Yellow Words wrote...
I don't know how populair exploring is among the players, but I do hope that BioWare will incorporate it more in future installments. I miss the big blackout maps from BG and NWN and I always needed to explore the whole thing so the whole map was visible. But if they would return to this Bio needs to make it worthwhile for players who want to explore. Just a few extra treasures, enemies to kill or small side quests would do it for me.
The problem with making huge areas or areas that are none-linier is that they take a lot of time to do now a days. Making a large detailed -- some might say overly detailed -- area for NWN took me about 4-8 hours of work when I was at the hight of my Aurora Toolset days. This included: designing the flow of an area; making sure it fit with surounding areas; getting the lighting and fog right; making sure the audio for the area was done and no sound was to loud or to low so it all worked together; getting the transitions done; getting encounter spawns into the area; and finaly putting all the placeables in place. The think that actualy took the least amount of time was creating the area itself. Why? Because NWN was tilebased.
Leaving tiles behind you will have to spend more time creating the level itself, much much longer. Now, I dont actually know how BioWare went about creating the area meshes we see in Dragon Age, but given the heavely reused areas in DA2 -- as well as one or two tiny null space holes -- I would say that DA2 did not utilise tiles.
Now granted I was a one man show back in the NWN days as the toolset allowed for quick and easy area creation with all that that entails. BioWare probably has various people working on one area in different itterations, the ones who create the area might be different from the ones who light the area who, in turn, might not be the same people who adds the sound to the area.
My point with all that text is just to say that making large areas that are only there for people to explore and not used for anything else might have been easier back in the day -- though I am unsure if this is true for BG as I have no clue how the areas were put together back then. Creating such areas now is a bigger decision as you have to allocate more time, and thus more money, to the creating of a none-vital area -- and even more work if you want the area to be multilinier.
That said, exploration isn't a bad thing, but as fun as exploration is it might come at the expence of other things we would like.
LunarPhase wrote...
The ability to jump and have more control over your terrain.
Jumping is an interesting thing, giving the player the option to jump at anytime and anywhere means more design need to go into the areas to accomodate this new feature. For instance, there might be a place in an area where it looks like you can make a jump between two cliffs were in reality the space it too great. The player might try the jump a few time and get frustrated with the game because they can't make the jump. Invisible walls -- which are used to keep the player from accedentaly falling off a cliff or get to a place they are not suppose to -- also gets more anoying as you have a greater precived freedom when you get to control how you jump -- Fallout New Vegas has some issues with this.
On top of all that you would also need to put in places where the player can, or even has to, use this feature for it to feel like something that adds anything to the game. If you as a player never find any use for the jump feature then you might get anoyed at the fact that its there but does nothing of any value.
In both cases the estetics of the area might have to take a blow as you are now more limited in how you want to design your area as well as having more things to make sure gets integrated into the game, be it in the area you are working on at the moment or the area you just finished. Another problem is the companions and how they should handle this new feature so that they dont get left behind or tries to run around the long way and activates every spawn inbetween.
An alternative to this is to have jumping but now alowing the player to jump. What I mean by this is that at certain points in an area the player can interact with the area which triggers the player to jump over an obstical or climb over a wall. This is more for flavouring then anything else but flavouring can be a vital part to building up immersion for the player. If you want to look at games who have gone down this path you can take a look at Alpha Protocol or a more resent example, The Witcher 2.
Again, both exploration and jumping could be a lot of fun and I am not, I repeat not, against these ideas, I am mearly putting forth some argumetns as to why we might not see either of these features in a DLC or even a new installment of the series.
Will be back later to post some ideas on what I would want to see in an DLC or Expansion in terms of story but for now I will wish you all a great Midsummer's Eve.
-The Sad Dragon
Retour en haut
:wizard:
![=]](https://lvlt.forum.bioware.com/public/style_emoticons/default/sideways.png)
Most of all, I hope that any new installments in the series won't be rushed.
Another thing I would also like to see are bosses that are suited to the region they reside in. In other words, themes I suppose. (Ice, Fire, Forest,) 
