135 réponses à ce sujet

[SimonTheFrog]

If i imagine the office where all the graphical designer and animators are sitting and the producer comes in and yells: "i want 20 alien races and they need to be both believable and cool! And on top of that, very alien!" i'm pretty sure the people would pounce on the task. What's cooler then being totally free in coming up with weird creatures?



But as it has been mentioned before, there are limitations in the medium. Specifically, modelling and animating alien creatures is pretty demanding. Modelling humanoids not so much because the designers did that a thousand times already (plus, in many cases the middleware provides basic solutions to work with ^^) Anyhow, if you create something like the Rachni, this takes much much longer as you need to animate stuff that you don't know how it's supposed to move in the first place.



It would be fun for the people at BioWare to make interesting aliens i'm sure, but if they did that, other parts of the game would have to be reduced. Probably the cinematic dialogs. And given the choice either this or that i think they made the smart choice.



But I agree, as a person who dives into the game and first arrives at the citadell, or omega... i was expecting much much more "alien" stuff, as in "wow, what is this thing... ewwww it moves!!". If they'd manage to make such aliens relating now that would have been really awesome.



And i do think that people can relate quickly to alien things. They don't need to be spoon-fed with humans shapes. Both in films and in games the human shapes are a economical necessity, not an artistic or psychological choice at foremost. But in films it used to be much more complicated to show really strange aliens. With games we have a medium where animated miracles can be blended in easily because you don't need actors or CGI sequences edited into an otherwise live action film.



So, please.... please please give us more exciting strange, weird, awesome aliens with no human form or behavior. Also, not just a few steps down the evolutional tree either ^^. The hanar are a very good start. Now GO! DO IT!

[voteDC]

While they may look superficially like us the biologies are greatly different.

Look at the Volus. While they may have two arms and legs like us, they can't live in our environment without pressure suits.

The asari can live for a thousand years, even with the medical technology available in the Mass Effect universe we are lucky to be able to reach a 150.

Turians and quarians can't eat the same food as us without causing extreme reactions.

While the first visual impression of many of the species make people think they are like us, you look into their biology and they are quite different.

[AdmiralCheez]

Bipedal humanoids are way easier to animate (same gestures and lip syncs) and sympathize with (we tend to relate to things better the more they look and act like us). Making aliens really alien, while being more realistic and intellectually satisfying, would take a lot more resources and jeopardize the audience's reaction. It's a principle often used in any form of communicative design: clarity > realism. As for the asari... nerdy virgin wish fulfillment. Although I wonder why everyone has to wear clothes...

Of course, I would REALLY love to see someone break free of this burnt-out trope.  I've had enough of space elves.

Modifié par AdmiralCheez, 23 novembre 2010 - 03:29 .

[deleted]

@kaff33nd

The game is already pretty detailed both storyline and graphics-wise... they can't possible make every object and alien different, it would take up way too many resources. Technology and lack of time is the main barrier to innovation! 

Modifié par deleted, 23 novembre 2010 - 03:36 .

[kaff33nd]

@deleted

I wonder why The Witcher managed to look better in every way than any BioWare game, in spite of the fact that they used BioWare's own engine (although heavily modified). Also, the genetic diversity in that game is much greater, visually, in The Witcher than in ME or ME2. My belief is that the reason there are cut-corners in ME and ME2 is because hiring voice talent from actors with 'big' names must have taken a massive chunk of the entire developmental budget. I'm thinking that BioWare decided Martin Sheen would sell more copies of the game than, say, awesome 3D modelling, animation and texturing.



On the subject of how difficult animation is: Has anyone seen the dev diaries of the making of Oblivion? The animators used bipedal skeletons (human) for the rigging and animating of the horses! After all, humans and horses, although completely different (or alien) from each other, still have a head with 2 eyes, ears, nostrils.... and four limbs. Animators who know their work have no trouble animating between known and unknown animals, robots etc. In fact, if anything it's harder to animate humans than fictitious alien creatures, just because we ARE human and notice all the subtle flaws. If you can animate a human you can animate an original alien. Look at the animations of Sovereign. Awesome. But I've never seen a real life Reaper with which to compare.



In short, if BioWare had spent less on VO actors and more on other areas the game would be MORE amazing than it is currently.... which is still pretty amazing.

[Ahglock]

I don't have the same issues as the OP, but my appreciation of the ME has decreased and I suspect will continue to decrease. Continuity issues bother me more in sci-fi than other genres for some reason.

[sympathy4saren]

Go play halo then. No wait...nobody deserves that...

[Inquisitor Recon]

Now I'm a picky person. I get pissed when a FPS uses the wrong reloading information for a M16, or how the static and unusable aircraft in the Fallout series don't look the way they should. But this is absurd. Just do something else.

[Ahglock]

Hey, Halo is fun. It is not an RPG though so I didn't' really pay much attention to its story. Alien bad guys, you shoot them. Like virtually all alien bad guys you find out they aren't all bad, continue to kill the bad ones.

[Phategod1]

I'm no Xenobiologist but I think that any carbon based life form that evolved along the same patterns as humans will have arms and legs, as does most mammalian, bird, and reptilian life.

Modifié par Phategod1, 24 novembre 2010 - 08:27 .

[deleted]

kaff33nd wrote...

@deleted
I wonder why The Witcher managed to look better in every way than any BioWare game, in spite of the fact that they used BioWare's own engine (although heavily modified). Also, the genetic diversity in that game is much greater, visually, in The Witcher than in ME or ME2. My belief is that the reason there are cut-corners in ME and ME2 is because hiring voice talent from actors with 'big' names must have taken a massive chunk of the entire developmental budget. I'm thinking that BioWare decided Martin Sheen would sell more copies of the game than, say, awesome 3D modelling, animation and texturing.

On the subject of how difficult animation is: Has anyone seen the dev diaries of the making of Oblivion? The animators used bipedal skeletons (human) for the rigging and animating of the horses! After all, humans and horses, although completely different (or alien) from each other, still have a head with 2 eyes, ears, nostrils.... and four limbs. Animators who know their work have no trouble animating between known and unknown animals, robots etc. In fact, if anything it's harder to animate humans than fictitious alien creatures, just because we ARE human and notice all the subtle flaws. If you can animate a human you can animate an original alien. Look at the animations of Sovereign. Awesome. But I've never seen a real life Reaper with which to compare.

In short, if BioWare had spent less on VO actors and more on other areas the game would be MORE amazing than it is currently.... which is still pretty amazing.

Good point! the sad thing is that I had never heard of those VAs before ME, so their strategy did not work as expected on me