159 réponses à ce sujet

[StanojeZ]

It's not just about surprise, or humor.

It's seeing the delivery and the full context of the line. That will always be superior to reading the line in advance, and in isolation, and only then seeing it delivered and other characters reacting to it.

Context + delivery = awesome.

Modifié par StanojeZ, 07 novembre 2011 - 05:52 .

[blaidfiste]

I agree with the OP.

I need a healer = best paraphrase EVER.

[Giltspur]

Here's the downside.

What makes games special as a medium for stories in contrast to movies and books is the element of choice that the gamer has.  It's easier to choose what you want to say if you have the option to see full text instead of paraphrase.  And I suggest that facilitating player choice is even more important than the delivery of emotion through animation and voice acting.

(I'm not opposed to improving cinematics and voice acting in games.  I think that's fine, admirable and ultimately inevitable.  However, I still think you have to be very cognizant of player agency and consider things that improve agency even at the expense of the cinematic side of storytelling if necessary.  If you can strike the perfect balance, great.  But if you have to err, I'd rather err towards agency.)

Modifié par Giltspur, 07 novembre 2011 - 06:31 .

[seraphymon]

StanojeZ wrote...

It's not just about surprise, or humor.

It's seeing the delivery and the full context of the line. That will always be superior to reading the line in advance, and in isolation, and only then seeing it delivered and other characters reacting to it.

Context + delivery = awesome.

I might agree if it was done well, but for me it wasnt. It was horrible. Having to reload because the line you picked really wasnt what you thought it was  is much worse. Id rather know exactly what im saying, even if it meant sacrificng some surprise. But honestly  in DAO the full delivery was there for me, even more than DA2 because in DA2 it tries to hard to be funny or aggresive, and falls flat. Unlike in DAO where i could kill a locked prisoner and say the reason for it was him spitting on me.

[MKDAWUSS]

What can be sad is when the paraprased line is better than the actual one.

[SpockLives]

The sad fact is that Bioware no longer cares about making true role-playing games. All Bioware is doing now is creating stories in game format. They have a story that they want to tell us, and if they gave us choices, then we'd be able to shape the story the way we wanted rather than the "right" way that Bioware has selected for us.

I didn't care that Hawke wasn't out to save the world. Sadly, Hawke proved unable to save anyone or do anything that mattered. All of Hawke's choices led to the same conclusion. All agency was stripped from the character and the players have no real choices to make in the game.

The paraphrasing is simply a symptom of this philosophy. By removing my ability to know what my character is going to say, Bioware can force me to make choices I don't want. Yes, if the lines were fully written out, they could still exclude certain options, but at least we'd know what our options were. Nice, Sarcastic, and Jerk are not options. They are pseudo-options that give players who don't want to think an easy way to select one of the paraphrases. Put full text on the screen without mood icons and players have to think. Heaven forbid a gamer be made to think.

[Shazzie]

Personal preference.

Me? I do not want my character - my character, my in-game avatar, being run by me to surprise me with what she says. I am the one deciding what she says, and picking a senseless paraphrase - or even worse, going by the icon alone - is not me deciding what my character says. How can it be, if I'm not shown what she's going to say? No, the shoddy paraphrasing is me picking a tone and wildly guessing what she will say and crossing my fingers that I won't be so ticked off about it that I reload a quicksave.

I want to play a role-playing game, where I take on a role, where I make the choices. All of the choices, even the infinitesimal ones. I want to be in my character's head and making her decisions, not watching an interactive movie.

Personal preference. But my preference is to know what the heck my in-game avatar is going to say. After I've chosen exactly what she will say, I could hardly care less if she speaks it. (Yeah, I'm one of those that doesn't care about PC voice.) If she does speak it, I'll be quite interested in seeing her delivery, and hoping it's close to how I envisioned it. If she nails it, I'll be thrilled. If she doesn't nail it, I'll at least know that she said what I wanted her to say, even if she didn't say it how I wanted her to say it. But if the line was a funny one, and I picked the funny one, and then she nailed it? You bet your ass I'll be laughing - twice. And the second time will be even more gleeful than the first.

Modifié par Shazzie, 08 novembre 2011 - 04:21 .

[Huntress]

happy_daiz wrote...

^ Exactly. My femHawkes were hilarious. My Wardens, on the other hand, didn't actually speak.  

And thats why so many think the warden is funny! I didn't laugh with my warden, I laughed when morrigan opened her mouth to wynne or Alistair or when zev made his horrible poem rofl. The warden was mute she never smile or... anything.. she was very good at killing thought, do that counts? lol!

[AlexXIV]

Aye I also like paraphrising better than the actual text. For once, if you clicked the text and the protagonist just repeats it may come across silly. I like when the paraphrised answer is the 'thought' and the protagonist forms an answer as if he had the same thought. I am really on the 'voiced protagonist' side of the discussion in general. Silent protagonist does seem like yesterday and any RPGs that will use will automatically have this 'old fashioned' feel for me.

Modifié par AlexXIV, 08 novembre 2011 - 11:56 .

[StanojeZ]

Silent protagonist does seem like yesterday and any RPGs that will use will automatically have this 'old fashioned' feel for me.

Yeah, a silent lead simply doesn't fit with what's Bioware been doing for its last few games.
I'm not, like, morally opposed to a silent lead, but it must fit the rest of the game. And Bioware's "characterization & cinematics" approach doesn't fit with that. A game more focused on high-level strategy, where you're more distanced from the characters you control, might not suffer at all from a silent protagonist.

[Fallstar]

If we want a surprise, why stop at paraphrasing? Why not just have little coloured icons you pick throughout the game? Or why not select your Hawke beforehand (saintly, sarcastic, angry) and let the game pick the dialogue options for you. This way we get a nice surprise when Hawke says something funny, and it requires less effort on our part.

But this is a role playing game you say? Where the dialogue is actually supposed to be relevant? HA! You crack me up sometimes.

[StanojeZ]

DuskWarden wrote...

If we want a surprise, why stop at paraphrasing? 

Because it's a good place to stop. There's no need to take every concept to a counter-productive extreme in order to turn it into something it obviously isn't meant to be.

[RPGmom28]

Well, I can see both arguments, but I have had actual laugh-out-loud lines in DA2 that have made the paraphrasing worth it for me. And I am one of those people that delights in choosing the snarky option almost every time.

[Pygmali0n]

Perfect solution for Bioware if they want to keep rpg fans buying DA games and expand appeal to different gamers then (btw more sales means more work, not less)...

-Lines of dialogue and choice is the basis of the system
-All main character lines are voiced, but this voice can be turned off
-People who like an extra element of surprise can paraphrase (reducing dialogue and plot choices)
-People who like paraphrasing but are in a rush can just choose the mood by colour
-Button awesome fans can choose a character type at the start and skip all in-game dialogue choices
-Players can choose to follow the dev's preferred canon storyline. This is default for button awesome people
-This should not mean that there is no real choice and no real or cool content outside of canon choices. Origins-level of choice is acceptable.
-To be truly awesome and retain gamers, more personal choices should carry through to following games than not - for example how necessary was it to force Zevran in DA2 for players who killed him?

Modifié par Pygmali0n, 09 novembre 2011 - 04:45 .

[LobselVith8]

Shazzie wrote...

Personal preference.

Me? I do not want my character - my character, my in-game avatar, being run by me to surprise me with what she says. I am the one deciding what she says, and picking a senseless paraphrase - or even worse, going by the icon alone - is not me deciding what my character says. How can it be, if I'm not shown what she's going to say? No, the shoddy paraphrasing is me picking a tone and wildly guessing what she will say and crossing my fingers that I won't be so ticked off about it that I reload a quicksave.

I want to play a role-playing game, where I take on a role, where I make the choices. All of the choices, even the infinitesimal ones. I want to be in my character's head and making her decisions, not watching an interactive movie.

Personal preference. But my preference is to know what the heck my in-game avatar is going to say. After I've chosen exactly what she will say, I could hardly care less if she speaks it. (Yeah, I'm one of those that doesn't care about PC voice.) If she does speak it, I'll be quite interested in seeing her delivery, and hoping it's close to how I envisioned it. If she nails it, I'll be thrilled. If she doesn't nail it, I'll at least know that she said what I wanted her to say, even if she didn't say it how I wanted her to say it. But if the line was a funny one, and I picked the funny one, and then she nailed it? You bet your ass I'll be laughing - twice. And the second time will be even more gleeful than the first.

I feel the same way. I'm not a fan of paraphrasing.

[esper]

Pygmali0n wrote...

Perfect solution for Bioware if they want to keep rpg fans buying DA games and expand appeal to different gamers then (btw more sales means more work, not less)...

-Lines of dialogue and choice is the basis of the system
-All main character lines are voiced, but this voice can be turned off
-People who like an extra element of surprise can paraphrase
-People who like paraphrasing but are in a rush can just choose the mood by colour
-Button awesome fans can choose a character type at the start and skip all in-game dialogue choices
-Players can choose to follow the dev's preferred canon storyline. This is default for button awesome people
-This should not mean that there is no real choice and no real or cool content outside of canon choices. Origins-level of choice is acceptable.
-To be truly awesome and retain gamers, more personal choices should carry through to following games than not - for example how necessary was it to force Zevran in DA2 for players who killed him?

Zev... is a bug. He is not suppossed to show up. Only leliana and Anders defies their death in da2 and Anders can't be killed on screen in da:a.  

[bEVEsthda]

Didn't bother with this thread for awhile, because even the title disgust me.
I'm all with Pygmali0n on this.
I do get that a lot of you others think this is good stuff. My reaction just have to be that you all want to watch a movie, or a novel, not play a cRPG. You approach games from a completely different direction than many of us others. This is often apparent in other disagreements on DA2 as well.

I don't know how viable you are as a game market for Bioware. Looking back, previous attempts to make games like movies have not done well. But then, the market in those days were much people like me. And maybe there is a new generation now that wants this? All I can feel is a great disappointment, tiredness, sadness.

[Sylvius the Mad]

StanojeZ wrote...

Or as dramatic, or as sad.

That's why paraphrasing dialoge choices is better than writing them out fully - it undercuts the actual delivery, which is where the emotion happens. No paraphrasing means no surprise. And without surprise, there won't be a lot of humor.

I don't deny that for people who enjoy listening to the voice-acting, the paraphrase may well offer significant benefits that more than balance its obvious costs.

However, those of us who think the voice is entirely unnecessary, or worse, a barrier to be overcome, the paraphrasing has no upside at all.  Players who don't want a voiced protagonist see no benefit from the paraphrasing, but still must suffer through the uncertainty it creates.

[Malanek]

If it is supposed to be your character, you don't want to be surprised at what is said.

[Firky]

I'd say (at least) my top 3 most evocative games had no voices at all. Like, possibly not even NPCs, or only partially voiced. I just finished a horrendously evocative game which was text only. It had exactly no cinematics and not a single modern generation facial expression, etc. What do they even call that?

These days I'm actually finding voice actors to be more and more immersion breaking. Like, Fenris sounds just like a presenter on a TV childrens show when I was growing up. I couldn't shake the feeling that choosing the heart was actually very wrong.

I'd like RPGs to go back to having no voice actors, actually. Or, I don't know what it was about Origins, but it didn't bother me there. Maybe it was more understated, less dramatic. Maybe not having the PC voiced helped. I don't know.

PS. Whoops. I did have a reply to the OP, then got distracted by something in here, and went on a little voice actor rant. What I meant to say was that I often find things in games funnier, not if I can read them in advance, but if they are written. I seem to be used to reading in RPGs a lot faster than DA's dialogue was progressing. I think it detracted from being funny. (And I can recall laughing at a few lines the PC said in Origins which had no delivery.)

Modifié par Firky, 10 novembre 2011 - 03:55 .

[Anomaly-]

StanojeZ wrote...

It's not just about surprise, or humor.

It's seeing the delivery and the full context of the line. That will always be superior to reading the line in advance, and in isolation, and only then seeing it delivered and other characters reacting to it.

Context + delivery = awesome.

When talking about a game that isn't an RPG, or a character that isn't supposed to be your own, perhaps. Unfortunately, the delivery in particular killed it for me more often than not.

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
However, those of us who think the voice is entirely unnecessary, or worse, a barrier to be overcome, the paraphrasing has no upside at all.  Players who don't want a voiced protagonist see no benefit from the paraphrasing, but still must suffer through the uncertainty it creates.

Also, that.

Modifié par Anomaly-, 10 novembre 2011 - 05:37 .

[SkittlesKat96]

I think Bioware can still prove to us that paraphrasing can be cinematic AND give us role playing value...but we'll see. Good point OP.

[Zubie]

bEVEsthda wrote...

Didn't bother with this thread for awhile, because even the title disgust me.
I'm all with Pygmali0n on this.
I do get that a lot of you others think this is good stuff. My reaction just have to be that you all want to watch a movie, or a novel, not play a cRPG. You approach games from a completely different direction than many of us others. This is often apparent in other disagreements on DA2 as well.

I don't know how viable you are as a game market for Bioware. Looking back, previous attempts to make games like movies have not done well. But then, the market in those days were much people like me. And maybe there is a new generation now that wants this? All I can feel is a great disappointment, tiredness, sadness.

My thoughts exactly