390 réponses à ce sujet

[Persephone]

aphelion002 wrote...

Persephone wrote...

addu2urmanapool wrote...

"

Q: Blood Magic is a forbidden art in the world of DA2, but the main character uses it freely during the game against civilians and Templars. How is that logical?

A: Well, sometimes you have to give up perfect inner logic to make the game more fun. This is one of these cases. Anyway, this can be explained by the fact that the champion is someone who can do whatever he wants. No one is bold enough to lecture him about that. This is kind of like when the authorities ignore certain crimes because the criminal's aid is of great importance."

Weak!

No weaker than using blood magic in front of Wynne and her not caring. Or turning Wynne herself into a blood mage & her not piping up at all.<_<

That was horrible too. But this game it stands out more because of the story and setting. At least in Origins there were consequences when first obtaining the reaver and blood mage specializations. Here its entirely glossed over as simply another gameplay mechanic, that you have access to instantly, to boot.

Really? All I had to do was intimidate the desire demon and use the Reload glitch to keep the Reaver. Yeah, I was soooooooo heartbroken over that.

[payroo]

Thank you for the translation, even if the content makes me eyeroll. Did game dev interviews always sound like political stump speeches? :/

[Galad22]

Persephone wrote...

Really? All I had to do was intimidate the desire demon and use the Reload glitch to keep the Reaver. Yeah, I was soooooooo heartbroken over that.

You can't really fault the game if you cheated.

[6 Is stcky]

Narreneth wrote...

I really don't understand the problem with the wave mechanic in the battles. I think it was overdone in that every fight had waves, but I like the idea. If crawling through a dungeon led to a large fight with waves followed by more crawling with standard fights to another fight with waves, I think it would be fun. However, the way it was implemented in DA2 gets a little repetitive at times.

Oh, and Kelsjet, you're a bigot.

How about if there are more than 5 ai at anytime on the battlefield they just stand there. dropping enemies out of the sky is and having them *poof* in front of you ...oh noes! tap that A button faster here comes some more poofing! why not just make a game that plays itself we aren't far off here.

[Whammo]

Morroian wrote...

Meh, using dumbing down is an automatic reduction in credibility. As for the second paragraph above IMHO character construction in terms of planning abilities is more complex in DA2 than in DAO for those who like that side of it, some aspects are streamlined some are more complex. If one is not motivated to go too deep into that planning because other changes that they don't like have had a de-motivating effect well thats a different thing.

But it was dumbed down. The game was simplified to appeal to a wider audience. That's what dumbing down is.

Just because it doesn't sound nice doesn't mean it's not a valid criticism.

[aphelion002]

Crash_7 wrote...

Those two articles go to demonstrate just how badly the ageing 360 is holding back gaming. If they had designed the damned box properly in the first place MS wouldn't have lost over a billion in recall costs. The consolers would of had a new console by now and RPGs could be RPGs once more.

I think using the controller as an input from the comfort of a couch as opposed to a keyboard and mouse has more to do with it.  That said, I suspect that the memory limitations of consoles are directly linked to the lack of npcs in cities and abuse of the wave mechanic.

[Persephone]

Galad22 wrote...

Persephone wrote...

Really? All I had to do was intimidate the desire demon and use the Reload glitch to keep the Reaver. Yeah, I was soooooooo heartbroken over that.

You can't really fault the game if you cheated.

Sure I can. DAO is glitched as hell and its "consequences" are either MS-DOS like slides or avoided way too easily. (There's almost ALWAYS a way to sneak out of difficult decisions. "Good" vs. "bad" in b/w, cliché and formulaic to extremes.

[6 Is stcky]

lazuli wrote...

DocDoomII, your images are funny, but the inventory for the DA2 one is almost completely empty, giving it a false appearance of simplicity. I'm not saying the inventory isn't simpler in DA2, I just don't think your images are as accurate as they could be.

Nope that image is pretty much what you get. There is not "hidden anything else". Thats the whole thing. Unbelievable right? Don't buy this game

[Morroian]

Icinix wrote...

 

Q: Why are the city's streets not as crowded as one can expect from a city as congested as Kirkwall? Is it due to technical limitations?

A: Yes, this is completely due to technical limitation. We had more people crowding the streets in early stages of development but we had to cut the number to be able to cope with the limitations of game consoles and low-end computers.

I call bull****.  There is a huge number of games out there where there is massive numbers of people in areas. Hell, N64 and Ocarina of Time had about the same amount of people in areas...

Not even going to mention Assassins Creed, GTA, Mafia 2...oh wait...

This has always been an annoyance for me in BioWare games...just populate the damn world will you? PLEASE!

IIRC they are games with controlloing only 1 character, not controlling 4. They've said before that this results in technical limitations in terms of graphics. 

[Altima Darkspells]

In BioWare's defense, only Mass Effect 1 was endlessly criticized for re-using areas.  So it's not like they had warning or anything.

JohnEpler wrote...

Unsurprisingly, racial slurs are not acceptable on these forums.

You're one of that them there knife-ear lovers, aren'tcha?

[aphelion002]

Persephone wrote...

aphelion002 wrote...

Persephone wrote...

addu2urmanapool wrote...

"

Q: Blood Magic is a forbidden art in the world of DA2, but the main character uses it freely during the game against civilians and Templars. How is that logical?

A: Well, sometimes you have to give up perfect inner logic to make the game more fun. This is one of these cases. Anyway, this can be explained by the fact that the champion is someone who can do whatever he wants. No one is bold enough to lecture him about that. This is kind of like when the authorities ignore certain crimes because the criminal's aid is of great importance."

Weak!

No weaker than using blood magic in front of Wynne and her not caring. Or turning Wynne herself into a blood mage & her not piping up at all.<_<

That was horrible too. But this game it stands out more because of the story and setting. At least in Origins there were consequences when first obtaining the reaver and blood mage specializations. Here its entirely glossed over as simply another gameplay mechanic, that you have access to instantly, to boot.

Really? All I had to do was intimidate the desire demon and use the Reload glitch to keep the Reaver. Yeah, I was soooooooo heartbroken over that.

IMO, they should have limited the specializations to what you can get in your current playthrough. However, that does limit replay value, so I can sort of see their reasoning for what they did.

[skyrend]

aphelion002 wrote...
That said, I suspect that the memory limitations of consoles are directly linked to the lack of npcs in cities and abuse of the wave mechanic.

That would be valid criticism if, you know, GTA IV, Assassin's Creed weren't already out for consoles.  The fact that they tried to push their engine in a way that it wouldn't go is no one's fault but their own.

[tmp7704]

The one thing that's rather odd in this interview is explanation how the city in the game is sparsely populated because it's limitation of the engine. Which would be fine, except...

* it's BioWare's own engine and they can expand it as they see fit. In fact they did expand it in some ways.

* they knew from the very beginning they're going to make game in single large city, so spending some of the development time on adding functionality to the engine to allow some form of ambient crowds so the city can actually look like a city would seem like obvious move ... as well as pretty good investment for future titles which could also take advantage of the tech.

yet they chose to do nothing about it. Go figure.

Modifié par tmp7704, 23 mars 2011 - 01:00 .

[Morroian]

Whammo wrote...

Morroian wrote...

Meh, using dumbing down is an automatic reduction in credibility. As for the second paragraph above IMHO character construction in terms of planning abilities is more complex in DA2 than in DAO for those who like that side of it, some aspects are streamlined some are more complex. If one is not motivated to go too deep into that planning because other changes that they don't like have had a de-motivating effect well thats a different thing.

But it was dumbed down. The game was simplified to appeal to a wider audience. That's what dumbing down is.

Some aspects have been streamlined some have been made more complex. Streamlining is not dumbing down, at least not necessarily.

[Galad22]

Persephone wrote...

Sure I can. DAO is glitched as hell and its "consequences" are either MS-DOS like slides or avoided way too easily. (There's almost ALWAYS a way to sneak out of difficult decisions. "Good" vs. "bad" in b/w, cliché and formulaic to extremes.

But point is there were consequences that were supposed to happen to you in DAO for reaver and blood mage specializations, the fact that you decided to get through them with cheating tells much more about your own integrity than anything else.

I am not saying that this is any horrible crime or anything.

I just never understood why anyone would do this, since there was meant to be consequences for getting those specializations. So why not live with them.

[DocDoomII]

aphelion002 wrote...

lazuli wrote...

DocDoomII, your images are funny, but the inventory for the DA2 one is almost completely empty, giving it a false appearance of simplicity. I'm not saying the inventory isn't simpler in DA2, I just don't think your images are as accurate as they could be.

Yea, I'm sure the ten rings with identical icons and names that he left out of there would make the DA2 inventory look so much deeper and more nuanced.

I actually changed the picture. And managed to satisfy both of you!
Took a screen of my game. Lots of items in there! lazuli, you can't complain now, do you

And almost all items have the same name and obviously same icon!
I'm a mage, I know

[Whammo]

Morroian wrote...

Whammo wrote...

Morroian wrote...

Meh, using dumbing down is an automatic reduction in credibility. As for the second paragraph above IMHO character construction in terms of planning abilities is more complex in DA2 than in DAO for those who like that side of it, some aspects are streamlined some are more complex. If one is not motivated to go too deep into that planning because other changes that they don't like have had a de-motivating effect well thats a different thing.

But it was dumbed down. The game was simplified to appeal to a wider audience. That's what dumbing down is.

Some aspects have been streamlined some have been made more complex. Streamlining is not dumbing down, at least not necessarily.

The game was overall simplified to appeal to a wider audience. That is called dumbing down.

And streamline is a marketing buzz word. So you can't criticise someone for calling something dumbed down and defend it by calling it streamlined.

[Persephone]

Galad22 wrote...

Persephone wrote...

Sure I can. DAO is glitched as hell and its "consequences" are either MS-DOS like slides or avoided way too easily. (There's almost ALWAYS a way to sneak out of difficult decisions. "Good" vs. "bad" in b/w, cliché and formulaic to extremes.

But point is there were consequences that were supposed to happen to you in DAO for reaver and blood mage specializations, the fact that you decided to get through them with cheating tells much more about your own integrity than anything else.

I am not saying that this is any horrible crime or anything.

I just never understood why anyone would do this, since there was meant to be consequences for getting those specializations. So why not live with them.

Threatening the bloody demon isn't cheating at all, you know? And I usually don't get the Reaver because I think it's meh.:happy:

[Galad22]

Persephone wrote...

Threatening the bloody demon isn't cheating at all, you know? And I usually don't get the Reaver because I think it's meh.:happy:

Yeah I was talking about the reaver.

[6 Is stcky]

JohnEpler wrote...

Unsurprisingly, racial slurs are not acceptable on these forums.

I think you shouldn't be a moderator. You are an idiot.

[Swoo]

Deified Data wrote...

addu2urmanapool wrote...

"

Q: Blood Magic is a forbidden art in the world of DA2, but the main character uses it freely during the game against civilians and Templars. How is that logical?

A: Well, sometimes you have to give up perfect inner logic to make the game more fun. This is one of these cases. Anyway, this can be explained by the fact that the champion is someone who can do whatever he wants. No one is bold enough to lecture him about that. This is kind of like when the authorities ignore certain crimes because the criminal's aid is of great importance."

Weak!

Is he wrong? The same logic applies to being a mage in general. Why would the Templars let you run around in robes with a staff slung over your back, slinging fireballs? They wouldn't. Would you rather there be no mage option to begin with?

Weak or no, his logic is as close as we'll ever be to an answer. Presumably mage Hawke is subtle enough to lie low during acts I & II, with no one daring to touch him during act III. It follows a certain reason, does it not?

No, I would like a little internal consistency though. I am a diehard magic user fan, it's always what I go for first in any RPG, MMO, or ect.. where it is an option. If you want to stress story and how much the world and it's inhabitants are truly on center stage, then there comes a dividing point between suspension of disbelief and 'this is just sloppy as hell'. If you are in a Templar controlled city, then it should have been in the top three things of how do we present a logical workaround for magical usage in town? It could have been the cliched Mages Liscence, it could have been a subtley meter than has been used well in games for the past decade that the bigger the boom, the bigger the risk. You could have even put the Templars to the forefront early on and had them confront him and say '...but it's cool, as long as you're our lapdog'. But the ,eh, it's a game, don't think too hard is just stupid when they've spent so long telling us the world and it's laws, rules, and people are what we really should be paying attention to.

Hawke-Mage runs around the city for..4-5 years?...exploding people left and right, reigning down fireballs and iceshards, crushing the ground with forcewaves and sucking people into gravity vortex's, and even possibly slinging highly noticable blood magic around what is supposed to be heavily crowded city streets, leaving absolutely massive piles of corpses in his wake. It isn't until the end of Act II that he's done anything worth anything that would force the powers that be into turning a blind eye his way, and he's shown absolutely no restraint or subtley up to that point other than a throwaway line from the sibling about 'We have to be careful because of you, Mage'.

It's even worse when the reasoning is 'He's such a bad**** nobody is going to stand up to him'. Right. An army of Templars led by the most iron-fisted mage-hater we've experienced yet (other than shades of soon to be psycho Cullen who doesn't turn out quite as psycho as Origins led you to believe) were scared of no-named apostate street-sweeper. Riiiiiight.


Q:
Could prolonging development time for the game result in a better
variety within the city itself and avoiding reused areas, as seen in the
game?

A: Obviously, more time would enable more areas and bigger variation. Honestly, we did not expect this to be such a big deal,
but it seems the subject gave rise to a significant number of
complaints by both critics and players alike. We listen to the reviews
and we will try to address the issue in future games.



I cannot believe this was even said. How, HOW, could anyone think that making the areas old and worn out by the first act wouldn't be a problem? I would love to see Blizzard or Bethesda do this and then see Bioware's response on it, because I know damn well it wouldn't be 'Hey, it seemed like a logical plan to us too!'


Q: Why are the city's streets
not as crowded as one can expect from a city as congested as Kirkwall?
Is it due to technical limitations?

A: Yes, this is completely
due to technical limitation. We had more people crowding the streets in
early stages of development but we had to cut the number to be able to
cope with the limitations of game consoles and low-end computers.


I
call bull****.  There is a huge number of games out there where there
is massive numbers of people in areas. Hell, N64 and Ocarina of Time had
about the same amount of people in areas...

Not even going to mention Assassins Creed, GTA, Mafia 2...oh wait...

This has always been an annoyance for me in BioWare games...just populate the damn world will you? PLEASE!


That is so damn bogus it makes me wonder why I keep reading this. It has already been proven with modders that they can not only introduce large NPC populaces into towns in the Dragon Age engine, but they give them wandering scripts so they aren't just statuettes chilling in the beautiful midday sun. It wasn't done because it either wasn't able to be rushed in like most of everything else, or because work is hard. Don't even pull the 'Some computers couldn't handle it' because it's been proven to be an easy addition into the game and when I played Origins on my former five-year old computer at first that only could handle low settings, I had not a single problem with the massive population influx. Complete. Bunk. Answer. Bio-Person.

Very honest interview. Good read.

At what point?


Wow.  This guy actually thinks the wave
mechanic was good?  Pretty much nail in the coffin for Bioware getting
any money from me in the future.

And bringing up GTA and
Assassin's Creed for comparison is not very smart considering that
Kirkwall was a deserted ghetto town in comparison.


The idea is a good one, and has enough legs to be used as something that increases the joy of combat and the tactical difficulty of a game. The implementation was pi$$-poor that only accomplished turning combat into a monotonous button-smashing of exploding corpses and levitating knifemen and super-spiders.

I have no doubt they can turn something good out of the idea but it sure as hell didn't materialize in DA2.

As "level designer", what did he do outside the two weeks it took to build one cave, one sewer, and one mansion?

Picked colors, arranged the perfect feng shui arrangement for the Qunari on the go? I don't know, he seems to have had the easiest job of the entire team. Make a dozen rooms, splatter them everywhere. Job done. Hey, why not dip into the backgrounds as well since the  skies were just from Mass Effect with the same bloody towers and spires plastered everywhere.


I can definetely say I would rather have saved my money for Crysis 2 or the ME2 Arrival DLC.

If they would give me my money back for this game, I'd send it to them tomorrow. It's so bugged into non-playability in the third act I don't even want to bother with it anymore.

God, this is bad...

This
is embarrasing. They probably need to take a break from the interviews
because their answers to some of the hard questions aren't helping
things.

Yea, I'm surprised their PR department is even allowing this. 


This is going to sound rude but I in no way mean to be insulting towards you, but did you pay any attention at all to their lead relations and his videos leading up to the game? I honestly thought he was begging for a pink slip, not trying to do his job. It was the most god-awful thing I've watched come out of a company since RIFT released that horrible 'This MMO changed my gaming life' video with the voice overs and images of 'real players' with their 'true' in-game names. The fact this is out there and is this bad is so not a surprise at all.

I'm stopping now. This is just too stupid. Ugh.


EDIT: Tried to fix crappy forum formatting but gave up. Sorry, hope it's not too bad.

Modifié par Swoo, 23 mars 2011 - 01:33 .

[Persephone]

Galad22 wrote...

Persephone wrote...

Threatening the bloody demon isn't cheating at all, you know? And I usually don't get the Reaver because I think it's meh.:happy:

Yeah I was talking about the reaver.

Only advantage of the Reaver: Shutting up Wynne. Permanently.

[Phaedros]

Yes, this is completely due to technical limitation. We had more people crowding the streets in early stages of development but we had to cut the number to be able to cope with the limitations of game consoles

This explains a lot.  About a lot...

Many thanks OP, excellent post!

[Crash_7]

aphelion002 wrote...

Crash_7 wrote...

Those two articles go to demonstrate just how badly the ageing 360 is holding back gaming. If they had designed the damned box properly in the first place MS wouldn't have lost over a billion in recall costs. The consolers would of had a new console by now and RPGs could be RPGs once more.

I think using the controller as an input from the comfort of a couch as opposed to a keyboard and mouse has more to do with it.  That said, I suspect that the memory limitations of consoles are directly linked to the lack of npcs in cities and abuse of the wave mechanic.

The difference in input devices continues to cause strife.  Developers, for some reason, believe that it's possible to create an interface that fits both platforms; unfortunately, they never get it right (if it can even be done).  Ram is a major issue for consoles and acts as a significant limiting factor.  Storage space is an issue too.  The irony is, of course, that with each generation of console that platform moves closer and closer to the PC format.  But it does so whilst wearing the disguise of a console.  It's nuts.  Create a console, call it a console, create a vocal fan base for consoles and then convert the console to a closed platform PC.  Insane!