97 réponses à ce sujet

[9TailsFox]

really i fail to see how DAO is a RPG and no DA 2 or Inquisition or ME games.

 

What u are consider a RPG is a definition to small. RPG not only mean choices, is a alot of point that u can have or no to consider a game a RPG or no.

 

I really fail to see why Inquisition or ME 3 arent not RPG. When there are choice that carries weight on the story. U come and said that DAO was the last RPG Bioware made. Tell me, there is a option to fail to defeat the Archdeamon on the game? base on what u recruit or no? or can u become a darkspawn? (exclude the DLC since is not canon).

 

True RPG on the definition u give dont exit on video games. U cant have free choice, but u can give the player the illusion on choice that is what games do. Is like the Witcher 3 do that too. No meter what u do on the game u cant chose to fail, Geralt always win, the outcome on that win is the player choice. Same goes for ME and DA inquisition.

 

No meter the game u play this day u cant ignore the main quest and still progress trow the game, aka Witcher 3 or DA or ME. True free is left for pen and paper RPG, since u are only limited by your imagination, video games dont work like that.

No game exist where you can chose to fail, well you can when you know what would happen. You can "fail" in Witcher 3.

Spoiler

One ending is where Ciri die and Geralt just wait to die surrounded by monsters

Or ME2 Shepard can fail and die.

[In Exile]

Mass effect expects the player to decide, on Shepard's behalf, a wide variety of things. What skills does Shepard learn? What equipment does Shepard use? How does Shepard resolve many of the missions? How are we supposed to make those decisions without roleplaying Shepard?

 

This is the category mistake. The game doesn't expect us to determine this as an in-character choice. It expects - and is designed - to treat combat and inventory as purely meta-game considerations. In fact, I would say most RPGs are designed in this way. That it can be coincidentally played otherwise is not proof of design, and not a contradiction. 

[Drakoriz]

No game exist where you can chose to fail, well you can when you know what would happen. You can "fail" in Witcher 3.

Spoiler

One ending is where Ciri die and Geralt just wait to die surrounded by monsters

Or ME2 Shepard can fail and die.

 

yeah u right, i was just going more to that those options are set to happen if the player want, but if they arent u cant get it. U never on control of what will happen on a game, u always fallowing what the dev team made. So on the end u dont have true freedom on a game just the illusion of it.

 

Didnt know what end for Witcher 3 never got it. =P i got the one that i live with Yen and Ciri become witcher.

[Lyrandori]

What is there to role-play, or to play the "role of", when there's no story? If I want to role-play I need a context, details, a story. So story comes first, then role-playing within that story can follow.

 

Tell me the story, give me the details and don't force me to interpret because you're too lazy of a writer to actually flesh things out yourself. I absolutely loathe stories (writers) that voluntarily leave gaping plot holes and then proceed to tell you "from this point on make up your own ending" or "it's a matter of perception and points of views". I will always favor a story well-told over the "lack" of role-play in a story-driven game. However, when the game / story / universe is detailed and fleshed-out then role-play is not only possible it's almost inevitable. To me, role-playing is the byproduct of a detailed story. And even better when said role-play is an intended game aspect by the devs and they take some time to make it engaging.

[KamuiStorm]

I want freedom and choices that actually impact the world state/story in short and long term. If I kill a person, I want that person's kid to grow up and go full on beast mode in an attempt to avenge his father or mother. Likewise I kill a kid I want it's parent's to flip their ****.

[Deebo305]

You can't have an RPG without an external story, else daydreaming or writing would be RPGs

Definitely agree

I prefer a well written story over role playing any day, one of reason why games like Fallout don't appeal to me. If the story is paper thin then no amount of role playing will make it good

[Sylvius the Mad]

This is the category mistake. The game doesn't expect us to determine this as an in-character choice. It expects - and is designed - to treat combat and inventory as purely meta-game considerations. In fact, I would say most RPGs are designed in this way. That it can be coincidentally played otherwise is not proof of design, and not a contradiction.

When quests and dialogue need to be metagamed, that's when it stops being a roleplaying game.

Is there a way to make quest and dialogue decisions from an in-character perspective in any ME game?

[LinksOcarina]

When quests and dialogue need to be metagamed, that's when it stops being a roleplaying game.

Is there a way to make quest and dialogue decisions from an in-character perspective in any ME game?

 

Yes, the problem is you don't have full control of the character, you have full control of the situation the character is in.

 

So if your character is pro-alien for example, or pro-human, or suave and silver-tongued, or a jarhead, much of this is broad-stroking and using in-game decisions to give you a moment of choice that shapes the game's narrative, and your character's response to it, but not the characters inner-workings or thought process. 

 

You can't fully control their psyche, their motivations on what they do, but i'd argue you can't do that in any BioWare game anyway since you are fixed to the narrative to begin with in ways to control the player, while delivering a role-playing experience through character creation and interactivity.

 

This is also not necessarily a bad thing, of course. It is just simply the way it is. 

[KamuiStorm]

Yes, the problem is you don't have full control of the character, you have full control of the situation the character is in.
 
So if your character is pro-alien for example, or pro-human, or suave and silver-tongued, or a jarhead, much of this is broad-stroking and using in-game decisions to give you a moment of choice that shapes the game's narrative, and your character's response to it, but not the characters inner-workings or thought process. 
 
You can't fully control their psyche, their motivations on what they do, but i'd argue you can't do that in any BioWare game anyway since you are fixed to the narrative to begin with in ways to control the player, while delivering a role-playing experience through character creation and interactivity.
 
This is also not necessarily a bad thing, of course. It is just simply the way it is.

Well I want to be fully in control. Give me an option to piece together my pc's persona, history, mannerisms, time of day he poops, what he eats and does not eat, favorite color, favorite store on the citadel etc.

I want full control, no compromises!

[Drakoriz]

Yes, the problem is you don't have full control of the character, you have full control of the situation the character is in.

 

So if your character is pro-alien for example, or pro-human, or suave and silver-tongued, or a jarhead, much of this is broad-stroking and using in-game decisions to give you a moment of choice that shapes the game's narrative, and your character's response to it, but not the characters inner-workings or thought process. 

 

You can't fully control their psyche, their motivations on what they do, but i'd argue you can't do that in any BioWare game anyway since you are fixed to the narrative to begin with in ways to control the player, while delivering a role-playing experience through character creation and interactivity.

 

This is also not necessarily a bad thing, of course. It is just simply the way it is. 

exactly my point.

 

ME games or DA games are like "choose your own story book", that u get key points trow the game that allow u to change the narrative of it.

[Drakoriz]

Well I want to be fully in control. Give me an option to piece together my pc's persona, history, mannerisms, time of day he poops, what he eats and does not eat, favorite color, favorite store on the citadel etc.

I want full control, no compromises!

 

that isnt ME or DA game, they havent been like. In ME u always play as a preset character Shepperd. And on DA 1 u play as a preset warden, 2 as hawk and inquisition as inquisitor preset too.

 

What u want isnt what Bioware been doing. 

 

The issue with that type of freedom is normally become a issue when u trying to tell a story.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Yes, the problem is you don't have full control of the character, you have full control of the situation the character is in.

So if your character is pro-alien for example, or pro-human, or suave and silver-tongued, or a jarhead, much of this is broad-stroking and using in-game decisions to give you a moment of choice that shapes the game's narrative, and your character's response to it, but not the characters inner-workings or thought process.

You can't fully control their psyche, their motivations on what they do, but i'd argue you can't do that in any BioWare game anyway since you are fixed to the narrative to begin with in ways to control the player, while delivering a role-playing experience through character creation and interactivity.

This is also not necessarily a bad thing, of course. It is just simply the way it is.

I don't want to control the narrative. I want to see what sort of narrative emerges given a certain type of character.

That's like telling a golfer that he's not allowed to actually hit the ball, but he can fill in the scorecard however he likes.

Where's the fun in that?

[wright1978]

With Mass Effect you select a collection of characteristics and personality traits that are all "Shepard" Which let you create your interpretation of who Shepard is. However, there are some things Shepard will always/never be no matter what your interpretation of Shep is; like always being pro humanity/pro earth, never being pro Cerberus, never flat out hating any of their squadmates, never hating Anderson, always feeling guilty over the little kid dying in ME3, ect.

No, shep can express a desire to have been asked to join Cerberus earlier in me2. He can express anti alliance views. Whilst shep can not hate Anderson he isn't forced into a railroaded father-child relationship prior to me3. shep can leave a vulnerable kid to be experimented on. That's just a tiny selection of the multiple freedoms and multiple freedoms that existed within the shep persona.

Me3 is terrible because it tries to create a singular version of shep through its awful auto shep and cut downcharacterisatio.

[Timberley]

Sylvius, didn't we have a similar discussion prior to the release of ME3?  I seem to recall you making similar statements then, regarding narrative structure and so on.  That discussion went on forever as well as I recall...

 

Surely you should realise by now that Bioware have specific ideas and story beats they want you to hit?

 

Tim

[medusa_hair]

I liked me2 the most of the three because in-game choices had consequences within the game with companion attitudes, the ship, etc. and ultimately with the ending. And choices you made at the suicide mission had impact as well. Plus the ending was a smooth continuation of the story. The fact that those choices made some sort of impact on me3 was extra for me.

I thought TW3 was interesting because the choices that affect the ending the most are not at all the ones you think while you are playing. And I liked Geralt. I actually loved that game and I did not expect to.

I guess it should be story first, choice second, but you need both.

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

The "father - child" thing between Anderson and Shepard was Hudson's idea. Mac just wrote the scenes. 

 

But the idea that Shepard finally had a personality beyond that of an early 90s action movie hero was an improvement in my opinion. Shepard felt flat in ME1 and ME2. I just wish there had been some more options. I didn't mind the auto-dialogue. 

 

I liked the idea of the story. The character was fleshed out more. Still I was able to get into the role and it was because of the story and the other characters. 

 

I hope they give the protagonist in ME:A a personality and emotions. I hope they go for story.

[Drakoriz]

The "father - child" thing between Anderson and Shepard was Hudson's idea. Mac just wrote the scenes. 

 

But the idea that Shepard finally had a personality beyond that of an early 90s action movie hero was an improvement in my opinion. Shepard felt flat in ME1 and ME2. I just wish there had been some more options. I didn't mind the auto-dialogue. 

 

I liked the idea of the story. The character was fleshed out more. Still I was able to get into the role and it was because of the story and the other characters. 

 

I hope they give the protagonist in ME:A a personality and emotions. I hope they go for story.

 

After watching what they did on DA, that is the way Bioware is taking their games.

[wright1978]

The "father - child" thing between Anderson and Shepard was Hudson's idea. Mac just wrote the scenes. 
 
But the idea that Shepard finally had a personality beyond that of an early 90s action movie hero was an improvement in my opinion. Shepard felt flat in ME1 and ME2. I just wish there had been some more options. I didn't mind the auto-dialogue. 
 
I liked the idea of the story. The character was fleshed out more. Still I was able to get into the role and it was because of the story and the other characters. 
 
I hope they give the protagonist in ME:A a personality and emotions. I hope they go for story.

I accepted the odd brick moment in me1/2, over the murder of mycharacter via auto-dialogue.
I hope they don't go down the route of forced emotions and forced personality in mea. I'd much prefer the character variety to shine through via the dialogue dialogue choices and the characterising story choices.

[Barquiel]

The "father - child" thing between Anderson and Shepard was Hudson's idea. Mac just wrote the scenes. 
 
But the idea that Shepard finally had a personality beyond that of an early 90s action movie hero was an improvement in my opinion. Shepard felt flat in ME1 and ME2. I just wish there had been some more options. I didn't mind the auto-dialogue.

I agree, but I guess that depends on how you want to roleplay your Shepard. I understand that player who want a more stoic protagonist were obviously much more happy with ME2, but that game was the worst for my Shepard...particularly because Shepard didn't seem to be affected by her death at all.

"Shepard. But you're dead."

"I got better."

"But you died."

"Meh."

No matter how hard I tried, I felt like she was nothing but an emotionless hollow shell with a gun throughout most of the story while ME3 Shepard felt at least somewhat alive to me. Sure, it wasn't perfect (I found Shepards Earth bias rather irritating for example)...but better than the brick I played in ME2.

[LinksOcarina]

I don't want to control the narrative. I want to see what sort of narrative emerges given a certain type of character.

That's like telling a golfer that he's not allowed to actually hit the ball, but he can fill in the scorecard however he likes.

Where's the fun in that?

 

Thats a false equivalency, because to score points a golfer has to hit the ball. To play an RPG a player doesn't have to always be in character, truth be told. Well, maybe thats the wrong way to put it; a player doesn't have to focus on an emergent narrative if they choose to, that is a character decision vs player decision. And honestly, not a lot of people out there "role-play" over "roll-play" now a days thanks in part to how Pathfinder and D&D are.

 

The fun is controlling the narrative, for better or for worse. To have mastery of the situation with your hybrid character, not a reactionary one with a specific-minded character.

 

I know you that's not what you want, and you would argue RPG's are not games, but this is not a tabletop game, it never was. There is no toolbox to play in here, you're beholden to the designers limitations and narrative structure regardless of how much freedom, or lack thereof, they give you. 

[AlanC9]

This is the category mistake. The game doesn't expect us to determine this as an in-character choice. It expects - and is designed - to treat combat and inventory as purely meta-game considerations. In fact, I would say most RPGs are designed in this way. That it can be coincidentally played otherwise is not proof of design, and not a contradiction.

Though in theory there's no reason why combat and inventory would have to be metagame decisions. The player wants to win, and so does the PC. The difference is that the player doesn't want to win easily , while most PCs would take easy victory if they could get it. If the game is challenging enough so the player needs to worry about combat performance as much as the PC would, the decisions end up working the same way -- unless we want to open up issues like doing sidequests solely for levels and loot, which can cause plot problems.

[Linkenski]

I've been nerding a lot of MrBtongue content I hadn't already seen lately. He brings up a great point about how the best RPGs with choices in them are great because of how they simulate the game's world and makes it feel real whereas another brand of RPGs (and he uses ME2 as an example) has choices in it as advertisement and basically boils down to you playing 90% the same game where a 10% fraction of cutscenes differ often without clear cause and effect, like skipping Mordin's loyalty missions resulting in him taking a rocket to the head during Suicide Mission.

 

It made me think of what I've always liked about ME1. The feel that it was part a sci-fi simulator and a story-driven action/RPG. I think it's important to note actually. Use choice and consequence in your game in a way that enhances the user's immersion and the believability of it. Don't create arbitrary choices and don't overdo the choice/consequence aspect by telling the player it all matters or that the story is completely their own. In every Bioware I've ever played it's always been Bioware's story I was playing but I am given free reign to dress it up in my own way, but in the end the most effective use of this aspect is in ME1 moment to moment when I'm just having a conversation with an NPC, roleplaying my character and learning how these aliens think and what they're like.

 

I think that's why ME3's citadel content feels so incredibly shallow. There's no weight to any of those out-of-cinematic "support" conversations and there's no gratification in pressing "talk" and immediately getting some random war asset that I don't even know how works and some dialogue from the NPC I turned in to that flies past my head because the game doesn't even care what it was all about. And the quests that actually featured real characters and "story" were kind of unintuitive too, both in objective-design and how the conversations go. I saved the Hanar homeworld by flipping a few switches and interrupting some Blasto-wannabe, and some really cringeworthy inside-jokes on top of it? WHAT?

 

On the flipside one of the more fan-favorite things about ME3 I often see is the ambient dialogue on the Citadel. Personally I'm not a fan of how it was executed at large. Too static and done sooo much better in games like Half Life (even the original), Deus Ex Human Revolution and games where NPCs don't just stand in place and stare into nothingness or look at their invisible watch, but I gotta give it the atmosphere created on the Citadel through ambient dialogue was still great, and if you think of the picture without motion for a sec, each area has a great story that makes the Reaper conflict feel real and gives it weight.

 

That was one place where Bioware mostly decided "no, no cinematics and no choice. The player can see this happening on the periphery and know this is what they're fighting to change".

[AlanC9]

in a sense, it is. But I believe it is a rare individual who can completely shut out all outside knowledge of events and operate purely on what the character knows. On a certain level, we are not just operating on how the character would react, but on the direction we want to take the story.

I agree. But this leads us to very different places. The way I want this problem handled is for metagaming, at least on a first playthrough, to simply not work. Though I suppose with AAA titles I'll have to accept that the game will have to be, in some sense, winnable.

[legbamel]

Having Shep less directed let me project my own version of her on whichever of my character I happened to be playing, as opposed to ME3 which forced her to react in a particular way to something regardless of how that version would have done in my head.

 

I don't mind being forced to take certain actions in order to advance the story.  I very much mind my character being forced to feel a certain way about those actions.  Autodialogue and companion reactions in ME3 gave reactions a given Shep may or may not have had, in character.  [Yes, Thessia, I'm looking at you right now.  My lone, full-renegade, pro-human-all-the-way Shep would have had no patience with all the hand-wringing and sympathy over her supposed "loss" there yet she was forced to feel terrible and everyone on the ship reinforced it.]

[SerriceIceDandy]

I think the ME team could learn from the Dragon Age team in this regard. I really like the dialogue wheels in DA2 and moreso in DA:I. It gave me the feeling that I was developing my character in terms of how they reacted to the story elements around them (like being able to empathise with mages on account of being a mage themselves; the fact that he mentioned he had a crush on a templar during his time in the circle). Shepard was just a bland character with the purpose as a projection device for the player, and s/he seemed somewhat binary. Whilst Hawke had the benefit of being a partially constructed character, I do feel that limited replay-ability as I constantly felt like I was playing the same Hawke who just happened to react differently, rather than a different individual entirely or one I was projecting myself onto. 

So have our character bring up things relevant to their past, like biotic training, where their childhood was spent etc when it is relevant, rather than the one mention of Akuze/Mindoir etc. To provide exposition for a player-character narrative I feel would be a mistake. Let us play vicariously through our character; but allow us to develop them, rather than just having the choice of Space Jesus vs Interstellar Shitbag vs Neutral "Sempre fi" military man.