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[Lord_Darkmoon]

There is short article on PC Games about he latest demo of Dragon Age at the EA Showcase in London. The editor who was able to play the demo told about a lifeless, empty and sterile setting of a city.
Whereas the combat seemed to impress, the empty city stood in stark contrast to every other Bioware game.
The editor also wrote about bugs as well as graphical problems.
I'm getting a bit nervous...

If you are able to read german, here is the article at PC Games.de.

[David Gaider]

Seeing as most of the props and ambient cityfolk have only recently begun going into the build, yeah, I don't doubt it seemed pretty empty to him. No doubt he was told this when he was shown the demo, but some people are going to comment regardless. Nothing we can do about that.

[John Epler]

Well, I'm a biased source (obviously!) but unless I miss my guess, the build that they played didn't have the ambient behaviours set for our 'flavour' NPCs - non-quest NPCs who give the city more of a feeling of life and, well, being an actual city.

Given that, it's certainly an understandable conclusion to draw, though not representative. We have a guy working almost full-time on making cities exciting and interesting!

EDIT: Curse you, Gaider!

Modifié par JohnEpler, 05 novembre 2010 - 03:26 .

[David Gaider]

Saibh wrote...
Without being able to read the article, there's also the integrity of not being misleading. He could have very well prefaced this with "it's a demo, and certain portions like the city aren't finished", but I can't know that.

Indeed. He may have mentioned this in his article... or it's possible he didn't hear/understand the warning. Or perhaps it wasn't given at all -- I wasn't there, so I can't really say. Regardless, like I said the props and ambient population are just starting to go into the city now. The area looks really good, don't get me wrong. I think we were proud to show it off. But it definitely looks empty without a bit of the clutter one would expect.

[John Epler]

The problem with press demo builds and the like, unfortunately, is that the time to work on them has to come from somewhere - and generally speaking, that somewhere is someone who has a mountain of work to do on the main game that is about 5000 meters high and covered in radioactive lava scorpions. Who can fly.



Once you get a demo that works and is somewhat representative of how the game will eventually look, you put it aside because there's always the possibility that you have one of those days where someone leaves a comma in the wrong place and breaks the entire game as a result. And unless you have a demo build that is miraculously more stable and fancy than the one you originally set aside, you keep the build that you know A) works and looks alright. That does mean, of course, that demo builds tend to be weeks or even months behind what the main game looks like.



The advantage, of course, being that the demo works and you know for sure that it works. Which isn't always the case with the main build. But when you only have finite resources - well, you have to make decisions as to where to spend your time.



Not to mention, again, things like ambient creatures and such are usually among the last things added to a game. You want everything else to work great before you start worrying about having Jim the Salesman hawking his wares from a street corner. Because if you have a game where Jim works but Tim the Critical Path Questgiver is broken, then that is a bad thing.

[Mike Laidlaw]

Ir's probably worth noting that the level of Kirkwall he saw was at night. The streets aren't usually teeming after the sun goes down.

[Stanley Woo]

Let's try and keep this thread on-topic. Take your personal, off-topic conversations elsewhere, please. Thank you.

[Mike Laidlaw]

Phnx wrote...

I'm German and I just read the article.

Did he happen to mention whether he realized it was night? It's possible that didn't come up, and he was expecting teeming crowds because it was day. Our nights are reasonably bright (so you can play easily in them).

[Mike Laidlaw]

Phnx wrote...

Nope. He did not write anything about it being night time. But he did like the new combat system and he thought that maybe the "sterile" city should be considered as a contrast to emphasize the combat. He also wrote that the English VO was great, the character animations were believable and the dialog and cutscenes were great as well. So the article wasn't all negative.

Thanks. I asked a german friend for a translation, and those were his notes. Seemed that the demo hit a particular sore point for him, somehow. Ah well, it's a passion-driven industry, and we all have things we're passionate about.