13 réponses à ce sujet

[Everwarden]

So Bioware really loves their dialogue wheel. I get it. The dialogue wheel isn't going anywhere, and I don't really care. What does bother me is that for some reason I can't fathom Bioware won't make the paraphrasing aspect of the wheel optional.

Now I can understand being dismissive when players are asking for features that would be ludicrously difficult to program in, such as a cake baking mini-game or pregnancy shenanigans--but would it really be that difficult to show what the player is going to say when you mouse over the option? That way the players who want to be surprised by what their character says can still have that experience by default, and everyone else can avoid having their character say something completely unintended and be forced to reload a previous save.

Though I wouldn't mind a cake baking mini-game or pregnancy shenanigans. 

[David Gaider]

There's no reason to continue with this, as it's not a suggestion that will be taken. The answer is sorry, but no-- there will be no hover text that displays the full line. I know some have an idea in their head as to what it will do, and compare it to other games that did something similar (even if those games didn't work the same as DA), but we looked long and hard at this option and in the end didn't agree with the supposition behind it. I doubt the people this would be meant to please would actually be made happy by it because it doesn't go far enough-- that can't go for every single person, of course, as tastes vary, but overall we feel this would be more problem than it's worth.

I gave a longer response on this several times in the past, so I won't do it again. I'd appreciate it if someone wants to bring up "Gaider said this" they actually dig up the response rather than offer some incomplete and incorrect interpretation of whatever it was I said.

Modifié par David Gaider, 04 mars 2013 - 03:12 .

[David Gaider]

Everwarden wrote...
I don't understand this statement. Some people have a problem with paraphrasing, and showing what is actually about to be said would fix said problem. How could completely removing the problem not go far enough? Is your point that if the problem is removed people will just find other things to whine about?

Not every design issue is solvable by a toggle-- it always sounds like the best idea (everyone's happy!) but just forces us to deal with the consequences of both options rather than just one, as valid options must be equally supported.

In this case, the existence of player VO means the lines are written differently. So knowing the actual text of the line may give you more insight, but would probably fall down just about as often as paraphrases (albeit in different ways). There will always be places where options don't do what you think they will-- even in Origins, with its lack of VO, had this... and if you think it didn't and wasn't occasionally complained about, you're fooling yourselves.

The origin of the request (for many people, at least) seems to stem from the nuance of not being able to imagine a line spoken as they wish and less from a factual difference in the line versus the paraphrase. While the latter can be fixed with seeing the full line, the former cannot, and thus for many people is effort spent to not really address their base issue.

It also, quite frankly, isn't something we feel works very well. We're leery about putting in an option that many people will opt for without realizing the full implication ("More information on the dialogue? Hell, yes! I love dialogue!"). They wouldn't come and complain that they don't like the hover text, they'd complain that the dialogue seems slow or repetitive. Sylvius likes to counter this by saying we shouldn't protect players from themselves, but that is indeed exactly our job as designers. Not everyone is as aware of every nuance of the system as the people who come here to these forums-- actually, very far from everyone indeed.

If someone disagrees with that, it's fine. We investigated it, tried it out ourselves (various versions, in fact) and in the end put it aside. I know some people will categorize this as "you aren't listening", but we did listen and looked into it thoroughly and decided it wasn't what we wanted or what we thought could be made to work as an option. That's really the best we can do.

Modifié par David Gaider, 04 mars 2013 - 06:12 .

[David Gaider]

Fast Jimmy wrote...
I was implying that if discussions of past decisions by devs could be categorized or marked for easy reference, the burden wouldn't be on them to come into every thread about it that pops up and feel they have to explain or defend themselves. The fact that every single one of the Sticked Threads in this forum were fan created, not dev, would seem to suggest that this is not happening. 

These forums don't really exist to disseminate information on a game-- particularly one that hasn't been revealed, yet. I imagine there will some kind of more comprehensive info here once the reveal happens, but that's up to the community team to put together.

My only beef is when someone says "Gaider said this" but neither offers a direct quote or a link. People like to take that as gospel, and then refer to it later as if it was something I said rather than a (partial) interpretation of what I said. If someone wants to make a "collected quotes" thread, they're free to do so... but lacking access to that shouldn't mean that someone goes around ascribing statements to me (or any developer) which we haven't made.

[David Gaider]

Everwarden wrote...
Maybe it's just me, but recently I've gotten the impression that EA and Bioware specifically have decided that their customers are a bunch of gibbering, unpleasable retards who won't like anything they make--so why bother listening to them?

I appreciate the fact this comes directly after my response (particularly the last paragraph).

Of course it's entirely possible I'm getting that impression because of my own bias.

It's a stretch, but just maybe.

[John Epler]

Everwarden wrote...

Jayne126 wrote...
This strikes me just as stubbornness.

I get the same impression.

Maybe it's just me, but recently I've gotten the impression that EA and Bioware specifically have decided that their customers are a bunch of gibbering, unpleasable retards who won't like anything they make--so why bother listening to them? 

Of course it's entirely possible I'm getting that impression because of my own bias. 

As a general note, I would avoid using the word 'retard'. There are much better words to use without the serious ableist baggage that comes with that word choice.

Insofar as the rest of it's concerned - it's more that we listen to our customers, but all of that feedback has to be filtered through a bunch of lenses that we can't really make all that public. For example, what makes for a good user experience, what is the best use of resources, what fits our overarching vision the best.

Some things that the forums (and other fans) have brought up are certainly taken much more significantly into consideration - our push towards fewer moments that take the player out of gameplay and more ambient storytelling is definitely at least partially informed by fan feedback, although we certainly learned our own lessons playing games such as Dark Souls, Skyrim, or Dragon's Dogma.

[John Epler]

Jayne126 wrote...

John Epler wrote...

I have to wonder what you could learn from Dark Souls, considering it's the total opposite of your games.
From Skyrim? Well, the sense of "exploration" and details of the world, but hopefully nothing else since this game has no real depth.

Dunno 'bout Dragon's Dogma. Waiting for Dark Arisen (maybe).

Dark Souls does an amazing job of giving the player the feeling that everything they're seeing is a connected part of the same area. They have some really good level design ideas - you can go to Blighttown and look up to see the Undead Parish area way up above, or down to Ash Lake and see the roots of the giant trees you see in the Darkroot Garden.

Other than that, they have some very interesting mechanics in that I'd argue the game is tough but never unfair. Your deaths are almost always the result of impatience or poor planning, as opposed to the game just trying to make your life difficult.

Dragon's Dogma offers some good lessons on animations and showing a lot of information via the game, as opposed to through GUIs - when you're fighting a chimera, you know that it can't poison you anymore because the snake head has been completely lopped off, for example.

It's rare that a game comes out that doesn't do something exceptionally well.

[John Epler]

EpicBoot2daFace wrote...

John Epler wrote...

It's rare that a game comes out that doesn't do something exceptionally well.

You're kidding, right? There's plenty of games that come out every year that do nothing exceptionally well.

I'd argue that, but let me rephrase to - it's rare that a game comes out where you can't learn at least one lesson, either from things they do exceptionally well or from places where they missed the mark.

[David Gaider]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
If I bear the slaver no ill will, I want to choose yes.  However, it turns out that Hawke isn't allowed to like the slavers, and thus the full line associated with the Yes option is "Get out of my sight."  That's not an unaggressive line.

You probably had an aggressive-dominant tone setting (based on your previous choices).

From our analysis, one of the most frequent breakdowns came from what we did with the choice lines-- namely that selecting a choice meant that there were three possible resulting player lines, based on the player's dominant tone. Why? Because we tried to make those three lines as different from each other as possible (or why even have them?), and thus you were trying to make a paraphrase that covered all three lines and it ended up being necessarily vague as a result.

While having those different lines is cool when noticed, I don't think it was actually noticed very much ("card tricks in the dark" is a phrase for variations which, cool as they might be, aren't recognized by players as variation unless they have inside knowledge or replay), so we're not going to use dominant tone in those lines any more. Choice lines are always neutral tone unless the tone is implied in the paraphrase-- makes it easier to write the paraphrase and less chance of disconnect between it and the actual line, and we can use the wordcount elsewhere just as easily.

Modifié par David Gaider, 04 mars 2013 - 08:30 .

[David Gaider]

esper wrote...
Could you also not have any speeches be dominated by the dominate tone without input.

There's no such thing as dominant tone any longer. Tone exists for roleplaying choices in the tone wheels-- that's it. We don't track it. As I said, options off the choice wheel are neutral-toned unless the tone is already implicit, and any auto-dialogue (I'll use that phrase, since it seems to have stuck) we need to use is also neutral-only.

[David Gaider]

Filament wrote...
I would have preferred to be able to pick your dominant tone or just choose the tone of the action choice, but ok, back to boring neutrality it is then.

Neutrality isn't necessarily boring. We just call it that because it has no specific tone-- meaning that whatever tone it has is conveyed by the nature of the choice, same as how we wrote pretty much all action choices in DAO. It's also what we call the tone for any lines that don't need it... like in a cutscene where the player shouts out something, or lines you could expect anyone to say (like "Hello").

In this case, the decision to get rid of dominant tone wasn't made to appease any specific group. We were just looking at how to improve our use of paraphrases, and through that examining the places where it was problematic in DA2, and the choices being broken down into different tone responses was a clear culprit... if not for all issues certainly for many. It was an experiment that sounded better than it usually worked.

You still have the use of tones in every tone wheel, meaning you can choose which tone to use in most roleplaying situations. It's simply a case of us not supplying you with a tone elsewhere... and while I get the idea "just choose the tone of the action choice", I'm afraid that's really not feasible. Picking a choice and then picking the tone of a choice is the kind of micro-management that would be really cumbersome. Some people might like that kind of granularity, I suppose, but it's never going to happen.

[David Gaider]

Cutlass Jack wrote...
Dominant Tone is what made Auto Dialogue tolerable, and sometimes enjoyable to me. I enjoyed my characters not only speaking but having an actual personality. Especially in party banters.

Yes, well, there are other solutions to that. I've said before we'd likely have less requirement of auto-dialogue (or what you guys call it, anyhow... it seems to refer to what we writers consider to be several different things). If the idea on the writing side is to improve paraphrases, it's also to improve the player's control and offer more replayability. There are ways to do those things which don't involve "card tricks in the dark", and we'll be talking about those eventually.

Modifié par David Gaider, 05 mars 2013 - 07:32 .

[David Gaider]

Ghost43 wrote...
I'm not sure I understand-- is there a tone wheel seperate from the dialogue choices?

No, it's not separate. We term the dialogue wheel which has tone choices to be the "tone wheel" and the dialogue wheel which has action choices to be the "action wheel". In the former your choices are mainly roleplaying... you're deciding how to say something, or what topic to address, but you're not doing anything. In the latter your choices are what to do about something (or expressing an opinion which doesn't involve tone).

In DA2, options on the choice wheel had a single paraphrase but three different spoken lines which varied based on the player character's dominant tone. As I mentioned previously, this made it difficult to come up with a paraphrase for all three (aside from being fairly expensive, wordcount-wise). While the answer could have been to paraphrase each line separately, in the end we decided the content was better used elsewhere.

In DA3, we are adding the "reaction wheel" to the previous two categories. This covers any situation where an emotional response is called for, where the three tones don't cover the needed territory (sadness, shock, rage... or just being stoic if one prefers), but we haven't shown it yet nor will I discuss it much.

But those are the three basic dialogue wheels with which we work, and the terms are specific to us writers. They're not ones you need to use. From the perspective of the player, one dialogue wheel is the same as any other.

Modifié par David Gaider, 06 mars 2013 - 08:26 .

[David Gaider]

EntropicAngel wrote...
But regardless, I think we all agree that at this present time the removal of the dominant tone was the best choice.

I know there are people who seem to think so-- making assumptions, I assume, as to exactly what that will mean to the bigger picture the same as those who seem to be concerned about the removal of dominant tone are. Both groups of people don't really have all the information, however, about what we're doing with dialogue... and I'm not about to start going into detailed explanations. As we've seen here, doing so just raises more questions, none of which we're prepared to answer yet.

So... draw your conclusions with a giant grain of salt for the time being, is all I'm suggesting.