141 réponses à ce sujet

[Jeremiah12LGeek]

There's something wrong with rooting in place, moving one's arms around awkwardly, and having conversations to the soothing background noise of an oddly screechy night-time forest?

 

Actually, I found returning to camp and conversing with the characters in DA:O to be something that I really liked about the game. I thought it was an important coda to each mission, and I was religious about making sure I exhausted all the new dialogue options with the characters whenever we finished an area.

 

So far, with DA:I, returning to talk with characters after completing story missions hasn't really produced much in the way of new or compelling dialogue. The interactions with them at camp are pretty stiff and... uninteresting. A bit of a chore to get through, especially when it's obvious that my choices have no more impact than to cosmetically modify a few of the words at the beginning of the next line of dialogue.

 

By contrast the scripted party banter is hilarious (at least, with certain combinations) and on par, in some cases even better, than the party banter in DA:O.

 

I don't really care about the quality of the animation in cut scenes. Which is to say, it could certainly be better, and that might be impressive, but it's not what I play the games for. If it was, the awkward animations in DA:O would have bothered me, and they didn't. I play the games for the dialogue and the characters. DA:I is a distinct improvement over DA 2 in that regard, but I would have preferred less resources and energy on the cutscenes, and more resources and energy on dialogue. I can forgive technical failings when great storytelling is happening.

 

That having been said, DA:I is quite pretty, and I am certainly enjoying it. I won't put it in the same category as DA:O, but I'm happy with it, so far (I'm certainly glad that I waited for the price to come down before buying it, but it has a lot of technical issues, so I guess I wish I'd waited for another patch to come out.)

[Tensoconix]

CDPR using mocap for everything...

 

Source?

It's hard to imagine going full mocap in games of such scale anytime soon and the fidelity of facial animations in TW3 trailers and 35 min demo is far from mocap standard even though it's definitely one of the best of no mocap using games...

[Eternal Phoenix]

The Last of Us ruined cut scenes in other games for me.

 

That's the quality Bioware should aim for.

[Fast Jimmy]

The Last of Us ruined cut scenes in other games for me.

That's the quality Bioware should aim for.

Which goes back to my original point in this thread - Bioware can't compete with other studios who do one set of things much better than them by simply doing a wide variety of things below par.

Open world? Bethesda does it better. Cinematic story-telling? TellTale or NaughtyDog do it better. Choice and Consequence? CDPR does it better. Action RPG? Capcom does it better. Interaction with NPCs/companions? Atlus/Squaresoft does it better.

The only thing that Bioware has consistently done better than any other AAA studio is party based RTwP gameplay. This is really more due to a lack of competition from other AAA studios in the past decade, but that doesn't really negate the point - Bioware has one of the few AAA IPs that let's the player directly control each member of a party equally and in a strategic manner.

And so, of course... they focus on other areas and make this part of their game WORSE.

[RZIBARA]

I think the main issue is them recycling animations. They are still using animations from ME1 in DAI (7 year old animations!). It doesn't help that you see alot of the animations repeat throughout the game. 

 

I feel that for the next Bioware game, they really need to do mocap for a new set of animations, the old ones are really starting to show their age, especially in comparison to games like TLOU, Halo 4, and many others.

[A Crusty Knight Of Colour]

Baiting Jimmy on the topic of Save Importing.

 

Oh boy.

[Fast Jimmy]

Do you feel it's a bad or good thing that Bioware is a jack of all trades but master of none?

A bad thing. A very bad thing. Wading through hours of a game seeing the potential for being better and nothing sealing the deal is nothing but wasted time to me. Be the best or give it a rest.

And I'm going to have to disagree about choice and consequence. You may not realize, having not played the games, but each game gets set in a different location specifically because they've been unable to deal with the consequences to game choices. There are a number of choices in TW1 that get ignored in TW2 (like Zoltan's opinion of you if you sided with the Order in TW1).

And as for overall--Bioware is the undisputed king of choice and consequence for Geth/Quarian peace and Genophage cure alone. The day the Witcher manages to have such a huge choice be defined by initially innocuous choices in a different game, they can be considered equal.

I'm sorry, but Brahmin feces.

What changes in Tuchanka? If you sabatoged the cure, Eve dies. If you killed Wrex, you get Wreav. If you did both, Mordin doesn't have to die. And then if you did fake the cure, you kill Wrex. Those are all simple cameos and dialogue changes. The entire scenario plays out in the same essential manner and, after the mission, the events are hardly mentioned or make an appearance later in the game. Not to mention the endings lack of reference to them.

What changes in Rannoch? If you re-wrote the Geth instead of killed them in Legion's loyalty quest, you have a short curscenes difference where more Geth Prime appear. If Legion dies/was sold, he is replaced by the Geth VI. If Tali died, she is replaced by another admiral. If her loyalty mission was not completed, it makes choosing peace harder. If you choose to kill the Quarians, you see a slightly different curscenes. If you choose to kill the Geth, you see a slightly different cutscene. If you choose peace, you see a slightly different cutscene. The entire scenario plays out in the same essential manner and, after the mission, the events are hardly mentioned or make an appearance later in the game. Not to mention the endings lack of reference to them.

The game FEELS like there are huge choices and ramifications, but they are superficial. None of it matters to the story, to the game, to the way things play out. People you never hear from again die. Forces you never see are recruited. Ramifications for galactic fallout are made trivial.


Compare that to TW2, a game which I didn't even enjoy - entirely different areas based on choices, loads of exclusive content, characters, quests and story that can never been seen otherwise. That's choice. That's consequence. What Bioware does is blatant railroading with death traps for your favorite characters so you get the feelz when things play out differently.

[Wires_From_The_Wall]

I've come to mislike custscenes almost by default. That is not to say there wouldn't be many great cutscenes, and many great games with custscenes. It's just bit of a fail at deeply conceptual level. Kinda like " Gaming laptop"  is.

 

They cut the action, as their very name dictates. They remove the character and control of the character  from the player and give it to Jennifer Hale or whomnot. 

 

It rarely has true  enjoyment to it. Least of all if the cutscene is directed and 'filmed' like some BBC talkshow program. Listening to some ME cutscenes is interesting enough. Yet, it is almost always  incredibly BORING - watching -  any ME cutscenes. 

 

They used to have some very real, obvious value way back when. During ye olden times when every single in-game moment looked and sounded like ****, it was nice to have cutscenes with actual voice acting and bit nicer animations. They made a very nice, very real reward for beating a level or killing a boss. Everything has looked and sounded awesome enough for like 10 years now. Cutscene that does't involve 5 million budget doesn't look much better than the actual game.

 

It'd still be entirely possible to use cutscene as way to reward player. I guess some still do. Blizzard was master of this 20 years back. They remain great at it today too.  If you get 25 mins of cutscenes in an hour, that ofc won't happen. You sure as hell don't feel rewarded in ME when you see the damn dialogue wheel once more.

 

Currently, ME has like 300 conversations of you spinning dat wheel. Imagine if it'd instead have..say, 20 conversations; with each very important, character defining, high stake and with huge influence to story and destinies of people. Rest of the remaining 280 could be implemented as mid-game dialog. I guess 'as banter' would be the lingo way of saying it. At least to me, it isn't in any way experience defining to get to pick between " That's awesome, please tell me more about Omega-5" and " please tell me more about Omega-5". This was novel and awesome in ME1. Then it stopped being either.  Turn it mid game banter, give people occasional Paragon and Renegade option to react with and you're golden. 

 

20 conversations would also make a number manageable enough for an actual director to chip in and do something that prevents them cutscenes  from looking incredibly boring parade of talking heads.

[Fast Jimmy]

Those are consequences. That's what a consequence is. The fact that you think they are superficial does not change the fact that they are the consequences of your choices. The fact that theya re similar to another does not change the fact that Bioware made half a dozen permutations. They may be smaller, but that's because there are so many. Additionally, those choices being available to you are based on something you did in a previous game. That's the very definition of choice and consequence, and one few games in the past few years have been able to accomplish--the Witcher certainly not among them.

TW2, by comparison, has one big choice--and the entire game is shorter for it, and the end game changes very little--only, from what I've seen, what happens with the dragon.

The difference is one has one big choice change. And the other has many smaller ones. More permutations = exponentially more work.

I'd rather one big change I can truly see and feel rather than a plethora of small, piddling ones that sometimes subvert the purpose of the original choices in the first place.

[Fast Jimmy]

Fair enough. I'd argue, however, that from a development point of view the more branched one is more work, and more technically successful (a single if/then statement with a bunch of changes is trivial, while multiple if/thens that interact with each other is much harder).

It's really hard to build a straight tower with a bunch of pebbles. It's smarter to use square blocks.

Harder to do doesn't mean better.

[SlottsMachine]

It's easy to sum it up when you're just talking about cutscenes. We're sitting in here, and I'm supposed to be the franchise player, and we in here talking about cutscenes. I mean, listen, we're talking about cutscenes, not a game, not a game, not a game, we talking about cutscenes. Not the game that I go out there and die for and play every game like it's my last. Not the game, but we're talking about cutscenes, man. I mean, how silly is that? … I know I supposed to be there. I know I'm supposed to lead by example... I know that... And i'm not.. I'm not shoving it aside, you know, like it don't mean anything. I know it's important, I do. I honestly do... But we're talking about cutscenes man. What are we talking about? Cutscenes? We're talking about cutscenes, man. When you come to the arena, and you see me play, you see me play don't you? You've seen me give everything I've got, right? But we're talking about cutscenes right now. We talking about cut...

[Fast Jimmy]

if you're talking about the same thing, sure. But we're talking about two different things: a path that branches in twain, and a path that branches in many directions (or conversely, that converges from many directions) while each path interacts with the others (the analogy is stretched a bit, but that's the idea).

They're building two different things. CDPR's looks more impressive from a distance. But Bioware's has more technical nuance.

You're right.

[Fast Jimmy]

Starkiller>>>>>>>Kyle

OHSNAP

You're wrong.

[Han Shot First]

Compare that to TW2, a game which I didn't even enjoy - entirely different areas based on choices, loads of exclusive content, characters, quests and story that can never been seen otherwise. That's choice. That's consequence. What Bioware does is blatant railroading with death traps for your favorite characters so you get the feelz when things play out differently.

 

To be fair Bioware did do exactly that with Dragon Age: Inquisition. The choice between Mages & Templars results in entirely different missions, different companion characters aiding you, different antagonists, and different optional side missions later in the game. While I agree that overall CD Project Red does choice & consequence better (though not without their own stumbles), I think that choice in DA:I was on par with the Roche/Iorveth choice in TW2.

[mybudgee]

Someone please talk some sense into Entropic