aldien wrote...
eroeru wrote...
Staarbux wrote...
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What what? That is some major double talk backslash with a twist of lemon. No... DA2 doesn't abhor creativity because that would imply you understand, without predjudice, exactly what the creators of DA2 emotionally had in mind. Also, it would suggest that no one could use their imagination if words and voice were mixed.
Well... there are no mind readers on planet Earth as far as I know. You can still have the internal dialogue even if stated by a female/male va. She, perhaps he (that's debatable) just happens to deliver the lines better than what most of us hear in our minds. I guess we get jealous.
What is pragmatic about a sarcastic Hawke? Nothing. Pragmatism is out the door on this one. But a mix of cinematic and traditional might be a good compromise for the new generation of rpg fans and the old. To dismiss it entirely is to say you have all the answers. No one does.
Human psychology has already decided that speaking is less communicative than body language. Tonal inflection would definitely be understood on a higher cognitive level than emotionless words. Some people prefer voice and other prefer to read words. I suspect these two are at odds, like apples and oranges, but the idea to mix the two should not be dismissed because one prefers the other.
Aah, yes, sorry for the encrypted-like reply.
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(edit)
The main thing I argued for in the previous post was that pragmatics' in others' responses are insignificant in giving the protagonist's lines firm meaning - thus it isn't Origins' "fault" as was claimed - and this position of course helps and is helped in turn by my overall stance on things, which I draw out in this current post.
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I was talking about pragmatics as in communication or maybe information studies, not pragmatism. When a person responds to another in a way that "works normally" that's "good" pragmatics. When playing Hawke you get only good pragmatics for the whole situation, including the acting of the protagonist - and none of the choice and creating of character - that's my stance, and I believe the reason for one of the more crucial differences in the two games.
This is because you don't get the previously common perspective of giving the character intent, meaning AND tone yourself. If meaning is only in the level of quite common 3-way pragmatics, and no possibilities of near-infinite protagonist-interpretation are even possible, if you don't get to choose intent nor tone in a significant way, then all that's good in DA:O dialogue is gone. You cannot play AS the character as well with mostly predefined intent (which follows from the 100% predefined tone). Thus creativity in creating meaning is abhorred. If it were only the reactions (on a level of pragmatics'), like in Origins, then you do not play ANOTHER character, but you yourself can think up one.
So giving tone to the character in a Bioware game is a no-go for me.
Surely there is preferrence at play - but only on the level of "enjoying someone else's story" vs "enjoying your own".
PS even if I do sometimes enjoy "someone else's story" in RPG's (The Witcher for example), it's all that you get nowadays - that's a bit sad and frustrating. I loved older Bioware for their previous trademark system - and there's much reason to that - this is the always underlying point of my posts, against posts that (falsely) need to prove the opposite. The system was not simply constrained by technical possibilities, it had and still has many merits that are impossible without silent PC. And if Bioware will scrap their legacy entirely and erase from their games' dialogue that they really excelled in (which was imo giving the player a blank yet interesting character to mess with), that's not entirely ok.
What's more, I didn't enjoy DA2 even in the aspect of "someone else's story". It's probably because I cannot relate to the snarky/aggressive/boring type so much as for example Geralt, nor believe in the character-types as much (Geralt had the sort of angsty yet calm/intelligent thing going on that goes well with so-called dark fantasy, Hawke didn't go well with the setting at all, and made it even worse, imo). I always had the impression from previous games that the protagonist and the world that responds to him were not so unprobable and... simple (I do think Bioware has come the intristically awful direction of simplicity=good, from some money-making reason alone - as I cannot imagine anyone truly loving creating games with less abundant "life" and content to them).
triple-edit: in order to make the voiced system work almost as well, you'd need to have the most commonly liked and "used" character types. I'd say there's hundreds if not thousands - but if you're optimistic, you could say 10 (at least). In order to have ONE character my type of player enjoys you need one of these (insufficiently explained with one-word descriptions but oh well): 1. an intelligent character with quirks (e.g. flegmatic intelligent, excentric intelligent, stern intelligent or empathetic intelligent etc - I have many more types and shades I've played in BW games), 2. angsty yet calm, with compassion and purpose - yet he has grown weary to the ways of the world (Geralt), 3. mad-man or evil character.
There are loads of others, and this is why I think the project of BW with voice has failed from the start-go - but I did think it would be important to name a few character-types I would actually enjoy (as opposed to DA2 protagonist-types).
With voice I cannot feel them my own, but I think "realating to the main character" (as we cannot have "creating and being one" significantly if with VO) should also be even if only a bit enjoyable.
Modifié par eroeru, 14 juillet 2012 - 03:00 .
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