68 réponses à ce sujet

[TastyLaksa]

Day night cycles are just annoying to be honest. The reason why they are not in games anymore is because the majority have spoken and they find it annoying too. Everyone just sleeps through the night anyway so why not assume you're only playing the game during the day cause rest of time you are in party camp sleeping?

[Korva]

Krigwin wrote...

But, short of making the game extremely linear like the Witcher, I really don't see any real ways to impose time limits, time/day cycles, proper time passage systems, NPC schedules, etc.

I disagree there, having played games which had any or all of these features and were still rather non-linear. Mostly in the "good old days", admittedly, such as the abovementioned Ultimas which also had far more in-depth conversations and NPC interactions than most other games.

I don't know if it's the increasing quality of and demand for pseudo 3D graphics that eats resources which could spent on making a more "interactive" game -- blaming graphics is always a favourite for those of us who want a more "alive" game rather than a "pretty" one but I'm not sure that's the only reason.

[Zem_]

NPC schedules and "organic" activity are a two-edged sword. Once you've implemented them, you only open yourself up to yet more complaining about immersion when they fail to act as realistically as someone might expect. I became sick to death of Oblivion's constant NPC chatter wherever I went. You're going to pass by people having conversations thousands of times during the course of a game. It's impossible they will have something new to say each time so you inevitably hear the same thing over and over and then go on a forum to complain about it. Like I said before, they really can't win and sometimes it's better to leave something up to the player's imagination rather than try to (poorly) approximate real-life activity.



It is exactly like a stage play. You put up those cardboard props knowing that everyone knows they are cardboard props and yet hoping they can imagine it's a farmhouse or something with cornfields and blue sky in the background.

[Zem_]

Korva wrote...
I don't know if it's the increasing quality of and demand for pseudo 3D graphics that eats resources which could spent on making a more "interactive" game -- blaming graphics is always a favourite for those of us who want a more "alive" game rather than a "pretty" one but I'm not sure that's the only reason.

I would point the finger more at voice acting than any other single feature.  I'm very happy with the excellent voice acting in DAO but it really does limit what they can do and how much content they can add.  We won't be seeing a new origin or new companion added via DLC, for example, because none of the other NPCs would interact with it as you'd have to haul them all back into the sound booth at great expense to record more dialogue.

Which by the way is again to my point. Voice acting is added to improve immersion and yet it also constrains the game.  We can look back fondly at all the complex character interaction and consequence of past games because it was all just manipulating text.    And no offense at all to Mr. Gaider but he and the other writers can probably turn out lines of dialogue much more cheaply than someone like Claudia Black or Tim Curry can speak them.

[Sir Ulrich Von Lichenstien]

Whilst I know to some people the OPs comments are a bit 'nitpicky', I have to agree to a certain respect and whilst not looked in the toolset properly myself, agree with Darpaek that it is a bit sad that there is no way even in mods for us to implement a day/night cycle of some sorts.

The one thing I think they really should have done though is fix the issue whereby if the PC (or person the Player is controlling) starts 'walking' rather than running, the rest of the party should follow suit. I imagine it might be hard to implement this but there are times when it really should be in there.

One perfect example is Howe's estate, your trying to blend in walking around just like the guards are and following you are 3 stuttering runners.

Yes I am nitpicking but it just seems wrong and breaks the immersion that we are trying to be subtle and acting as guards.

I understand why devs don't do it, because the question comes up of how far do you go. As someone earlier stated, if wanted to be truly immersive you end up with the situation whereby Denerim either gets attacked whilst your still running around in it or not only does it get attacked whilst you are out and about, but the darkspawn spreads even futher afield than it has so far.

Like when you look at the country map and you can see the big mark of where the darkspawn are apparently infesting. When I first played the game, I thought that if I went along that road by Lothering that it would almost guarantee a random encounter with darkspawn.

To all intents and purposes if what Morrigan says is true, there really wouldn't be a reason The Warden's party would go back to Ostagar just after leaving Lothering, but soon we'll be able to have that situation.

I guess it all comes down to taking things and ignoring some that would give a sense of disbelief/lack of realism.

Having said that, Luke Skywalker and party went into Imperial Central (the Death Star) and rescued a Princess and escaped. So if they can do it, we should be able to at Ostagar

[robertthebard]

For the flaws listed here, there must surely be lots of immersion. I will simply base this on all the love 'em/hate 'em threads regarding NPC's.

[Magic Zarim]

As far as I'm concerned, implementing a sense of time shouldn't need deadlines to do so, or hamper the player much. The Witcher uses a meditation system, where you click a campfire and then get a dial to set the time of the day you want to be in. In this mode you can brew potions too, or spend skillpoints. In Oblivion, you can invoke the wait command where you, likewise, can set the desired time. Neither game implies a deadline on a number of days. The cool thing you can do then is to have certain monsters appear at night, make streets empty apart from the occasional roaming brawler etc. Both games make equally well use of using time in this manner. It really adds.

[Nhani]

I'm not too fussed about the NPCs, really; I'd rather have them do nothing than having them fail to do something - in the former case I can just shrug and walk them by like you might any human in real life, in the case of the latter it becomes more like someone standing in the streets flailing their arms and screaming. There's something so obviously wrong with them that you can't help but stop and wonder just what's up with that.

And in a game, stopping to ask generally means disbelief ceases to be suspended.

I actually tried a mod for Morrowind once that added these kinds of schedules and more effects of night and day to the NPCs which was quite cool.. for about fifteen minutes, after which I started realizing that no one was actually where they were supposed to be and I kept having to frenetically run from building to building just to find who I was supposed to talk to. Oblivion tried to implement something like this via AI by giving NPCs wants and needs alongside a schedule, and ended up scaling the feature back massively after they realized NPCs would murder their relatives for food, and still didn't manage to prevent the Anvil City Guard from having at least one massacre of the Anvil Clergy just about every playthrough of the game I've attempted. While I do like Oblivion, it's fair to say that immersion isn't the reason behind that..

I actually kindof bought the pseudo-time-passage in Dragon Age for most part - it's day when you fight stuff, it's night when you stop at camp, and everything happens in "movie time" - day and night doesn't move in real time but rather as plot demands, which tends to work rather well unless the actual time is put to a test. Amusingly enough, the thing I found the most breaking to immersion - ignoring the party members can't walk issue - was actually the lighting engine the game has.

I'm serious. They've used this really odd approximation of handling how world lighting affects characters that just looks wrong to me - I think the most visible example were a few shadows around castle Cousland where it seems they'd forgotten to mark world shadows as darker, so if you walked between in shadow and in bright light (and the ground made it look like that light was really bright) your character didn't change lighting intensity at all. Now I can fully understand why they used a simpler model for performance, but to me it just looks wrong. Much like the trees that become very dark towards their root end and then suddenly end in vibrantly bright ground without any kind of transition whatsoever.

Now how is that for a petty gripe? I still enjoy the game, mind you, but since we're all on the topic of what chips away at immersion and everything, there you have it.

[Loki330]

What's all this talk about not walking? There's an option for it, I'm sure: I think it's right shift and then you use the WASD system, but I remember thinking to myself 'Ooo, I can walk!" before shortly therafter thinking "Bu**er this, it's taking too long" and went back to jogging. It is jogging too, which makes sense: it's fast enough to get from A-B reasonably without tiring you out especially.

[robertthebard]

Loki330 wrote...

What's all this talk about not walking? There's an option for it, I'm sure: I think it's right shift and then you use the WASD system, but I remember thinking to myself 'Ooo, I can walk!" before shortly therafter thinking "Bu**er this, it's taking too long" and went back to jogging. It is jogging too, which makes sense: it's fast enough to get from A-B reasonably without tiring you out especially.

We used to call that the Airborne Shuffle in the Army.  You could cover a lot of ground pretty fast and still be able to fight when you got where you were going, if it wasn't too far away.

[GhostMatter]

I guess I was just too busy having to notice any of these(especially the party moving in bursts). The only that I did notice was the non-passage of time but I don't see any solution for it. No day limit like Fallout please.



Ogre Battle 64 actually broke the " "immersion" " by making you able to grow really old by just traveling around, getting older and getting gifts.

[johnbgardner]

I think one reason there is no day/night cycle in DA:O is that there appears to be no way to dynamically change the lighting.  I've been messing with the toolset the devs used to create the game and the lighting is placed then a "light map" generated.  There is an ambient "sunlight" but once placed it does not "move" through the sky so all of the shadows are static.  In order to create a night scene one must use the same basic level layout and create a set of nighttime lighting.  So there has to be two "areas", one for day, one for night.  There may be a way to dynamically change the lighting from morning to noon to afternoon to evening to night, but I haven't figured it out yet.

[Endurium]

Before the term became popular, most games I played were good at providing immersion, to the point where I'd lose hours of my day while playing. Games today generally have the same effect, as long as I'm enjoying them (no longer a guarantee).



I prefer day/night cycles, NPC schedules, dynamic lighting, wind effects on foliage and trees, swimming, jumping, and riding mounts, to name a few things. Thus I enjoy Oblivion and The Witcher. (BTW, NPC schedules started with Ultima V Warriors of Destiny, which also introduced day/night cycles - not bad for a 21 year old 2D game.)



I agree with the point that any genre can provide immersion. I've lost many hours in FPS worlds and Adventure worlds, just as in CRPG worlds. If the world is believable, it is much easier to immerse myself. Alas, I have to do my best to ignore things such as those pointed out about DA:O. I get the sense that Bioware expected us to rush through the game, stopping only for lavish cutscenes the Writer Gods were given much leeway with, so we weren't supposed to notice all the game world oddities, nor use walk mode - ever.

[morrisbrown]

A lot of people don't seem to understand the way that creative development works. Sometimes (see: often) you have to make sacrifices for the good of the overall project. When you're operating on limited time and limited money, you simply can't have everything. You can't go down every possible path because you would never get to your destination.



For example, anyone who watches Lost knows that there are many loose-ends throughout the series that will never be addressed. Things like Shannon's inhaler...Libby's backstory...the Hurley Bird...Lost will be done within 6 months and we'll never know why Libby was in a mental institution. But does it matter? Sure, it would help with your vague concept of "immersion," but is the story significantly worse because it's left out? When the series finale is done with, are you really going to be sitting on your couch thinking "OMG WHAT ABOUT THE INHALER?! GOD THIS SHOW SUCKS!!!"

There's also the fact that "immersion" is extremely subjective. One man's immersion is another man's time-sink. I consider Ocarina of Time to be one of, if not the greatest games ever made. But when I think about what made it so great for me, the day/night system has nothing at all to do with it. I think about the memorable characters, the captivating music, the fun gameplay...not whether or not I could talk to Random NPC #53 when it was dark outside.

[Endurium]

I understand that people with skill and desire don't make excuses; they simply get the job done. I also understand that, in any company, those people are the minority, and this impedes the overall project.

The story and plot are what take place front and center on a stage (the Lost example given above), the game world is the backdrop and props (in Lost, the island and crashed plane, etc.). A more detailed backdrop and props contribute better to the telling of the story. Perhaps some people prefer a cardboard + magic marker backdrop for their illustrious story and plot. I prefer sufficient detail in both, as with the Phantom of the Opera tours of recent years; good 'graphics' and good storytelling all in one package. Thus I don't see why developers who have skill and desire can't do the same in a 3D game.

Bioware proved they are capable of this in the past, with NWN. I can stand still, listen to the wind, see banners fly, see grass blow, watch the sun or moon rise, and listen to birds or crickets. Walking around with a torch casts appropriate shadows, etc. All of that and a story I quite enjoy. I'm not happy with their current direction, claiming so much has to be sacrificed for the sake of the story. I don't believe it for a second.

That's my opinion, of course, and I realize I'm in the minority. Part of being an old school gamer I suppose.

Modifié par Endurium, 19 décembre 2009 - 10:52 .

[phordicus]

Games for the ADHD generation. the strawmen in this thread are holding hands and dancing a jig.

a day/night cycle for an area doesn't automatically necessitate quest deadlines or Waiting for Merchants. they could have just added a change in lighting script for the market and cycled in/out a few, perhaps even randomly named, npcs.

[Loki330]

phordicus wrote...

Games for the ADHD generation. the strawmen in this thread are holding hands and dancing a jig.
a day/night cycle for an area doesn't automatically necessitate quest deadlines or Waiting for Merchants. they could have just added a change in lighting script for the market and cycled in/out a few, perhaps even randomly named, npcs.

This is of course, assuming the game engine supports day/night cycles. (See above-that would mean at least 2 versions of every surface map)

I've done modmaking and stuff for quite a few games and even with something like the Neverwinter Nights (I or II, take your pick) toolsets which are designed for anyone prepared to spend a few hours learning stuff it becomes very clear very quickly that there are some things you want to do but Can Not Do for some reason. 

Valve mentioned this in some commentary. For those of you who don't know, in most Valve games you can go through the game in 'Commentary' mode, where you can play recordings from various team-members explaining choices and limitations of the game.
Long story short, in a demo map designed to show off some new (at the time) game engine developments ( a map which was dropped from the main game because it ultimately didn't add anything incidently) one of the developers pointed out that sometimes you have to make choices. In this case it was a physics puzzle vs having enemy soldiers absailing down a cliff while you made your way up said cliff via a clifftop passage. In Team Fortress II they mentioned that they were going to have a commander class at one point, but that got the chop because it just wasn't working. They could have spent time making it work, or they could spend that time and effort doing something like, making the other classes better and making some more maps or making the game code more stable or whatever.
Same goes for Bioware; I'm sure there's lots of lovely stuff they wanted to put in but couldn't due to lack of time, budget, voice actor availiblity, ability for it to work, or perhaps even the apparently unconsidered possiblity of an honest to god 'It-sounded-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time-on-paper-but-when-implemented-turned-out-to-suck-more-than-a-hoover' idea. I would be very surprised if one of the writers (or animators, or artists, or modellers, or coders) for DAO hasn't at some point looked at something they're come up with and gone "....this is crap." and binned it.

As for day/night cycles, they tend to be obnoxiously fast these days.

[Nhani]

Loki330 wrote...
This is of course, assuming the game engine supports day/night cycles. (See above-that would mean at least 2 versions of every surface map)

I think it's fair to say that it very possibly might not - the lighting model takes some pretty obvious shortcuts that - while understandable - do affect the visuals and seems to be very quirky. I actually felt Dragon Age was a noticeable step down in visual quality compared to Mass Effect which sported Unreal 3-based visual goodness. (Mind you, Dragon Age avoids the strange texture streaming effect)

That said, I've gotten the impression that the main reason for the change in visuals is the toolset - to make a game that's much more accessible to edit and fundamentally alter. It's an understandable change, and I actually think it's a good one, given the merits and gains, but that doesn't change the fact that my immersion occasionally gets murdered because of some visual quirk that just looks utterly wrong.

That said, I find having to pause during combat even more breaking to both flow and immersion, so it's arguably a fairly petty gripe. I'm also quite happy that BioWare included a combat setting to cater to people like me, also known as "easy".

I do wish they'd make the walk/run toggle affect your team members too, though. 

[Loki330]

It's also worth pointing out that immersion is not tied to graphics. Baldur's Gate series was immersive, hell Dwarf Fortress is really immersive if you bother to use your imagination you know. And that's ASCII.