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[David7204]

I've been looking over some of the DAIII material, and something I've seen come up several times is 'word budgets.' They weren't explained in great detail, but the gist of it seems to be that the amount of 'words' avaliable in game is decided beforehand and appropriated to quests and characters. Gaider's blog mentioned that sometimes writers have to cut down on the dialogue in quests to fit budgets.

I thought the limiting factor behind the amount of dialogue and such in a game was that writing is hard, and there are a limited number of writers with a limited amount of time to do it in. Yet it sounds like BioWare artificially limits the amount of 'writing' done, even if a writer is willing and able to provide more content.

Is there a technical reason for this that I don't know about?

From Gaiders blog: http://dgaider.tumbl...creating-quests

"You’ll also have to work with a budget— the bane of any writer’s existence, let me tell you. There’s a time budget (“how long is this quest supposed to be?”) which means you’ll be working with the pod to approximate how long every step is expected to take. More importantly for you, you’ll have a word budget (as in the # of words of spoken dialogue you can have). The total word budget of the project has already been chopped up and you know how much of it is yours… so you have to figure out how much talking there is in each section. Is this idea going to be complicated to explain? Maybe it’s better to show instead. Is this conversation going to be really long and drag down the pace of the plot? Is it a show piece with lots of cinematic work expected?"

Modifié par David7204, 03 décembre 2012 - 02:24 .

[David Gaider]

It used to be that art was the major bottleneck in our design. Now it's writing.

Why? Because words are expensive. We have separate types of word budgets, based on the costs they generate. So a "cinematic word budget" are voiced lines that require extensive touching by the cinematic design team. They have X number of people who can work Y number of hours at an average lines/hour speed. So we do the math based on the time we have allotted for the Production phase. We have a "voice budget" based on how many voiced lines we can afford to record, whether cinematic or not. Both of these numbers are smaller than the number of lines writers can actually produce.

Despite the fact that we have more cinematics and voiced lines nowadays, the word budget isn't actually new. After BG2 an effort was made to constrain the amount of writing we do, as even non-recorded lines (including text such as codex entries and journals, which also has its own budget) need to be translated into numerous languages and also have a knock-on effect of how long a plot is (and thus how much time it takes for the level designers to implement).

Ultimately, with more money and more time the budget can be higher... but that's always the case. This isn't something we'd normally discuss since, to a fan, why wouldn't we put more money and time into a project? Hell, we'd like it too. Essentially we need to start from somewhere, and that all starts with people much further up the chain than someone at my level.

[David Gaider]

David7204 wrote...
Although it's also kind of depressing since those seem like pretty hard limits that won't be changing anytime soon. Obviously nothing can be done to automate or quicken voice recording, and I doubt touching up cutscenes is going to get much easier either.

Yes and no. There's ongoing work to make procedural cinematic scenes (ones that don't require much manual handling) look better, and thus more widely used. There's also some work on making what we call ambient dialogue (such as party banter) more useful and thus reduce the need for cinematics.

Voice-over is always going to be expensive, however, both from a pure cost as well as diskspace standpoint.

[David Gaider]

JWvonGoethe wrote...
There's a scene in DA2 where Hawke has a conversation while walking on the beach. I wonder if walking during conversations (in front of a looped background) takes a considerable chunk out of the cinematic word budget? If not, then I would definitely like to see it happen more frequently - it made that conversation seem much more cinematic and special.

We call that the "walk-and-talk". It requires cinematic work, but isn't as work-intensive as some of the bigger scenes where you see combat or need elaborate animations. It's primarily useful for making longer conversations drag down the pace less.

[Allan Schumacher]

Are you asking what the likelihood would be of EA/BioWare doing a kickstarter if we felt we needed additional funding to match our vision for DA3?

While I am never keen on talking in absolutes, I would bet large sums of money on it not happening.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 03 décembre 2012 - 09:00 .

[Allan Schumacher]

Jade8aby88 wrote...
In other words, EA?

If you wish to consider the 8 years and several games prior to EA's acquisition as "in other words, EA" then yeah I guess you're right.

(You're not right)

[Allan Schumacher]

LOL it wasn't until you pointed it out that I see his name isn't "AmistadHero" >.>

[David Gaider]

Orian Tabris wrote...
After Mike Laidlaw, I'm pretty sure there aren't many people above you.

I am a sub-lead... meaning the Lead Designer is above me (as are the other leads), the Project Director, the Director of Design as well as the BioWare GM. Among others. And that's before one gets to the EA level. So, no, my authority over the project at large is fairly limited.