59 réponses à ce sujet

[mikeymoonshine]

I am getting a little tired of people saying "lazy" in reference to where and how development companies choose to spend their resources. You can't make everything 100% perfect and realistic, that's just not possible. Some things take priority over other things, that doesn't mean the devs are all just sitting on their asses all day doing as little as possible. 

 

Making individual faces for every enemy is something that would be very difficult (if possible at all) and require allot of memory. The fact that they didn't do it doesn't mean that they are too lazy too it just means that they do not believe that amount of time and resources should be poured into something that isn't even all that important. 

[Sidney]

I am getting a little tired of people saying "lazy" in reference to where and how development companies choose to spend their resources. You can't make everything 100% perfect and realistic, that's just not possible. Some things take priority over other things, that doesn't mean the devs are all just sitting on their asses all day doing as little as possible. 

 

Making individual faces for every enemy is something that would be very difficult (if possible at all) and require allot of memory. The fact that they didn't do it doesn't mean that they are too lazy too it just means that they do not believe that amount of time and resources should be poured into something that isn't even all that important. 

 

 

Exactly, any project is about time, money and resources. The resources to resolve something as trivial as this would be large and would in the end not sell a single copy more of the game.

[HellaciousHutch]

It would take A LOT of resources to give every fodder enemy some sort of identity. Resources, which, could be allocated to more important things, and things the playerbase would get more enjoyment out of, instead of giving an enemy that you encounter for 30 seconds then kill an identity. 

[rocsage]

 

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.

 

A heart-felt thank you for continuous optimization.

[General TSAR]

Please. That's child's play compared to the Arcane Warrior's floating-ghost-teeth-and-eyeball combo.

Actually that's more silly than scary.

 

Horror needs to be both frightening and subdued at the same time. 

[slimgrin]

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

 

Sorry, but this is just making excuses. Other developers have done it by varying NPC models. 

[mikeymoonshine]

Sorry, but this is just making excuses. Other developers have done it by varying NPC models. 

 

Well not all the enemies in DA have been faceless, only some of them are

.

I assume some kind of system that generates random different faces on enemy npc's would be the solution but wouldn't you need a different one for virtually every enemy faction? 

 

Antivan crows should at least mostly look like people from Antiva so they should be ethnically different from Ferelden bandits. Of course you also have to have some verity because not everyone from Antiva would be ethnically Antivan Kinda like how Viv is from the Free Marches but is culturally Orlesian and ethnically Rivaini. 

 

Even Ferelden and Orlesians are meant to somehow look different, we know this because Lelianna is described as having noticeable Ferelden features in TME. Is it worth going that in depth and if not then why is slapping helmets on some of the factions who would be wearing helmets anyway so bad? 

[dutch_gamer]

 

I assume some kind of system that generates random different faces on enemy npc's would be the solution but wouldn't you need a different one for virtually every enemy faction?

Even if they could do such a thing Bioware still has to worry about the budget for companions, with fixed faces. A lot of games with non-masked NPCs are games where you only control one character instead of an entire group.

 

Bioware gave a fair explanation in this thread as to why there are many faceless enemies. One can say they should do it anyway, but it is not about want but about what is actually possible within the structure of a Bioware game. Not all games can be compared with one another. Just because developer Y has A in their game it doesn't mean developer Z can easily implement the same thing. Sometimes it is a matter of priorities and in this circumstance it also seems to be a matter of memory budgets.

[mikeymoonshine]

Even if they could do such a thing Bioware still has to worry about the budget for companions, with fixed faces. A lot of games with non-masked NPCs are games where you only control one character instead of an entire group.

 

Bioware gave a fair explanation in this thread as to why there are many faceless enemies. One can say they should do it anyway, but it is not about want but about what is actually possible within the structure of a Bioware game. Not all games can be compared with one another. Just because developer Y has A in their game it doesn't mean developer Z can easily implement the same thing. Sometimes it is a matter of priorities and in this circumstance it also seems to be a matter of memory budgets.

 

I know, I was just speculating about how it could be done and how much work would have to be put into it.

[Lotska]

I think that this problem is simply solved if there are regular occasions of unmasked enemies, even in small groups. It would still give the impression of variable enemies that can be very human, but without so much effort if large groups are masked and matching in armour by type.

On the humanising of enemies, I do think that occasional crazed individuals (like fanatics or lyrium-mad Templars) provide that more than normal faces all the time.