67 réponses à ce sujet

[Bryan Johnson]

shackleshotgun, If you've read any of my posts, you'd know I said I understood why they dropped future DLC releases for old gen. That's not the issue I'm trying to raise. Dropping PATCH support for all the current content we have, and then not being up front about that in the beginning is what all PS3/Xbox360 users are in an uproar over.
 
The game we bought never worked very well. Did they fix a few things? Sure. Did the Dragonslayer dlc (free) work very well? Not so much, and they NEVER fixed those issues. And now they won't.

I did touch on patches for technical reasons, look a few pages back about patching on Xbox 360 and the space available.

Also for the dragon slayer issue you brought up, I asked a question of would you rather the content was never released or released with the issue you brought up?

[Bryan Johnson]

I would've rather you spent time fixing the content you released. Neither of the options you raise are good for business, or good for your fanbase.

 

The way you pose this sounds like this: "would you rather we pulled the support earlier, or left it as it currently is now, with tons of bugs". 

 

Who would want you to be worse than you were? We're already not happy with how you've handled the pull out.

The intent of the question was, if it was not technically possible would you rather have broken or not at all.

[Bryan Johnson]

I will blame EA for foisting FB3 upon Bioware to have them use it on DA:I. At that point only three games had been made on the engine (Need for Speed: Rivals, Battlefield 4 and Plants vs Zombies), none of which dealt with the style of play DA required and its why we got an inferior game all around. In either way BW should have continued to build upon their own custom designed engines that they've been building for years, so I will blame BW for caving and using the FB3 engine. I will also blame them for stretching themselves too thin and keeping old gen on the line instead of just sticking to next gen when design problems came up, they even had to hold the game over an extra month to fix bugs that made the game not play at all when certain things came up. 

First off the engine you are describing was only used by Dragon Age team, at one point BioWare had 4 games going (excluding ToR). DAI, ME:A, Shadow Realms and our new IP. So while a narrow engine might be great for 1 game it certainly wouldnt have worked for all the titles (notice ME used Unreal).

 

Second off EA didnt (as far as I know) force Frostbite on us we wanted it. Frostbite allows us to built extensions in it for our own needs, while giving us some features free. Something like tools (which is what I worked on) were taken from Frostbite (with most being developed for battlefield). There was 4 tools (called infrastructure) programmers on DA:I, compared to 9 on DA2, 10 on DAO, 12 for ME1. Keep in mind that is shipping 5 platforms vs 3 and 1 (ME1 was only 1 initially). As a result those people could be used for something else. 

 

Also when you stick a number onto the end of something you do not immediately throw out all efforts that were done before, meaning Frostbite 3 (in some ways) is not that different from Frostbite 2. 

 

Also the extra month was not because things were broken beyond all repair, it was for extra polish time. Since you brought up Batman Arkham Knight, you can see a month is not enough time to go from super broken to suddenly working at a tolerable level. 

[Bryan Johnson]

I believe scene was banned after receiving a number of warnings in a short period of time (this may be an automated system), I believe the majority of the warnings came after another user reported them and the mods found grounds for the posts being removed and a warning given. 

 

Note that I did not give any of those warnings.

 

Also of note, one of the warnings came from posting a single image as a reply which is a non-subjective grounds of receiving a warning and not all the warnings came from this thread.

[Bryan Johnson]

Alright enough, you guys claimed we are censoring I gave you more insight into what happened and then this happens.

Let's take a moment, to calm down

[Bryan Johnson]

I would like to know if dropping of support means there will be no more server side balance fixes; I assume it does, which leads me to also assume nothing will be ever be done to fix the XP glitch on PS3 and XB360. If I'm correct in these assumptions, does that also mean that the PS3/XB360 leaderboards are completely pointless, as it appears nothing will be done, despite the TOS reminder, to rectify the prestige gained from intentionally glitched lobbies? Currently, imo, it's the single biggest issue outside of the general unplayabilty of the FC map on Perilous or above under certain circumstances, and has been responsible for a definite fracturing of the community.

I could be mistaken, as I do not deal with MP (pretty much at all) but I believe server side balance changes will still be happening, you would have to get confirmation from Billy, Blair or Luke. 

[Bryan Johnson]

oh look.  The person who has been reporting post after post didn't come forward. What a surprise.  It shouldn't be anonymous.  Users should be told when they are reported and by whom.

Absolutely not, what possible purpose does that serve outside of promoting mob mentality? 

[Bryan Johnson]

I'm not saying so we can confront the person (make that against the rules), but when someone has some type of objective or is purposely targeting one person or a group of people it would be good to know.  I think a lot of this is for trolling and silencing and NOT because of rule violations.  From reading I know that there are more than a few people who have picked up on this.

 

If that's such a bad idea I would prefer my posts be forever blocked from someone who just can't stand your posts to the point they need to report you.  I think we should have that option.

You assume the people reporting is active in the thread in question, lurkers report as well.

 

Regardless, the simple solution is follow forum rules and do not be a jerk.

[Bryan Johnson]

Hmmmm.  I have a question then.  In terms of graphic quality, inventory, size, scale, content...all of it.  How is it possible that there are games such as....Skyrim, Dark Souls, Gran Turismo, GTA, Red Dead, and **insert game here** on the consoles, but DAI just burn it up with its massive content and sheer greatness?

 

I also feel like ME3 is larger game than DAI as a whole.  The MP for it absolutely dwarfs DAI's.  I'm not calling BS on your post or anything, I'm just saying that seems a bit off is all.  I fully believe Bryan knows what he is talking about and he came into this thread to help us out.  I'm just asking a question.

This question is pretty vague in the sense that you are talking about how does data get larger. Since this focus I am going to assume is about mainly disc size (which was the main point that TheThirdRace is refering (I assume)). There is different types of size for consoles (generally), main game (if there is an install), patches, player data (such as saves) and then DLC. The limit we are primarly talking for Xbox 360 is that of the patch size, from what I have been told has a cap at 2gb (it is a singular file), which I would expect to be actually 4gb since I believe the Xbox 360 is Fat32, so not sure exactly why it is 2gb (or if I was lead astray). Note while the technical limit is 2gb, MS required patches to be substantially smaller than that for the longest time (4mb, which if you dont believe me you can read here http://shoryuken.com...ally-planned/) 

 

Generally speaking this meant patches were limited to code changes (since content is much much bigger). Any content changes generally came along with DLC. IE the majority of Mass Effect 3 MP is DLC (content wise), and is infact 1.12gb (on PC). The frostbite engine has a bit of a tighter coupling between data and code, which means that in order to fix a lot of issues doing content is far easier, which means increasing the size much further.

 

How games decide to do their budget (space wise) can result in a lot of different situations. Once again ill take Mass Effect for example, the pre-rendered scenes total 3gb of space, for 30minutes worth of content. Something like Music and textures can vary so greatly in terms of recording quality that a 1mb piece of music in mp3 could be 25mb in a different format, to a lot of people they wont notice the difference but there are those that do. 

 

Further more, you may have data duplication that contributes to on disc size. Lets say you have a piece of music in Val Royeaux and the same in Skyhold. You have a few different ways you can decide to lay out the files for loading. If you put the music in the file that gets only loaded in Val Royeaux well then you have to duplicate that file into the file that represents Skyhold as well. If you decide to put it in its own file (which would create thousands and thousands of files) then you lose performance loading because of hard drive seek times. Now if you say well why not always have it loaded, then you end up in a situation where that data is always loaded into memory, which is definitely finite.

 

Also for ME3 vs DAI, it depends on what you compare right? The Single player for DAI is certainly larger than that of ME3s.

 

I mean minecraft is technically more vast than any other game, yet could be smaller.

 

Games have evolved it is like saying, i spent the same time in Chrono Trigger as I did in Dark Souls but Chrono Trigger is 32mb and Dark Souls is 4gb. Same goes with DAI where it is 16gb on Xbox 360 and yet Xbox One is 41gb despite more or less being the same game.

[Bryan Johnson]

And what is your policy on getting two warnings from the same moderator for the same post making a harmless joke?

Hello, you got a verbal warning (not the same thing as a typical warning, as points were not assigned). It appears the moderator in question for the first warning forgot to include the link of what it was you were being warned for. And as far as I know there is no way to edit a warning after the fact, so they sent another one to include the link that they had forgotten. Again there was no warning points assigned.

[Bryan Johnson]

Fair enough. I still think it was an overreaction though.

I do believe that it was innocent enough (which is why it was verbal) but could have very easily been built upon, so I would say it was preventive. If you would prefer we can take this to PM as we are going off topic

[Bryan Johnson]

Furthermore, I'm pretty sure something could be done about the size limit. I mean, if they have a limit of 4GB for example, they could use reduced quality textures and/or sounds to keep the total below that 4GB limit. They dont "have" to keep the same level of graphic quality, they just don't want to lower it. I know for some it would be an unacceptable solution, but in theory there is a solution. Either you give up on some quality or you give up on future content, your choice...

The Xbox 360 fit on 2 DVD9s whereas PS4 and Xbox One were on a BD50.

 

Also the last patch for 360 was 810mb to contrast PS4 was 2.25gb

 

The content was the more or less the same so the 'savings' was already from things like texture quality. 

[Bryan Johnson]

Did people make the same justifications for me3 on wii u not getting anymore patches or dlc?

Just a note, the only patch I believe the Wii U did not get was 1.05 (since 1.04 came out on October 1, and the Wii U came out November 18) which contained only 2 fixes, one of which did not apply at all to Wii U. 

 

As for the DLC, I do not believe DLC was even supported by the console at that point (this point is influenced by what I saw at the time of Wii U launch, since I noticed titles like CoD or Assassins Creed or Baman Arkham City did not have DLC also note CoD released DLC 2 years after it was made). The first mention of DLC (that I could find online) was Assassin's Creed III Wii U which came out April 23rd, 2013, which was after we had finished making DLC (also 6 months after the console had launched). 

[Bryan Johnson]

Don't quote me on that, but I'm pretty sure it was because there wasn't enough Wii U sold to justify DLCs. I know a lot of third party developers lost a lot of money by releasing their game to Wii U as a direct result of poor sales at the time. Eventually, they stopped releasing most of their game for that platform, keeping only the most popular ones. It's a slightly different story now because the Wii U finally got a couple very popular first party games that made the Wii U sales jump positively.

It appears I was wrong and the first DLC was available on the 19th of January.

 

If you need proof this feature was not available at launch you can look here: 

[Bryan Johnson]

Guys if you continue to bump this without adding anything, this thread will undoubtedly be locked.

 

Note: I have said, what I am going to say on this matter, so no sense 'jumping' on me (as this will ensure that I will never come back in here to participate). I also would very unlikely be the one to lock/warn people since I very rarely moderate. 

[Bryan Johnson]

The main issue is that there is an ongoing outrage and issue, and the fact that no one is addressing it is what keeps making it worse. It's pointless to complain to a wall, but we're trying to believe that someone cares enough about our collective problem to make it right in some way. "Bumping" is keeping it relevant in a sense, and the only posts ever read are the ones that are deemed "relevant." So there's little choice but to try to keep this thread in the spotlight so that someone may eventually notice it and choose to offer something.

I believe everyone who is going to comment (at least from BioWare side) has done so. The majority of this thread (and the others like it) have been making largely the same points with variation. There is nearly 3 pages of BioWare posts (most were from myself). 

 

The point of my post was to say, if you are going to simply reply with the word "bump" (or some variation within) those that are still reading this thread (ie myself) will never even bother to click on it because the assumption is that the only reply is bump (ie definitely not contributing anything new), and the time is better served on reading other threads. 

 

Furthermore bumping is considered spam and against site rules, my post was to give a warning that warnings may be given to people who are constituting this type of spam. Since in this thread we have been accused of censorship, I feel as though giving this warning was relevant to post.

[Bryan Johnson]

So why isn't this information somewhere where more people can notice it like gen discussion and why was it unsticked? Are they trying to hide this information so new last gen buyers don't realize it until it's too late?

Because there already is a thread about it in there (not created by BioWare mind you but I did link to this one), there was also one in spoilers I believe (but that one got pushed down by the community fairly quickly), and there was more than 1 in feedback (which also got pushed down by the community).

 

I believe it was unstickied because there was 5 stickies already up there, and generally speaking if you have more than 3 stickies people are far more likely to ignore them completely. I believe one of them was regarding double XP which more people were interested in than this topic.

 

What do you believe the chances of someone who has never bought the game yet, even coming onto the forums before buying it? Especially as their "deciding" factor in terms of buying the game. 

 

Just sticky the thread then. Problem solved. Well, not the real problem. But a problem. Honestly, it's bizarre a news post like this wouldn't be stickied to begin with.

 

The topic was stickied for 2 weeks.

 

What does sticky a thread actually solve, in your opinion? In my opinion it is either to a) curb the amount of potential duplicate threads or inform people who are not aware. 

 

For a) Given this thread has been off sticky for nearly 2 weeks and I have not seen any duplicate topics on this forum (there may be some, but not in droves like other topics have been). 

 

As for I am of the mind that those that are most affected by this (in this particular subforum) are multiplayer players who are likely to play on a regular basis and are forum users. There is very little of that intersect of groups that are not currently aware of this fact. 

[Fiddzz]

We've said all we're going to say on this topic, and understand that some people do not like our answer, or don't think it answers their questions exactly, but that's all we can say.  Locking.