I finally went back to this game to try out the Jaws of Hakkon DLC after I beat Witcher 3. At first, I quite liked going back and started to ponder whether I had been too harsh on this game in how I judged it or maybe infavorably compared it against Witcher 3... but here, 2-3 hours later I'm back where I was and I once again remember exactly why DA:I was underwhelming to me. There are multiple reasons, but since I'm basing this mostly on my time with Jaws of Hakkon there is one thing in particular that sticks out to me, which works against the very game-design Bioware tried to go for:
A big part of this game is that it is big in scope, vast landscapes and varied level-design, smaller towns populated with inhabitants and environmental storytelling. Here's the reason why none of this has the impact on me it should.
You see, generally speaking, DA:I and its world simply feels too static. I bolded the word because that, I think truly is the keyword that needs to be looked into for every single upcoming BIoware game in, or to be in, production
There's people to talk to, they do things, sit, lie down, walk around, look at things in the ground or on the wall, talk to other people in groups, I mean, what's there to complain about? Well, part of the reason this still doesn't work is because while the NPCs are programmed to do all these things, it never comes across as anything but just that to me (that is "programmed"). If I bump into anyone there's just a solid collision as if the NPC is a brick wall that gets in my way an obstacle rather than another organic being that's in the same supposedly moving and breathing world as my own character and his team. Furthermore, a lot of the NPCs who are scripted to look like they're doing things just flat out don't make sense half of the time. Back in Skyhold there's a guy examining the ground outside of the main hall, and he'll keep doing that for the rest of the game.
When you hold conversations which are 90% non-cinematic in Jaws of Hakkon anyway, they have very basic gestures but either stand, sit or lie completely still in the same pose throughout the whole conversation zoomed out so far that I cannot properly see the emotion in their face. The world-building in Jaws of Hakkon largely goes to waste as I'm just bored out of my mind when a rather interesting new lore-tidbit is being revealed to me but the Clan-leader has no emotion I can be affected by and no real tone or mood set up by good cinematic camerawork, or proper use of cuts and closeups to imply what these things mean to these characters. Effectively, the writing is often ahead of what's being portrayed visually or mechanically in the game. While the writing and voice acting is where it should be, the entire image is just this monotonous, static bore that fails to convey anything interesting.
Here's a lecture in game-design from the co-creator of The Stanley Parable: In case someone from Bioware did not attend in person at this GDC conference, here's what you missed (and this is the key to making your future games much, much more engaging):
(At 19:30, William talks about something I feel is exactly the issue in DA:I's entirety. Writing and game-design doesn't gel enough. The NPCs have banter or ambient dialogue that nobody cares about because, in order to take it in properly, you have to either stand still and do nothing, or you'll end up jumping and running in circles just to listen in on these conversations because the game doesn't have a good way of engaging us with all this extra writing)
Either way, conversations add to the issue of DA:I's sense of staticness but the major gripe I want to highlight here is mostly just the physical and mechanical aspects of the game-design that governs the way DA:I's in-game world is portrayed.
The explanation I have that shows how and why everything is so static is that Bioware designed this world by using "map-iterations" which in short means that they have a dozen versions or presets of the game map that has pre-loaded positions for NPCs. In The Witcher 3, I think this might be the case too, but because in that game, even the shopkeepers and hairdressers can move about from their preset location it doesn't feel like you're just going through one preset of the same map after the other. In DA:I on the other hand, it feels like everything, every object, every NPC, every asset and lighting setting used, are just all presets within one of several map-iterations. There are no day/night cycles, the NPCs stand in place and can't be moved and when they do move their path-scripting is broken and you'll sometimes see them fly across the map or turn in place awkwardly in the background while having a conversation with your companion (this is in Skyhold).
TL;DR: DA:I is very static and it is so because:
- NPCs are stiff bricks that cannot by physically manipulated by your interactions.
- NPCs have artificial routines that don't always make sense or simply lack any context whatsoever
- Conversations (in JoH anyway) are 90% non-cinedesign and they fail to compliment the writing and voice-acting properly through visuals or setting the mood through cinematography.
- When things change in the map, it feels like the game has just loaded a different iteration of the same map that contains alternative presets to NPC locations and things like that.
And last but not least: My point is, again. I've seen what DA:I tried to do here, done better but mostly it was acceptable because BIoware had the story-driven RPG. Now The Witcher 3 has shown us that you CAN make such an RPG like DA:I and make it feel as "lived in" as in a Bethesda game. Bioware has been riding the same horse in regards to how they design their in-game worlds since Mass Effect 1 and as their games become more mechanically interactive the more jarring it is how static everything is.
The thing Bioware absolutely MUST do with all upcoming games is to take this static and turn it into dynamic.
Retour en haut
