114 réponses à ce sujet

[tybert7]

http://wccftech.com/...ss-effect-ever/

 

Alistair McNally ‏@Al_McNally  Sep 11

Spent today reviewing creative progress on #MassEffectAndromeda. I believe it to be the best (and certainly largest) Mass Effect ever! #Hype

 

 

 

Best sounds good, large sounds good, but REALLY scares me.

 

 

Dragon Age Inquisition was by FAR the largest dragon age game ever made in terms of sheer time and land mass and detail.  And while it was orders of magnitude better than a game like dragon age 2, it felt... empty compared to origins.

 

 

I think it was SO big, SO devoid of narrative cut scenes that fleshed out the story that it often played more like an open world mmo rather than a more intense and focused rpg like origins or previous mass effect games.

 

 

A good analogy for this is babylon 5.  Many of you never saw the series, the single greatest sci fi series of all time.  But let me tell you a bit of history, the writer/creator did not know if the show would get a 5th and final season (it did) so he crammed as much content as POSSIBLE into the 4th season.  There was virtually ZERO filler in that entire season, it was dreadnought after dreadnought of powerhouse and engaging episodes.  THAT is my ideal tv season or rpg.  When the show did get a 5th season, the left over stories, while interesting, were not as intensified and concentrated as season 3-4, and so it did not have the same impact.

 

Dragon Age Inquisition was like a tv series giving too many episodes where the writers had to put in a lot of filler.  Even the witcher series which I'm not a fan of seemed to lose some more intense and strong story beats compared to previous installments when it switched to a more open world approach.

 

Previous mass effect games had a great balance, you could travel to different stars, have some superficial exploration with the mako, but mostly the open world was going to major hubs of activity of condensed and intense and engaging story and narrative.  

 

 

When the guy mentions this being the biggest mass effect game, that might just mean big and too spread out with the engaging content.  That was the biggest flaw of dragon age inquisition, please for the love of the flying spaghetti monster, let's not have that same mistake made here.

[Panda]

Large is not positive thing for me BW game-wise. I like tighter and more coherent packets that you want to play multiple times cause they are so good instead of spending over 100 hours in one playthrough, usually most of time either collecting some weird stuff like shards or grinding.

[tybert7]

Large is not positive thing for me BW game-wise. I like tighter and more coherent packets that you want to play multiple times cause they are so good instead of spending over 100 hours in one playthrough, usually most of time either collecting some weird stuff like shards or grinding.

 

 

For the record.  I don't mind large expansive games, but if they ARE going that route, PLEASE fill it with compelling stuff and not those shard collector styles of content.  That last is empty, seeing a cut scene of the normandie fighting a collector ship was NOT a waste of time, it's the kind of cur scene that can be watched OVER and OVER and OVER because it is a great scene.

 

I think bioware got gun shy about cut scenes and too much time spent talking from dragon age 2 because that was one long cut scene with no actual locales to visit, and they took things the wrong way.

[Broganisity]

Inquisition's problem wasn't mainly that the world was empty, but that you were forced to go off the story path in order to progress with the story path. In short, the narrative was forcibly gated so that the player had to gather power in order to proceed. Not a bad idea in theory, but given that gate was through side missions and not actual missions that lead you to the next part of the main story, well-

I like your example of the 'filler' episodes. While some filler episodes are good and do, in a small way, carry on a small sub-story or shed light on something old or new, many tend to be the equivalent of holiday specials at best and generic 'walk here and encounter the monster/villain/pokemon/side character of the week' type episodes at the worst.

[Laughing_Man]

I don't trust anything that comes with the hash tag "Hype" in the end.

 

Hype is not a healthy enthusiasm for a new game that you may like, it's an artificial group mentality or trend used as a leverage to ensure that as many

potential customers as possible would impulse-pre-order the game, no matter if the company creating it is deserving of the extra trust.

That would make the buyers more likely to engage in confirmation bias, and in some ways become marketing tools themselves.

 

In short: Hype is a thing created by shadowy marketing departments in order to preasure the gullible peasants into pre-ordering.

 

It's all about pre-order numbers and first-day sales, and in marketing like everyone knows or suspects to some degree - everything is allowed

and nothing is too moraly ambigous.

[Remix-General Aetius]

largest as in open-world large is one thing, the quality and quantity of content FILLING said open world is another thing entirely.

[Panda]

For the record.  I don't mind large expansive games, but if they ARE going that route, PLEASE fill it with compelling stuff and not those shard collector styles of content.  That last is empty, seeing a cut scene of the normandie fighting a collector ship was NOT a waste of time, it's the kind of cur scene that can be watched OVER and OVER and OVER because it is a great scene.

 

I think bioware got gun shy about cut scenes and too much time spent talking from dragon age 2 because that was one long cut scene with no actual locales to visit, and they took things the wrong way.

 

With DAI it just seems too much was sacrificed for open world. Cinematic dialogue being one of biggest, I absolute hated how there was lack of that in DAI. Then side quest were watered down from quest that made you actually feel something and made you make choices to: go there and kill these people, go there and search for this etc.

[SNascimento]

Isn't there a thread just to discuss tweets? hm... 

[Remix-General Aetius]

Isn't there a thread just to discuss tweets? hm... 

 

since when has that ever stopped these pyjaks?

[mickey111]

oh good another hiking simulator.

[Hjklop]

Won't this whole game be more about exploration though? 

 

I mean it's a whole new galaxy to explore, and we've got a confirmed appearance of the Mako, so a larger wider world would help with that.

 

But I do agree that space needs to be filled, not just the same cave/transport/spaceship with differently arranged boxes.  

[v0rt3x22]

Hyping upcoming games with tweets or on social media isn't uncommon.

[Ahriman]

Hyping upcoming games with tweets or on social media isn't uncommon.

No, it's uncommon to #hype tag your own games, it's like liking your own fb status. 

[v0rt3x22]

No, it's uncommon to #hype tag your own games, it's like liking your own fb status. 

 

actually it's very common for developers to #hype tag their own upcoming games.

[Hathur]

"Large" is .. a deceptive term or concept. Whilst DAI was larger than any Bioware game ever, it was only "larger" in regards to the amount of time you spend running around on foot in game. Everything is so vastly spaced out (to an annoying degree. Points of interest / things to do were not handled adeptly as they were in Skyrim or Witcher 3.. instead we just ran around in far too much empty space doing mmo style side quests between story missions / companion missions and the odd side quest that had an actual story to it).

 

I recorded DAO, Da2 and DA3 all for my youtube channel and if you want to measure which games (of dragon age anyway) have the most / longest narrative, It is DAO, DA2, then DAI. DAI being significantly the shortest, clocking in at just over 10.5 hours of narrative (this includes time spent talking to companions etc, excluding all gameplay and including only conversations with NPCs / cutscenes etc). It's just barely longer than ME1 which was a bit under 10 hours length (bioware's shortest game in fact.. narratively speaking).

 

Mass Effect 3 (if you take all DLCs included) is the "largest" game they've made... narrative-wise (dialogue / cutscenes only), measuring at just over 26 hours length... however, if you combine DAO + its expansion, then DAO is longer, at around 30 hours if I recall from my youtube videos (on it's own, DAO was around 25 or 24, can't recall). DA2 sat around 16 hours (with DLC) and ME2 was about 15 hrs with all DLC.

 

Again.. those numbers above are if you cut out 99% of gameplay / combat and only include dialogue / narrative related material. But DAI was by far one of Bioware's shortest games in recent years, if you're measuring by amount of written material for 1 playthrough (that doesn't take into account combined length of all the various branching dialogues DAI has, which appears to have more than DA2 did by a fair margin... similar to Witcher 2 which was "short" for 1 playthrough, but it had a 2nd act that was entirely different and in a different location based on what choice you made in act 1, thus making the total potential playtime much longer if you played it a 2nd time).

 

I for one hope for a return to the "level-based" or "hub-based" worlds of DAO, DA2, Me2 / ME3 etc and elimination of these huge swaths of empty world to wander through. I much prefer the more focused / smaller locales of DAO / DA2 (sans recycling assets) and mass effect games. As DAI stands, it feels bloated and artificially large.

 

Either that, or they need to study Skyrim / Witcher 3 and how they handled open worlds because neither of those games has ever made me feel like I was in a dead, empty landscape trodding along endlessly as if I were playing old-school World of Warcraft or Everquest.

 

Most importantly.. I don't want ME4 to turn into a 10 hour narrative like DAI did.. it should be 22+ hrs narrative at the least... it should be as long as ME3 was from a narrative point, not shorter.

 

I don't care if ME4 is 900 hours long if 880 hours of that involves boring wandering around on empty worlds that have nothing interesting to experience.

[Hathur]

I don't trust anything that comes with the hash tag "Hype" in the end.

 

Hype is not a healthy enthusiasm for a new game that you may like, it's an artificial group mentality or trend used as a leverage to ensure that as many

potential customers as possible would impulse-pre-order the game, no matter if the company creating it is deserving of the extra trust.

That would make the buyers more likely to engage in confirmation bias, and in some ways become marketing tools themselves.

 

In short: Hype is a thing created by shadowy marketing departments in order to preasure the gullible peasants into pre-ordering.

 

It's all about pre-order numbers and first-day sales, and in marketing like everyone knows or suspects to some degree - everything is allowed

and nothing is too moraly ambigous.

 

Agreed, especially odd to use it as a hashtag when the word hype itself is infact an entirely negative term (from a consumer perspective.. but a positive one from a marketing perspective).

 

The definition of the word itself: "promote or publicize (a product or idea) intensively, often exaggerating its importance or benefits."

 

As a consumer, I'm not interested in being lied to by the people making the games I want (lets face it, that's what exaggerating is, a form of lie). Bizzarre they want to tell their consumers they're exagerrating what their game is / will be... that hardly instills me with confidence in the product.. on the contrary, it makes me wary of it. 

[Sartoz]

http://wccftech.com/...ss-effect-ever/

 

Alistair McNally ‏@Al_McNally  Sep 11

Spent today reviewing creative progress on #MassEffectAndromeda. I believe it to be the best (and certainly largest) Mass Effect ever! #Hype

 

 

 

Best sounds good, large sounds good, but REALLY scares me.

 

 

Dragon Age Inquisition was by FAR the largest dragon age game ever made in terms of sheer time and land mass and detail.  And while it was orders of magnitude better than a game like dragon age 2, it felt... empty compared to origins.

 

 

I think it was SO big, SO devoid of narrative cut scenes that fleshed out the story that it often played more like an open world mmo rather than a more intense and focused rpg like origins or previous mass effect games.

 

 

A good analogy for this is babylon 5.  Many of you never saw the series, the single greatest sci fi series of all time.  But let me tell you a bit of history, the writer/creator did not know if the show would get a 5th and final season (it did) so he crammed as much content as POSSIBLE into the 4th season.  There was virtually ZERO filler in that entire season, it was dreadnought after dreadnought of powerhouse and engaging episodes.  THAT is my ideal tv season or rpg.  When the show did get a 5th season, the left over stories, while interesting, were not as intensified and concentrated as season 3-4, and so it did not have the same impact.

 

 Snip

 

When the guy mentions this being the biggest mass effect game, that might just mean big and too spread out with the engaging content.  That was the biggest flaw of dragon age inquisition, please for the love of the flying spaghetti monster, let's not have that same mistake made here.

 

                                                                                                  <<<<<<<<<<()>>>>>>>>>>

 

Did you see the trailer for the new DAI DLC  (Trespasser) ?

 

The Old Gang is back! Looks to me as if this DLC was part of the original game and got gutted out to make a DLC for more $$$.  Why else have the same chars?

 

Perhaps, ME:A will follow suit. A reason for the devs to hype a massive/large SP world.  Like you, I wonder how they will fill that massive empty space.

[FKA_Servo]

                                                                                                  <<<<<<<<<<()>>>>>>>>>>

 

Did you see the trailer for the new DAI DLC  (Trespasser) ?

 

The Old Gang is back! Looks to me as if this DLC was part of the original game and got gutted out to make a DLC for more $$$.  Why else have the same chars?

 

Perhaps, ME:A will follow suit. A reason for the devs to hype a massive/large SP world.  Like you, I wonder how they will fill that massive empty space.

 

They said they began work on it after they buttoned up JoH. You can believe or disbelieve, I guess.

 

That said, trundling around a gigantic alien planet in the mako sounds like heaven. I hope for a perfect marriage of DAI and ME1.

[SardaukarElite]

Did you see the trailer for the new DAI DLC  (Trespasser) ?

 

The Old Gang is back! Looks to me as if this DLC was part of the original game and got gutted out to make a DLC for more $$$.  Why else have the same chars?

 

Yeah, and Empire Strikes Back was edited together over a weekend out of deleted scenes from the original Star Wars.

[PhroXenGold]

Inquisition's problem wasn't mainly that the world was empty, but that you were forced to go off the story path in order to progress with the story path. In short, the narrative was forcibly gated so that the player had to gather power in order to proceed. Not a bad idea in theory, but given that gate was through side missions and not actual missions that lead you to the next part of the main story, well-

I like your example of the 'filler' episodes. While some filler episodes are good and do, in a small way, carry on a small sub-story or shed light on something old or new, many tend to be the equivalent of holiday specials at best and generic 'walk here and encounter the monster/villain/pokemon/side character of the week' type episodes at the worst.

 

To be fair, you didn't have to do that much side content to advance the main plot - power wasn't particularly difficult to obtain.

 

That said, I do agree with the gist of your point, and I'll take it further. The problem in DA:I was that doing the bulk of the side content made no sense given the main plot and those two aspects (plot and side content) might as well have been seperate games. The big bad is a huge, immediate threat to the world. You shouldn't have the time to do anything major other than directly oppose him. Maybe a few things here and there to build up your forces to face him, but there is simply no justfication for doing the vast majority of the content in the game given the way the main story progresses. Beyond the forced mechanic of power, there is simply no integration of the main plot and the rest of the game. The main plot doesn't give any reason for exploring, yet if you do go exploring, the main plot just stops until you are ready to continue it again, which is stupid. If I go collecting every bit of elfroot in Thedas, the Elder One should've won while I was wasting time.

 

ME1 suffered from this as well - how can you justify going to visit the unexplored worlds when you always have concrete leads on what Saren is up to, and the (story) consequences for not stopping him are so severe (i.e. the galaxy is ****ed)? And yet, if you do explore those worlds, why isn't Saren any closer to achieving his goals than if you'd gone straight after him?

 

If BW are going to have a large "open world" style game for ME:A, then they need to write the main story with that open world in mind. Don't tell a "big evil dude (or big evil robot spaceships) are threatenting the world (or galaxy), you're the last hope" story, when your gameplay is primarily about having the freedom to explore, as exploring makes little sense when such a threat is looming over you. The plot needs to written such that there are times when there isn;t an immediate threat so that it would make sense for you to go visit all the various planets. There needs to be times when taking the Mako out for a joyride wouldn't be wasting time that could be better used saving humanity. The main plot should not always imply that you are time constrained the way games like DA:I and ME did, yet when it does imply that, you should actually be constrained (so if the story says something is happening now, you should have to go do it now instead of exploring a new planet in the arse end of nowhere).

[Sartoz]

They said they began work on it after they buttoned up JoH. You can believe or disbelieve, I guess.

 

That said, trundling around a gigantic alien planet in the mako sounds like heaven. I hope for a perfect marriage of DAI and ME1.

 

                                                                                                 <<<<<<<<<<()>>>>>>>>>>

 

Well, if trundling around massive maps to look at eye candy is like fishing, then I agree with you ( btw, I like fishing).

[Ahglock]

I suspect the hype hashtag was a typo. It probably was supposed to be hyped.

[Remix-General Aetius]

If BW are going to have a large "open world" style game for ME:A, then they need to write the main story with that open world in mind. Don't tell a "big evil dude (or big evil robot spaceships) are threatenting the world (or galaxy), you're the last hope" story, when your gameplay is primarily about having the freedom to explore, as exploring makes little sense when such a threat is looming over you.

 

lol they made you have a party and chase after a stupid clone while the galaxy is literally burning, and you think they're gonna mind making you explore empty spaces when there's supposed to be no time to waste?

[JeffZero]

I love the Babylon 5 reference. It isn't my favorite space opera, but it is damn good.

And I totally had a weird dream where Garibaldi was kidnapped and forced to do laundry just now. So that's super-weird.

[Jaquio]

*snip*

 

That's pretty much it.  Good open world games don't start you on the main quest.  Good open world games suggest to you where to go to start along the main quest, but afford you the opportunity to ignore it for the time being without fear of breaking immersion.

 

In Skyrim, a dragon attack frees you.  The game hints that you should go down to Whiterun to warn the lord, but even then, you can do about two or three quests along the main quest line before the game even tells you that you're the Dragonborn and starts the urgency.  Plenty of opportunities to run off and do whatever the heck you want before that.

 

DAI, on the other hand, starts with a giant hole in the sky that's going to doom the world.  Bringing flowers to a grave for a widower seems a pointless waste of time when you've prematurely jammed the player into an "end of the world' narrative.