17 réponses à ce sujet

[GreyLycanTrope]

Do you want to loose the dialogue wheel and return to the point based persuasion check?

Keep the dialogue wheel and something similar to DA2 personality/class dependant persuasions?

A hybrid of sorts were you put points into the skill and have the option appear in the dialogue wheel similar to ME1's paragon/renegade skills? (This is likely my personally prefered option btw)

Loose the element all together?

Something I haven't mentioned/thought of yet?

Your thoughts please.

[Allan Schumacher]

They're not for me, but that's because the character's faces just aren't something that I spend a lot of time looking at. It's like with comics, where I almost never notice the things in the art unless someone points them out to me. I pay attention to words, but not to images. Heck, until someone mentioned it on the forums, I never knew the faces in Jade Empire changed depending on what dialogue option you had highlighted.

What would happen if you turned off subtitles?

While interacting with a person in real life, there are no visual words to take my focus away from the speaker, so I am focusing more on the body language of the speaker as they speak (on top of things like intonation and so forth).

In games like Mass Effect, I actively do not play with subtitles on to allow me greater freedom to see what is going on. If I have subtitles, I tend to focus on the subtitles.

[Allan Schumacher]

The idea is that the numbers become locked or static. The programming simply remembers which areas have been visited and saves the numbers that were generated at that time. The contents of any chest would also be remembered so re-entering the area will not change anything, unless the gamer has leveled up the character in that particular skill to overcome the difficulty that was encountered.

This isn't very difficult to do (it's actually trivially easy to add a RNG seed).

Now, you *could* assign the unique seed to each entity that uses it (sharing the same seed would result in allowing players to do things out of order to get slightly different results), although that still works as some sort of a level of predeterminism.

Imagine we have critical fails in the game (I'm not a huge fan of critical fails...). This means that whatever locked placeable has received that critical fail can now never be opened in that particular game. Even if you jack your lockpicking up to over 9000.

It's an idea that could work, but it's still a system that is going to be open to exploitation and is going to cause aggravation in some eyes.

[Allan Schumacher]

Come to think of it, this could be an accessibility issue for some groups of people (such as people on the autism spectrum). Perhaps I don't understand how a neurotypical person acts, or what facial expressions they might have, but should that be inevitable reflected in all of my characters?

Unless we abstract out dialogue so it's no longer even about spoken lines, but more along just picking specific instructions (i.e. "Ask about Quest" as an option), I don't think you can really do much to mitigate this. It'd require very fundamentally different perspectives on how to create those interactions.


I mean, as much as people may like to say it's the character's stats that make a difference, not the player abilities, from a cognitive perspective there's always going to be issues. In some cases you can make it work, such as high intellect providing the explicitly correct answer in a dialogue option. Torment did this, and it worked well. Though if a person is functionally at a much lesser intellect than their character, they are still going to trip up because they may not fully understand the "intelligent" response. How do we reconcile that? Do we also add a [Super Smart Response] beside it?

That can still work (Fallout New Vegas did it a lot), but if there's ever a gameplay element that involves figuring out a puzzle, a player is going to need to place their own inherent restrictions on whether or not to exploit their own intellect (assuming the puzzle isn't crit path). When I was younger I was a power gamer so my BG2 Paladin had 3 intellect. I was still able to figure out logic puzzles without issue.

You start to get VERY divergent game content creation when you start to let yourself chase down these rabbit holes. It works if you end up compromising depth of content for breadth of content (i.e. multiple paths that end up with shorter overall playthroughs), but it can be difficult and challenging to justify.


I mean, I think the best way to ensure that it was purely character stats that drove these things, and not player response, would be to make the game automatically make a lot of those choices based on the sum of the character's stats and experiences at any given time. I don't think that that would be very well received, however.

[Allan Schumacher]

ianvillan wrote...

Allan Schumacher wrote...

When I was younger I was a power gamer so my BG2 Paladin had 3 intellect. I was still able to figure out logic puzzles without issue.

.

I have to disagree with you here I don't believe a power gamer would of picked Paladin in BG2.

It was imported from BG1 and I typically liked the idea of the righteous holy warrior.  My character may not have been outright optimal, but I still created my character specifically for making my character powerful in the game, while minimizing stats that were not important to me.

Hence, I power gamed.

[Allan Schumacher]

I would argue that they do actually have a "right" way to win. Fopr instance, in that conversation with the russian informant, there are three ways the conversation can end: with him afraid of you and notifying the authorities about you, making later missions harder, with him neutral to you, and with him positive towards you and giving you access to black market materials. That's very much "right and wrong." There's not a single benefit to making him afraid of you and causing difficulty on later missions.

There are times and places to ensure that the "reward" for branches of gameplay are equivalent (whether it be conversations or otherwise), and other times for there to be a degrees of success/failure.

The situation you describe with Grigori could be declared to be a "win," but if you're the type of gamer that feels conversations should be about defining your character, I don't think Alpha Protocol is a good example of a game that doesn't let you do it.

I pick my choices in Alpha Protocol to define my character, and I live with the consequences of whatever those choices may be. Sometimes they work out well for me, and other times they do not. Those differences, as subtle as they may be, are what makes the game so fantastic for me. I see no reason why the interaction with Grigori having an "ideal" outcome prevents you from still defining your character.

[Allan Schumacher]

EntropicAngel wrote...

It's rather like Jimmy has mentioned--if there is a "right choice," I feel obliged to try to gain it.

Now, I'll note this doesn't happen in every game. For my, say, third or fourth playthrough of DA:O to this last one (around seven?), I took my Grey Warden directly to Redcliffe, because Alistair, the senior Grey Warden, says more than once that Arl Eamon can help us and that we should go there first. As a result, I felt unable in character to go to the Circle to try to save Connor and his mother both, because of the Circle turmoil. This resulted in someone dying who could have been prevented entirely. This resulted in "me" using blood magic, the consortium with demons, because I felt it was the best way given the circumstances.

I was willing to accept the suboptimal game conditions for better roleplaying. But I find that difficult in AP or in DE:HR--probably because those aren't the only problems, just the latest in a line, I have with roleplaying [like KotOR with Revan really having his old memory, it just being hidden (which means he/she is a set protagonist with set beliefs that caused him/her to become a Jedi, rebel, then become a Sith)] in these games.

I only changed my strategy in DA:O because I realized the game does not tell you the Circle's problems while you're at Redcliffe, thus the PC doesn't know about it, thus I was unintentionally metagaming.

This depends on what metric you're using for evaluating the "correct choice."

Going back to Alpha Protocol, being nice to Mina is only the "right choice" if you have constructed a value system that considers "Mina's approval" as being more worth while than whatever consequences you may think exist for Mike's other responses.

If you make every choice "equivalent" in value, you can also effectively make choice meaningless.

This comes across as a statement that you do not want consequences with your "choice and consequences."  As a gamer, I can only agree to disagree.

The best time, for myself, to have "all choices being equivalent in their value" is at the end game.  Mostly because there's no opportunity for the player to work around whatever problems may be introduced.  That said, I don't think it's a requirement.  Bloodlines has some awesome endings that are decidedly bad endings, and they are a direct consequence of the decisions that you have made in the game, so it still works.


Sometimes you want choice to simply be an illusion, as it's a way for you to define your character.  Such as agreeing to do something because you think it's a good idea, or agreeing to do something despite reservations that you may have.

That Alpha Protocol lets you smash Grigori's head into the bar as a way to intimidate him does a marvelous job of allowing the player to define Mike's character.  Going back to your original concern, if a player defines the "right choice" as the choice that fits their character the best, then smashing Grigori's head into the bar is unequivocally the right choice.

Take that away, and I feel Alpha Protocol becomes a weaker game, and undermines what I feel is far and away its strongest characteristic.

Just my opinion.

[Allan Schumacher]

The other side of that coin is that our character begins doing these things without any input at all. After a time, it becomes less you having a conversation and more watching how Bioware's character is behaving in a situation.

Text gives you the option to at least say "Turian Merc, to woman." Though disjointed, it gives player choice instead of being relegated from an interactive medium to a passive one.

Can't agree with this. I interact on a daily basis with people without having subtitles to rely on.

Granted, you can't say "Pardon me" in a game (since you can only do what is put into the game), but I can't remember specific instances where I have found myself needing the text to know what is going on.

However, when a scene is created in a way to utilize body language, tonal shifts, emphasis, pauses, and so forth, I feel it's value added and things like sarcasm and subtle nuances end up coming across more clearly.

Furthermore, I do subvocalize, so I found myself disabling subtitled specifically because I couldn't help but read them, which disrupted my own pacing and made the sequences less enjoyable for me. So I disabled subtitles and found myself enjoying the experiences more.

And I very much am a fan of the more cinematic conversations (having recently played KOTOR 2 and going through something much more static).

That's my problem with Bioware's choice... not that they moved to a voice protagonist. But that they seemed to have zero understanding of why the silent PC had tons of value when they went about their system to implement said protagonist.

Ouch....

I wouldn't be one to consider myself clueless to why the silent PC has value. But you're welcome to think that's the case if you so desire.

I say this with Planescape: Torment being my all time favourite game.  I loved the push to make NPCs voiced when it happened, and find that games like Alpha Protocol are only further complemented by having the protagonist voiced as well.  Same goes for Mass Effect.

From a technical side, I found it interesting how Meer greatly improved as a voice actor from ME1 to ME3, but in general I'd still consider FemShep weaker without the fantastic work that Hale delivered throughout.

Different strokes for different folks.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 16 mai 2013 - 06:25 .

[Allan Schumacher]

EntropicAngel wrote...

I understand, but I would argue that the "correct choice" is the one that is clearly outlined in the mission objectives. I don't remember what the mission objectives said for that mission, so I'll use another as an example: the NSA computer bank. Your entire purpose for being there was to plant the bug. Thus, anything that goes against that (like say shooting an NSA operative) is the "wrong" choice.

I'm not talking about an internal correct choice, I'm talking about what the game tells you to do.

It's only the wrong choice to shoot an NSA operative if it leads to game over.  If your goal is to enact revenge on a corrupt system that left you out to dry and tried to kill you, killing NSA operatives still serves your overall goal.

It also has an impact on how difficult the mission is (i.e. it's less difficult to run around shooting people in the faces instead of meticulously sneaking around them.

It's a system with great consequences in my opinion, and great variability in how you want to play.  Protecting players against metagaming is likely not worth the effort, IMO.

[Allan Schumacher]

It is one thing to say "let's have the character do this in a scene" and an ENTIRELY different one to say "let's give the player the OPTION to have their character do this in a scene." Don't make me fall to my knees upon my mother's death. Don't make my jaw go slack when Duncan Murder Knife's Jory. Don't EVER make my Shepherd do this face...

How do we reconcile things if I like that Shepard makes that face? I personally feel that there's room for both types of games to exist in the market, as both have their pros and cons.


As a side note, Ultima 7 is actually an exceptionally non-linear game (as opposed to faux non-linear like Baldur's Gate). You can literally do whole chunks of the critical path in completely different orders, and even skip on some stuff if you find yourself stumbling upon where you need to be first.

Did the scene with Connor, where he making Teaghan dance like a possessed puppet and berating his mother seem any less creepy because your character wasn't voiced, though the other ones were and interacting with each other?

No.

Did the introduction of Morrigan, with Allistair, Jory and Daveth all speaking to and about Morrigan, seem broken up or ham-fisted with a silent PC?

No

Did the Landsmeet, where you accuse Loghain in front of an entire crowd of people, who can chime in and comment, seem arbitrarily choppy or odd to respond to?

Yes.


The tricky thing for this though, is that we don't know any better. It's hard for me to say "I think DAO would be unequivocally better with a voiced protagonist, as it's also hard for me to say "I think Alpha Protocol would be unequivocally better with a silent protagonist" because it's not what was presented.

What I do know, is that for a variety of reasons, I love Alpha Protocol's dialogues (they are my favourite in all RPGs). Some things I'm not necessarily married to (the timer... though in general I liked it), but it was a great synergy. I really enjoyed the work that Mike's voice actor did as well.

[Allan Schumacher]

MerinTB wrote...

Well, we know that Chris Avellone strongly dislikes the cinematic presentation and voiced protagonist aspect of Alpha Protocol...
even if he DID like the voice actor's performance. 

Chris is probably my favourite designer.  Doesn't mean we'll always agree with everything though.

I know he's also not a fan of how complicated their dialogue system was (because it's really, really, really complex in terms of its dependencies and the like - which is precisely why he liked it).

Although part of the reason why Chris wasn't so keen on the cinematic aspect of Alpha Protocol is more along the lines of how he felt it wouldn't compare well to other contemporaries, such as Mass Effect, because BioWare was better at it.

THough it's more the conversation system in general that I hold in high regard, not the specific cinematics part (which is part of the equation)

[Allan Schumacher]

But I think you are misconstruing what I am saying. I am not saying Alpha Protocol shouldn't exist

No, I think I am understanding what you're saying.  I know you're not saying that Alpha Protocol shouldn't exist.  What I get from what you're saying, however, is that you'd like BioWare to make games that are more in alignment with what you want, rather than say something like Alpha Protocol (I could argue that Hawke is as much of a pregen as Thorton, and even the Warden has a lot more preordained about him than earlier BioWare games).

Going back to the "BioWare is clueless as to why the silent protagonist may have value," it comes down to:

Ultimately we're making the game based on stuff we'd like to put into our game. Yes there's reconciliation between some stuff that fans want, and not everyone on the team (or the fans) is going to want the exact same things, although buy in for wanting whatever we put in to be awesome is usually pretty high.

You can say that it's a bad idea to change from DAO's system to DA2's system. I can counter by saying DAO's roots go back to long, long before even Mass Effect. You're making the assumption that everyone here just adamantly did not want to have a voiced protagonist as well for DAO.

I don't know Brent Knowles. Maybe for him it shouldn't be done, and that helped motivate his decision to leave BioWare because the direction BioWare as a whole was moving in was no longer in alignment with what he'd like to do. So he did the classy thing, said thanks, and moved on (as opposed to sticking around and working on something he wasn't actually interested in making.  That is rarely good for the project).

I can only speak so much on what the studio would have liked to do for DAO, but I do know that there were people that work here that cringe at the DAO conversations and cutscenes, even if I felt they did a pretty good job with the system in place.

What would happen if you decided to approach BioWare's games more like Alpha Protocol or The Witcher?  Would you enjoy them more if you went in with the mental expectation that the parts that let you define the character moreso are seen as bonuses?

Therefore, it can be difficult to accurately roleplay his character.

This is why I'm never keen on defining "roleplaying." I found it easy to play a wide variety of Mike Thortons, and coupled with the way the game was designed, immensely satisfying. It seems our definition, and expectations, of roleplaying are not in alignment.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 16 mai 2013 - 07:50 .

[Allan Schumacher]

MerinTB wrote...

I dunno, I may be parsing this wrong - 

I will say that it did try to carve some new ground with the dialogue mechanics (which were done by Brian Mitsoda – currently on Dead State, check it out – and implemented by Dan Spitzley), and the idea of having a limited cast of extremely reactive characters was a plus as far as I was concerned. I also liked how the game didn’t judge you, it simply showed you other people’s prejudices and judgments on your player character. I liked the hate-mances as much as the romances, I liked the handler perk mechanics, I liked buying intel, I liked the hints of how to tackle speech puzzles (especially if intentionally angering the target would get you an advantage based on a clue in the Intel), I liked how the game rewarded you for being a dick as much as being a hero in a positive light – there wasn’t any judgment there, either.I didn’t like the cinematic conversations (even though I liked the urgency), and I didn’t like the main character, nor did I like the fact he was voiced, either, even though I thought the voice work was good.

It may be because of Mass Effect, but I more have the general feel from MCA that he dislikes cinematic dialogs (at least in games he works on.)

It's possible.  I came to my conclusion here:

I never liked the cinematic feel of the game, but that was the request and one of the pillars, so we did that. I would rather all the animation budget have been spent on combat, stealth, or other game mechanics rather than cinematic conversations, and I felt anything we did would be a negative comparison to current RPG titles from studios who already had a lot more experience and pipelines for delivering that cinematic experience - our animators and designers did a great job, but we definitely didn't have the same resources and budget as other developers.

Source

Could very well be a combination of both, however.

[Allan Schumacher]

But here is where we stand today. Bioware has fans of the DA franchise who really enjoyed something about DA:O. They felt like they did not get it for DA2. They pointed to the way DA:O did it (the silent protagonist) and said "here is why this worked for me and here is why DA2 didn't." Will DA3 make everyone happy? No. Even if it was the greatest game ever made, there will be some who say they hate it and that's just life.

At what point is it seeing what you want to see, when examining that?  How significant is the number of people that report how silent protagonist was one of the crux issues?

For example, there's a lot of people on this forum that tell me how awful the dialogue wheel is.  I know the number one complaint of people I personally know, was the "regression" DAO had by not using it.  They preferred the dialogue wheel.

There are a lot of things people don't like about DA2, many of them I agree with.  It can be difficult to discern the specific reasons for why DA2 didn't do as well as DAO, when compared to the sum of its parts.

It's easy to say "I want to play a mean, bad-ass character." It is quite another to imagine a character that has seen abuse all of their life, or who deeply fears and resents magic, or has a view of the world that is slightly askew. This type of character might be a wholly different person under differing circumstances - polite and nice in one instance, a rage of emotion in another. They may choose to treat two groups of people in ways that are night and day different from each other.

I'd argue that BioWare's games have not allowed you to do this for some time.  Probably going back to at least KOTOR, though admittedly I didn't play Jade Empire.

You can create all the history you want in KOTOR, but none of it is actually true.  You have to come up with rationalizations ex post facto when the reveal happens to still maintain congruity with one's backstory.

A player that has seen abuse all their life only works with specific Origins in DAO.  You can maybe attempt some insane mental gymnastics, but you'll never convince me that Cousland comes from an abusive setting.  Nor will you convince me that Dwarf Commoner had a mostly happy life.

[Allan Schumacher]

Im really sorry (I normally think your posts are very well writen and can understand your point even if I don't fully agree) but making a game should be solely about what the fans want, the majority, as not everyone will agree. When you don't listen or think that you know better than your customers you end up in trouble.

This means that we can never make anything new, because (unfortunately) fans rarely ask for anything new.  They ask for sequels.  They ask for things that they can draw reference to.

You can see this in the Kickstarters and the like.  People always ask Tim Schaefer for Psychonauts 2.  Or Grim Fandango 2.  The people that ask him to surprise them and do something new and fresh gets drowned out.

Should BioWare have made some mech sequel instead of Baldur's Gate?  How many Shattered Steel fans were clamouring for an isometric RPG from BioWare?

Imagine the world had BioWare not decided to shift to RPGs.

It also requires that, ultimately, you may want me to make that I don't want to make.  FPS games historically sell much better, and are easier to make, than BioWare's games.  I don't want to make FPS games, however, even if that's what a lot of people do want to play.

In the end, I'm ultimately still going to want to make a game that I believe has a market (since I enjoy being paid to do my job), but ideally I'd prefer it to line up with what it is I want to do at that particular moment in time.  This also includes mixing it up and trying new things that have never before been done.

That is most likely true that they wanted a voiced protaganist and for whatever reason couldn't get it. But as FastJimmy ask, once you make the decision to go a particular way in a series then you should stick to it, and if you don't stick to it then you should make sure that whatever you change it too is better and executed very well, which a large number of your fans would say you didn't do. If DA:O was voiced then no one (ok some would but thats life) would be complaining about it in DA:2. I don't think many people complain about Mass Effects voiced PC because it alway was.

I agree that changes should be executed better (things you don't change should be executed better as well).  My question then is, did you not know that a voiced protagonist was coming in?  Why did you not think it'd come with the costs of sacrificing single player?  Or rather, why would you go into DA2 and not be okay with the voiced PC, because as far as I know we weren't exactly cryptic with the voiced protagonist.

[Allan Schumacher]

Well that may well be true, however again it is the comany's responcability to
a) hire the right people who will work regardless, at the end of they day everyone will end up doing work they dislike at some point, a good employee is one who still works hard at it.
Ensure that their employees are happy through other means than just ensuring they are doing exactly what they want

I do things in my job all the time that I don't want to do. Because I am stoked and excited for DA3 and the promise I feel it has is why I resolve to do as good of a job as humanly possible on it, rather than something that is merely satisfactory.

Because I'm making something that I feel will be fun and awesome, it makes the "easy days" not even feel like work, and the "hard days" as something totally worth fighting through. Put me on a Facebook social game, and you better hope that I'm motivated through some other means (learning stuff, or something, I can't think of much) because my level of care in the product itself is not particularly high. It's going to be easier to rationalize "good enough."

[Allan Schumacher]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

But you do understand the value we see in the silent protagonist with full text dialogue options, yes?  The ability to choose exactly which line we would like delivered.  The ability to deliver that line however we choose.  And we want these things to avoid our character's word and behaviours from ever contradicting our design of that character's personality.  We build each character's beliefs, values, and goals, and then we have him act based on what we've built.  But if can't control what he says or how he says it (and using the voiced protagonist design we see in DA2, we can't), then that character creation effort is rendered pointless.

Yes, I understand why it's important to you and others.

I have understood this perspective ever since Mass Effect mentioned it was going to use a dialogue wheel.  I have seen people get upset because they didn't like the way Link sounded in Ocarina of Time (and he just grunted) because they imagined something different in all the other games.

This is not a new development by any means.

I still remember the disappointment many had when the transition went from keywords to specific, full lines.  I mean, here are the developers dictating precisely what words the player would use (and yes, I did have these discussions with people).

I, personally, have no interesting in playing a game that doesn't let me control my character's behaviour.

One of the many differences between Sylvius and myself.

[Allan Schumacher]

My last bit on the AP tangent, but it was such a fantastic game to play the first time through by just accepting what happens in the game, rather than save scumming or anything (which is challenging anyways, with the savegame system they use)