3 réponses à ce sujet

[GmanFresh]

i get why they were hard to implement in game for the player but why not in cutscenes ie ostagar charge. would have made the game more epic.....cavalry>dog charge

[David Gaider]

There are horses in Ferelden.

There are no horses in the game because we had time for a limited number of models, and engineering a way for NPC models to ride horses when we weren't going to use it for PC models seemed like a waste -- as nice as it would have been, yes. Loghain's men were supposed to be cavalry originally, for instance, and a charge on Denerim at the end would have been cool (even if a tad Helm's Deep-ish, I suppose). But such is how it goes.

[David Gaider]

Atmosfear3 wrote...
To be honest, the more responses I read from Bioware staff regarding things they could have done just sounds to me like the game was rushed.  What ever happened to releasing games when they are DONE?

There's always things that are cut, from every game. I could write a litany of things that were cut from BG2 or KotOR or NWN that would break your heart. Why it would break your heart, however, is because you imagine the perfect thing it could have been rather than what it probably would have ended up as -- or you can't imagine what we ended up doing that we would have had to do differently (or not at all) if we had forged ahead with the thing we cut.

The reality for any game development, from any company, is that cuts are necessary. There comes a point where you have to finish a game, even though there's always ten more things on that list that you'd really really kinda want to include. "But couldn't we just...?" "But it would just take a little bit...?" That's how you get feature creep, and buggy games that get harder and harder to test because they're never feature complete. It's the lesson that modders rarely learn, and why so many big mod projects end up three-quarters done and then abandoned.

The game *is* done. And pretty polished, considering the monumental effort that went into it, if I do say so myself. It's always going to seem rushed if you're aware of all the things (the very normal things) that we had to cut -- usually with much teeth-gnashing and heavy hearts -- just to get it done. The alternative, I suppose, is simply never to speak of these things in public so that fans don't end up wistfully wondering about what might have been. "What might have been" is a pipe dream.

[David Gaider]

Kileyan wrote...
Devs: Sorry, the want for these features was unexpected, we don' t have the time or the technology in place to add those features in. Maybe post release!
 

I know you said this doesn't apply specifically to DA, but I'll point out that you're misrepresenting our position there.

The want for those features is not unexpected. But the fact that people want these things does not translate into them being cheap -- especially when they don't align with the goal of the game we're making. Should we make an RPG focused around riding horses? Maybe you think we should... but if we aren't, where does that leave plans for mounts? As soon as you have mounts you have the need for wide open spaces in which to use them, as well as plots where they are important. You need to consider what happens to the mounts when you're in spaces where they aren't used, how they affect combat, how your party members use them and pathfind with them (unless you don't have a party, at which point that's not an issue). Regardless, it is not a trivial feature. It's something that's going to need to be taken into consideration at every level of design in the game.

Maybe you really think we should do that even so. We don't, but us not thinking that it's worth the resources it would take is not the same as us saying, "gee we didn't know anybody wanted it. Maybe next time!"

Insofar as ambient horses go -- we could have done that, yes. The only objection to that idea is the kind of short-sighted attitude that would lead people to go, "Well you have horses in the game already! Geez, what's the problem with letting us ride them?!" It's like dangling that carrot in front of them and then snatching it away. Most people, after all, don't consider the fact that putting a character on a horse model is not a matter of simply picking the model up and dropping it on their back. Naturally mounted models can be done -- it's not a question of technology. It's a question of benefit for the time spent. One can compare horses to ambient chickens if they like, but that's sort of missing the point.