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[Farci Reprimer]

Dear Bioware.

Why is it that in your every game recently when protagonist faces waves of humans or other "sapient and emotional" races as enemies you tend to make more and more of them wear masks and other full-body armors? So they would seem more inhuman at the eyes of the player and he wouldnt feel so bad massacering hundreds of soliders? And they would be easier to hate?

 

 

Enemies can have personalities too you know. Even if you just cut them down from your way, they could/should scream in pain and twicth in the ground before they die because there isn no such thing as human who dies immidiately even when he is stabbed though the stomach with sword or bullets. they could seem more like characters of the world and not just some masses of walking experience points and loot. Even if Cerberus soldiers and kirkwall templars followed such persons as Meredith and ilusive man I am pretty sure most of them are just regular guys with families who are just following orders.

 

I had hoped that since in inquisition you are supposed to identify your enemies, there would be more enemies with faces, motives and most of all humaness. But all the human enemies that I have seen the protagonist fight in DAI demos are so heavily masked bodies and inhuman characteristics that you could have fought a bunch argonians for all we know.  It was rather silly that even the guy who tortured Leliana was wearing a helmet and everything when there was no need other than successing of not making Leliana appear like a cold murderer who killed a person instead of faceless tevinter enemy number 206, I quess. You always have had your collectors, reapers, darkspawn and demons the pure evil guys that you have to kill in masses without sympathy.

 

So my question is what is the deal of this everything? Your games are already rated for mature audience only so I dont see why you have to protect us innocent gamers from that harsh truth that Warden, Shepard, Hawke and Inquisitor are all big time mass murderers who cut down hundreds of humans just to complete their quets and ultimate porposes.

 

I would like an answer from one of you bioware.

[Seb Hanlon]

There's a memory cost to every variation between characters in a scene; depending on how optimized the character loader/renderer is, and how big of a variation we're talking about, it could cost as much as two entirely different characters.

 

Going to gloss a lot of technical details, and the not insignificant asset creation cost, but here's the outline of the runtime costs:

 

There's a cost per archetype loaded ("hurlock", "genlock bolter", "shriek"), and there's a cost per instance (current animation state, stats table, active effects, etc etc etc etc). Things like meshes and textures (and therefore faces) typically get bundled into the archetype cost, because we want to minimize the per-instance cost. Say we lay out our memory budget so we can have 3 creature archetypes loaded at a time (archetype budget; ie. you can fight three different kinds of things at once), and a total creature count of 8 (instance budget). We can have a fight with 5 hurlocks, 2 genlock bolters, and a shriek.

 

If we have to account for each hurlock potentially having a different face, in the worst case then each hurlock is both an archetype and an instance - we can have a fight with 2 hurlocks and a shriek, or 3 hurlocks. Not nearly as much headroom to make interesting encounters. Let's say we can shove the face override data into the per-instance data so we're not making unique archetypes: that's going to make each instance cost more, so now we can only have 6 or 7 individual creatures running simultaneously. Better, but still not as much room for interesting fight design.

 

It also follows that if we're already paying a unique creature cost for a plot character or one-off, we can probably give them a unique head/face for "free". "Free" means we still have to pay the asset creation cost and the diskspace cost of the asset, but we've determined it's worth giving them a whole new archetype so that that character has a signature look. For a cheaper character, we can just give them a unique name (cost: strings).

 

Because everything is interconnected, if we know that the choice is between every soldier in the Wherever army having the same face or having the same helmet, the latter seems a lot less jarring. Maybe we decide that they all have fancy helmets as a stylistic choice, informed by the limitations of the tech.

 

YMMV, every engine is different, every game team spends their resources in different places with different priorities. Game development is compromise and trade-off. "Lazy" ain't got nothing to do with it.