195 réponses à ce sujet

[10K]

Flamingdropbear wrote...

Knowing the unknownable - How the hell did Hawke know where to take all the bits of garbage in fetch quests? How did she know what was important and not just vendor trash? If your making these quests again just shove a note on the Chanters board.

I agree with this. Way even have a chanters board if you only going to have 5 request on it throughout the entire game. It would've made more sense to add these fetch quest to it.

[Solmanian]

Yes, we have chanters board! Use them! Make it a rich and bustling tool. Instead of strolling about collecting SQ's make them all available on the board also. Like spectre requisitions in ME3, so we could pick up the quests we missed. Varric was kinda like it in DA2 telling us about romurs that became future quests when they "matured".

[Renmiri1]

Twisted Path wrote...

Yeah, that was a really weird moment in Mass Effect 3, though I thought the game was full of those.  By that I mean weird moments where the game just suddenly decides what the player character thinks and feels about stuff, often involving the PC acting like a compleat idiot. I hope there's none of that in Dragon Age 3.

+1,000

[Dabrikishaw]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

I think it's interesting how different people "roleplay."

I usually try to put "myself" in the role with whatever traits I have decided. I feel a need to imagine that it's myself with those traits (those traits may not be traits I actually possess. In fact, rarely have I been able to manipulate the Force in real life!), and I try to imagine what the emotional context of what "I" am feeling when events happen.

I draw upon my personal experiences to try to understand how that emotion must feel, sometimes I can come up with something fine (it's not hard for me to feel sorrow for the loss of my sibling in DA2, for example), and other times I just need to make my best guess.

It works for me as it helps my emotional connection to the game, and any game that can illicit genuine emotional responses out of me (for in game reasons) are typically games I hold in high regard (looking at you The Walking Dead).

When I do role play I use my characters pre-bulit background to determine how they would act. Like as a Dwarf Noble, my character would behave exactly as how any other dwarf born and raised in Orzammar would act.

I must also confess that how you roleplay is exaclty how I though all roleplaying was suppose to work Alan.

[ashesandwine]

No one seems to be bothered by a mage Hawke is immersion breaking for me.

[Rawgrim]

ashesandwine wrote...

No one seems to be bothered by a mage Hawke is immersion breaking for me.

Ohh mage Hawke was immersion breaking. Also the fact that mage Hawke could support mages constantly, and in public too - and mages still kept attacking him like he was their worst enemy.

[Dabrikishaw]

Rawgrim wrote...

ashesandwine wrote...

No one seems to be bothered by a mage Hawke is immersion breaking for me.

Ohh mage Hawke was immersion breaking. Also the fact that mage Hawke could support mages constantly, and in public too - and mages still kept attacking him like he was their worst enemy.

I've come to the conclusion that whatever Dragon Age 2 was trying to do, the story makes far more sense with a Pro-Templar Warrior Hawke with the Templar specialization.

[Rawgrim]

Dabrikishaw wrote...

Rawgrim wrote...

ashesandwine wrote...

No one seems to be bothered by a mage Hawke is immersion breaking for me.

Ohh mage Hawke was immersion breaking. Also the fact that mage Hawke could support mages constantly, and in public too - and mages still kept attacking him like he was their worst enemy.

I've come to the conclusion that whatever Dragon Age 2 was trying to do, the story makes far more sense with a Pro-Templar Warrior Hawke with the Templar specialization.

Thats probably true. He still gets the templar training out of the blue though.

[Remmirath]

Immersion in general tends to I think be slightly ill-defined in this usage, so for me, I'll define it as being when I'm going along playing the game and playing my character and nothing caused by the game is distracting me from that. Anything that makes me think too much about the game or especially which hinders playing the character is something I'd then consider to be immersion-breaking.

Roleplaying is, unsurprisingly, one of the main things I enjoy about roleplaying games. I roleplay by coming up with very different characters each time and playing that character. Any time that there's a cutscene where my character is doing or especially saying something that they wouldn't say pulls me out of things and bothers me, and it's often hard to reconcile the action that the cutscene made them do with the rest of their personality. This is why the voiced dialogue wheel approach is such a problem for me; not knowing what the character will say or how they'll say it ahead of time makes it difficult to roleplay a consistent personality.

Things that make no sense to me also tend to jar me and pull me out of things. class-based restrictions on armour and weapons tend to do this, especially for fighting classes. I can easily accept it if a mage can't use weapons and armour (though I do prefer it if they can), but it's hard for me to figure out why a fighter can't use all weapons and armour they come across.

Graphically speaking, the only things that really do it are very weird special effects (all the glowing for stances and so forth, when they aren't magical) or things changing in a major and noticable way from game to game (elves and Darkspawn and so forth between the games). Other than that, I don't notice graphics much.

I also tend to notice oddities and problems with weapons, armour, and combat a good deal. It doesn't bother me too much if combat animations aren't very realistic, so long as it isn't to the point of someone using a spear exactly the same as they use a sword, but ridiculously huge or heavy weapons bother me, and non-functional armour jars and bothers me. Activated abilities tend to also. For some reason that I unfortunately can't put my finger on, they seemed less intrusive to me in Origins than they did in other games I've played that had them. For some reason the way the combat system changed between Origins and Dragon Age II caused me to be constantly questioning it and wondering about it in II whereas it hadn't bothered me in Origins. The very large numbers might've had something to do with it; the same thing tends to happen to me in other games that have those.

[The Spirit of Dance]

Flamingdropbear wrote...

The Hands - by the Ancestors the hands in both DA games were either action figure grips, unmoving and in the uncanny valley, out of place on the body (Bethany had the hands of a 59 year old washer woman on the body of a teenager)

Couldn't say it better myself and the most scary part of the hands in dragon age is that a large number of BSN thought they were fine in DA2, yet we get threads in near full support of the removal of things that are less noticable.

[Allan Schumacher]

I must also confess that how you roleplay is exaclty how I though all roleplaying was suppose to work Alan.

I find the term roleplaying is also quite nebulous and open to interpretation, and hence tend to try to prevent discussions from turning into overt definitions as to "what it means to roleplay" since I find they tend to follow a similar path.

I don't have much issue of someone says what they feel roleplaying is or what is important about it for them. It's more when someone comes along and tells other people they are doing it wrong or that they should use a different word.

[nightscrawl]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

I find immersion to be that rather vagueish feeling that isn't really well defined, by which people will fall back on if something seems off but they can't quite put their finger on it.

When I see most people talk about it, I kind of equate to the idea of suspension of disbelief.  I also see the idea of those little details that help "enhance immersion."  Things you might not have even realized were there, but if removed would come across as taking away from the situation, even if you aren't able to describe why.

To me immersion is about forgetting you are playing a game. These can be as minor as UI elements, or large like artificial barriers put in by the devs to prevent you from escaping a boss fight. As much as I like and support them, the heart icons are also immersion breaking, but to me a necessary evil to avoid frustration.

Anything that reminds me that this is a game that was developed by people, and also has to have systems because it is a game (loot, leveling, stats), rather than some world that exists on its own, is immersion breaking.

Some of these things are just part of gaming and I have come to accept them: ability icons, health and mana bars, clicking on a mob to loot it, etc; other things like relationship meters can lead to meta gaming and remind me that a computer has to run these relationships, and in the guts of the game it's partly based on how many points I have in friendship or rivalry.

[Gibb_Shepard]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

Being a writer, I don't exactly put myself in the place of my character as I'm crafting them and their dialog and the world around them.

As a writer, how do you determine an appropriate reaction for a character that you are writing?

Take into account the character's traits and developments up until that point, and take an educated guess at what such a character would do.

[Allan Schumacher]

Take into account the character's traits and developments up until that point, and take an educated guess at what such a character would do.

What influences the educated guess? What makes a guess educated rather than random?

[bEVEsthda]

EpicBoot2daFace wrote...



All the effort that went into modeling that bow is wasted when the player notices there is no bow string.

All the effort that went into modeling that bow is wasted if the player knows 'A' about archery, or physics and practical engineering, and then realizes that bow is the wanking fantasy of somebody who's into spikes, jaggy edges, (and probably horns, feathers, leatherstraps and fluffy, androgynous, white or pastel hairdos as well).

(Yep, I don't mind still twisting the knife in DA2's art style, now and then)

[Monica21]

ashesandwine wrote...

No one seems to be bothered by a mage Hawke is immersion breaking for me.

Mage Bethany is equally immersion breaking. The first time I meet Cullen she's throwing magic around and only later does he tell me that he's hearing rumors and hopes they aren't true.

That said, I'm not entirely sure that my definition of immersion follows along with the idea that I'm supposed to get so lost in the game that I forget I'm playing the game. No matter how sucked in I get or how often I've called in sick to work to play a new game, I'm still very aware that I'm looking at a screen, clicking a mouse, and using the keyboard. 

The things that do break immersion (if that's what we're calling it) are things that put me in my head too much instead of in the character's head. I don't like having to try and make sense of quest because the decision tree was poorly made or the dialogue is disjointed and poorly executed. I don't like not having repercussions for choices or not even having the ability to make obvious choices. For example, telling Cullen about Anders. Great, let's have that option, but can we please not have Anders be invisible to Cullen when this happens? Another example would be the Magistrate's Orders quest, in which nothing happens no matter what choice you make. Oblivion had a great questline for the Dark Brotherhood until the final quest, in which you're carrying a head around, you know who the real killer is, and you aren't given the option to say anything because the final confrontation had to be dramatic or some nonsense.

The biggest immersion breaker to me though, is the dialogue. Maybe it's because of the voiced protaganist, but conversation is often very disjointed and the tone is wrong. If I investigate before I advance the conversation, in most cases the advancement then seems totally out of place. And yes, the paraphrasing throws me off, too. Just last night a paraphrase for Feynriel was "It's not about you" and Hawke said something like, "Mages shouldn't be locked up" which wasn't even close to what I meant as a player and not at all what my pro-Templar Hawke meant. There are lots of reasons why it wasn't about Feynriel. It's because my sister's a mage, because your mom asked me to find you, because I don't think people should be sold into slavery. It didn't have anything to do with locking up mages, so I had to reload, even though the answer didn't make a difference.

So, yeah. There are things which I would consider immersion breakers for me, but don't have anything to do with whether I forget I'm playing a game and have everything to do with whether I can use the game's canon for my character or have to create my own headcanon just for my character to make sense.

Modifié par Monica21, 07 avril 2013 - 03:11 .

[EpicBoot2daFace]

bEVEsthda wrote...

EpicBoot2daFace wrote...



All the effort that went into modeling that bow is wasted when the player notices there is no bow string.

All the effort that went into modeling that bow is wasted if the player knows 'A' about archery, or physics and practical engineering, and then realizes that bow is the wanking fantasy of somebody who's into spikes, jaggy edges, (and probably horns, feathers, leatherstraps and fluffy, androgynous, white or pastel hairdos as well).

(Yep, I don't mind still twisting the knife in DA2's art style, now and then)

Well, I was trying to be nice about DA2 for once. **** it, twist that knife!

[Renmiri1]

rofl!!!

Really ? Shall I count the ways DA is not realistic ? Lets start with the name DRAGON Age

Dragons aren't real they are the wanking fantasy of somebody who's into sword and sorcery

Pot, meet kettle. Be nice to kettle or your glasshouse might meet the stone you just threw at kettle

That knife you twisting ? Cutting up you too buddy 

Modifié par Renmiri1, 07 avril 2013 - 05:51 .

[EpicBoot2daFace]

Renmiri1 wrote...

rofl!!!

Really ? Shall I count the ways DA is not realistic ? Lets start with the name DRAGON Age

Dragons aren't real they are the wanking fantasy of somebody who's into sword and sorcery

Pot, meet kettle. Be nice to kettle or your glasshouse might meet the stone you just threw at kettle

That knife you twisting ? Cutting up you too buddy 

You gotta admit, that bow does look ridiculous. At least the bows in Origins looked closer the real thing.

Modifié par EpicBoot2daFace, 07 avril 2013 - 05:55 .

[Monica21]

Renmiri1 wrote...

rofl!!!

Really ? Shall I count the ways DA is not realistic ? Lets start with the name DRAGON Age

Dragons aren't real they are the wanking fantasy of somebody who's into sword and sorcery

Pot, meet kettle. Be nice to kettle or your glasshouse might meet the stone you just threw at kettle

That knife you twisting ? Cutting up you too buddy 

How is it cutting him up? It's a ridiculous looking bow. Also, no matter what fantasy world you live in, bows simply don't work without bowstrings. If there's a codex entry in Inquisition stating that it has something to do with magic, then fine, but so far, it's an entirely useless piece of wood that only kind of looks like a bow.

And thank you for (again) reminding us that Dragon Age isn't real. We know that though. We really, really do. 

[AstraDrakkar]

Renmiri1 wrote...

Server down, retry in a few minutes...

This ^

[Renmiri1]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

Take into account the character's traits and developments up until that point, and take an educated guess at what such a character would do.

What influences the educated guess? What makes a guess educated rather than random?

Dunno about him but when I write a character I come up with a background for him / her, a generic personality, some generic way of responding to the world.. And that is the "educated" part, i.e. based on those initial parameters how will he or she act when X happens ?

Lets look at Sigrun, for instance

Background: Casteless dwarf, got in trouble, is on Legion of the Dead because of said trouble
Personality: Based on her background, Sigrun knows hardship. Has it made her bitter ? Angry at the world, chip on her shoulder ? Broken ? Numb ? All possible but done to death..

So let's make this little dwarf girl strong and unbreakable, no matter what gets thrown at her. She has a great deal of emotional pain on her past but she is a survivor so she can either be numb or stoic, i.e. she either distances himself completely from her emotions or she "just get over it" and forges on. Let's go with stoic.  She can deal with pain and hardship but she still is affected by it.

We decided for no chip on her shoulder and she is on Legion of the Dead, helping all dwarves survive a bit longer by killing Darkspawn till she dies. So if a) she isn't numb, i.e. she still allows herself to feel emotion and her "profession" is helping her people, then it flows very well that Sigrun has a lot of empathy for her people. We could make Sigrun be "dwarf centric" and only care about dwarves problems, being a higly empathetical humanoid when it comes to dwarves but completely unconcerned about other races (Dalish elves anyone ?). Nah, that is selling Sigrun short, lets make her less myopic. Sigrun is a "hero" in the sense that she fights to the death to protect all peoples of Thedas and empathyzes with all who suffer.

That could make hear gooody goody two shoes but she is a bad arse dwarf who kills darkspawn for a living so no, it deosn't make sense for Sigrun to be "Mother Theresa". She can and will hurt and kill monsters or bandits if it is necessary to protect her squad. Mmm.. too many "hero" ingredients here. she could be the Warden with this bio. How can we make her stand out ? Well we have a dark hurtful past, we have strength but we also have a doomed future. She is fighting to the death. She will never have family, kids, learn to paint or sing or be able to study.. Dark past and even darker future, spent on a hellhole fighting monsters. And not bitter... She is stoic and practical after all, so no point on dwelling on the negatives. That would make her resigned to her fate, seeing no point in throwing her hardship on people's faces. 

Aha! lets make her cheery and sunny and a breath of fresh air.. Would balance a bit of the sadness and drama of her past and future, bringing a nice contrast: unbelieveably dark future x preppy and cheery demeanor is new, most doomed characters are the "dark and broody" type.

Her ceerfulness might be genuine or might be a shield she uses to keep her inner suffering private, bottled up, which allows her to stoically move on with her "life". Or both. She is practical, sees no point in dwelling on negatives. She is doomed, but she doesn't have to spend her days moping. All her squadmatesare there to die just like her, what is the point of repeating the obvious ? Weakens the squad and makes her weaker if she spends her energy on "what could have been" instead of on repairing her armors and weapon and getting ready for the next battle.

Ok, now we made Sigrun, a cheeful and funny dwarf gal, with a sad past and strong as nails.

She gets kidnapped by darkspawn and separated from her squad, and a bunch of humans save her. WWSD now ? (what would Sigrun do now) ? Sigrun, the dwarf gal we described just above, what would she do if she finds herself rescued by a bunch of humans while in the middle of a scuffle with darkspawns ?
a) Say thanks (empathy, cheefulness)
Go back to fight darkspawn and rescue her team (resigned to be Legion of the Dead and to dying, empathetic with her squad mates)
c) Not ask for help.  (No point: She is practical so she knows it is suicide. Only a mad dwarf like her would go back into Kal Hyrol crawling with darkspawn as it is right now. Suicide ? Well she is "dead" already so no biggie - for her - but her human rescuers are not Legion of the Dead and will probably object if asked to join a hopeless mission)

/ shrugs

That is how I write anyway 

Modifié par Renmiri1, 07 avril 2013 - 06:31 .

[Rawgrim]

Renmiri1 wrote...

rofl!!!

Really ? Shall I count the ways DA is not realistic ? Lets start with the name DRAGON Age

Dragons aren't real they are the wanking fantasy of somebody who's into sword and sorcery

Pot, meet kettle. Be nice to kettle or your glasshouse might meet the stone you just threw at kettle

That knife you twisting ? Cutting up you too buddy 

Dragons are realistic. In the games we are told they excist. Ergo, in Thedas they are very very real. Its called Lore.

However we are also shown that the laws of physics are real in thedas. just like in our world. And when that gets broken the immersion suffers.