7 réponses à ce sujet

[jds1bio]

After I played through the EC of ME3 with my "main" trilogy-hardened Shepard, I couldn't help but feel a bit jealous of myself.

Why?

Because I'll never get to play through that kind of ending with Hawke.  An ending that at least provides some indication towards answering "what happened to the people I spent 7-10 years in Kirkwall with?"  And I don't mean the outcome of mages vs. templars.

And it doesn't have to be so explictly spelled out.  I'd gladly take animated slides of...say...Fenris pouring drinks, or Knight-Captain Cullen watching things unfold in the streets, or the "in memoriam" clips.  Depending on the way Hawke treated some people, and the final choice Hawke makes, does the supporting cast revere or revile him/her?  I know that the final battle gives some indication of this, depending on who shows up to assist, but that only demonstrates that some of the supporting logic is already in use in the game.  (I was impressed by the picture of the ME3 EC logic graph)

And given the journey taken by Hawke's family, there are certainly some residual feelings that could be acknowledged, without having to interfere with setting up or giving away what's coming next for the Dragon Age universe.

If BioWare decided to do this as part of any current or future Dragon Age efforts, that would be a welcome surprise.

[Allan Schumacher]

The whole studio has definitely taken notice on the reaction to the ME3 endings, so looking forward I think that there are some lessons learned from it and DA2.

If you're asking for additional content for DA2, I guess nothing is for certain, but IIRC Mark Darrah made a comment about how we were moving forward to other projects with the cancellation of the expansion pack we were working on.

It sucks if you'd like more answers, but I certainly wouldn't count on it if you're anxiously waiting for more.

[Allan Schumacher]

A significant portion of the ME3 ending criticism came from lack of epilogue.

[Allan Schumacher]

bEVEsthda wrote...

Allan Schumacher wrote...

A significant portion of the ME3 ending criticism came from lack of epilogue.

So now you have satisfied a "significant portion" of your ME audience. Good for you. Congratulations.

Snarkyness aside, the point was brought up that perhaps you're the outlier in terms of what gamers expect from their epilogues?

I do actually, never once did I see someone complain about the
presence of an epilogue. You're the only one, and you haven't actually
stated reasons for why you don't like them. And I don;t think there have
been any epilogues that say what happens "years and years later"

I have seen people complain about epilogues when they talk about what the player character does after.  I think it's a reasonable complaint too.

I think in general they are typically well received as they provide another way (often with low cost too) to provide reactivity to the gamer's choices.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 30 juin 2012 - 05:50 .

[Allan Schumacher]

JennDragonAge wrote...

Allan Schumacher wrote...

The whole studio has definitely taken notice on the reaction to the ME3 endings, so looking forward I think that there are some lessons learned from it and DA2.

If you're asking for additional content for DA2, I guess nothing is for certain, but IIRC Mark Darrah made a comment about how we were moving forward to other projects with the cancellation of the expansion pack we were working on.

It sucks if you'd like more answers, but I certainly wouldn't count on it if you're anxiously waiting for more.

i'm afraid Bioware feels they've been burned with the whole choices thing in the ME universe, so they are going to move away from it. I hope that's not the case because I think the fact that choices are supposed to carry over throughout the ME and DA games are one of the coolest aspects about them. I realize it has likely been more difficult to carry out than envisioned, but I feel they handled it brilliantly in some aspects of ME such as Ashley/Kaiden and Wrex/Wreav. Granted some areas did not come across as well (rachnii decision). I think the "carry over" from DAO to DA2 was minimal and not handled quite as well. If someone dies for one person, that person should remain dead in their world. I feel the reason protagonists are changing with the DA series is likely because it makes the choices thing easier to handle since they don't have to be addressed directly. While I would prefer to personally close up the Warden and Hawke's storylines myself, I realize that is not going to happen. At the same time, I truly hope that their storylines are at least tied up at some point in the franchise with some hint as to how our choices affected the outcomes. Their fates could either be discussed by other characters or be shown through cutscenes in future games set within the world.

When you say choices, I gather you more mean the "bigger choices" that would have repercussions beyond a single game?  (i.e. choices that would get imported or something along those lines)?

[Allan Schumacher]

Maybe the endings should be constructed first off and made playable, so that a) a climax exists that is not originated from time/budget pressures, and so that the rest of the journey can be developed in perspective to what that ending (and its final presentation to the player) will represent.

This was actually a part of our design for the expansion pack. We had some interesting ideas for the ending and we realized we needed to get some proof of concept stuff on it to know how viable it was. This would also mean properly playing the end sequence early in production. Games aren't built entirely linearly, though they do seem to get iterated on that way due to the nature of how games play.

Stuff earlier in the game has a greater chance of being seen (also in part because less permutations in choice happen), and iteration is very valuable in polishing a product. I definitely feel that Act 1 was DA2's strongest act and I'd say iteration time is a large part of that.


As QA, a real challenging thing for us is testing later game content in a viable way. Testing tools can help, but often require a high degree of maintenance or expertise to use (example below). Simply warping to various levels usually results in an invalid plot state, where decisions that must have occurred simply haven't. Debug scripts can be written to help set those plot states but if design ends up changing some plot names or plots are cut, moved, whatever, then the scripts need to be updated. And when it's super busy those things often fall by the wayside. The alternative of course, is playing the game quickly from the start.

We are working on tools that have more direct access to the plot flags for ease of manipulation (and just ease of tracking) so hopefully we can make the workflow a bit easier for all of the QA testers so we can balance out our iterations throughout the whole game, and hopefully it helps produce a higher quality product.


As a script maintenance example: We had a script in DAO that simply killed all the hostiles. Just made them dead. Pretty much called a function in game that was .kill(). Problem with that in DA2, was that some of the fights were structured differently (Meredith is the easiest one). Just outright killing her at the beginning breaks the game as the progression of the fight doesn't occur. There are other instances where this cause an issue (often if a conversation/cutscene is required right after a fight). So now our script isn't working properly. Oh noes! Burnthrough requires this script too! So now we have to update it, which required allocating some time to it, and ultimately we changed it to just do ridiculous amounts of damage. It more accurately simulated what the player dead in the game (kill creatures by causing damage), rather than something unique (programmatically calling kill commands).


Hey about that. I actually contributed something!

[Allan Schumacher]

Regardless, do you think engine design like this, where game design itself is focused on, making the creation process as seemless as possible, would be a boon as someone who works in the video game industry?

Engine design to accommodate the content creation process is always the goal, and making the creation process as easy as possible for the designers is pretty much our goal for any sort of Tools. The entire idea behind them comes from the idea that not every creative person knows how to program. I don't follow engine development, but if UE4 has good improvements to this then that's only a good thing for content devs.

First off, I get what you're saying that having more iterations on parts of the game make those parts stronger. Citing Act 1 of DA2, however, wasn't exactly a good example, Act 2 was stronger IMO.

I see this has came up a lot. I'm not restricting my comments about being a "stronger" act purely based on how interesting or subjectively good the content is, but also on whether or not there's issues with the content, as well as the amount of content.

Now, everyone is going to have different experiences (I rarely had issues with bugs in FONV at release, and it's considered one of the buggier games on release in recent history), so your mileage may vary. But in my experiences with the game as it went through certification (essentially the game is done) is that I feel there's more obvious issues with the game in the later acts, from a purely technical point of view.

Evidently not everyone agrees

[Allan Schumacher]

Wulfram wrote...

Even David Gaider said "I think the second chapter in DA2 had the most work done on it so it was the most polished".

Which I guess just shows how it depends on your perspective.

Fair enough.

I was working on an Autobot that would automatically play the game for the DA2XP, and I was using the original campaign for DA2 as a testbed for it.  It was able to get through Act 1 without much issue, but it started to really struggle and needed a lot of manual support come Act 2.

Though it's fair that different aspects of the game saw different amounts of detail, so what I saw and what David saw were two different layers of the same thing.  I don't test content specifically, so those sorts of things are difficult for me to judge iteration on.