46 réponses à ce sujet

[EricHVela]

LinksOcarina wrote...

I find this no more or less absurd than other games glossing over similar moments of design. As someone said above, Baldurs Gate had several moments where the plot kind of stopped things from making any logical sense. We also have Elder Scrolls too, the storylines often contradict lore set up by previous games just for the sake of a quest and epic item.

The mage-situation is essential and central to the second Dragon Age. Noticing that most of the game can ignore it so blatantly is quite a bit more than a nit-pick.

That's the issue: A very important part of the story that was re-enforced throughout the game was continually ignored.

Your examples are occasional deviations in the game. The example here was consistent throughout the game.

[LinksOcarina]

ReggarBlane wrote...

LinksOcarina wrote...

I find this no more or less absurd than other games glossing over similar moments of design. As someone said above, Baldurs Gate had several moments where the plot kind of stopped things from making any logical sense. We also have Elder Scrolls too, the storylines often contradict lore set up by previous games just for the sake of a quest and epic item.

The mage-situation is essential and central to the second Dragon Age. Noticing that most of the game can ignore it so blatantly is quite a bit more than a nit-pick.

That's the issue: A very important part of the story that was re-enforced throughout the game was continually ignored.

Your examples are occasional deviations in the game. The example here was consistent throughout the game.

I disagree, mainly because the issue regarding the mages is handled in the storyline, with the gameplay conceits of being free and throwing fireballs at people being non-essential to the plot, to the point where Hawkes, Anders and Merrills freedom is due to the behind the scenes scheming of party members. 

But let me ask this, since Kirkwall is the battleground for a lot of the fights that will occur, what would you want to do then if you played a mage, or had mage party members with you while in a fight in the city? Would you prefer them to be curbed and hidden, would you prefer characters to confront them from time to time? How would the games design fit into that aspect of the story without being in the way?

Story usually trumps gameplay in BioWare titles. But blocking the gameplay mechanics that are the meat of the game would be worse.

Modifié par LinksOcarina, 27 septembre 2012 - 02:48 .

[Nomen Mendax]

LinksOcarina wrote...

I disagree, mainly because the issue regarding the mages is handled in the storyline, with the gameplay conceits of being free and throwing fireballs at people being non-essential to the plot, to the point where Hawkes, Anders and Merrills freedom is due to the behind the scenes scheming of party members. 

But let me ask this, since Kirkwall is the battleground for a lot of the fights that will occur, what would you want to do then if you played a mage, or had mage party members with you while in a fight in the city? Would you prefer them to be curbed and hidden, would you prefer characters to confront them from time to time? How would the games design fit into that aspect of the story without being in the way?

Story usually trumps gameplay in BioWare titles. But blocking the gameplay mechanics that are the meat of the game would be worse.

The obvious answer would be to write a main plot that wasn't wildly inconsistent with game play.  They managed this much better in DAO where being a warden gives you immunity from the normal behaviour expected of mages. Not that I'm claiming DAO was perfect, I thought it was absurd to give players the option to become a blood mage, at least without half your party leaving or trying to kill you.

If the lore and the story are inconsistent with your character running around Kirkwall blowing things up, which they are, then it is the writers job to fix this.

[edit] What I'm getting at here is that it's not like someone forced Bioware to make the templar / mage conflict to be central to the plot of DA2 and they just had to live with it.  The plot was their decision, as was the choice to set a lot of the combat in places that your character could easily be seen using magic.

[edit 2] Honestly, I hate to criticize but it came across (to me) as pretty sloppy work in that regard and we should be asking them to do better rather than coming up with excuses for them.

Modifié par Nomen Mendax, 27 septembre 2012 - 03:01 .

[grregg]

LinksOcarina wrote...

(...)

But let me ask this, since Kirkwall is the battleground for a lot of the fights that will occur, what would you want to do then if you played a mage, or had mage party members with you while in a fight in the city? Would you prefer them to be curbed and hidden, would you prefer characters to confront them from time to time? How would the games design fit into that aspect of the story without being in the way?

Well, there are several possibilities that I would prefer to the current state of affairs. Templars could attack if you used magic in the city. Possibly only in the better districts, so if you blast a slum nothing happens, but if you show off your magic skills in front of the cathedral, there will be trouble.

Also, how about using the night maps? Daylight use of magic would be problematic, but at night it won't. Heck, even an explicit handwave of templars trying to arrest Hawke and Varric appearing out of nowhere and doing the "that's alright officers, everything's fine, here's a little something for your trouble" routine would be welcome.

LinksOcarina wrote...

Story usually trumps gameplay in BioWare titles. But blocking the gameplay mechanics that are the meat of the game would be worse.

Yes, that's why I find the dissonance so jarring. The more important and usually better element (the story) gets overwritten by the bigger element (the gameplay).

The same goes for characters by the way. For me the best element of many BioWare games are the companions and it is a pain to see that their dialogue/back story/etc show very different personalities that the cold-blooded killers they become when it comes to combat.

[Wulfram]

Really, there are two blatant examples that shouldn't have happened. The fight in the gallows courtyard when you arrived in Kirkwall and the fight right in front of Cullen.

The rest is fairly handwavable, though some more acknowledgement of the issue might have been nice. Like having a blackmail plot in Act 1 being what prompted you to go on Varric's expedition.

And having the mage equipment being a bit subtler in the first 2 acts would have been a good idea. Having Hawke wander around in ornate robes with a staff with skull on the end of it just makes things a bit silly.

[LinksOcarina]

Nomen Mendax wrote...

LinksOcarina wrote...

I disagree, mainly because the issue regarding the mages is handled in the storyline, with the gameplay conceits of being free and throwing fireballs at people being non-essential to the plot, to the point where Hawkes, Anders and Merrills freedom is due to the behind the scenes scheming of party members. 

But let me ask this, since Kirkwall is the battleground for a lot of the fights that will occur, what would you want to do then if you played a mage, or had mage party members with you while in a fight in the city? Would you prefer them to be curbed and hidden, would you prefer characters to confront them from time to time? How would the games design fit into that aspect of the story without being in the way?

Story usually trumps gameplay in BioWare titles. But blocking the gameplay mechanics that are the meat of the game would be worse.

The obvious answer would be to write a main plot that wasn't wildly inconsistent with game play.  They managed this much better in DAO where being a warden gives you immunity from the normal behaviour expected of mages. Not that I'm claiming DAO was perfect, I thought it was absurd to give players the option to become a blood mage, at least without half your party leaving or trying to kill you.

If the lore and the story are inconsistent with your character running around Kirkwall blowing things up, which they are, then it is the writers job to fix this.

[edit] What I'm getting at here is that it's not like someone forced Bioware to make the templar / mage conflict to be central to the plot of DA2 and they just had to live with it.  The plot was their decision, as was the choice to set a lot of the combat in places that your character could easily be seen using magic.

[edit 2] Honestly, I hate to criticize but it came across (to me) as pretty sloppy work in that regard and we should be asking them to do better rather than coming up with excuses for them.

Its a fair opinion, but my point is that giving story conceits only goes so far. Is it sloppy work? You can argue it sure. Of course they can do better, and they should. But in the end some concessions have to be made. 

And i'll be honest with you, I liked the fact that we didn't have immunity this time around like being a Warden or a Spectre ot Jedi or whatever, and that the reason for them being safe was background info we didn't fully see. You know that in the next game they will follow that as an inquisitor of some sorts, but thats my guess. 

grregg wrote...

Well, there are several possibilities that I would prefer to the current state of affairs. Templars could attack if you used magic in the city. Possibly only in the better districts, so if you blast a slum nothing happens, but if you show off your magic skills in front of the cathedral, there will be trouble.

Also, how about using the night maps? Daylight use of magic would be problematic, but at night it won't. Heck, even an explicit handwave of templars trying to arrest Hawke and Varric appearing out of nowhere and doing the "that's alright officers, everything's fine, here's a little something for your trouble" routine would be welcome.

Now let's look at it from a mechanical POV. For one, if the templars attack you, it extends a already long fight against whoever in the middle of the city, even if its in only two districts. So the chances of combat going on too long, and having death occur quite easily is a huge design problem, because it makes combat tedious (which lets be fair, it was kind of tedious at points in Dragon Age II as it is)

The night time maps already had more combat scenarios like the cleaning up the streets side quests makes it so. And I agree having a moment with Varric in the party to bribe templars would be nice, again that all was implied.

Modifié par LinksOcarina, 27 septembre 2012 - 03:16 .

[Sejborg]

Story and gameplay shouldn't contradict eachother.

[Nomen Mendax]

LinksOcarina wrote...

Its a fair opinion, but my point is that giving story conceits only goes so far. Is it sloppy work? You can argue it sure. Of course they can do better, and they should. But in the end some concessions have to be made. 

And i'll be honest with you, I liked the fact that we didn't have immunity this time around like being a Warden or a Spectre ot Jedi or whatever, and that the reason for them being safe was background info we didn't fully see. You know that in the next game they will follow that as an inquisitor of some sorts, but thats my guess. 

Like most things it comes down to how much it bothers you.  It essentially prevented me from being a mage, I got about 1/4 of the way through Act 1 and gave up. I'm willing to admit that my reaction is probably on the extreme end of things though.

I agree with you about it a being a nice change not to be a member of some special group, but that also made being a mage really problematic. 

I would prefer it if they made more of an effort to align the game play and story.  Personally I find things like enormous weapons and the sheer number of people that I slaughter in Kirkwall immersion breaking.  At some point I started wondering about what percentage of the population of Kirkwall I'd killed! 

Modifié par Nomen Mendax, 27 septembre 2012 - 03:21 .

[LinksOcarina]

Sejborg wrote...

Story and gameplay shouldn't contradict eachother.

they always will, its rare that they dont. 

I can name maybe a dozen games that have moments where the story and gameplay fit perfectly, but they are only moments, not the whole thing. Incidently, Dragon Age II is one of those games, take that for what you will, but there were parts that were just downright brilliant in terms of narrative and gameplay.

[Blackrising]

I usually have no problem with that kind of thing. I just make up a headcanon that explains it and that's that.

[LinksOcarina]

Nomen Mendax wrote...

LinksOcarina wrote...

Its a fair opinion, but my point is that giving story conceits only goes so far. Is it sloppy work? You can argue it sure. Of course they can do better, and they should. But in the end some concessions have to be made. 

And i'll be honest with you, I liked the fact that we didn't have immunity this time around like being a Warden or a Spectre ot Jedi or whatever, and that the reason for them being safe was background info we didn't fully see. You know that in the next game they will follow that as an inquisitor of some sorts, but thats my guess. 

Like most things it comes down to how much it bothers you.  It essentially prevented me from being a mage, I got about 1/4 of the way through Act 1 and gave up. I'm willing to admit that my reaction is probably on the extreme end of things though.

I agree with you about it a being a nice change not to be a member of some special group, but that also made being a mage really problematic. 

I would prefer it if they made more of an effort to align the game play and story.  Personally I find things like enormous weapons and the sheer number of people that I slaughter in Kirkwall immersion breaking.  At some point I started wondering about what percentage of the population of Kirkwall I'd killed! 

Well Kirkwall is a port city...so I bet the population is in flux a lot.

I don't know, I never got bothered by that kind of stuff. Maybe I am too forgiving in the end. 

[Nomen Mendax]

grregg wrote...

Well, there are several possibilities that I would prefer to the current state of affairs. Templars could attack if you used magic in the city. Possibly only in the better districts, so if you blast a slum nothing happens, but if you show off your magic skills in front of the cathedral, there will be trouble.

Also, how about using the night maps? Daylight use of magic would be problematic, but at night it won't. Heck, even an explicit handwave of templars trying to arrest Hawke and Varric appearing out of nowhere and doing the "that's alright officers, everything's fine, here's a little something for your trouble" routine would be welcome.

Actually I think that would be worse.  Once you've got to the stage that you are regularly fighting templars I would expect  Hawke to be arrested and executed.

[Nomen Mendax]

LinksOcarina wrote...

Well Kirkwall is a port city...so I bet the population is in flux a lot.

I don't know, I never got bothered by that kind of stuff. Maybe I am too forgiving in the end. 

And maybe it bothers me more than it should ...

But I think this kind of stuff was a lot harder for the writers to deal with in DA2 than it was in DAO.  In DA2 we are in a relatively stable city (apart from the end of Act 2 and most of Act 3).  In DAO they had the huge advantage that we were in the middle of war so lots of combat made much more sense. 

Partly its an annoying CRPG trope, the same thing happened in the first part of NWN2 where you end ups slaughtering hundreds of thieves or guards (depending on your choice of who to support).

Small things would have made it a lot better, avoiding fights in daylight (like the arrival in Kirkwall) and having gear that wasn't obviously a mage robe and a big staff.  I would also would have liked the game to be more definitive about who knew whether or not your companions were mages, and if they knew why they weren't doing anything about it. 

[Big I]

It never bothered me that Hawke could run around throwing fireballs at templars and never get called on it. It DID bother me when the story would allow me to choose something and then ignore it. For example, telling Cullen in Act 3, with Anders standing next to you, that Anders was going to do something to the Chantry, or threatening to kill Petrice in Act 1 only to have Hawke do nothing. Having Hawke act indignant about blood magic while being a blood mage or a reaver just didn't make sense.

[Nomen Mendax]

LookingGlass93 wrote...

It never bothered me that Hawke could run around throwing fireballs at templars and never get called on it. It DID bother me when the story would allow me to choose something and then ignore it. For example, telling Cullen in Act 3, with Anders standing next to you, that Anders was going to do something to the Chantry, or threatening to kill Petrice in Act 1 only to have Hawke do nothing. Having Hawke act indignant about blood magic while being a blood mage or a reaver just didn't make sense.

I sometimes took Anders and Merrill with me to the Gallows just so they could wander around with their enormous mage staves.  Perhaps the templars are just really unobservant.  I agree with you that your conversation choices should reflect your character design choices.

[grregg]

LinksOcarina wrote...

(...)

The night time maps already had more combat scenarios like the cleaning up the streets side quests makes it so. And I agree having a moment with Varric in the party to bribe templars would be nice, again that all was implied.

I actually meant that the use of magic at nighttime would be safe so there would be less combat at night.

But anyway, I would hope that the potential complications would be worth the effect of giving the player a better experience of how it is to be a mage in Kirkwall. You hear and even see mages being persecuted, but you never experience it yourself. If you had to only fight at night, or outside of the city, or even was harassed occasionally by the templars, you would (to a small degree) share in other mages' experience of hiding, fear, etc.

In short, it would be nice if DA3 was able to move from "show, don't tell" to a more advanced "don't show it, let the player experience it." I think the story would be much more powerful that way.

[Aulis Vaara]

grregg wrote...

"don't show it, let the player experience it."

That IS the videogame equivalent of "show, don't tell", or at least it should be.

[grregg]

Mikael_Sebastia wrote...

I am surprised this has any kind of established terminology – and even some discord about it! Nonetheless the world is certainly a better place if we have a neologism like ludonarrative dissonance. Keep on folk!

Shouldn't be surprising really. As games become a more established medium, a terminology for discussing them will surely appear. I hope anyway.

Mikael_Sebastia wrote...

(...)

Still DA2 was filled with examples, which can be fairly said to be those game breaking problems. The mentioned mage example being one of the most prominent ones. Although personally it wasn’t even that much of immersion breaker for me, or it didn’t ruin the whole mage vs templar storyline. It was more like watching somebody getting a straight flush in poker and then folding. They could have done so much with it, but instead they poke around it a little in the dialog, and do nothing. Wasted potential more than anything.

Yes, there are two "camps" that will rant against the ludonarrative dissonance. One is the immersion/realism/consistency brigade that cannot understand why gameplay and story occupy two different (and oftentimes contradictory) realities.

Myself I belong to the other "camp" that bemoans the loss of narrative opportunities. Just imagine how much more powerful mages' story would be in DA2 if Hawke was allowed to share other mages' experience of persecution. If your character would have to disarm, or change his/her clothes before entering the city. If he was crippled in combat because of patrolling templars, or if she could only safely go out at night.

It would probably be a bit of a hassle, but that way Hawke could experience things instead of just being an observer like in DA2. Again, it's a feature of human minds that the experiences are that much more powerful than stories.

[Realmzmaster]

Wulfram wrote...

Really, there are two blatant examples that shouldn't have happened. The fight in the gallows courtyard when you arrived in Kirkwall and the fight right in front of Cullen.

The rest is fairly handwavable, though some more acknowledgement of the issue might have been nice. Like having a blackmail plot in Act 1 being what prompted you to go on Varric's expedition.

And having the mage equipment being a bit subtler in the first 2 acts would have been a good idea. Having Hawke wander around in ornate robes with a staff with skull on the end of it just makes things a bit silly.

Actually the gamer had to choose to dress Hawke that way (there are several pieces of clothing for mage Hawke that are not standard robes like Robe of the Notorious Pirate or Champion ). At the the end of the year before meeting Bartrand, Hawke is dressed in either smuggler's  or merecenary's garb. and is not carrying a staff. Bethany and Carver remark that we have nothing to prevent the next person from selling us out when after being rejected by Bartrand. So they have been blackmailed before. The writers do address the situation. 

The captain  in the courtyard is willing to give mage Hawke or Bethany a pass because they save his life. (Not the best explanation but pausible.) The same with Cullen Hawke saves his life. 

The problem with DA2 is that Bioware should have left it in the oven longer and given themselves more time to implement a better story for the mage or leave out mage Hawke and Bethany.
The mages Hawke meets are different because Varric is pulling strings to keep them safe. You hear Varric talking to one of his contacts about Anders asking is the Coterie still making rumblings about protection. He tells Merrill to quit cutting through Lowtown at night because protecting her is costing him a fortune.

Varric is pulling strings and using his connections. It is not like Kirkwall does not know about Anders, but since Anders is helping the refugees it keeps them from becoming totally discontented and rioting or causing more to turn to crime.

The story for the mages could have been much better, but the alternative was not to include the class if Bioware wanted to meet their timeline. I would have prefered that they took longer in development to flesh the story out better.

Modifié par Realmzmaster, 28 septembre 2012 - 05:30 .

[Nomen Mendax]

grregg wrote...
...

Myself I belong to the other "camp" that bemoans the loss of narrative opportunities. Just imagine how much more powerful mages' story would be in DA2 if Hawke was allowed to share other mages' experience of persecution. If your character would have to disarm, or change his/her clothes before entering the city. If he was crippled in combat because of patrolling templars, or if she could only safely go out at night.

It would probably be a bit of a hassle, but that way Hawke could experience things instead of just being an observer like in DA2. Again, it's a feature of human minds that the experiences are that much more powerful than stories.

While I think the patrolling templars idea would have to be handled very carefully, I think these are great ideas.  I feel that there was too much separation between the writing team and the combat/gameplay team.

One of the biggest examples of dissonance for me in DA2 is that the combat seemed almost entirely separate from the narrative.  Most of the important plot points occurred in the cinematic parts, and the few dramatic combat set-pieces tended to degenrate into farce (the duel with the Arishok being the obvious example).  It didn't help that the visual style of combat was very different from that of cut-scenes.  Any violence in cut-scenes (Isabela at the start of the fight with Hayder, the Qnari killing Petrice etc.) is very matter-of-fact and realistic compared to all of the skills that your character uses in combat.