8 réponses à ce sujet

[Sylvius the Mad]

Encounters in games do this a lot.  You enter a room, a fight starts, and if you try to flee you discover that all of the doors - even the one you just opened with a key - are now locked and there's nothing you can do about it (though they then do often magically open as soon as the fight is over).

This should never happen.  ME2 did this incessantly.  DAO did it on a number of occasions (Jarvia springs to mind).  It's never okay.

If the door locks behind us, there had better be a good reason for it that isn't just "this is how we want the fight to happen".

It's often true that we cannot leave an area while in combat - that's a consistent restriction doesn't really bother me - but we can generally run wherever we would like within an area during an encounter.  Retreating to a chokepoint was perhaps the most effective tactic available in DA2.  But when we enter a smaller area only to have the door inexplicably lock behind us, even though under normal circumstances the door would be openable, that badly damages the credibility of the game's setting.

If you want an encounter to be difficult, fine, but achieve that difficulty without changing the rules of the game world arbitrarily.  Having an encounter be unexpectedly trivial is better than having an encounter be arbitrarily nonsensical.

[David Gaider]

esper wrote...
Whille it would be much better if it was always justified, I think this is just one of these examples where gameplay thrumps story ntegration.

Pathfinding, enemy ai, combat design and so forth have to be taken into consideration and for it to work sometimes it will have to be restricted to a certain area.

This is indeed the case. While I won't speak for the gameplay designers on the matter, this really seems to be one of those things where what seems to be reasonable in theory adds an incredible amount of complexity in practice.

[Allan Schumacher]

You didn't used to artificially constrain encounters. This is a relatively new feature in BioWare's games.

Therefore, it cannot be necessary.

This is making the assumption that our games are functionally created and executed in the exact same way (on the same platforms, for the exact same purposes).

They aren't.

There is no such thing as gameplay/story segregation. There cannot be.

Sure there is. It's why someone can take 50 shots in combat, and survive gigantic explosions and being turned into solid ice, but during a cinematic a single crossbow bolt that hits is deadly.

Combat gameplay has always been an abstraction element of RPGs, going back to PnP. Once it became visual, it was still a visual abstraction. This is the way it's always been. It's a bunch of rules compiled together in order to make something fun and enjoyable. Justifications exist to explain the abstractions since the abstractions make it inherently unrealistic, but they're just justifications.

The player's decision-making would be rendered impossible by such a divide.

Players do it all the time. They have no problems one shot "murder-knifing" someone, when their counterpart takes 200 bludgeoning hits to the head while on fire in the combat immediately preceding said murder-knifing.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 12 décembre 2012 - 12:28 .

[David Gaider]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
Do you honestly not understand what abstraction is?

Do you?

The doors are closed because that's necessary for the combat design, and it-- as is much of what goes on with combat-- is an abstraction of what one might consider "realism". You can't go through the doors just like one of any number of things that you might think of doing but can't because the fact that this is a game requires everything to occur within set parameters. You can't go through those doors because you don't, just like you don't retreat or use environmental objects or any one of a number of imposed limitations. Yet this is where it breaks down for you?

I've no idea what the combat team or level designers have planned for DA3-- there are a number of overhauls to the system, all of which we'll discuss in the future. But the idea that this sort of thing must never be done? Sorry, but that's pure baloney. As I said before, this is the sort of idea that someone who gives it superficial thought will go "yeah, that sounds reasonable"... even if that impacts combat design in ways you can't imagine.

Modifié par David Gaider, 12 décembre 2012 - 03:40 .

[David Gaider]

Upsettingshorts wrote...

I await the Ken Burns documentary of the David Gaider vs. Sylvius the Mad Wars.

There will be slow pans over screenshots of threads ("The Battle of Locked Doors") set to Inon Zur music.

It will win a Peabody.

If there's a war, it's purely in the head of Sylvius or yourself. Considering that Sylvius' suggestions are ones he simply repeats ad nauseum (until they become borderline spam) because he thinks getting others to potentially agree with him will somehow convince us to make a game catered more to his specific tastes, and are mostly just ignored, there's room for neither battle nor drama.

[David Gaider]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
First of all, I don't think combat design should even be a thing.  It's all part of the world, and it should all follow the same rules.

And I'll stop you right there. Combat design is a thing. It was a thing in DAO as well.

As I said before, I've no idea what the combat team will do with doors specifically. But I have little doubt there will be some things which will be set up to occur a certain way when it comes to setpiece combat encounters, and some of those won't seem logical to you. Other things won't seem logical to others. Yet there it is, because combat is a complex thing that requires abstraction.

Other than a combat designer actually deciding to come in here and tell you why a door might need to be locked every now and again, that's really all there is to say.

[Allan Schumacher]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

That can easily be explained through abstraction.

Since, in your own words, everything is an abstraction, so can everything else.

Doors consistently close.  Empircally, it happens all the time.  It's a part of the abstraction.  The only thing you can't deduce is why they close, but since we're not interested in the why, only the empirical observations, this isn't something we should be bothered with.  Why should your character care if Sylvius is finding there to be some sort of strange behaviour?

Turns out that in the future, there's a prankster God that lollerskates as he closes doors behind Shepard.  Actually it's just a Reaper thing.

Do you take this into account when you test the game?  Every moment
of the game, how does your character feel?  Moment to moment, what does
he know, how does he know it, and what impact does that have on his
decision-making?  Because you should.  That's roleplaying.  Inhabit the
character.  What does he know?  How does he feel?  Every detail.

I don't.  Mostly because I don't actually content test very much.  Unfortunately, you'd probably not like the answer even if I did.  Especially since we've already demonstrated that you and I see eye to eye on very little.  After all, I've already ascertained that the separation of player and character is impossible.

Except that's how people behave.  Even players do this.  If you watch a
Let's Play of DAO you may well see players blindly chasing after that
Hurlock Alpha in the Korcari Wilds who attacks at range and
then retreats behind some traps and into an ambush position.

People are dumb.  Having the AI be dumb mimics human behaviour.

Correction, people make dumb decisions within the context of an artificial world that ultimately will not harm them in reality in any way.

The problem here is that you continue to think that video games are in some way an accurate reflection of reality, and that the things that happen in video games should therefore be strictly adhered to in those same ways that you expect.

Video games are not reality though.  I can freely choose to blitz into an area knowing that if something bad happens, I can just reload.  This is typically the point where you will interject with a statement about how the in game character couldn't know that, and therefore is behaving with his own interal logic for making such an aggressive move.  Unfortunately, since the player is not removed from controling or influencing the character's actions, this can never be the case.


People do not typically blindly run into choke points.  People typically act in the best interests of self-preservation, which is often some form of cowering or running.  It is very rarely to actively pursue the hostile by taking actions that explicitly expose oneself to greater harm.

Then again, the exceptional restrictions that exist on what one can and cannot do in a video game already reflects this.  Unless there's some sort of deity that determines what decisions I can and cannot make at a given time, video games will always have this disconnect from reality.

Or they turn down the difficulty, behave exactly the same way, and succeed.

Some people appear not to want to learn.

And sometimes it's just the dice falling the right way.

I do agree that some people do appear to not want to learn, however.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 13 décembre 2012 - 08:36 .

[Allan Schumacher]

This is EXACTLY why Sylvius does what he does. You play PnP's and are resigned to the fact that games don't have the technology (not really the case, maybe AAA game design does not allot the neccessary resources required for such a, to most people, minor feature, such as seamless combat and other gameplay design functions, but regardless...) to do that today.

Yet less and less people who have played PnP's are now playing video games. It is getting to the point where video game limitations aren't even being viewed as limitations anymore. They are just accepted as par for the course. What happens when no more PnP players are giving input into game design? What happens when no more game designers have any working knowledge of the wide-open possibilities of a PnP campaign with a live DM can do?

It should probably be noted that there's several PnP campaigns that occur by the staff in various universes and rule settings that happen every day of the week, in the office.

This doesn't include the numerous games that I know happen but just aren't literally played inside BioWare's offices after hours.

Technology is not the problem. Game Design limitations and lack of initiative to do so is the problem.

This is probably one of the rudest things I've seen written on this forum. Just a blanket statement that we lack initiative. Thanks!

[Allan Schumacher]

Abit off topic: But you could die of starvation in the Ultima games, actually.

From at least 6 on, the Avatar is actually invincible. He may "starve to death" but someone always utters "Kal Lor."

Two of my favourite RPGs of all time (6 and 7, plus Serpent Isle) have a game mechanic that literally makes it impossible to lose.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 13 décembre 2012 - 09:16 .