10 réponses à ce sujet

[AkiKishi]

Personally I hate it. In DA I would read through my choices and pick the one that suited my character best. Now much like ME we get the good/evil and middle path. Not only that, but we get little icons to make it even easier...

Now you don't even have to read just look at the icons.

Anyway what does everyone else think ? Better or just lazy?

[David Gaider]

Clonedzero wrote...

in all honesty, its not that different from what origins was like. its just not all listed out.

(nice continue option)
(snarky continue dialogue option)
(mean continue dialogue option)
(ask clarifying question dialogue option #1 i.e investigate)
(ask clarifying question dialogue option #2 i.e investigate)
(ask clarifying question dialogue option #3 i.e investigate)
(stab the dude dialogue option)

its just presented in a wheel this time.

This is exactly the case.

In Origins we had instances of these kinds of "personality" hubs, as outlined above, where it's more about how you're saying something that making actual decisions on what to do. They, too, had the same three basic options-- something we've done in variations since Baldur's Gate.

Then there are "choice" hubs where you are deciding what to do, and there are no icons except for those actions that need clarification on the intent, such as "this will lead to combat" and "this is asking for money".

Again, no different than in Origins.

If the intent from someone is to imply that moving the investigate options into a seperate wheel (rather than having them as part of the main list, as in Origins) or adding an icon to clarify tone (which, no, was not self-evident to everyone who played Origins) somehow makes it simpler rather than different from Origins is very much missing the point.

You may not like that the layout is different from Origins, but it's truly not as different as some people seem to want everyone to believe. Not liking something doesn't make it "for dumb people", which is the implication that some people keep making. Which is too bad, as I'd hate for someone's love of Origins-- a sentiment I share-- predispose them to disliking something based only on the fact that it's not Origins.

Modifié par David Gaider, 24 février 2011 - 04:30 .

[David Gaider]

Galad22 wrote...
It is not as I said, if you can't know what you are saying you aren't really roleplaying anything, but playing as someone else. This is the problem.

The original comment was about the "three paths" and the tone icons.

If you don't like paraphrasing the responses, that's fine-- I'm well aware that not everyone's a fan of that system-- but it's also something quite different. If you're going to blend them together as if they're the exact same thing then every conversation is going to break down into "I didn't like x", "but x isn't what you're saying it is", "yeah, but I hated y" ...which isn't all that helpful.

[David Gaider]

Zigzaggy wrote...
Would say that a vast majority of DAO fans don't like the paraphrase wheel...don't see any topics in the archives of fans requesting it be implemented into the franchise.

That's quite an assumption to make.

The people that liked DAO best are going to number among the people who spend time on its forums. That shouldn't be particularly surprising. They're also going to be resistant to changes-- at best many of the fans would have liked iterations. "Keep everything the same but also give us new stuff". A tall order, especially if it's not the direction we want to do.

To take that and say "a vast majority of DAO fans don't like the paraphrase wheel" is to go too far, however. Just because you'll hear the most negative people on these forums doesn't mean they speak for the majority of DAO fans. Even the most casual poll on these forums, with only voluntary respondants, show that the majority of people -- on these forums, even -- don't agree with the negative sentiment. That doesn't mean that the majority of all fans like the changes, either, but it sure doesn't mean the opposite.

I can see how it's made development much simpler,less complex and from a players perspective 'dumbed down'  .We cannot avoid that unfortunately people experience 4-5-6 choices of response as more complex than 3

Err... no.

Origins had 6 choices max on the list. If we needed to have more, we had to break it out into a seperate hub, which we occasionally did. The vast majority of the time, however, you had three basic sorts of tones to reply with-- the exact three we have in DA2. Any others on the same list were investigate questions.

Then you had times when you actually made choices about what to do. Sometimes there we had to break investigates out onto a separate wheel if the total was more than 6, but generally speaking there was never more than 3 actual "action choices" in the list. All actions were written in one specific tone, a tone that we writers chose.

In DA2 you have up to 10 options possible on 2 seperate wheels, 5 of them investigate. The number is not less, it's simply a different layout.

If you really want to talk about how it's "less complex" and "dumbed down", you might not want to start from a point of ignorance. I really do get that not everyone likes the changes-- and some people are simply going to conflate all the changes together (ie. "I liked Origins so therefore everything that Origins did was good and anything that changes from that is clearly lesser") but taking that sentiment to imply "everyone who likes the changes is dumb and likes less complex things" is taking it too far.

Perhaps you don't want to actually convince anyone (or us devs) of anything. That's entirely possible. Just expressing your displeasure is perfectly valid -- and not getting the sequel I'd wanted would cause me some displeasure, as well. But if you do, making less generalizations and invalid assumptions would go a long way to helping it.

Modifié par David Gaider, 24 février 2011 - 05:07 .

[David Gaider]

tmp7704 wrote...
I was actually expecting it to be "not as different" based on the earlier dev comments, but must say that in practice --at least as far as the glimpse we get in the demo-- it feels quite different and somewhat more limited.

Maybe it's because i was making pretty liberal use of what would be equivalent of "neutral" option and this one isn't really present in DA2, and instead i'm given option to be a wisecracking jackass who generally fails to make anyone in Thedas as much as smirk at his/her antics

For example, encounter with Duncan in CE origin right from the start has:

Duncan: Good day. I understand congratulations are in order for your impending wedding.
1: You're not wanted here. This is a private ceremony.
2: Let's talk about your impending beating.
3: Thanks, but please go. I'd rather avoid any unpleasantness.
4: Do you have business here, human?

while it's similar, right from the start this deviates from the DA2 model, because rather than polite, snarky, aggressive (+ investigate) you have polite, aggressive and neutral. And that neutral is quite believable line to pick, given the situation. In DA2 however this option would seemingly be gone and if i didn't want the character to be snarky i'd only have option of kissing butt or seeking trouble. Neither being very appealing.

Part of it could be also, being able to read the choices exactly as they were i didn't have to choose based on the vague summary. In the DA2 demo i catch myself constantly second-guessing and stalling before i actually commit, and in the end just clicking the lines based on the tone icon because the paraphrases confuse me more about what the character is going to say, than help. For some unexplained reason this is quite more frustrating in DA2 than in ME, where the paraphrases didn't really give me that problem.

edit: on second thought, i suppose these three options in the example could be interpreted differently -- 1 as aggressive, 2 snarky and 3 polite. That would match the DA2 model (if i overlook that "snarky" is also pretty aggressive, something the icon wouldn't really warn me about) but then i suspect the paraphrase thing would bite me in the back as it happens in DA2 demo, and i'd wind up getting too influenced by the "aggressive" icon for the option 1 and as result hesitate to pick it.

I get what you're saying, but having written many of those dialogues in DAO I can say that the "neutral" option was the exception and not the rule.

On the other hand, when we wrote the "action" choices, the neutral tone practically became required.

For DA2, we have the same option to have more than 3 basic choices if we choose -- there's still room for two more "special" options on the left side of wheel, aside from the Investigates. Like Origins, however, those are the exceptions and not the rule.

[David Gaider]

Galad22 wrote...
Did you know that diplomacy is apparently gone for good. So do you suppose you can talk your way out of any fights?

Considering how often you can do that in ME2 I doubt you can talk your way out of anything in DA2.

Also every other non combat skills are gone.

The lack of non-combat skills does not mean you can't talk your way out of fights.

You get bonus dialogue options based on your personality choices-- so someone who's diplomatic most often will occasionally have such options appear. And that's when you aren't already getting choices that can lead to a peaceful resolution regardless of your personality.

But you're free to jump to conclusions, if you wish.

[John Epler]

Cut it out with the giant quote trees, please.

[David Gaider]

Threeparts wrote...
Mr Gaider (or anyone else in the know), if you're still reading this, can you please answer a quick question? I know the toolset won't be ready for a while, but when/if it is, will it be physically possible for modders to transcribe the dialogue choices and replace the paraphrased text in the game? If so, I'm betting we'll see a new top download on mod sites before the year is out.

The toolset warns you if you go over the length limit, but I don't believe it stops you. What effect that would have, however, I don't know. There is probably a practical limitation of what can actually fit onto the GUI, though it might still fit (and just look really bad). Assuming that any of that is possible, good luck with it.

[David Gaider]

Nomen Mendax wrote...
So let's make everyone happy.  For DA3

• Get rid of the dialogue wheel (because it doesn't easily allow the display of multiple sentences of a reasonable length) and use a standard old-fashioned dialogue tree
• Allow the user the option of toggling intent icon's on and off
• Allow the user the option of showing paraphrase or full response text

OK so that should say "everyone happy except Bioware" (because of all of the extra work putting in the options).

Yeah... sorry, but a toggle is not the answer to every design issue. Sometimes doing both means inheriting the weaknesses of both.

[David Gaider]

Marionetten wrote...
Sounds like a good start. As an addendum, I'd like them to get rid of personality tracking. It's far too similar to alignment.

Personality tracking that not only doesn't have anything in common with alignment but which you also haven't seen the effects of.

Not that there's any pre-judging going on here, right? Just a bunch of people who approached the demo with an open mind and are now extrapolating what the entire game will be like from that? Yep.

[David Gaider]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
Voicing the protagonist ties us to the delivery the writers intended.  This is bad.

You've always been limited to the delivery we writers intended, as even in DAO the world reacted to that intention and not whatever you made up in your head. We select the possible responses and that's all you get.

And, yes, I know you like to imagine your own delivery, and resign any failure of the world to heed that as their misunderstanding, as if they are incapable of understanding communication. So, yes, we no longer allow you to play a character with Asperger's.

Are there drawbacks for that limitation? Sure, just as there are drawbacks for the unvoiced protaganist (see the Landsmeet, for instance, and the address of the soldiers at Denerim as two places in DAO where having a protaganist able to speak would have been a real plus on the design side). If having an unvoiced protaganist is the only way for you to believe you're roleplaying, then this isn't the game for you-- but that doesn't make it not a roleplaying game, or any worse of a design, as there are many people indeed who don't see that as a limitation on their ability to get into character.

And those are the limitations we've chosen to live with this time around. In this case, the benefits are worth the limitations we've given up. And that's all there is to say about it. If the demo didn't convince you that the writers can deliver, then that's all you really need to know, isn't it?