311 réponses à ce sujet

[AkiKishi]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
I knew TNO's personality before I started playing the game, so how he responded to any stimulus was based on that established personality.

As I said that is not possible because he has amnesia. While you appear to like PST you seem to ignore the two things that PST is based on.

1. Having no memories and recovering them.
2. Atoning for the crimes of past lives or finding some other way out (suicide). In the end no matter how much of a nice guy you are in PST you are doomed to the blood wars for past sins.

[Sylvius the Mad]

BobSmith101 wrote...

As I said that is not possible because he has amnesia. While you appear to like PST you seem to ignore the two things that PST is based on.

I think you're granting those things unnecessary weight.

1. Having no memories and recovering them.

Those memories don't necessarily tell you anything about who TNO is.  They tell you about who TNO was.  Any similiarty between those two people is entirely up to you.

You and I might disagree about how identity works, but surely you realise that your position has no more logical basis than mine.

2. Atoning for the crimes of past lives or finding some other way out (suicide). In the end no matter how much of a nice guy you are in PST you are doomed to the blood wars for past sins.

Because TNO did do those things.  There are cosmic rules TNO must follow.  But again, that has no necessary bearing on what sort of person TNO is during the run of gameplay.

I suspect you think that someone's behaviour tells us about his nature, and that that nature is immutable.  That's the only explanation I can come up with for your position.  Am I close?

Modifié par Sylvius the Mad, 13 juin 2012 - 06:55 .

[Das Tentakel]

BobSmith101 wrote...

Does anyone know what the engine is actually good at ? The thing that occurs to me, is that it's a lot easier to write a story around what your engine does well. Rather than trying to make the engine do something that shows off it's weaknesses.

You see it very clearly in ME3 opening level, everything you could show off poorly is in that level.

Andersons dire animation
The obvious scripted nature of events (move a bit and ship blows up, never more and it never does)
2d sprites if you look down and watch the crab people running.
Linear with a backdrop

Not the greatest first impression. Once you get into the old box room and corridor levels things are much better. London is just dire.

Personally I have no idea what the DA engine is good at, but I think it was DevSin who once pointed out that it’s good at scripting. And that’s a good thing for the devs I suppose, relatively poor graphics (and other issues) notwithstanding.

Mass Effect uses another engine by the way (though it might be that DA and ME share some software tools? I don’t know).

But I think you are right about making a game that uses your engine’s strengths and avoids its weaknesses, and vice versa. There’s probably a good reason why CDProjekt and Larian both made their own engine. They found the ones they used for respectively The Witcher I (Aurora engine licensed from BioWare, though apparently heavily modded) and Dragon Knight Saga (Gamebryo) not really suitable for what they wanted to do.
And I gathered from interviews and blogs that they found out the hard way while developing The Witcher and DKS.

Part of it may be due to lack of resources (manpower, money, time), but I have a strong impression that the DA engine sometimes fails abysmally, or is simply incapable, of doing what the game and the setting demand it should do.

A lot of game engines have problems of course. In Oblivion and Age of Conan, view distances can be very large, but the engine is not capable of showing distant landscapes realistically. Or at least not without considerable additional modifications.

The DA engine’s ‘problems’ (if you can call it that) seem to have to do with creating a relatively ‘open’ and ‘dynamic’ setting. Compared to almost the entire (western) competition from the last 6 or 7 years (both single-player RPG’s and MMORPG’s) DA areas are cramped, visually underwhelming and extremely static. It is almost as if it’s a ’dungeon engine’, rather than a ’world engine’. And heavily scripted, linear dungeons at that.

I haven’t really played Mass Effect I and II much (I do own them for Xbox), but I do know that Dutch reviewers have commented that these games (ME3 too) are very much ‘gangetje-gangetje’ games, basically meaning ‘corridor shooters’, though sometimes background cinematics etc. can hide this fact somewhat.
So, basically, linear dungeons with guns rather than swords.

That is actually rather archaic in my view, though there is a (large-ish) place in the videogame market for graphically gorgeous, highly linear, tightly scripted games with expensive cinematics I suppose.

(not my cup of tea, 15 minutes of Uncharted II were enough to make me decide that I’ve had it with linear dungeons, no matter how gorgeous, thank you very much. The packaging has been improved and it’s slicker than Slick submerged in olive oil with some extra lubricants with added slickness and some snake oil salesman and politician DNA thrown in for good measure, but it’s basically the same stuff I played well over a decade ago, thank you very much)

[daffl5]

i think its a great idea! the only fault i found in origins was minimal exploration and small maps.

[RussianSpy27]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

I'd rather a 30 hour game with 30 hours of interesting content than a 60 hour game with 30 hours of interesting content.

To take an example of my favourite game, Planescape Torment had very mediocre combat elements which in many cases just prevented me from experiencing what it was I wanted to experience (the kickass writing). I remember using Annah to literally sneak through entire levels (especially places like Baator) because I just founds those elements less interesting.

Agreed 100%, though I must note that DA:O ended up being a unique exception of 60 hours of interesting content.

[bEVEsthda]

There was a time when I saw the ideal development roads, for TES and Bioware's storydriven games, were to converge into two different games. A TES that manages to put so much AI into NPC personality engines that the definition of relations and communications approach Bioware's quality. And a Bioware story set into a sandbox-lite world.

I've kinda given up that. Mostly because I think Bioware have moved themselves away from this, with their movies and their more and  more fixed and set characters and stories. This is their great weakness. They've set themself on a dead-end path towards an interactive movie-story type of game, which is definitely not compatible with any cRPG-future that would be interesting to me. To me it also looks like a cul-de-sac. Where do they go from there? How would they evolve? Like they're trying now? - Better movies, better acting? More "fun"  combat? - How utterly useless!

(I've played some Max Payne 3 lately, and despite a soft spot for MP - gawd how much these long movies, and sudden shooting galley intervals, annoy me. The entire video game industry have gone mad. So much money to make games so dumbed down and passive? Who are these pan-industry gurus and consultants, that have convinced everybody that video-games should be like this?  It's said that this $60 part of the gaming industry is in problems. It sure isn't hard to figure out why. If this cinematics {like ME, DA2 and MP3} is what they figure goes for "good" games, then the industry deserves to die. Good riddance. I'll just build model ships instead.)

I could always be totally wrong though. Bioware could surprise me. They could redefine cinematics to be something about ambient. They could make their characters into something more customizable and roleplayable. Never stop hoping, like, at least not until they're shut down by EA.

Modifié par bEVEsthda, 15 juillet 2012 - 11:03 .

[Nightdragon8]

they culd always switch over to the Unreal engine,

they have used 2 so far, in DAO its the elicps engine, in DA2 its the Lyrical which is based on Infinity engine they developed.

Mass effect/2/3 used Unreal engine.

Just because they have both have dialogue wheels doesn't mean its the same engine.

As for a skyrim like game for DA3... I wouldn't say no to it, but they need to do it a different way, at least with different terrian, Green jungle like stuff is ok

But at the bare minium it needs to be like DA:O more cause while it was intresting to stay ina city for 10 years... nothign much changed, I mean heck they din't even do anything with the that one section in a few years time, sorry in a city like that it would be at least a shanty shack town in a year.

and for god PLZ make it easy to mod, the longity of a game is in its Modder comunity. I'm still playing skyrim with different mods and stuff.

And while I think the modders will fix it anyway. Add more hairstyles. plz... the genaric 10 just doesn't cut it anymore in any game.

[Cimeas]

No, Skyrim was full of copy paste caves and boring scenery. Without mods texture resolution and draw distance are weak, animations are miserable and though it has many quests, the vast majority are boring fetch and kill quests.

Give use more locations. They can be small. For example, ME2 had 4 hubs (Ilium, Citadel Wards, Tuchanka and Omega) and even though each was small, they were very well designed and had enough content to make the worlds feel alive and interesting. It felt like 'Omega and Ilium were part of a huge city, I didn't NEED to explore all of them.

A little bigger sure wouldn't hurt, and it would be nice, if they did a city with multiple districts, to stitch them together into one big map, but apart from that, we need MORE areas, not bigger ones.

[wowpwnslol]

A big NO to outdoor exploration. If I wanted to play a meaningless game that goes nowhere, I would play any of the Bethesda titles like Skyrim, Oblivion and Fallout. Keep the exploration nonsense out of Bioware RPGs and focus on story, action and player influenced choices. Playing a single player MMO is not my idea of a good RPG game, neither is having to walk for 20 minutes to reach a new area. Skyrim was so tedious that I was reduced to murdering random animals I encountered because I was so bored and annoyed. Talk about artificially lenghtening your game... Pathetic.

[Cimeas]

wowpwnslol wrote...

A big NO to outdoor exploration. If I wanted to play a meaningless game that goes nowhere, I would play any of the Bethesda titles like Skyrim, Oblivion and Fallout. Keep the exploration nonsense out of Bioware RPGs and focus on story, action and player influenced choices. Playing a single player MMO is not my idea of a good RPG game, neither is having to walk for 20 minutes to reach a new area. Skyrim was so tedious that I was reduced to murdering random animals I encountered because I was so bored and annoyed. Talk about artificially lenghtening your game... Pathetic.

I shall wholeheartedly agree with this statement. 

[RobertRBest]

What does any of this have to do with the dialogue wheel? That's what this thread was about, right?

Modifié par RobertRBest, 16 juillet 2012 - 01:05 .

[Sylvius the Mad]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

Random generation isn't out of the question. Though IMO it works better for dungeon crawler type games.

I think 3D can pose some restrictions on random level creation. Or really, the engine itself. But I'm no engine guru so I'm mostly just speculating based on what I've seen about random level generation from the old 2D tile generation going forward. I think that randomizing the content within the level is a bit easier, in my experience, however.

Didn't the NWN premium module Infinite Dungeons feature randomly generated levels?  That was 3D.

[Sylvius the Mad]

I lost this thread for a bit.

simfamSP wrote...

The reasons behind any of it were denied him.

You mean motives? Well, thats the problem with voiced protagonists. In the Witcher 2 (and ME2) there were at times where the player was asked "why are you doing this?" But ultimatley, your motives are kept to your mind to figure out.

Even in other games like KOTOR and Baldur's Gate II this was the case. Motives have almost always been up to the player to decide to there are just to many of them to write down in paper.

Giving the player motives to voice would be very limiting in the development of your character. The devs wouldn't be able to think of all of them.

My concern isn't that the voiced protagonist won't make his motives clear, but that he will.  Hawke behaves in a way that contradicts the motives I've already assigned him  He might do it hours later in an unrelated conversation, because I'm not able to choose his words and actions with sufficient precision to avoid those contradictions.

Modifié par Sylvius the Mad, 16 juillet 2012 - 01:12 .

[Sylvius the Mad]

Cimeas wrote...

wowpwnslol wrote...

A big NO to outdoor exploration. If I wanted to play a meaningless game that goes nowhere, I would play any of the Bethesda titles like Skyrim, Oblivion and Fallout. Keep the exploration nonsense out of Bioware RPGs and focus on story, action and player influenced choices. Playing a single player MMO is not my idea of a good RPG game, neither is having to walk for 20 minutes to reach a new area. Skyrim was so tedious that I was reduced to murdering random animals I encountered because I was so bored and annoyed. Talk about artificially lenghtening your game... Pathetic.

I shall wholeheartedly agree with this statement. 

But wouldn't the game world feel more real if the available paths didn't only lead to the places you'd alrady been told to visit?  Why does a dungeon with a quest object at the bottom not exist (or is inexplicably locked) until someone has told you about that quest?  Wouldn't you rather be able to find the quest item first and not know what it's for?  That would make the setting much more credible, I think.

Starting with BG2, BiOWare started limiting our access to the game world to fit their narrative, and it's been a mistake every step of the way.  NWN briefly reversed this trend by letting us find quest items out of order, but DA2 is probably their most extreme example of only letting us go to the places they've explicitly told us to visit.

The world feels less real (and more game-y) when its reality is so closely tied to game states.

[Everwarden]

The odds of Bioware creating a large outer world are very poor.

Bethesda is good at that, Bioware is good at lazily cutting/pasting caves. 

[Sylvius the Mad]

sjpelkessjpeler wrote...

Overall the 'game-style' of TES and DA are not compareble. The first is a 'one PC' game while DA has a PC with a group of companions that are tied to the story in the game and you constantly battle as a team.
TES is sandbox, DA has smaller areas that can be explored.

I agree that DA2 felt less real and very game-y in the fact that there was no means of entering areas that were not opened because you could only get there when you accepted a quest. Also the area was mostly closed after finishing it. (Suppose this also had to do with the recycled areas that were used overall.) But being able to enter all possible areas within an allready accesible map would really increase the exploration feel even if later on in the game quest related persons or items are present.

I like the idea that the PC can find quests himself by finding a quest item f.e. This was done for the quest in DA that involved looking for a missing wife/leaflet on a pillar in high town. Makes the questing more interesting if own initiative is acquired instead of getting it handed over all the time.

Exactly.  BioWare's games can offer vastly more exploration content than DA2 did without going anywhere near full-TES.

While I love the exploration in TES games, there are many other aspects of the games I don't like.  I don't like the action combat.  I don't like the lack of a party.  I don't like the shallowness of the settings overall (the new Fallout games mostly don't suffer from that last one - Bethesda might be learning).  BioWare is better at all of those things, but they've been moving away from exploration.

Modifié par Sylvius the Mad, 16 juillet 2012 - 07:37 .

[Plaintiff]

Everwarden wrote...

The odds of Bioware creating a large outer world are very poor.

Bethesda is good at that, Bioware is good at lazily cutting/pasting caves. 

Because Skyrim doesn't re-use design elements at all?

To answer the main question posited at the beginning of the thread, I like sandbox style exploration in concept, but the reality is that, when implemented, it's a tradeoff between an expansive world, or decent story and characters.

Being bigger doesn't make Skyrim feel anymore real. It's a shallow world, populated with cardboard cutouts who can only say the same five phrases over and over again. I don't see the value of having unlimited freedom if your odds of finding anything interesting or worthwhile are so low.

DA's 'map' style of travel does the job just fine. Storytelling is Bioware's strength, and that's what they should play to. I think there's a decent enough amount of independent exploration for what we get. Even in DA:O, exploration was quite limited, with paths branching only very slightly most of the time, but at least the reward was proportional to the exploration required.

I think a happy medium could be found, however. Deus Ex: HR and the Assassin's Creed series have limited sandbox exploration, and DE:HR in particular has the player travel between major areas via cutscenes. The worlds aren't as large as Skyrim, but they manage to pack in a lot, exploration is fun for its own sake, and they feel genuinely alive.

Bioware doesn't need to incorporate free-running or vent-crawling necessarily, but areas like Redcliffe and Denrim and the different sections of Kirkwall would've been pretty awesome if you could climb a ladder and walk from rooftop to rooftop and maybe find a new way to bust into the Chantry.

Modifié par Plaintiff, 16 juillet 2012 - 08:39 .

[AkiKishi]

sjpelkessjpeler wrote...

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Exactly.  BioWare's games can offer vastly more exploration content than DA2 did without going anywhere near full-TES.

While I love the exploration in TES games, there are many other aspects of the games I don't like.  I don't like the action combat.  I don't like the lack of a party.  I don't like the shallowness of the settings overall (the new Fallout games mostly don't suffer from that last one - Bethesda might be learning).  BioWare is better at all of those things, but they've been moving away from exploration.

TES and also The Witcher and a game like Divine Divinity I enjoy for being the game they are. The differences between the games is what appeals and what makes them interesting to play.

Sometimes it seems like the gaming industry is going the same way like the car industry; certain models in their line all look alike..

Differentiation between devellopers and having their own identity in regards to the games they make is a line that is becoming more vague I think. At least as far as DA is concerned when I look at DA2.

Exploration is something though that is very important for me. It's a part of being in control of the game to some extend; I can do it without the game wanting me to do it. The game has to give me the opportunity to do it though which lacked in DA2 very much imho.

Technology will often drive design in the same direction. If you want to compete then you need to be competative.
DA has gone that route. Take ME and try to apply it in a fantasy game. Had DA2 proved succesful Hawke would no doubt have cropped up again as the character.

If you want innovation  you find it on handhelds. Or you calve out a niche and don't worry too much about the numbers like Nippon Ichi/Atlas.

[bEVEsthda]

I don't really think 'exploration' is the big point of TES. I've said this before and I say it again - it's the freedom and what that means for role-playing. Your character has to make decisions all the time. But those decisions are not multi-choice. They are real decisions from the ground up, from scratch.

And I can't really take criticism like "cardboard character that only have five things to say" seriously. It's not like random NPCs in DA, ME, or any other RPG at all has anything more to say. So I just take it as a comment from someone who maybe means something slightly different, but choose to describe it in a negative way, for reasons of bias.

But dialogue is not as developed and nuanced as in Bioware's games. It's functional. You have to pad it out yourself, in your head. And that is actually not so bad. When it comes to making NPCs in Bethesda's sandoxes more advanced, the primary thing I want is more functionality, not more emotional nuances of the same thing.

But when we do go to the subject of exploration, there is one reason, why I would have Bioware do it the TES sandbox style. Bioware games like KotOR, DA and ME, all provide exploration. Some of them quite a lot. But you also always know  that you have to  carefully search every nook and cranny, look into every compartment. You have to, or you'll miss something important.

In stark contrast to that, every experienced TES player knows to ignore nonsense like that, knows that it's futile to go around searching every barrel, and just focus on business at hand.
I quite prefer it that way.
TES has a similar solution to looting. I quite prefer that as well.
TES finally also provide a sense of journeying, which I enjoy a lot, but which has been mostly absent from Bioware games since BG2.

Modifié par bEVEsthda, 16 juillet 2012 - 05:41 .

[Cimeas]

bEVEsthda wrote...

I don't really think 'exploration' is the big point of TES. I've said this before and I say it again - it's the freedom and what that means for role-playing. Your character has to make decisions all the time. But those decisions are not multi-choice. They are real decisions from the ground up, from scratch.

And I can't really take criticism like "cardboard character that only have five things to say" seriously. It's not like random NPCs in DA, ME, or any other RPG at all has anything more to say. So I just take it as a comment from someone who maybe means something slightly different, but choose to describe it in a negative way, for reasons of bias.

But dialogue is not as developed and nuanced as in Bioware's games. It's functional. You have to pad it out yourself, in your head. And that is actually not so bad. When it comes to making NPCs in Bethesda's sandoxes more advanced, the primary thing I want is more functionality, not more emotional nuances of the same thing.

But when we do go to the subject of exploration, there is one reason, why I would have Bioware do it the TES sandbox style. Bioware games like KotOR, DA and ME, all provide exploration. Some of them quite a lot. But you also always know  that you have to  carefully search every nook and cranny, look into every compartment. You have to, or you'll miss something important.

In stark contrast to that, every experienced TES player knows to ignore nonsense like that, knows that it's futile to go around searching every barrel, and just focus on business at hand.
I quite prefer it that way.
TES has a similar solution to looting. I quite prefer that as well.
TES finally also provide a sense of journeying, which I enjoy a lot, but which has been mostly absent from Bioware games since BG2.

But the stories in TES are so boring.  So many quests are just 'kill that' or 'fetch this', even the main storyline has terrible voice acting and a lame plot.   Sure you can 'imagine' motivations etc.. to make the story more interesting, but that's lazy writing and shoddy game design.