the sake of options. Every time we bring up any feature, you immediately ask if it can be turned off-- because in some theoretical world you think you might want something different, and imagine that something different is something we should automatically want to provide you. Not the case. "I want" is not the only consideration.

I think I've explained our thought process behind it sufficiently, and if you want to continue to tilt at windmills-- be my guest.

Modifié par David Gaider, 02 octobre 2010 - 07:54 .