AlanC9 wrote...
Are those limitations actually real? Is Hawke actually more limited than, say, the Bhaalspawn? Only in the sense that things come up in DA2 that just don't come up in BG2.
(1) The observational evidence: Hawke is more limited than the Warden, Shepard is more limited than...well, pretty much every other protagonist in Bioware's games (caveat: I don't know Jade Empire). What have the ME trilogy and DA2 in common? They are where Bioware switched to voiced protagonists and paraphrasing.
(2) The theoretical rationale (voiced protagonist): it is considerable more work to create a spoken line for a character than to create a written line. With the economic pressure of game development being what it is, there is a much bigger incentive to cut down the options to the bare bones of what makes the story work. These options must cover a wide range of possible player intentions, and thus, the fewer options there are, the more generic they need to be. The logical end to this is generic autodialogue for everything that isn't a plot-affecting decision. Cue ME3. This development is not unavoidable, but for any developer who wants to avoid it, it's a constant uphill battle against the bean counters.
(3) The theoretical rationale (paraphrasing): Paraphrases, for some unfathomable reason, apparently need to be short. Which means that even considering that there is a lot of redundancy in spoken language, they can't give you the full semantic content of the spoken lines they're connected to, especially since with this system, choosing a paraphase often results in an exchange of several lines between the scene's participants. This practically guarantees that there will be content in the spoken lines which was unintended by the player, which is hugely annoying. Now they could make the paraphrase more specific, but (2) above works against that for they might need more options, and again, for some completely incomprehensible reason, paraphrases of more than seven words appear to be anathema for the developers, so the preferred solution is to ensure that the spoken lines don't say anything specific beyond what the paraphrase says, because that way, the player can't get annoyed for having been misled by the paraphrase. Basically, everything beyond the limit of the paraphrase's exact meaning needs to be meaningless filler.
"No more expression of atheism" is hugely annoying on its own in a story where attitudes towards gods and religion are actually an important aspect of the story, but in the end this is just the latest casualty in a war I'm afraid we dedicated roleplayers are doomed to lose. And before someone says: "BGx wasn't that specific" - no, it wasn't. But PST was, Arcanum was, and the Fallouts are to this day including New Vegas, which, incidentally, hasn't got a voiced protagonist.
Make no mistake: I love my voiced protagonists even as I hate paraphrasing, and Deux Ex:Human Revolution shows that you can show the full text of the spoken line in advance with no adverse effects, so Bioware's given rationale for paraphrasing is bogus. But if the choice is between more specific dialogue options and a voiced protagonist, I'll sacrifice the latter in a heartbeat.
Modifié par Ieldra2, 24 janvier 2014 - 09:14 .
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