98 réponses à ce sujet

[Allan Schumacher]

Travie wrote...

Allan Schumacher wrote...

CaolIla wrote...

So Bioware is going the lazy route... who would have thought?

Define lazy.

Actually don't.  You can hate our decision, but just call a spade a spade and say you don't like the decision we made.  If you think I'm "lazy" then you don't know me, nor my colleagues.

We aren't sitting around with our feet up drinking cognac going "Good show mates, now that that's resolved there's not much to do but sit around and enjoy the sun!"

Wait... are you saying this wasn't a resources/time issue? 

To think that this decision was made because Bioware actually thought that somehow 'less is more' is even more disturbing for me considering how deeply held people's opinions on this issue are.

I am not at all sure how you came to this conclusion after reading my post.

[John Epler]

Alright, the tangent of 'What is an RPG/It's not really an RPG without racial choice' has taken the same right turn into absurdity as so many other tangents in this thread, so I'm shutting it down.

[Allan Schumacher]

plnero wrote...

Well, are you going to tell us why you chose not to put other playable races in the game? People are just going to assume that there's no good reason for it you don't at least provide some explanation.

Opportunity cost.  To add this, and especially to do it well, is not free.  So in order to do it, we'd have to not do something else.

At its simplest distillation, people are disappointed with the lack of races in large part because it represents a lack of content.  I do not believe that many of these people would be content if we just had allowed Hawke to be an elf/dwarf in DA2 without making necessary story changes to accommodate the option.  I'm sure some would have been, but dwarf mages running around would have certainly been setting breaking.


Trust me, I would love to have all four races be playable options.  In an idea world, I'd love for all 4 races to be their own unique story.  But once you get that far, costs start to get pretty intense.  And no, I'm not talking about using different voice actors for the different races.


If you're asking me "what it is exactly we're doing instead?" the best answer I can give is "it's not cut and dry."  For example (hypothetical), if a feature is deemed to take a month of work, cutting that feature could allow 20 different features that take 1 day of work to be implemented instead.  Many of those features may not even be stuff that the gamer will see, but are things like tools improvements to ensure that other teams can keep their velocity high to get their goals done for the project on time and on budget as well.

To go on a small tangent:
This is why we can't just say "Well this feature shouldn't be very hard to implement" because frankly, there's always a lot of features that "shouldn't be very hard to implement."  Hundreds if not thousands of them.  So while you may see "This would only take a couple of days at the most!" for one particular feature, we see "Yeah, but the other hundreds of other things were in the same boat.  How do we choose which one to do!?"


So to anyone that says "You could still work the story around an elf and a dwarf if you wanted" I say you are absolutely right.  We could do it.  However, that doesn't make it easy to do and doesn't fully appreciate how much time it could take within the context of the story or a host of other types of influences that could play a part.  Eventually it comes to a point of "What are we willing to sacrifice in order to do it?"

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 23 octobre 2012 - 08:31 .

[John Epler]

Icinix wrote...

Quite frankly I won't be happy until we can play through the entire game as a Marbari with the entire voiced dialogue as woofing.

I think you're barking up the wrong tree here.

[Allan Schumacher]

ArinTheirinCousland wrote...

Allan Schumacher wrote...

To go on a small tangent:
This is why we can't just say "Well this feature shouldn't be very hard to implement" because frankly, there's always a lot of features that "shouldn't be very hard to implement."  Hundreds if not thousands of them.  So while you may see "This would only take a couple of days at the most!" for one particular feature, we see "Yeah, but the other hundreds of other things were in the same boat.  How do we choose which one to do!?"


So to anyone that says "You could still work the story around an elf and a dwarf if you wanted" I say you are absolutely right.  We could do it.  However, that doesn't make it easy to do and doesn't fully appreciate how much time it could take within the context of the story or a host of other types of influences that could play a part.  Eventually it comes to a point of "What are we willing to sacrifice in order to do it?"

I wonder what was sacrificed in order to incorporate MP.

That's where things become even muddier.  Something like multiplayer opens up additional potential revenue streams, so for some features it's possible to receive more funding than had that feature not been one put forth.  The budget for any project is going to be determined based upon the the amount of costs it will take to deliver the project by a time, based on the potential revenues we can expect to make.


So while coming up with our plan, we could have game X and lets say it has a budget of $10 million for some easy math.  We expect to make $20 million with this game.  Now, if we also want to do Feature Y in our project and (based on whatever data we have to make our case) we can show that it'll get us an extra $100 million in revenue, and we expect it to cost $20 million to implement, then the idea of allocating $30 million instead of $10 million (200% more budget) is almost a trivial one.

Now these numbers are pulled out of my rear end just to illustrate the situation, but I am hoping it shows that determining how time and money is allocated, and where it should go, is not a particularly simple thing to do.

[Allan Schumacher]

Nerevar-as wrote...

Is MP in  non shooter games that popular, or someone decided if it is popular in a kind of game then it´ll also work
in any other?

I´m afraid if DA3 has any cut corners (and we already have race) and MP, there´s going to be quite a ****storm.

And have you thought of making expansions/DLCs involving PCs of other races to explore their lore, rather than have a (problably) outsider human do it?

This is in part why MP isn't confirmed at this point.  The most important thing about adding something like that is that it's fun, and there are differences to how it can be fun compared to a shooter based game.


I'm unaware of any DLC/expansion type plans.  I'm sure some stuff in some places have been flagged as "nice to have" type of features/content that will be considered for future work, but likely only on an adhoc, informal basis.

[Allan Schumacher]

Assuming there are, say, three different human background stories, couldn't the human PC in just one of those stories be replaced by an elf without incurring any great additional costs and resources?

I'm guessing the answer is no - camera issues due to height differences being one reason why - but, having read through Allan's posts, I'm still not sure I understand what any of the other reasons are.

There's going to have to be some level of writing differences otherwise the change is purely cosmetic and somewhat jarring in some cases. We could just say "bampf you're an elf" but without providing appropriate context within the game, you may get contradictory conversations (you're talking as though you're a human, or people are responding to you as though you're a human, based on the words you use) and other things like that.

If a human commoner background were replaced with a city elf background then obviously there would need to be all sorts of elven references put in to the game. But why would those references be more expensive to implement than references to the background of the human commoner?

It's because the change would be a bit more than just the references. In that there may be human focused dialogue that is still heard by ALL characters, regardless of background. I can think of a plot where this will probably be more prevalent, but unfortunately I don't know full details of it and even if I did it's not my place to discuss it anyways. Sucks I know, but hopefully it can provide some context for why it's not just about references to the background.

[Allan Schumacher]

I will take that as a tacit admission that you plan to directly monetize DA3's multiplayer. Not that I'm complaining -- I have no problem whatsoever with ME3's model and with F2P in general.

Take nothing as an admission of anything. MP can have a financial appeal for no other reason than it provides an additional avenue for friends to encourage friends to buy the game, as well as keeping the disc in the tray longer to mitigate supply of used copies, on top of, in some cases, being a feature that will help them decide to buy (whether or not it's a wash with those that boycott is something I don't know).

That said, I think we'd be silly to just ignore the model that ME3 uses since it's seen some success in its own right (and it's familiar).


Please don't read more into what I'm saying as it only discourages me from posting for fear that more stuff will be misinterpreted and taken with a greater degree of authenticity based upon said interpretations.

[Allan Schumacher]

Brohammed wrote...

Allan Schumacher wrote...
For those that feel this is a necessary component to "making the character theirs" I'm curious what peoples thoughts are to games like the Ultima ones, KOTOR, Jade Empire, Knights of the Old Republic, or even Planescape: Torment.

The Ultima series never had race options, KotoR never had race options, Jade Empire never had race options etc.

Try to imagine a new Baulders Gate without race customization,  if you will. 

I can.

[Allan Schumacher]

And it would be mega-lame.

Disagree. Then again, I never identified Baldur's Gate's race customization as being particularly essential. The only way it was was that I was forced to play as a Human because Paladin was my preferred class. Race was a nice to have, but especially for myself as a game player at the time, it pretty much only served as a way to reallocate my attribute points and garner particular power gaming type advantages.

Pretty much this. Ultima only has the human race to begin with. No elves in that setting.

To be perfectly frank, I consider this an exceptionally weak argument.

Ultima didn't have elves, but they did have Gargoyles/Daemons, trolls, and a variety of other nonhuman, sentient species.

Planescape was a game set in a rules universe that had a strong history of racial selection, but forced the player to be a Human Male. Of course, then people make the excuse for it "Well BioWare isn't going to make a PST" which is just mental gymnastics to prevent cognitive dissonance. Jesus I could go on almost forever for the vast variety of races that exist in this game that can never even become a part of your party, let alone are not the main protagonist of the game.


Going "Well, it was the only race" only serves to reinforce that racial selection is not an essential part of roleplaying, because the only way for your predicate to be true, would mean that a game that does not even have different races cannot possibly offer the same level of roleplaying. It's a logical contradiction.

I'm not buying it.


As for "Baldur`s Gate with no racial options wouldn`t have been half the game it was." I think that's an immense disservice to the game and trivializes so much of what made it wonderful. The second one especially.

People like Minsc, Jaheira, Viconia, Edwin, and Imoen would all still be amazingly interesting characters even if they were all human. The only racial context that serves any meaning is Viconia, which essentially boils down to a woman in a matriarchal society that breaks free of it's oppressive rule and finds herself battling extreme fear and prejudices when walking among different societies.

At this point I guess we agree to disagree, because good story and good writing transcends those details. That the plot of each Baldur's Gate is indifferent to your race demonstrates this. I'd still love the game if it existed in a fantasy setting like Ultima's, and the NPCs fit their archetypes but were still human.

[Allan Schumacher]

in all fairness; games do cost alot more money to make these days, than they did when the BG games came out. Everything is fully voiced now. that alone pushes the price up quite abit, i would think.

I've never been a fan of the idea that we aren't making games that we want to make either. I can understand if a fan feels that we aren't making the game that they want us to make, but part of the reason why we got defensive in light of the backlash of DA2 is that it was a game that we really wanted to do well. I think part of what clouded my perspective, personally, is that it was easier for me to recognize the ideal of a particular feature since I was there during conception and I was excited for the types of prospects it could offer in terms of player agency and whatnot.

It's something that I recognize and I need to remain diligent to not let cloud my perspective, and to try to see things as a fan that has seen something for the first time.


For example, the dominant tone was something that, when I first saw how it worked (completely by accident when I was trying to reproduce a bug for the localization team and I couldn't get a line to display, so I investigated the conversation directly) and went "Oh hey! I didn't realize we were doing this! This is actually pretty cool. It's a system that responds to player choice and provides additional flavor to the character, helps add to replayability, and the things we can do with it seem like they could really add a lot!"

But for some, it's "uh, I feel restricted into having to pick a particular tone now" and "Well, I would have preferred to say that line differently... (or to have chosen it outright from a list)" and other stuff like that.


I know people are quick to blame EA and whatnot for DA2's shortcomings, but I don't believe in that. I think it's on BioWare and that had we had the foresight of the types of challenges we'd end up encountering, we probably would have ended up doing some stuff differently and probably provided a more interesting game for people. I'm not afraid to own up that DA2 had faults, and it's up to me to learn about what I can do better to make sure that DA3 is a better game. But I still enjoy DA2, and there are a lot of aspects about it I really enjoy, and it's still a game that I'm proud to have been a part of, even if it didn't hit the mark for a lot of people.

[Allan Schumacher]

I think you are missing the point. The thing with ultima is that your character is from Earth. He gets transported into a fantasy world via a moongate.

No, I'm not missing the point.

You're saying "Well, it was the only choice!"

I'm saying "And despite being the only choice, it's a fantastic RPG." In other words, whether or not a game is a good RPG is less dependent on whether or not racial choice is present, and more on what types of opportunities exist in the game for roleplaying.


Seriously, look at what you just did. You took the Avatar, whom is effectively as much of a pregen as any character in an RPG, in that the player has no input over where that character is from or his history (he MUST be an Earthling. He can't even be someone from the world of Britannia!), and you are perfectly okay with it.


Imagine DAO as a game where you're an Earthling transported into Thedas. Would you still be willing to let this pass?

[Allan Schumacher]

I did want to add something since I think I saw it mentioned in this thread.

Some people have commented that they are disappointed that this is the first feature cut. Just to be clear, that we mentioned it doesn't mean it's the first thing cut. Dozens of features have been cut because to start a project, it's pretty much "every idea is a good idea!" This one gets communicated out because people have various expectations for it. Sadly, having the big bad guy be a physical manifestation of Allan that shoots fireballs from his eyes and bolts of lightning from his arse are cut game ideas that people never hear about.

[Allan Schumacher]

I'm pretty sure that if the next edition of D&D were to cut out the non-human races people would **** bricks same with the Elder Scrolls games

I absolutely agree with you that if D&D cut non-human races people would be upset. But I've never been one that feels that CRPGs are much of an analogue to PnP gaming.

In my opinion, there are orders of magnitude less restrictions on PnP gaming, especially with a good group of people and an excellent DM.

[Allan Schumacher]

Rawgrim wrote...

Allan Schumacher wrote...

I did want to add something since I think I saw it mentioned in this thread.

Some people have commented that they are disappointed that this is the first feature cut. Just to be clear, that we mentioned it doesn't mean it's the first thing cut. Dozens of features have been cut because to start a project, it's pretty much "every idea is a good idea!" This one gets communicated out because people have various expectations for it. Sadly, having the big bad guy be a physical manifestation of Allan that shoots fireballs from his eyes and bolts of lightning from his arse are cut game ideas that people never hear about.

Would be cool if you guys made a book about that. Ideas being left out, or changed alot. And loads of trivia about games you made. I would certainly buy it.

Allan Firearse...If thats not a good name for a dwarven badguy, I don`t know what is.

I think there's two problems with this.  It would indirectly create expectation of things that were cut ending up in future games.

In some regards not knowing what "could have been" could help fuel criticism (especially given the idea that you and others have that not allowing races in DA3 hurts more since DAO did allow races).


It could be fun though, but ultimately when it gets down to late project no one is thinking about this anymore.  Stuff like this actually does often come up earlier in the project for fun ideas to include in a CE or something.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 24 octobre 2012 - 05:00 .

[Allan Schumacher]

I don't think all (or even most) would, but some would.

It's also really also the idea of "an unused idea is still an idea that could be used in the future." For instance, it's now entirely possible for a competing game company to have a big bad featured on me with Braveheart style weaponry and I have totally ruined it for BioWare to fully capitalize on. Expect rip offs in short time.

[Allan Schumacher]

I could see it being more writing specific, as (and I'm just musing here) I could see writing being the one most affected by it. So it's probably hard to nail down as a specific "feature" but rather some range of written content.

[Allan Schumacher]

DA3. Has a bad start? You mean the downward slope didn't magicly disapeare? And no one agreed with me when I predicted it letting us down.

Given this was the same as DA2, I don't see a slope here.

[Allan Schumacher]

99DP1982 wrote...

It still falls short to the amount of text and dialog that was present in Baldur's Gate, Planescape, Fallout, KotOR, etc. It definatelly is better than TES series though (which I personally loath and don't touch with a10ft pole).

I can't think of much of anything that holds a candle to PST.  I probably should replay BG1/2 since it's been probably over a decade since I last played them.

Although I did recently replay the original Fallout, and I actually found myself surprised at how straight forward the dialogues in that game really were.  I'd have to take a peek at Fallout 2, but I remembered more depth the conversations of Fallout than what I was given.

[Allan Schumacher]

What do you mean "removal"? There was never going to be racial choice in DA3. There was racial choice in Origins, but that's a *completely separate game*.

The idea of removal is that they once had it in DAO, and not having the option in future games in the series stings more because they had a taste of what it was like to be those races and would like to explore them further.

[Allan Schumacher]

Numbers speak for themselves, and Skyrim has sold more copies than DA:O, DA2, ME, ME2 and ME3 put together. That would seem to indicate that Bethesda understand some basic desires common in roleplayers that Bioware do not. Therefore, no matter the many other weaknesses in the TES games, the player is able to create excactly the character they like.

I never like this argument, because Skyrim trounces the crap out of DAO too. So should we just drop everything we did in DAO too and do what Skyrim did? It seems to me that there's a lot more to the success of Skyrim than the contribution that Multiplayer may or may not have had on the sales.

[Allan Schumacher]

I would be lying if I said I wasn't dissapointed...however, I'm glad they have origins for humans at least, rather than the same-old we got with Hawke. And considering the lovely variety in Origins, I hope the human start points will be just as interesting.

Just to be clear because I don't want to people to be getting excited and later disappointed by a misunderstanding, there isn't any plans for the backgrounds to be playable at this time (and I'd encourage people to not hold out hope that they might become so).

To refer to Gaider's post on the topic, however, the idea is for them to not just be in the vein of what Mass Effect did with their backgrounds either.

[Allan Schumacher]

Then they already lost, because that perception I talked about above is what will kill it.

In the end, its a self-fulfiling prophecy by the gaming community as a whole, not just BioWare, EA, or the fanbase as singular entities. If the fans thing EA sucks, they won't buy the games, despite it being good. If BioWare did things to the game that upset people, they won't buy the game. If Origin is blocking them from playing, they won't buy the game.

Fans are fickle. In the end if we make a game that they want, there's a pretty good chance they'll pick it up.

It reminds me of sports teams. When things aren't going the way the fans want, they get upset and slag the organization. Team starts threatening for a championship, and you'll find more people excited and even willing to overlook transgressions.

Note that I think it's fine for fans to behave like this as well.

[Allan Schumacher]

Deleted some posts that were off topic.

In any case, the point of my post is that ultimately fans want games that they like. If I didn't feel it would be possible to win back some of the fans that felt scorned by DA2, then I'd just be wasting my time. Likewise, if a fan that felt scorned by DA2 is still hanging around talking about DA3, I get the impression that they WANT to be brought back into the fold as well. Otherwise they'd have just moved on.

[Allan Schumacher]

I would not necessarily assume anyone wants to be back in the fold, because assumptions are dangerous and that assumption might elude to the ongoing perception of feeling like they've been taken for granted.

When I say "back in the fold" I mean "I'm sure they'd love to pick up a future BioWare game and say 'I really like this game!'"

Whether or not we will based on the quality of the game and the decisions that we make is a completely different matter.

Unless you'd prefer that I not assume that it's possible to get those fans back, which would mean even considering to go back to DAO is just a waste of time. Might as well establish consistency and go with more of DA2 style, right?