59 réponses à ce sujet

[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.

[Nocte ad Mortem]

Faces take time to make different and having an army of clones coming after you is strange. Easier to just put masks on everyone. 

[Farci Reprimer]

Even if they are just lazy they could make charistarictics to enemies with other means as I mentioned in my post.

 

No, that doesnt explain it. Not fully anyway.

[Dubya75]

All boss enemies are actual characters in the game(s). 

Can you imagine the amount of resources it would require to give each and every enemy a distinct identity? This is just not feasible.

[Farci Reprimer]

I never said I wanted every single damn enemy front line cannon fodder unique character. Just small illusion of variety and humanity from time to time but bioware is clearly not even trying even that when designing those faceless Tevinter soldiers from redcliff demo for example.

[Feybrad]

Helmets shelter your Head, which is basically the most important Area of your Body. Hence why Enemies in battle wear Helmets. What's so difficult to understand about this?

[Dubya75]

I never said I wanted every single damn enemy front line cannon fodder unique character. Just small illusion of variety and humanity from time to time but bioware is clearly not even trying even that when designing those faceless Tevinter soldiers from redcliff demo for example.

 

Well hey, if this is such a big issue for you, don't buy the game! And try to calm down a bit, your aggression is unnecessary.

[DarthLaxian]

Since when is a soldier in a war a mass murderer? - It's war for heaven's sake

 

As for:

 

I was following orders - the nazis destroyed that defense (and it is good that they did, because it's a shitty justification that can be used to justify everything from using nuclear weapons to raping civilians...I hate people saying that)

 

greetings LAX

ps: Why enemies have face-covers: PROTECTION (hell, our protagonist and party have those (unless you play with "no-helmet-hack" or don't use one!)

[Farci Reprimer]

Helmets shelter your Head, which is basically the most important Area of your Body. Hence why Enemies in battle wear Helmets. What's so difficult to understand about this?

Sigh. Read my full post. Helmets were just indication to the problem I see.

 

there is variety in all the games you just seem to see what you want to see

Maybe so, but I remember DAO and lothering bandits and loghains men at the tavern. Both were unique group of fellas and encounters which could end with more ways than one and you didnt have to fight those unrealisticly spawning templar forces in DA2 who would hit again and again. Couple of bloody bodies lying in the ground after each battle and some last enemies sometimes actually running away from such killing macine as Hawke would have done wonders to immersion.

[Farci Reprimer]

Well hey, if this is such a big issue for you, don't buy the game! And try to calm down a bit, your aggression is unnecessary.

Who said I am in agression? If I use a word damn does it immidietly mean I have lost my cool?

You can calm down yourself bro. Nobody here is trying to hurt you

[IAMTHEOVERLORD]

Cerberus is kind of a crappy example, by the time you're fighting them they've all been bastardized into something halfway towards husk and are barely human at this point...now that I think about it it looks like the Red Templars are going to be somewhat similar in that regard.

[Wulfram]

I think having everyone look identical saves memory.  And it looks odd when you can see that everyone has the same face. 

 

If you showed their faces you might end up with something like this

 

But, yeah, people like the torturer could have faces.  Though a torturer might wish to de-humanise themselves in the eyes of their victim.

[aTigerslunch]

Uh, yeah, they are human for the most part, this is known.  Whats the big mystery?  They are fully armored, so, that is no biggie?

 

You patted away someone else with the answer you was looking for. They are minions. Minions are important for their families, but in the big scheme of things (armies) they are just minions. I was a minion in an army that saw a number. Individuals in the groups saw faces but when big wigs saw the groups, they saw numbers. I know, I was part of the changing faces to numbers for them, literally. This is common and normal for quite a majority of games, if showing faces, pay attention again at their many clones. I focused view on audience/commoners/military soldiers and such and found some get copy pasted as groups, so there is a stop and start to each section. Laziness?  Well, Actually here...

 

You have to make 100,000 people.  You have list of other things to do as well, you have a month to make 100,000 different people with restricted time frames. You wouldn't want to make it easier as well, when they are minor characters? 

 

Major characters or people named, I prefer them, and only them to be a bit more unique than cloning same face for several. It's much easier to just copy paste helmeted soldiers. Which they are already doing this effect.

[Sidney]

They are faceless because they are wearing armor in the examples given. Armor that, in the realm of the world you are in, is consistent with what you would expect to see. Plenty of DAO foes wore open faced helmets - Howe's guards for example. The question is silly in total.

[Icy Magebane]

I kind of get the OP's point, but there's just no way to do this without using up a ton of money, time, and memory... it's just simpler this way.  At a certain point, they have to draw the line as to how realistic the game is going to be.  What you're suggesting doesn't seem like it's worth the effort when there are so many other things to worry about in a game of this nature.

[Jorina Leto]

It's cheaper than to make an individual face for every mook.

[Spaghetti_Ninja]

Wouldn't it be great if every time an enemy appears, the character generator spits out a random face? Probaby not possible, but maybe in the future it will be...

[Enigmatick]

The mages all have faces actually, The only faceless enemies in the demo where the templars and warrior class venatori.

[Maria Caliban]

It's either they all have the same helmet or they all have the same face.

Interestingly, I was playing Tomb Raider the other day and the enemies were randomly generated. I'd reload and they'd change skin color/hair/accessories.

[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.

[Fidite Nemini]

 

 

 

"Lazy" ain't got nothing to do with it.

 

 

 

Tell the website team they should tweak the Like system, because one isn't nearly enough for this.

[Magdalena11]

Thank you, Seb Hanlon, for a little peek behind the curtain.  Honestly, when I read the thread title, I thought it was about the unanswered questions about the opposition in the upcoming game, of which I've got many.  [Please keep them unanswered - I'm a sucker for spoilers and someone needs to protect me from myself  ].

 

My sister's modding a "just for fun" module or 2 and I've seen the amount of work that goes into spawning enemies.  Why in the name of Andraste's holy stockings would anyone want to design enemies created just for the PC to kill with unique features and personalities?  In the persona of Oghren,  great, a talking darkspawn.  Let's shut it up already.  If an entity exists just because it's there to kill, why not create an image that exists solely as a future casualty?

[Gregolian]

I won't speak on Mass Effect but on the DA enemies, especially the templars, it would make sense for them to wear a full helm.  One, for protection and two for their job.  Imagine you are a mage in one of the Circles...  which would make you more likely to "obey"?  A templar where you can see their face and see they are human?  Or a disembodied voice coming from a helmet where you can barely see their eyes?