No chance it was that last gen restriction nonsense. Just take a look at the GTA series. They have been doing major cities for well over a decade and I'd put Vice City, a 2002 game on the first Xbox, as a significantly better city than Val Royeaux.
After so many references to the majesty that is Val Royeaux over all the DA media over the years it was one giant tease. Especially in a game all about religion and the Maker, the Grand Cathedral that is the seat of the Divine, isn't even visible, let alone a location you can go. Val Royeaux, the Orlesian capital, is also the capital city of the Chantry, you can actually pick the next Divine, but you can't visit the Grand Cathedral, not even worth a cut scene.
I'd much rather have one fewer zone if it meant we would have had a grand city like we've been told Val Royeaux is for several games, comics, books, etc. DA:O's Denerim felt like a city, DA:I Val Royeaux felt about as worth while and expansive as the Black Emporium
I don’t think it’s a gen restriction either, though it may have played a role, meaning that it’s just more difficult to do on weaker hardware.
Pathfinding is a different thing, though. I don’t think it’s going to be easy to combine a party following you with a mazelike city with lots of mobile NPC’s.
Then again, they could have just gone for an expanded and improved Denerim- or Kirkwall-like structure with an impressive skybox.
I don’t think scrapping a zone would have freed enough resources for a city. Swen Vincke (Head of Larian, maker of the Divinity cRPG’s) once wrote extensively in his blog on the relatively high cost of creating a (convincing) city versus the amount of actual playtime. At the same time, creating basic wilderness real estate doesn’t appear to be too expensive. Ever noticed a lot of single-player cRPG’s and MMORPG’s have large amounts of pretty-looking but relatively empty landscape? I’ve also read or watched comments by devs that, with a decent engine, it’s not that hard to create attractive and expansive zones.
The real problem is the actual content to fill the landscape. Ubisoft (and others, including BioWare) tried to solve this by implementing lots of fairly simple, repetitive ‘quests’ (really just tasks). It’s a ‘cheap’ but increasingly un-cheerful way of getting enough content to fill all that space.’
@panzerwzh:
I don’t agree that Skyrim is just generic medieval fantasy; it clearly has some depth to it and a large part of the ‘feel’ they went for is actually rather Conanesque sword & sorcery-ish, rather than generic quasi-medieval European.
Having said that, Morrowind is clearly Bethesda’s creative peak so far. Ken Rolston, who is highly regarded in the world of pen & paper RPG’s, was one of its designers. Rolston was also involved in the far less memorable Kingdoms of Amalur (which did have some interesting and original stuff from a lore and gameplay perspective) and, well before Morrowind, was involved with Runequest and Glorantha.
Glorantha, in particular, is in many ways the antithesis to generic quasi-medieval European fantasy RPG settings (and look here:
https://twitter.com/...482993777758208)
Glorantha then, during Ken Rolston’s time as editor and…
Glorantha now…
I don’t think Bethesda will ever touch the Morrowind-esque kind of fantastic again, though.
CDPR…maybe. I’m actually hoping they’re going for a non-Witcher, non-standard fantasy IP after or alongside Cyberpunk for their next fantasy cRPG.
Or perhaps we’ll get something out of Scandinavia, Funcom did a great job in visualizing Hyboria in Age of Conan and while they are now a much reduced force, there’s still experience, talent and a liking for the non-standard stuff up north.
I don’t think we’ll get anything like that, or even the only very moderately non-standard a la Skyrim, out of Edmonton though. BioWare’s most exotic setting was Jade Empire, and that was within its oriental fantasy subgenre a rather generic mishmash (even though I loved it and kudos to Bio for even trying). Jade Empire, however, was a bit of a flop. I don’t think EA BioWare will try its hand at something non-standard until somebody else has proven that it can be commercially highly successful.
Retour en haut
). In the middle of a fourth that involves investigating a haunting at a well. That's also good, because it's not a case of 'go to location X and kill Y'. You have to investigate why the creature is there.
