90 réponses à ce sujet

[Lazarillo]

I think the main problem with Friendship/Rivalry wasn't lack of understanding among the players, but among the writers.  Every time friendship was used as approval and rivalry as disapproval, it undermines the system.  Not just because it associates "rivalry" with "bad", but because it can make it hard to follow the rivalry path to the end if your character doesn't consistently act like a jerk.

 

I think there's also the flaw that high rivalry companions don't really show Hawke any sort of respect or camaraderie as well.  There are quite a few scenes, particularly the "gift" bits, where if you're a rival the companion in question basically calls you a jerk and wonders why you're even around.  Fenris and Merrill were pretty bad about this...Aveline, and Isabela, just off the top of my head, weren't.  Not sure who wrote which character, but it makes me wonder if maybe specific character writers were the ones who didn't really get the memo.

 

That said, I did like the concept, but I think Approval/Disapproval and Friendship/Rivalry should have been an axis, rather than a flat out replacement of the old system.

[Capone666]

Anyone else? Anyone....ANYONE!

[Iakus]

!!!

 

>>> Players were too stupid to get it, so we better take it out!

 

This is why we can't have nice things.

Rivaling Merril, expecially a rivalmance, was a cool and novel experience

[Dutch's Ghost]

Can't wait to hear what was cut out of Inquisition. I'm assuming a lot since we got a mediocre product.

[Andraste_Reborn]

Can't wait to hear what was cut out of Inquisition. I'm assuming a lot since we got a mediocre product.

 

The one doesn't necessarily follow the other, though. Metric craptons of stuff got cut out of BG2, and most people think that was a pretty good game.

[Marshal Moriarty]

The rival system works just fine for all the characters. They still have reasons to be with you, and in fact rivalry can act as an incentive for them to be around you more often (Aveline for example can see you as a trouble making nuisance, who she nevertheless has a near familial duty to keep an eye on, Varric may not approve of your actions, but sees that you are still where the story is at etc etc).

 

Rivalry can also include the idea of tough love, telling people things they need to hear, but don't necessarily want to hear. Sebastian reacts badly if you suggest he should return to Starkhaven and rule there as is his right and duty. Because he is tired of politics and intrigue, and wary of slipping back into bad old habits. He wants to lead a contemplative life now, because it brings him peace and release from such burdens. But he knows too that its not necessarily the 'wrong' decision either.

 

Other characters have little choice but to stick with you, because you still represent their best chance at fulfulling their personal goals, Isabela, Anders and Fenris are all in need of able help, but can't exactly say why (in the case of Anders and Isabela who have secrets they must keep). As for Fenris, he has such a low opinion of people in general, that he kind of expects everyone to betray him and be complete jerks. So even if he disapproves of you, its only the same as he reacts to mostly everyone else he's ever met. The important thing to him is that you aren't overtly hostile (yet), that you are in the right line of work to have need of him as hired help, and that he has business in the city, so he might as well take what little aid he can find.

 

It was a good system, and far superior to any other Bioware have attempted. Because as Gaider points out, without such a system, conversations with your party members tend to boil down to are you going to give them the 'right' answer and get your reward of Influence/Approval/whatever or are you going to give the 'wrong' answer and get nothing?

[teh DRUMPf!!]

Rivaling Merril, expecially a rivalmance, was a cool and novel experience

 

What makes DG's comment even more annoying is looking at the Inquisition party.

 

With the current system, you have to be agreeable to progress your relationship with each character, even with that character's bad traits: Sera's immaturity, Vivienne's callousness, SolASS's arrogance, Blackwall's naivete, Iron Bull's Qun, Varric's questionable priorities... your Inquisitor can/will lose points for not endorsing those.

 

The effect on your PC is coming off as a suck-up with no strong opinions of his/her own.

[Amirit]

 

I think there's also the flaw that high rivalry companions don't really show Hawke any sort of respect or camaraderie as well.  There are quite a few scenes, particularly the "gift" bits, where if you're a rival the companion in question basically calls you a jerk and wonders why you're even around.  Fenris and Merrill were pretty bad about this...Aveline, and Isabela, just off the top of my head, weren't.  Not sure who wrote which character, but it makes me wonder if maybe specific character writers were the ones who didn't really get the memo.

 

That said, I did like the concept, but I think Approval/Disapproval and Friendship/Rivalry should have been an axis, rather than a flat out replacement of the old system.

 

I also think the system they tried to implement was too complex not only for very limited in terms of resources and time DA2 but games in general. Rival relationship of Hawk with any companion (probably, except Anders) felt very wrong to me. There was no a hint of respect but jerking and alienating each of them. There was no opportunity to show something like "I respect you as a person but disagree (mind you - disagree! Not despise, not hate, not laugh at but disagree) with some of your ideas".

 

It looks like the whole thing was written for Anders alone - and with Anders it did work to some degree and because mage\templar thing is the mane subject of the story, you CAN argue, explain, discuss and so on. The rest is just horrible by itself plus you have to be a jerk\ murderer \immoral abomination with others to get it work and earn rivalry points. Not to mention, the system required from you to get full bar to make it work which made the whole thing very inflexible.

 

I am glad they got rid of it. Highly doubt system can be improved. 

[Andraste_Reborn]

The rest is just horrible by itself plus you have to be a jerk\ murderer \immoral abomination with others to get it work and earn rivalry points.

 

Um, no. You don't ever have to be cruel to Fenris or Merrill to get them to full rivalry. Consistently supporting mages pisses Fenris off enough to get him to full red bar early in Act 2, and with Merrill all it takes is criticising her use of blood magic and maybe not helping her get the arulin'holm if you're not over the line yet. Supporting mages will also get you an easy full rivalry with Carver. With Isabela, being moral and not stealing things or helping poison merchants generally gets you rivalry points. Sebastian can be a bit trickier to get to full rivalry if you're nice but still tell him to take back Starkhaven, but only because he arrives in the middle of the game and gives you friendship every single time you rescue a kitten from a tree. With Aveline, you just have to break the law at any opportunity, which doesn't necessarily involve being a jerk.

 

The only instances where you have to consistently be an arsehole to get to full rivalry are Varric and Bethany. (It's actually impossible to get to full rivalry with Bethany anyway, in the vanilla game at least.)

[robotnist]

kinda blows my mind, i take it DA2 was meant to be a DAO X-pack?!?!? and then if all that happened, would there then be yet ANOTHER x-pack in the way of the "Exalted March" also for DAO?!?!? (if people didn't hate DA2?) i loved it for what it was.

 

crazy thoughts when u unpack everything in your head...

so now since we have a super fresh game engine and a brand new spanking game, could we be lead to believe/assume that DAI will spawn at least one or two X-packs??? if not more, amongst the usual DLC???

 

i know expansion packs aren't "hip" anymore, but man i would love some old school RPG XPACK in a fancy box for DAI, like say a new race and/or class//skill tree!!! with a new 20-40 hour story campaign!!! 

 

hell i would pay for an x=pack that just unlocked the SP as a story lite co-op'er that you and a friend could make your own characters to romp around thedas in!!!!

[Eudaemonium]

Then why did you change it?

 

They showed that they've found a solution to the whole "I hate the things you do, but I can only make you love me by not hating them", and then completely discarded it. It's not like it was perfect, but that is in my opinion 100% due to the way some interactions where handled mere choice wise, not because of the relationship system.

 

Especially in a game like Inquisition, where people understand they have to be around, so the only option is the be friendly or respectful. Not that this isn't the case, but it just completely returned to "hatred - less content / love - more content"

 

 

They basically scrapped it because nobody understood how it worked. (Using 'nobody' hyperbolically.) There are people who played DA2 that to this day don't quite seem to understand that Friendship =/= Good and Rivalry =/= Bad. I had several friends who max-Friendship'd everyone and then got mad when the characters did things they didn't like but which they'd been supporting in those very actions. Basically exactly like what happened with Merrill outlined in the Interview. It was a great system, but probably less than half of players actually understood it and so, in typical BioWare fashion, they threw the baby out with the bathwater.

 

It's kind of weird, but I really think that half the problems with understanding the F/R system could have been solved by using different colour-coding. Like Green and Purple, or Orange and Blue, or whatever. The Blue=Good, Red=Bad thing had kind of been ingrained in BioWare games since KotOR (you can make arguments around ME, but I think they kinda dropped the Renegade ball once 2 had glowing Sith scars and half your decisions made no logical sense). If you want people to not associate Red with Bad in a BioWare game maybe don't train them to see that in all your previous works...

[Nerevar-as]

Problem with renegade is it included ruthless pragmatism together with "only a psycho would do this" actions, hard to defend. It worked best when it focused on the choice between protecting victims and destroying perceived threats.

I got rivalry all right, problem is I didn't get why a full rival would kept on following Hawke. Carver flat out said we'd better part ways once the mission was over in Legacy.

[Amirit]

Um, no. You don't ever have to be cruel to Fenris or Merrill to get them to full rivalry. Consistently supporting mages pisses Fenris off enough to get him to full red bar early in Act 2, and with Merrill all it takes is criticising her use of blood magic and maybe not helping her get the arulin'holm if you're not over the line yet. Supporting mages will also get you an easy full rivalry with Carver. With Isabela, being moral and not stealing things or helping poison merchants generally gets you rivalry points. Sebastian can be a bit trickier to get to full rivalry if you're nice but still tell him to take back Starkhaven, but only because he arrives in the middle of the game and gives you friendship every single time you rescue a kitten from a tree. With Aveline, you just have to break the law at any opportunity, which doesn't necessarily involve being a jerk.

 

The only instances where you have to consistently be an arsehole to get to full rivalry are Varric and Bethany. (It's actually impossible to get to full rivalry with Bethany anyway, in the vanilla game at least.)

 

I think we have a very different understanding of the word "cruel". "Just supporting mages" was never enough for me to get full rivalry. I had to add supporting slavery on top of it, not to mention be very rude (I would say cruel) in personal dialogs with Fenris. 

And with Merrill... My God! You are not "criticizing" her believes, you are crashing them. And with such a horrible wording (I mean, the wording is good artistically but again - rude up to the point of cruelty) that I had only one question - why Hawke is still alive? Ok, Merrill would never kill anyone (we do not count monsters here), but Fenris with his temper had at least to leave long ago or try to respond violently. 

And with Izabella! At some point you literally call her a ****. And all those excruciatingly judgmental moral lectures like Hawke is the moral compass for the whole Thedas which Izabella - a very definition of free spirit -  totally out of character takes with "thank you" and "oh, you are so right"... Same with Merrill, who dared to stand up to Keeper for her believes, leave her clan and her whole life behind for them, sacrificed everything for that believes and suddenly turned around for one man - the meanest SoB in Thedas!  

I do see Hawke on the most rivalry part as a jerk, hypocrite, cruel monster, who is dancing on the believes of others just for fun and THEY TAKE IT AND CHANGE.  

 

Yes, this is another problem - companion reaction. To stay on rivalry path companions believes have to be bended over and crashed. Completely out of character.

There are exactly 3 character where rivalry works - Anders (only because it's the main theme of the game), Carver (they made him this way that anything is rivalry with him and still, result of full rivalry if he is a templar is OOC for me) and Sebastian (guess, they learned by that point how to make system look more natural). For the rest of companions it's simply awful.

The idea could be good, but implementation did not work for me in.

[ThePhoenixKing]

An interesting interview, thanks for sharing. It's kinda sad though; as someone who thought DAII was okay, it's just a shame that know that it could have been so much better. The Coterie arc sounds like it could've had some potential, and more Varric is rarely a bad thing.

 

With regards to Friendship/Rivalry, I personally found it to be better in theory than in practice. While I could see something like that working in Origins or Inquisition, where there's a central threat that the characters must work together to defeat, even if they don't like each other, it didn't make much sense in DAII, when the characters' association is much more loose. Maybe it would have worked better in Inquisition?

 

Also have to disagree with David on Merrill's Friendship path; a lot of people took it not to change her outlook, but because they agreed with it, or valued her ability to make her own choices, or just plain liked her as a person. Bit of a shame to see him take such a black-and-white outlook on the subject too; one of the great strengths of Merrill as a character was that she introduced some ambiguity into blood magic, and posed some interesting moral questions that deserved exploration. (Yet another reason why they need to bring it back as a specialization for DA4).

 

Still, it's a very interesting look at the creative process. Let's hope that whatever project he's working on now doesn't suffer the same complications.

[Capone666]

An interesting interview, thanks for sharing. It's kinda sad though; as someone who thought DAII was okay, it's just a shame that know that it could have been so much better. The Coterie arc sounds like it could've had some potential, and more Varric is rarely a bad thing.

 

With regards to Friendship/Rivalry, I personally found it to be better in theory than in practice. While I could see something like that working in Origins or Inquisition, where there's a central threat that the characters must work together to defeat, even if they don't like each other, it didn't make much sense in DAII, when the characters' association is much more loose. Maybe it would have worked better in Inquisition?

 

Also have to disagree with David on Merrill's Friendship path; a lot of people took it not to change her outlook, but because they agreed with it, or valued her ability to make her own choices, or just plain liked her as a person. Bit of a shame to see him take such a black-and-white outlook on the subject too; one of the great strengths of Merrill as a character was that she introduced some ambiguity into blood magic, and posed some interesting moral questions that deserved exploration. (Yet another reason why they need to bring it back as a specialization for DA4).

 

Still, it's a very interesting look at the creative process. Let's hope that whatever project he's working on now doesn't suffer the same complications.

 

Thank you for the kind words

[ThePhoenixKing]

Thank you for the kind words

 

You're very welcome! I really do appreciate all your hard work doing and transcribing these interviews; as an aspiring writer myself, it's always nice to get a peek into the inner workings like this.

[dsl08002]

Thank you for the kind words

It will be interesting to hear regarding DAI interview later.

Da2 was in my opinion Refreshing, with a new kind of story and characters. Despite its many major Flaws, I still maintain that its one of the worst games I have ever played. Though I still don't agree to Dragon age its about the "world" not about the main characters playing as hawke was a nice touch, In hindsight of DAI I would have preferred to have hawke as Inquisitor.

But most important of all regarding DA2:s transcendence towards DAI the whole concept of mage, Templar war in DAi was reduced to a small part of the game itself, when it should have been bigger. Which was a big letdown not only that, but it also diminished DA2 even more given that the game itself approached the subject very clearly and then it was a trifle matter in DAI.

[Shechinah]

Da2 was in my opinion Refreshing, with a new kind of story and characters. Despite its many major Flaws, I still maintain that its one of the worst games I have ever played. Though I still don't agree to Dragon age its about the "world" not about the main characters playing as hawke was a nice touch, In hindsight of DAI I would have preferred to have hawke as Inquisitor.

 

Did you mean to write "worst"? I thought I'd ask for clarification since the rest of your comment seems to suggest it was unintentionally used.
 

[Nerevar-as]

It will be interesting to hear regarding DAI interview later.

Da2 was in my opinion Refreshing, with a new kind of story and characters. Despite its many major Flaws, I still maintain that its one of the worst games I have ever played. Though I still don't agree to Dragon age its about the "world" not about the main characters playing as hawke was a nice touch, In hindsight of DAI I would have preferred to have hawke as Inquisitor.

But most important of all regarding DA2:s transcendence towards DAI the whole concept of mage, Templar war in DAi was reduced to a small part of the game itself, when it should have been bigger. Which was a big letdown not only that, but it also diminished DA2 even more given that the game itself approached the subject very clearly and then it was a trifle matter in DAI.

BW main policy when something doesn't work in a game is go completely the opposite way instead of looking at what failed and fix it. So plot-wise, it got swept away as fast as possible, pretender DA Shepard included, and got a world threat again after all that mockery about a superblight during DAII marketing. Yet the problem with DAII wasn't scale, it was they failed to make it compelling for most players.

[dsl08002]

Did you mean to write "worst"? I thought I'd ask for clarification since the rest of your comment seems to suggest it was unintentionally used.

No I genuine mean worst, but even the worst games can have some good elements, even though they are few.

[dsl08002]

BW main policy when something doesn't work in a game is go completely the opposite way instead of looking at what failed and fix it. So plot-wise, it got swept away as fast as possible, pretender DA Shepard included, and got a world threat again after all that mockery about a superblight during DAII marketing. Yet the problem with DAII wasn't scale, it was they failed to make it compelling for most players.

of course because the fans was expecting a dragon age origins 2, hence the big let down.

[leaguer of one]

I've never tried the rivalry with Merril, because she is my preferred romance I typically always agree with her decisions just to get the approval but from what Gaider said in this interview the rivalry sounds awesome..

The hell. I did rivalry with Merril the first time and I romanced her. Sorry, but it sounds like you're one of those guys who sits quietly as your friends do something horrible to themselves.

[Nixou]

There was no opportunity to show something like "I respect you as a person but disagree (mind you - disagree! Not despise, not hate, not laugh at but disagree) with some of your ideas

 

 

It's not that this type of relations don't exist in Dragon Age 2: it's that they tended to happen in friendship paths:

For instance, apart for Carver, my Apostate Hawke pursued friendship-type relationships with everyone, yet, when it comes to Fenris, plenty of dialog sequences and banters clearly indicated that Fenris and my Hawke clearly didn't see eye to eye regarding mages: basically, their friendship sounded a lot like a Rivalry I-dont-agree-with-you-but-I-respect-you-nonetheless type of relationship, but Fenris still had a maxed blue bar.

 

 

I am glad they got rid of it. Highly doubt system can be improved. 

 

 

The system could be improved, if they established it along two axes:

Follower Like - Dislike PC

PC Agree - Disagree with follower's worldview

Let's take Fenris' case as a template: in such a system expressing disagreement with his harsh views on mages would move the cursor toward Disagree, but not move it on the Like-Dislike axis, while accepting to go along Fenris sidequests would make him like Hawke more but Not move the cursor on the Agree - Disagree axis.

 

***

 

Act II was my fav, and felt like the end. I always saw Act 3 as rushed and thrown together

 

 

I didn't mind the rather short final act, since it's suppose to depict the point where years of prejudice and distrust finally reach the boiling point.

 

Still, I always thought that apart from needing at least two more years in development, DA2's narrative was two cluttered and unbalanced: Varric's tale had long time skips between the acts, but it always felt that the each act's events all happened within the same week: leading me to think that the game needed intra-acts time-skips as well as a five (instead of three) acts structure alternating between optimistic and tragic conclusions

[Amirit]

The system could be improved, if they established it along two axes:

Follower Like - Dislike PC

PC Agree - Disagree with follower's worldview

Let's take Fenris' case as a template: in such a system expressing disagreement with his harsh views on mages would move the cursor toward Disagree, but not move it on the Like-Dislike axis, while accepting to go along Fenris sidequests would make him like Hawke more but Not move the cursor on the Agree - Disagree axis.

 

 

Sounds like a "virtue" mod for BG2 and I personally like it a lot. Probably you are right and that would make system functional, less frightening and more realistic. Also totally agree about Fenris and mages on a friendly path - yes, you said it perfectly! Every time DG or someone else from developers mention that "respect but disagree" Fenris's friendship path comes to mind, not that abomination they called rivalry (sorry, I still can hear that horrible OOC dialogs in my mind and can not call it differently). 

 

I wish BW writers saw it as clear as you do.