No, you shouldn't strive for the latter because unless your resources are infinite it means you have to skimp elsewhere in order to compensate for the focus on cinematics. Again, cinematics are not a bad thing, but when the player's freedom must suffer that greatly in order to make a more cinematic game, it's not ideal.
You don't require infinite resources to improve workflows and to create a cinematic experience that is cheaper than it is now, and more versatile. What you need is iteration. We are
constantly adding support to allow the CinDes team to create better cinematics at a more efficient rate that allows them to do more things.
You may not realize it, but a line of thinking like this prevents innovation. It'd prevent the Infinity Engine from being developed. Heck, it'd literally prevent CRPGs from even being created, because a CRPG inherently restricts player freedom. You can only do in a game what is deterministically available in the source code.
There's a reason why the "true RPGers" appended a 'C' before RPG computer games back in the day. They weren't "real" RPG experiences, but we'll make sure to qualify that by saying they are "CRPGs" just so that no one gets entirely confused and mistakes them for actual RPGs.
Is the Lycium engine responsible for how DA2 looks overall? Because if so I'd have to disagree, DA2 looks horrible compared to DA:O. Colors are washed-out and character models look plastic.
But, again, that's beside the point. The issue at hand is how plot branching and the writing was handled, and to m knowledge neither of those are limited by the engine,
What you are capable of allowing the player to do in a game is intrinsically enabled by the engine (it may be important to note that an engine is much more than the graphics you see on the screen). You don't even see attack animations in older games, but I would be suspect if people didn't appreciate the full prerendered backgrounds and sprite animations that existed in Baldur's Gate and the Infinity Engine, especially if the alternative was a text based adventure.
It probably also serves to note that, it is now more expensive to create 2D sprite animations, and that cost shoots up manipulatively the more variation you allow for the player character. Why? Because 3D animation tools are more versatile and iteration has allowed the development processes to become much faster and significantly easier than they were in the past. This development came as a result of iteration on the workflows. 3D art wasn't always cheaper than 2D stuff.
Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 14 septembre 2012 - 05:18 .
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