My main point is that trying to use console limitations as an excuse for poor level design is a blatent attempt at misdirection and is bordering on outright bull****.
I keep saying this, because I think comparisons to AC's capabilities are flawed. From other threads.
I think there's something in the complexity of the RPG that prevents too many dynamic graphic assets from being used.
The Anvil Engine (Assassin's Creed) is wonderful but it has limits. Note that the game is linear and doesn't have anything close to a branching storyline. The main character has limited customization. I have yet to see a complex RPG or even an Action RPG that has as many "actors" as AC. When you add dynamic branching, dialog trees, etc., and keeping the memory limit for the two major consoles, there are limits to what can be done. Also to keep in mind, there aren't complex spells in AC, nor are there dozens of different monsters--all the bodies are either humans or horses. AC also makes some use of pretty neat Procedural content (if you look closely a lot of buildings are the same, for instance--windows and buildings--but it's done so well and they supplement it with unique assets and buildings.
The Witcher 2 is probably the best technical RPG engine out there, but even then the number of inhabitants on the screen at once is far shorter than AC can do. I also noticed that TW2 made sure to use smaller settings--we didn't get a city as big as Vizima, we got a village, a few fortresses, and a ruined citadel. Sure, the levels were big, but they used illusions (such as most of the army of Henselt in tents) rather than try to populate the land. TW2 smartly decided they weren't going to use a city because it would break the illusion.
When I see an RPG maker create something as big and populated as AC, then I'll know it's possible. I won't let Bioware off the hook because seeing TW2 tells me it's possible they can pull off larger areas and more assets on the screen, but I think AC2 works as well as it does because it isn't as internally complex as an RPG.
It's a function of the engine being one made for creating RPGs. Dialogue trees and voice overs aren't excessively taxing once the engine is running, but like all elements of the engine someone has to spend the development time coding them first. And that coding comes at expense of coding something else instead, like e.g. ambient crowd functions.
Not to mention some things take up a lot of space. There's a reason, for instance, you don't see mountable horses in many games--skeletal animation takes up memory and modeling time. An RPG, for instance, you're expected to have things like Darkspawn, Dragons, Demons, Wolves, Bears, different races. All which require modeling. TW2 has perhaps the most advanced RPG engine right now--and they can only fit about 1 dozen different major monster types (Harpies, Trolls, Golems, etc...)
Also, in some ways, for the RPG, having hundreds of people might make it harder to find the "needles in the haystacks". Could you do complex schedules with the amount of people in AC cities--while keeping in account no respawning. Would it make it confusing to navigate to find specific people? AC works because 99% of the people are respawning NPCs with no distinct personalities--it's the sandbox method.
Even if it seems like a trivial task, a lot of the deceptively simple stuff may have to be pre-loaded in regular memory to work. For a fast reactive game, you can't keep swapping out to disk to use lookup tables, most critical functions would have to stay in RAM or the like.
Modifié par YohkoOhno, 04 juin 2011 - 09:55 .
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