187 réponses à ce sujet

[killingsheep24]

Ugly, brown mess.... gah why is this Dragon Age crew obsessed with browns.
The last game had a bad colour palette.... think they would spice things up abit.

[LPPrince]

Okay, that was WAAAAY too much brown. Holy crud.

And the city, or at least that part of it, looked dead as hell.

Now I'm sad. I'm not expecting the numbers of Assassin's Creed/Assassin's Creed 2/Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, but something between that and what we got would be nice.

A medium, rather than a TON or NONE.

[Shadedclan]

Too few people walking around. Hope someone makes a mod for this. Making this more realistic with a lot of people moving round and about.

[AtreiyaN7]

Wompoo wrote...

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

And you expected what, a thousand NPCs filling the city? There are clearly people around in most of the city areas. I don't need to feel like I'm stuck in Kolkata.

For the most part it looked like a ghost town, a lack of ambiance in the video in general, loved the city art however... but the game world looks barron empty and and almost lifeless. I don't need to feel as if I am in Calcutta either, but what I seen in that video was disappointingly sparse to empty.

Compare that slum district in the video to the Denerim marketplace - I think there were a similar number of people, if not more of them in the slums than the marketplace. Furthermore, some of these people were actually walking around. I think all the people in the Denerim marketplace were static - unless you count the zombie kittens. Maybe I'm forgetting someone who walked around and patrolled, in which case feel free to correct me. However, Kirkwall seems more lively than Denerim ever did, and it also (from what I've seen) feels a lot larger than Denerim ever did too.

Maybe they kept the number of people low because it would create havoc with framerates - beats me. It would be nice if the numbers were scalable for those who like massive crowds, but if that's as many people as there are, I'm fine with it. I see fewer people than that when I walk to the store on my usual route (as in foot traffic - although now that I think about it, not that many cars go by on the route I take). Car and/or foot traffic only picks up when I actually hit the shopping center. Well, if it's too sparse for your tastes, then that can't be helped. We all have our own preferences as far as population density goes.

Modifié par AtreiyaN7, 27 février 2011 - 07:43 .

[Lacan2]

The city looks empty.

I hope there is a mod to drop in some people and at least make this look like a real city. That looks like the last remnants of stragglers fleeing a ghost town.

Modifié par Lacan2, 27 février 2011 - 07:46 .

[Cruven]

I think Kirkwall looks exciting, I love the new art direction.  Can't wait to see and explore her.  Thanks for this video. :]

[AtreiyaN7]

Maria Caliban wrote...

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

And you expected what, a thousand NPCs filling the city?

The last game urban based game I played was Assassin's Creed II.

Ah, that does seem like a good number of people - I imagine those numbers would satisfy many who like seeing a well-populated area. Personally, I hate crowds, which is probably why I'm okay with the small number of people in the Kirkwall video.

[Mr. Gerbz]

Well, at least we know someone at Bioware likes the colour brown.

[Lacan2]

Maria Caliban wrote...

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

And you expected what, a thousand NPCs filling the city?

The last game urban based game I played was Assassin's Creed II.

Very technically advanced game, along with being exceptionally good. The people at Ubisoft Montreal know their stuff.

That felt like a city. RPG makers take note.

I cannot run around a dead city for the entire game. There must be a way to mod this so I'm not stuck at 4 gigs playing a game meant for 360 hardware.

Modifié par Lacan2, 27 février 2011 - 07:55 .

[LPPrince]

Instead of raging at the "Its the consoles' fault" argument, I'm just going to say I hope they learn how to put more NPC's in the game so that it feels ALIVE rather than barren.

I mean, hell. Fable III has more NPC's than this, and even that game was barren in places.

[Envor44]

I don't think it's consoles's fault nor engine, but...seriously they should add more NPC in Kirkwall the town look so empty.

[Lacan2]

If they're going to do this to us PC gamers, at least give us a toolset so we can add people to this empty city.

Anyone know if the modding community has the capability to do this? I bought a new PC recently and I'll be damned if I'm stuck with some cheap console port. Pause it at 1:39 there is one person in an intersection visible. FFS!

Modifié par Lacan2, 27 février 2011 - 08:09 .

[John Sheridan]

Lacan2 wrote...

If they're going to do this to us PC gamers, at least give us a toolset so we can add people to this empty city.

Anyone know if the modding community has the capability to do this? I bought a new PC recently and I'll be damned if I'm stuck with some cheap console port. 1 person in an intersection in broad daylight? FFS!

Of course they have the capability.  It's easy as hell.  

It's a simple hardware limitation for consoles.  Don't worry about it.  

[mhenders]

Or you guys can just assume that BioWare purposely made the areas empty to ****** you off. 

Maybe not to ****** us off, but maybe they have internal design philosophies or rules that cluttered areas are bad and that as a matter of principle, they don't want a lot of NPCs walking around. You blame the DA2 engine on consoles, but the lack of big, vibrant populated areas has been a problem in BioWare games since they left behind the Infinity Engine and entered their RPGs entered the 3D era:

-NWN1 and NWN2 had small cities and sparse NPCs.
-KoTOR 1 and 2 had small cities and sparse NPCs.
-Jade Empire had small cities and sparse NPCs.
-Mass Effect 1 and 2 had small cities and sparse NPCs.

Are you noticing a pattern here? Across games, franchises, and engines, BioWare's 3D RPGs have had... small cities and sparse NPCs.

So I don't think that the "engine is limited because consoles are wimpy" argument holds up. They've been shipping games with this problem for almost 10 years, both for titles that have been solely on the PC and titles that have been cross platform. Various contemporaries of the games they've shipped (such as the aforementioned Assassin's Creed, or even really old console titles like the GTA games) have managed to have big sprawling cities with lots of bustle and NPCs. So I think there's only two possible explanations that would explain why BioWare can't manage a properly bustling city:

1. They're opposed to creating such settings as matter of design principles (which I hope is not the case, because it would be really, deeply misguided).
2. Over the last 9+ years, they've either refused, postponed, to or are unable to implement engine technology that would allow them to create bustling cities.

The second seems most likely to me. As recently as Mass Effect 1, you could detect strains of NWN still in their engine. The un-pausable, uninterruptible dialog sequences; the massive over-reliance on prefabricated areas and texture sets; disjoint areas that require lots of level loading; and a general lack of verticality in the settings were all clues. If you ever played around with the NWN toolset, you'd recognize all those "features"  because they were all limitations of the way the NWN engine worked.

So, I'll make an un-bold prediction! Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 3 and even Dragon Age 3 will have the following issues:

1. There won't be a "city" that has a single uninterrupted area area that's physically larger than  a square mile.
2. There won't be a "city" that has more than 200 non-enemy NPCs in a single uninterrupted area.
3. There won't be a "city" where there's ever more than a dozen non-enemy NPCs on the screen at one time.

There have been other games on the market for years that have managed all these feats.

I love BioWare games, but they really need to fix this. It's like their worlds have become a shallow set of cardboard props for their ever more complex dialog sequences. I mean... the tiny town in rural Alabama I grew up in is bigger and denser in terms of population than Denerim, the allegedly huge and crowded capital of Ferelden. The problem has been going on so long, and is such an obvious and glaring problem in all their games that it's become a running joke and really interferes with suspension of disbelief.

[atheelogos]

thanks for the post op : )

[StokedUp]

I just can't get over how when your in combat your blades arnt even hitting the target (rogue).

[John Sheridan]

mhenders wrote...

Or you guys can just assume that BioWare purposely made the areas empty to ****** you off. 

Maybe not to ****** us off, but maybe they have internal design philosophies or rules that cluttered areas are bad and that as a matter of principle, they don't want a lot of NPCs walking around. You blame the DA2 engine on consoles, but the lack of big, vibrant populated areas has been a problem in BioWare games since they left behind the Infinity Engine and entered their RPGs entered the 3D era:

-NWN1 and NWN2 had small cities and sparse NPCs.
-KoTOR 1 and 2 had small cities and sparse NPCs.
-Jade Empire had small cities and sparse NPCs.
-Mass Effect 1 and 2 had small cities and sparse NPCs.

Are you noticing a pattern here? Across games, franchises, and engines, BioWare's 3D RPGs have had... small cities and sparse NPCs.

So I don't think that the "engine is limited because consoles are wimpy" argument holds up. They've been shipping games with this problem for almost 10 years, both for titles that have been solely on the PC and titles that have been cross platform. Various contemporaries of the games they've shipped (such as the aforementioned Assassin's Creed, or even really old console titles like the GTA games) have managed to have big sprawling cities with lots of bustle and NPCs. So I think there's only two possible explanations that would explain why BioWare can't manage a properly bustling city:

1. They're opposed to creating such settings as matter of design principles (which I hope is not the case, because it would be really, deeply misguided).
2. Over the last 9+ years, they've either refused, postponed, to or are unable to implement engine technology that would allow them to create bustling cities.

The second seems most likely to me. As recently as Mass Effect 1, you could detect strains of NWN still in their engine. The un-pausable, uninterruptible dialog sequences; the massive over-reliance on prefabricated areas and texture sets; disjoint areas that require lots of level loading; and a general lack of verticality in the settings were all clues. If you ever played around with the NWN toolset, you'd recognize all those "features"  because they were all limitations of the way the NWN engine worked.

So, I'll make an un-bold prediction! Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 3 and even Dragon Age 3 will have the following issues:

1. There won't be a "city" that has a single uninterrupted area area that's physically larger than  a square mile.
2. There won't be a "city" that has more than 200 non-enemy NPCs in a single uninterrupted area.
3. There won't be a "city" where there's ever more than a dozen non-enemy NPCs on the screen at one time.

There have been other games on the market for years that have managed all these feats.

I love BioWare games, but they really need to fix this. It's like their worlds have become a shallow set of cardboard props for their ever more complex dialog sequences. I mean... the tiny town in rural Alabama I grew up in is bigger and denser in terms of population than Denerim, the allegedly huge and crowded capital of Ferelden. The problem has been going on so long, and is such an obvious and glaring problem in all their games that it's become a running joke and really interferes with suspension of disbelief.

Yeah, I do notice a pattern.  They started making games on consoles.  

[Lacan2]

mhenders wrote...

Or you guys can just assume that BioWare purposely made the areas empty to ****** you off. 

Maybe not to ****** us off, but maybe they have internal design philosophies or rules that cluttered areas are bad and that as a matter of principle, they don't want a lot of NPCs walking around. You blame the DA2 engine on consoles, but the lack of big, vibrant populated areas has been a problem in BioWare games since they left behind the Infinity Engine and entered their RPGs entered the 3D era:

-NWN1 and NWN2 had small cities and sparse NPCs.
-KoTOR 1 and 2 had small cities and sparse NPCs.
-Jade Empire had small cities and sparse NPCs.
-Mass Effect 1 and 2 had small cities and sparse NPCs.

Are you noticing a pattern here? Across games, franchises, and engines, BioWare's 3D RPGs have had... small cities and sparse NPCs.

So I don't think that the "engine is limited because consoles are wimpy" argument holds up. They've been shipping games with this problem for almost 10 years, both for titles that have been solely on the PC and titles that have been cross platform. Various contemporaries of the games they've shipped (such as the aforementioned Assassin's Creed, or even really old console titles like the GTA games) have managed to have big sprawling cities with lots of bustle and NPCs. So I think there's only two possible explanations that would explain why BioWare can't manage a properly bustling city:

1. They're opposed to creating such settings as matter of design principles (which I hope is not the case, because it would be really, deeply misguided).
2. Over the last 9+ years, they've either refused, postponed, to or are unable to implement engine technology that would allow them to create bustling cities.

The second seems most likely to me. As recently as Mass Effect 1, you could detect strains of NWN still in their engine. The un-pausable, uninterruptible dialog sequences; the massive over-reliance on prefabricated areas and texture sets; disjoint areas that require lots of level loading; and a general lack of verticality in the settings were all clues. If you ever played around with the NWN toolset, you'd recognize all those "features"  because they were all limitations of the way the NWN engine worked.

So, I'll make an un-bold prediction! Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 3 and even Dragon Age 3 will have the following issues:

1. There won't be a "city" that has a single uninterrupted area area that's physically larger than  a square mile.
2. There won't be a "city" that has more than 200 non-enemy NPCs in a single uninterrupted area.
3. There won't be a "city" where there's ever more than a dozen non-enemy NPCs on the screen at one time.

There have been other games on the market for years that have managed all these feats.

I love BioWare games, but they really need to fix this. It's like their worlds have become a shallow set of cardboard props for their ever more complex dialog sequences. I mean... the tiny town in rural Alabama I grew up in is bigger and denser in terms of population than Denerim, the allegedly huge and crowded capital of Ferelden. The problem has been going on so long, and is such an obvious and glaring problem in all their games that it's become a running joke and really interferes with suspension of disbelief.

Great post.

But one thing I'd like to mention. While the cities in the 3d era of Bioware gaming haven't been well populated, we've never before been restricted to just one city. We understood that the designers had to spend resources creating forests, lakes, grasslands, etc. In this game, they have one prime responsibility: Kirkwall. And their explantion for this restriction is that Kirkwall is a city in which it's worth being restricted for nearly the whole game.

It is going to be very disappointing if 90% of their responsibility was one single setting, the Kirkwall city setting, and couldn't manage to make it look populated.

I've noticed their technical lack of sophistication, but they're supposed to be an elite developer now, and being 5+ years behind in such simple things like NPC spawning...

Modifié par Lacan2, 27 février 2011 - 08:38 .

[Hawke92]

ME2 Fighter M wrote...

I am really hoping that the whole game doesn't stay in kirk wall, please let it be like DAO where we roam to villages, cities, mountains, and deep roads.

Don't worry bro Bioware woulden't do this to us none of there RPG games stays only in the city not Mass Effect1/2 not Dragon Age Origins.not any of them.Don't worry they won't dissapoint

[TeamLexana]

Hmm, going by the dialogue wheel, Aveline often spy's on Hawke. Creepy. lol

[ViSeiRa]

Wait, Aveline is a stalker? damn!

Also, the city seems so empty, and the Hot Rod Samurai graphics and art style aren't that much different from Origins, if they thought Origins was all brown they what do they call this?

Also Bioware if you're gonna restrict how many NPCs are in the city because you're stuck developing a game for a 6 years old console then don't draw the same restriction for PCs, almost every PC gamer now has 4 GBs of RAM or more, adding more people to the city requires just more RAM and slightly more VRAM... I'm not walking around Zombieland here!

Edit: Now I hope more than ever that a toolset gets released, at least we can  have mods like "Improved Atmosphere".

Modifié par ViSeirA, 27 février 2011 - 09:03 .

[Grunk]

John Sheridan wrote...

mhenders wrote...

Or you guys can just assume that BioWare purposely made the areas empty to ****** you off. 

Maybe not to ****** us off, but maybe they have internal design philosophies or rules that cluttered areas are bad and that as a matter of principle, they don't want a lot of NPCs walking around. You blame the DA2 engine on consoles, but the lack of big, vibrant populated areas has been a problem in BioWare games since they left behind the Infinity Engine and entered their RPGs entered the 3D era:

-NWN1 and NWN2 had small cities and sparse NPCs.
-KoTOR 1 and 2 had small cities and sparse NPCs.
-Jade Empire had small cities and sparse NPCs.
-Mass Effect 1 and 2 had small cities and sparse NPCs.

Are you noticing a pattern here? Across games, franchises, and engines, BioWare's 3D RPGs have had... small cities and sparse NPCs.

So I don't think that the "engine is limited because consoles are wimpy" argument holds up. They've been shipping games with this problem for almost 10 years, both for titles that have been solely on the PC and titles that have been cross platform. Various contemporaries of the games they've shipped (such as the aforementioned Assassin's Creed, or even really old console titles like the GTA games) have managed to have big sprawling cities with lots of bustle and NPCs. So I think there's only two possible explanations that would explain why BioWare can't manage a properly bustling city:

1. They're opposed to creating such settings as matter of design principles (which I hope is not the case, because it would be really, deeply misguided).
2. Over the last 9+ years, they've either refused, postponed, to or are unable to implement engine technology that would allow them to create bustling cities.

The second seems most likely to me. As recently as Mass Effect 1, you could detect strains of NWN still in their engine. The un-pausable, uninterruptible dialog sequences; the massive over-reliance on prefabricated areas and texture sets; disjoint areas that require lots of level loading; and a general lack of verticality in the settings were all clues. If you ever played around with the NWN toolset, you'd recognize all those "features"  because they were all limitations of the way the NWN engine worked.

So, I'll make an un-bold prediction! Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 3 and even Dragon Age 3 will have the following issues:

1. There won't be a "city" that has a single uninterrupted area area that's physically larger than  a square mile.
2. There won't be a "city" that has more than 200 non-enemy NPCs in a single uninterrupted area.
3. There won't be a "city" where there's ever more than a dozen non-enemy NPCs on the screen at one time.

There have been other games on the market for years that have managed all these feats.

I love BioWare games, but they really need to fix this. It's like their worlds have become a shallow set of cardboard props for their ever more complex dialog sequences. I mean... the tiny town in rural Alabama I grew up in is bigger and denser in terms of population than Denerim, the allegedly huge and crowded capital of Ferelden. The problem has been going on so long, and is such an obvious and glaring problem in all their games that it's become a running joke and really interferes with suspension of disbelief.

Yeah, I do notice a pattern.  They started making games on consoles.  

Yep, I had a ton of fun playing NWN1 and 2 on my Xbox.

[Josef bugman3]

Shock and horror, Medieval cities are mainly brown with some marbeled elements! To be honest I am just glad there isn't effluence running in the slums.

[joffmonk]

John Sheridan wrote...

Lacan2 wrote...

If they're going to do this to us PC gamers, at least give us a toolset so we can add people to this empty city.

Anyone know if the modding community has the capability to do this? I bought a new PC recently and I'll be damned if I'm stuck with some cheap console port. 1 person in an intersection in broad daylight? FFS!

Of course they have the capability.  It's easy as hell.  

It's a simple hardware limitation for consoles.  Don't worry about it.  

From what I have read the toolset doesnt seem to work on the demo files, they are locked somehow.
Lets hope its just the demo and the modders can utilise the toolset on the actual game, or an updated one is released, would be a terrible shame to be stuck with bioware basic version of the game.
Its going to another case of "wait and see" seems there is too much of that going on with this game imo.

[John Sheridan]

Grunk wrote...

John Sheridan wrote...

mhenders wrote...

Or you guys can just assume that BioWare purposely made the areas empty to ****** you off. 

Maybe not to ****** us off, but maybe they have internal design philosophies or rules that cluttered areas are bad and that as a matter of principle, they don't want a lot of NPCs walking around. You blame the DA2 engine on consoles, but the lack of big, vibrant populated areas has been a problem in BioWare games since they left behind the Infinity Engine and entered their RPGs entered the 3D era:

-NWN1 and NWN2 had small cities and sparse NPCs.
-KoTOR 1 and 2 had small cities and sparse NPCs.
-Jade Empire had small cities and sparse NPCs.
-Mass Effect 1 and 2 had small cities and sparse NPCs.

Are you noticing a pattern here? Across games, franchises, and engines, BioWare's 3D RPGs have had... small cities and sparse NPCs.

So I don't think that the "engine is limited because consoles are wimpy" argument holds up. They've been shipping games with this problem for almost 10 years, both for titles that have been solely on the PC and titles that have been cross platform. Various contemporaries of the games they've shipped (such as the aforementioned Assassin's Creed, or even really old console titles like the GTA games) have managed to have big sprawling cities with lots of bustle and NPCs. So I think there's only two possible explanations that would explain why BioWare can't manage a properly bustling city:

1. They're opposed to creating such settings as matter of design principles (which I hope is not the case, because it would be really, deeply misguided).
2. Over the last 9+ years, they've either refused, postponed, to or are unable to implement engine technology that would allow them to create bustling cities.

The second seems most likely to me. As recently as Mass Effect 1, you could detect strains of NWN still in their engine. The un-pausable, uninterruptible dialog sequences; the massive over-reliance on prefabricated areas and texture sets; disjoint areas that require lots of level loading; and a general lack of verticality in the settings were all clues. If you ever played around with the NWN toolset, you'd recognize all those "features"  because they were all limitations of the way the NWN engine worked.

So, I'll make an un-bold prediction! Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 3 and even Dragon Age 3 will have the following issues:

1. There won't be a "city" that has a single uninterrupted area area that's physically larger than  a square mile.
2. There won't be a "city" that has more than 200 non-enemy NPCs in a single uninterrupted area.
3. There won't be a "city" where there's ever more than a dozen non-enemy NPCs on the screen at one time.

There have been other games on the market for years that have managed all these feats.

I love BioWare games, but they really need to fix this. It's like their worlds have become a shallow set of cardboard props for their ever more complex dialog sequences. I mean... the tiny town in rural Alabama I grew up in is bigger and denser in terms of population than Denerim, the allegedly huge and crowded capital of Ferelden. The problem has been going on so long, and is such an obvious and glaring problem in all their games that it's become a running joke and really interferes with suspension of disbelief.

Yeah, I do notice a pattern.  They started making games on consoles.  

Yep, I had a ton of fun playing NWN1 and 2 on my Xbox.

You had a ton of fun playing KOTOR on your Xbox, didn't you?  It's based off that engine.  Only difference being 3d backgrounds and facial animations.  

Furthermore, NWN was basically a toolset with a campaign tacked onto it.  The best NWN content was the non-campaign stuff, and there were no restrictions on the amount of NPC's you could put, since it was a PC game.