3042 réponses à ce sujet

[Vordish]

I don't believe Bioware is serious about fixing this issue. They claim they cant reproduce it, but I don't believe them. I think that is PR and damage control. If they were serious then perhaps they should speak more about it and let us know more information about their so-called "investigation"

[sole-destiny]

I've started a new character (did import from Keep) and am documenting when I get banters on her. So far, it is better than my old game. In about 8.5 hours of time in Hinterlands/Storm Coast/Fallow Mire, I've gotten 19 banters. There are times where I get 2-3 banters in less than 10 minutes, and the most I've gone without a banter is 50 minutes... but I also quit before I got a banter, so it could have taken longer. I've just gotten to Skyhold on her, so I'll see if it continues in areas like Western Approach and such.

I have been trying to keep things marked as read in my journal, codex, and inventory on my new character. I doubt that really has much to do with it, but I'll keep doing it anyway.

Since I haven't beaten the game on my first character yet (close to it), I'll try to document banters on her while playing normally instead of trying to force banters via fast traveling/calling horse/etc. See how the two characters compare. Perhaps her banter rate will be better now too.

Also since using the War Table "fix", I did finally have music in Val Royeaux, but only for a minute or so. Then it was silent for the next 10 minutes I spent there. I still have no combat dialogue. I have grunts/screams, but no "X needs help" or anything. I also don't get people telling me to watch my step while going down a steep slope. I swear Varric did say that once on my first character, near the beginning, but only that one time.

[Jenrais]

It sounds like it's an inconsistent issue, which are always the worst.  Especially if it's inconsistent enough to fail "silently."  Lets assume that we have 100 people all doing legitimate playthroughs (i.e. not testing with their focus on something else) and something happens 1% of the time.  That means that 1 person's playthrough will be affected, and if it so happens that that one person doesn't notice (because they found other issues, or are specifically tasking on something else) then it can get missed, which means we need on average another 100 playthroughs before it occurs again, and we have to hope it gets noticed and not overlooked because some other thing was noticed as well.

 

 

Now let's fast forward to release.  Lets say a million people all start playing at release.  Something that happens 1% of the time is now impacting 10,000 people.  That's a lot of people and their concerns are valid.  Further, once people starting point it out, then others that might not have noticed also start noticing (this happens in QA too, people say "Hey, keep an eye out for this thing.").  I don't think banter has been an issue in my game, but I am definitely much more cognizant of it when I notice "I haven't heard a banter for a while... or am I just going crazy!?"

 

 

Numbers just made up for easy math, but it's the crap reality for inconsistent issues   I loathe intermittent problems because it usually means that there's some particularly unusual and not at all obvious set of preconditions (computers aren't really random) to cause it to happen, so now the hunt becomes "figuring out what those problems are."  I'd much rather it simply be "banter doesn't happen very much at all for everyone" because then it's easier to identify and fix.  Alas.

 

I do appreciate the feedback though.

 

 

I appreciate your work and all. But I would love some fix in the near future. As I have actually stopped playing until one happens. I'm not going to spend 150 hours listening to silence alas.

 

Sorry :/

[Efvie]

My ATI Radeon 5870 technically meets system requirements, but isn't recommended and is peaking at about 85 degrees Celsius.. That's well over 150 F ... And I am thinking that is a problem.

 

Well 85 isn’t good, but if the lack of banter were an issue of resource scarcity, what you want to look at is your CPU load and see how high it is across the cores. That’s where the logic runs. I doubt that that is the problem, though, because the problem also exists on Xbone and PS4, both of which (I assume) are well within tolerances as far as resource use goes.

[pat221]

Hi.  I've been following this thread pretty closely.  As far as my DA:I experience, I hardly have any lol.  I got it on opening day, played through the prologue, then stopped shortly after.  I wanted to play some games in my backlog before I commit all my time and energy to what I am sure will probably be the greatest rpg I've ever played.  I'm a huge DA fan, so couldn't wait to play this game. 

 

The bug has me concerned, since I love the banter, and I'm hoping it will be fixed by the time I get back to the game(in about a month or so).

 

One observation really has me intrigued.  And that was when someone posted that they saved the game, and when they reloaded, two characters were in the middle of a conversation.  It's like the banter fires, but we can't hear it, and I know this has been suspected for some time that that is the issue.  I really believe that is the key, that the audio is not firing for some reason.  Another person suggested that maybe the game has problem loading information, and that could be it, too.

 

I'm wondering, if in a bugged game, if you stand idle, and no one is talking, if you can see your companions lips still move?  It's something that I've been thinking about for a little while.  Not that that will help prove or disprove anything; I'm just curious.  :-) 

 

Anyways, just passing through.  I wanted to ley you guys know that this is probably one of the most civil groups I've run across.  And Jeffzero, you're the bomb for all your hard work on this issue! 

[Abreu Road]

Don't know if anyone alread experienced this or posted in this topic, but as soon as my character woke up and got out of the house, everyone was silenced. No one in the crowd talked a single line of dialogue. So I've just loaded the last save and everything worked fine (although my Inquisitor was with sword and shield... something that I did not noticed before).

[vengerturtle]

The war table solution definitely seems to have helped, I get a lot more banter now. Weirdly enough though, the same banter between Iron Bull and Solas about the result of Bull's personal quest has now triggered five times in the past 6 hours. Three times it was in the same zone, even. It triggers very soon after fast traveling to an area. But even with some banter back I never, ever hear music anywhere.

[Sister Goldring]

Ok, so I finished up my first game last night and I can confirm that towards the end I started getting more banter,especially in places like the Emerald Graves and Exalted Plains.  It seemed to improve when I played offline without Origin.  The banter appeared to be from earlier in the game though, in some cases a reaction to something I had completed days ago (real time not game imaginary time) or introductory comments, when I had been travelling with the same companions silently for quite some time.  After the official response, I gave up on ever hearing much from the party and so just took whoever I felt like with me without bothering to follow an orchestrated mix up of characters to try to maximize my chances.  So you can imagine my surprise when Solas actually started chatting to Cassandra.

 

Anyway the results are banter seemed improved when I was logged out.  I have a total game time of 184 hours and I have not heard most of the companion banter I've seen recorded on Youtube.  Nobody commented or recognized my romance (just an easy example of banter I know was supposed to be there because I've watched it in others games) and the bulk of the comments I received from the party were environmental.  I never heard music in Val R and in my game Skyhold's audio track was drums.  I think I got some combat music once or twice and the combat barks were mostly health related.  If I fell off a cliff, walked up a mountain or stood too close to a ledge, it was never mentioned.  I have heard that the party was supposed to make a comment about things of this nature.

 

This is a truthful account of my experience and I cannot account for the difference between my game and those of others that I have read about and viewed on websites outside of saying there appears to be something wrong with my version.  Except for this issue, I have greatly enjoyed my time playing DAI.

[Brea]

The War Table fix has worked the best for me so far.

 

I get banters roughly every 5-20 mins, and I'm actually hearing music now! However, Western Approach is still a problem area (no banter, no music) and banters/music seem to stop if I switch party members out in the field. So if I want to switch my party around I have to go all the way back to Skyhold. A bit of a bother, but it's worth having the banter back.

[Eiphel]

Sigh... I rerolled after getting the Trevelyan bug, and succeeded in dodging that this time... And now I get no banter instead, which I did have previously. This is seriously unimpressive. I do get music, though.

[Faeryia]

This problem is probably related to the same bug that makes party members disappear from Skyhold (as in, literally vanish rather than leave because of approval loss), and makes Fade rifts inactive (visually present but impossible to interact with) and makes items disappear from the world until a save is made and reloaded while in visual range of whatever was vanished/inactive/not present.

 

IE poor optimization leads to memory leaks leads to things not being properly loaded into memory.

 

I wonder if the developers have been using computers to test the 'missing banter / people / items' problem on machines with 8gb of RAM or less, on-board audio, and leaving their computers running Inquisition for long periods of time.

 

An example I recently had of banter going missing; Cole, Solas, and Varric in the Lost Temple of Dirthamen.

 

All three of them had a line or two of reaction dialog.. and NO inter-party banter at all. None, all throughout the entire Temple. Switched out Varric for Blackwall; still nothing. Switched out Cole for Seras; STILL nothing.

 

It's a memory loading issue. Something is preventing the party banter dialog from being loaded and played.

 

Is it possible for BW to fix this if it is a memory problem? 

[Olessan-]

Just going to chime in and say that I have a file over 100 hours long, PS4, Dalish Quiz with British/race default voice, imported Hawke.

I recall getting a decent amount of banter earlier on, but it was never as much as some report, and it seems to have drained out gradually to nothing. I'm certain that there is more to unlock due to the small volume that's actually been triggered, plus I've seen recordings/quotes of banter others have gotten.

 

Very occasionally, when I load a save, or fast travel, even, if I idle for a few moments a banter triggered. Being online or off doesn't seem to have a particuarly noticable difference.

  It has definitely reduced since arriving at Skyhold. Before Skyhold I was getting 3-6 banters in the space of around 2-3 hours, perhaps, but that was so long ago it's difficult to be sure. Two banters triggered on the first visit to the Fallow Mire.

The little one-or-two-line dialogues relating to battle or the environment seem to be triggering mostly as normal (still somewhat rare though). Just not the actual conversational banter.

 

Music's also predominantly quiet, but it plays more in some areas than others.

I don't recall really hearing any music in the Emerald Graves or Exalted Plains, and in the last twenty hours have probably gotten 1-3 banters in each.

Could banter triggering possibly run on a timer? In past games it had specific trigger spots but that's not the case this time. Perhaps, if a timer (semi random?) determines when the banter triggers, that's the component that's broken. I dunno, though.

[Efvie]

 

 

It's a memory loading issue. Something is preventing the party banter dialog from being loaded and played.

 

That’s a pretty confident statement It’s so specific that I don’t think it’s a general system issue. It’s possible, but…

 

(Plus, obviously, if memory leaks or similar were at fault, then banter would logically be much better when you just start the game than an hour or two in. I don’t think this corresponds to people’s experience. Plus plus Xbone and PS4, which I’m absolutely certain were stress tested rigorously, and all carry the same hardware. Or should, anyway.)

[Olessan-]

 

That’s a pretty confident statement It’s so specific that I don’t think it’s a general system issue. It’s possible, but…

 

(Plus, obviously, if memory leaks or similar were at fault, then banter would logically be much better when you just start the game than an hour or two in. I don’t think this corresponds to people’s experience. Plus plus Xbone and PS4, which I’m absolutely certain were stress tested rigorously, and all carry the same hardware. Or should, anyway.)

 

Actually, now that you mention it, my sister and I are both playing, (80hr+ and 100hr+ respectively), and I've noticed that on my file at least, I seem to have more banter when I first load up -- sometimes triggering seconds after loading the file and another minutes later -- and after three hours of play it's all but silent. After playing for, say, six hours, in a session, even the music seems to go completely.

It's not a big difference since at this stage there's nearly none anyway, but when the banter is triggering it's almost always at the beginning of a play session or within an hour of reloading.

 

Sister has also reported similar but she has the bug worse (nearly no banter at all since the beginning) so it's harder to gauge.

[Vordish]

A memory loading issue would seem to make sense considering I can run into the tavern in skyhold and Iron Bull and Krem are sometimes NOT in their designated spots....or the fact that the minstrel sometimes does not load her instrument and I hear her singing the lyrics of a song I KNOW has music attached to it but the music itself does not play. I sometimes even have the reverse.

[Ceratius]

A memory loading issue would seem to make sense considering I can run into the tavern in skyhold and Iron Bull and Krem are sometimes NOT in their designated spots....or the fact that the minstrel sometimes does not load her instrument and I hear her singing the lyrics of a song I KNOW has music attached to it but the music itself does not play. I sometimes even have the reverse.

 

i'd like to contribute that i have the same problem with characters not appearing when i enter an area -- i've skipped talking to cassandra and sera multiple times because they simply don't show up at the spots they are supposed to be on the map. if i wait around long enough, they pop in in front of me; this also happened to solas after i'd been at skyhold for two hours. 

 

my banter is pretty inconsistent but when i do hear it it usually comes right after loading into an area or into a save, and i occasionally load into an ongoing conversation -- by which i mean i've done so at least 5 times. i do get periods where one fires off right after another and end up with 3 in 10 minutes, but overall i'd say i'm more likely to get it early on than later on.

[savetheking]

Well, just tried the latest "clear the Journal" fix. Got banter for about 30 mins and now silence again for the past 5 hours.

 

Back to being angry.

[Leftcoaster]

Actually it does feel like a memory issue to me too. I've had the most luck getting banter when I shut down my PS4 and start the game fresh, and then after a longer session is gets quieter. 

[Morroian]

Banter comes and goes for me but it stood out last night. Went to the Western Approach for the first time, spent around 2 hours there with only 1 piece of banter. I went there via the war table (to try and make sure I got banter), initial party was IB, Cass and Dorian, later changed out IB for Varric, it didn't change anything though.

[CaptnR]

The memory issue makes sense to me too. Whenever I do get banter to work, it's usually right after I've attempted to "fix" it, and then the time between banters seems to get longer each time until it's pretty much quiet. I wonder if the devs have thought of this and if there's anything that can be done?

 

To follow up on my previous progress, after "Repair"ing the game in Origin I had mentioned banter was working much better for me. It bugged again after leaving the war table back into Skyhold, as I expected. I began again with the war table/fast travel and clearing out my codex/journal fix, but banter was still quiet except for a couple one-liners. I've repaired the game again to see if it fixes again, this time I'll consistently leave the war table through fast travel and see if the banter stays regular.

[knightoftaurus]

FWIW, I'm not noticing any dialogues starting/joining in the middle of when I load up a save and I have a party with me. Xbone player here.

[RenFemShep]

Well 85 isn’t good, but if the lack of banter were an issue of resource scarcity, what you want to look at is your CPU load and see how high it is across the cores. That’s where the logic runs. I doubt that that is the problem, though, because the problem also exists on Xbone and PS4, both of which (I assume) are well within tolerances as far as resource use goes.

Like I said, a problem... Not necessarily the problem, or this problem. Cores sit in the 60s when overclocked, mid 50s when not. Need to take a look at my cooling system. Thanks Efvie. I'll got back on topic now.

[GaijinNinja]

A memory loading issue would seem to make sense considering I can run into the tavern in skyhold and Iron Bull and Krem are sometimes NOT in their designated spots....or the fact that the minstrel sometimes does not load her instrument and I hear her singing the lyrics of a song I KNOW has music attached to it but the music itself does not play. I sometimes even have the reverse.

 

THIS.

I would say that, in my game, on average I get the tavern songs 40% of the time with vocals and no lute (instrument), 40% lute only and no vocals, and the final 20% with both as intended.

 

So, there are obviously issues with the audio in the game.

Banter, music, tavern songs, sound effects, etc. etc.

 

My (somewhat educated) guess would be audio scripting priority issues, which could be related to memory or not (which is likely why this is so insidious).

Basically, if saved games are showing that the banter audio cues are firing (which Bioware says they are, which would make sense since the game would need to track fired banter to keep it from repeating) and we are not hearing the associated bander dialogue audio, it's likely that the banter audio priority is being overridden by another audio element, or even non-existent dialogue cues (I'll explain what I mean in a minute).

The audio subsystem goes to fire the banter (or music, or whatever), but sees that it has lower priority than something already playing and thus it's inaudible.

You can see that the audio priority sorting is a bit funky in the game anyway, like if you stand in the Haven tavern for a while you'll get background chatter about character-specific stuff ("look there's a new elf girl Sera etc.") get interrupted by meaningless one-liners (“if only it were so” etc.)

This is especially visible when looking at the subtitles as you'll notice them bouncing all over the place as audio plays - I'd bet $50 that the subtitles are tied in to the audio subsystem and designed to display whichever dialogue cue has the highest interrupt priority.

I'm sure we've all noticed this out in zones also, like when banter gets interrupted by mission-specific dialogue, or combat exclamations etc.

Any time a spoken line ends mid-sentence it's likely because it was priority interrupted by something else, valid or not.

This is a necessary feature in the game to make sure that certain "critical path" spoken lines are triggered no matter what, but it opens the door for priority interrupt issues and I think that's what's happening here.

(Hell, if I wanted to be even more specific I could tell you that my theory as to why the tavern minstrel sometimes only plays music or vocals without the other is because the vocals are considered dialogue and are linked to the subtitle system while the music is not, so if the vocals get priority interrupted by other dialogue they may not fire even if the music does - and these priority interrupts might be on the level of milliseconds of timing hence why it's so random. Just an educated theory)

 

So, this is where things tie back in to memory states and why I mentioned "nonexistent dialogue cues" earlier.

Any time there is a hard load (basically, when you see the loading screen), theoretically the game is removing a lot of values from memory and replacing them with ones for the new zone.

When exploring zones such as Hinterlands I’m 99% sure that soft loads are happening in the background via memory streaming that allows us to explore such a vast area without load screens (this is how all open-world games do it).

This gets tricky when we start talking about memory leaks and other bugs in the way the game handles memory states. I believe it’s quite likely that in certain cases the game is not properly clearing memory states during loads which could explain the banter issues when combined with the audio priority issues mentioned above.

Basically, the game transitions to a new area but certain values are carried over from the previous area without being cleared and/or replaced, causing issues.

Why do I think this?

Let’s look at the evidence from workarounds that many say anecdotally help with the problem:

 

-Fast traveling directly from War Room

I can say from experience that fast traveling in any game like this is a PITA, because so many variables have to be accounted for. Since DA:I graciously allows for fast travel from pretty much anywhere to anywhere else, the combinations of values that have to be cleared from memory and then loaded for new zones become exponentially larger than “single path” games like, say, campaigns in Call of Duty.

What does this have to do with the War Room? Well, as we’ve all noticed the War Room is it’s own “zone” as evidenced by the hard load when entering it. Yet, unlike Haven/Skyhold proper it doesn’t have any interactions with companions, background chatter from NPCs etc. It’s pretty much as much of a “clean slate” zone as there is in the game, and thus probably has a pretty simple data value map in memory for things like banter etc.

So by going there first and loading a relatively simple slate of values into memory, it makes it less likely to cause issues when transitioning to other zones. However, when fast-traveling using the map from Haven/Skyhold proper, there are probably a lot of values related to chatter and music that are somehow not getting cleared. So when the level event scripting system in, say, Hinterlands fires party banter according to the triggers in the level script, the audio subsystem checks against memory and says (figuratively, of course) “wait, we are already playing dialogue/chatter/high priority audio! We can’t interrupt this for banter!” so the banter trigger is fired in the event script but the audio doesn’t actually play. It’s just conjecture, of course, but I think there are memory state issues when traveling from zone to zone and that memory is not getting cleared properly especially when using map travel. Other indicators? War Room drum music playing in Haven proper! If you fast travel out from the War Room (which I’ve already established as a relatively clean zone that likely only has one music value setting) to another zone and then come back to Haven, the War Room music value was never cleared and that’s what it the game “remembers”! Seems logical to me.

 

-Clearing completed mission log (getting rid of stars by reading completed quest entries)

I think we’ve all noticed that mission tracking is buggy in that some quests complete when the conditions are met, and for some the mission complete UI and sound effect will only “pop” when you go into the Journal and actually highlight the quest under Completed Quests and return to the game.

My theory here is that, even when the conditions are met, quests that haven’t “popped” as completed yet are considered open by the mission tracker and saved as such in the saved games and in memory, so that may priority interrupt banter as well (if the game thinks that it is waiting for a dialogue cue associated with a completed quest and that dialogue has a high interrupt priority and never plays, the game may not fire any banter until that wait request is cleared).

 

As I said this is all theories and conjecture as I am not involved with the development of the game in any way; that being said I shipped a game last year with a similar structure (large streaming areas separated by a few hard loads with fast travel available) and even though it was absolutely nowhere near the complexity of DA:I we still had a lot of bugs with memory states not clearing for fast travel, dialogue interrupt issues, etc so I feel Bioware’s pain.

As much as I wish there was a fix available ASAP I don’t believe it is even as simple as I’ve laid out above (that’s just theory on some root causes) and I believe that Bioware is doing what they can given the likelihood that this issue touches a lot of the game’s core systems. It’s very likely that banter shown as “fired” but never heard is actually being saved as already fired in the saved games compounding the problem by not playing banter that the game thinks we’ve heard but never have, and that might require a new playthrough to hear them even after a patch.

I wish them the best of luck and I think we can all agree that we’d rather wait for a comprehensive fix then have them rush out a band-aid.

 

If Bioware QA reps are reading this, my only advice is try to repro the issue as much as possible on natural progression playthroughs.

I know that in my experience with investigating similar bugs in other games it’s all to easy to jump to zones using dev debug commands and observe that everything is behaving properly because you’re not dealing with memory clutter caused by tens of hours of transitioning between disparate zones. That’s the only red flag that stands out at me when I hear they spent “several hours” investigating this in the initial comments on the issue from Bioware since that tells me that (as of that first post) they had not yet repro’d the issue on a natural progression playthrough.

Obviously it will take DAYS to do enough natural progression playthroughs to have a sample size big enough to determine repro rate on this issue and that’s why I’ll just say that patience on this from us customers will be the best thing we can do at this point.

 

I share the frustration regarding this (and other glitches) in the shipped game, but we can’t change the past so let’s give Bioware the time they need to get to the bottom of this.

In the meantime, from my point of view avoiding fast travel from the world map and making sure that all completed quests actually “pop” in the quest tracker would be logical steps to take if playing the game right now.

[flabbadence]

THIS.

I would say that, in my game, on average I get the tavern songs 40% of the time with vocals and no lute (instrument), 40% lute only and no vocals, and the final 20% with both as intended.

 

So, there are obviously issues with the audio in the game.

Banter, music, tavern songs, sound effects, etc. etc.

 

My (somewhat educated) guess would be audio scripting priority issues, which could be related to memory or not (which is likely why this is so insidious).

Basically, if saved games are showing that the banter audio cues are firing (which Bioware says they are, which would make sense since the game would need to track fired banter to keep it from repeating) and we are not hearing the associated bander dialogue audio, it's likely that the banter audio priority is being overridden by another audio element, or even non-existent dialogue cues (I'll explain what I mean in a minute).

The audio subsystem goes to fire the banter (or music, or whatever), but sees that it has lower priority than something already playing and thus it's inaudible.

You can see that the audio priority sorting is a bit funky in the game anyway, like if you stand in the Haven tavern for a while you'll get background chatter about character-specific stuff ("look there's a new elf girl Sera etc.") get interrupted by meaningless one-liners (“if only it were so” etc.)

This is especially visible when looking at the subtitles as you'll notice them bouncing all over the place as audio plays - I'd bet $50 that the subtitles are tied in to the audio subsystem and designed to display whichever dialogue cue has the highest interrupt priority.

I'm sure we've all noticed this out in zones also, like when banter gets interrupted by mission-specific dialogue, or combat exclamations etc.

Any time a spoken line ends mid-sentence it's likely because it was priority interrupted by something else, valid or not.

This is a necessary feature in the game to make sure that certain "critical path" spoken lines are triggered no matter what, but it opens the door for priority interrupt issues and I think that's what's happening here.

(Hell, if I wanted to be even more specific I could tell you that my theory as to why the tavern minstrel sometimes only plays music or vocals without the other is because the vocals are considered dialogue and are linked to the subtitle system while the music is not, so if the vocals get priority interrupted by other dialogue they may not fire even if the music does - and these priority interrupts might be on the level of milliseconds of timing hence why it's so random. Just an educated theory)

 

So, this is where things tie back in to memory states and why I mentioned "nonexistent dialogue cues" earlier.

Any time there is a hard load (basically, when you see the loading screen), theoretically the game is removing a lot of values from memory and replacing them with ones for the new zone.

When exploring zones such as Hinterlands I’m 99% sure that soft loads are happening in the background via memory streaming that allows us to explore such a vast area without load screens (this is how all open-world games do it).

This gets tricky when we start talking about memory leaks and other bugs in the way the game handles memory states. I believe it’s quite likely that in certain cases the game is not properly clearing memory states during loads which could explain the banter issues when combined with the audio priority issues mentioned above.

Basically, the game transitions to a new area but certain values are carried over from the previous area without being cleared and/or replaced, causing issues.

Why do I think this?

Let’s look at the evidence from workarounds that many say anecdotally help with the problem:

 

-Fast traveling directly from War Room

I can say from experience that fast traveling in any game like this is a PITA, because so many variables have to be accounted for. Since DA:I graciously allows for fast travel from pretty much anywhere to anywhere else, the combinations of values that have to be cleared from memory and then loaded for new zones become exponentially larger than “single path” games like, say, campaigns in Call of Duty.

What does this have to do with the War Room? Well, as we’ve all noticed the War Room is it’s own “zone” as evidenced by the hard load when entering it. Yet, unlike Haven/Skyhold proper it doesn’t have any interactions with companions, background chatter from NPCs etc. It’s pretty much as much of a “clean slate” zone as there is in the game, and thus probably has a pretty simple data value map in memory for things like banter etc.

So by going there first and loading a relatively simple slate of values into memory, it makes it less likely to cause issues when transitioning to other zones. However, when fast-traveling using the map from Haven/Skyhold proper, there are probably a lot of values related to chatter and music that are somehow not getting cleared. So when the level event scripting system in, say, Hinterlands fires party banter according to the triggers in the level script, the audio subsystem checks against memory and says (figuratively, of course) “wait, we are already playing dialogue/chatter/high priority audio! We can’t interrupt this for banter!” so the banter trigger is fired in the event script but the audio doesn’t actually play. It’s just conjecture, of course, but I think there are memory state issues when traveling from zone to zone and that memory is not getting cleared properly especially when using map travel. Other indicators? War Room drum music playing in Haven proper! If you fast travel out from the War Room (which I’ve already established as a relatively clean zone that likely only has one music value setting) to another zone and then come back to Haven, the War Room music value was never cleared and that’s what it the game “remembers”! Seems logical to me.

 

-Clearing completed mission log (getting rid of stars by reading completed quest entries)

I think we’ve all noticed that mission tracking is buggy in that some quests complete when the conditions are met, and for some the mission complete UI and sound effect will only “pop” when you go into the Journal and actually highlight the quest under Completed Quests and return to the game.

My theory here is that, even when the conditions are met, quests that haven’t “popped” as completed yet are considered open by the mission tracker and saved as such in the saved games and in memory, so that may priority interrupt banter as well (if the game thinks that it is waiting for a dialogue cue associated with a completed quest and that dialogue has a high interrupt priority and never plays, the game may not fire any banter until that wait request is cleared).

 

As I said this is all theories and conjecture as I am not involved with the development of the game in any way; that being said I shipped a game last year with a similar structure (large streaming areas separated by a few hard loads with fast travel available) and even though it was absolutely nowhere near the complexity of DA:I we still had a lot of bugs with memory states not clearing for fast travel, dialogue interrupt issues, etc so I feel Bioware’s pain.

As much as I wish there was a fix available ASAP I don’t believe it is even as simple as I’ve laid out above (that’s just theory on some root causes) and I believe that Bioware is doing what they can given the likelihood that this issue touches a lot of the game’s core systems. It’s very likely that banter shown as “fired” but never heard is actually being saved as already fired in the saved games compounding the problem by not playing banter that the game thinks we’ve heard but never have, and that might require a new playthrough to hear them even after a patch.

I wish them the best of luck and I think we can all agree that we’d rather wait for a comprehensive fix then have them rush out a band-aid.

 

If Bioware QA reps are reading this, my only advice is try to repro the issue as much as possible on natural progression playthroughs.

I know that in my experience with investigating similar bugs in other games it’s all to easy to jump to zones using dev debug commands and observe that everything is behaving properly because you’re not dealing with memory clutter caused by tens of hours of transitioning between disparate zones. That’s the only red flag that stands out at me when I hear they spent “several hours” investigating this in the initial comments on the issue from Bioware since that tells me that (as of that first post) they had not yet repro’d the issue on a natural progression playthrough.

Obviously it will take DAYS to do enough natural progression playthroughs to have a sample size big enough to determine repro rate on this issue and that’s why I’ll just say that patience on this from us customers will be the best thing we can do at this point.

 

I share the frustration regarding this (and other glitches) in the shipped game, but we can’t change the past so let’s give Bioware the time they need to get to the bottom of this.

In the meantime, from my point of view avoiding fast travel from the world map and making sure that all completed quests actually “pop” in the quest tracker would be logical steps to take if playing the game right now.

 

Can I just say, even if it turns out memory states aren't really the problem, this has been a very educational post on game design, thank you for this.