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Dan Didio posted:Having full VO was always a sideways step/balancing act and game dialogue sytems and dialogue in general would probably be better if game developers had ever understood that.
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Dec 3, 2016 16:24
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Croccers posted:But I'm not going to name any until someone calls me out so I can look smug by knowing more about video games than them Well now I'm not going to tell you because I don't want to look smug.
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Dec 3, 2016 16:24
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Dan Didio posted:Well now I'm not going to tell you because I don't want to look smug. There's a massive difference between shooters with rpg mechanics (Deus Ex, System Shock), and a full-blown RPG with shooter gameplay.
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Dec 3, 2016 16:25
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A Buff Gay Dude posted:How many RPGs had realtime shooter combat before ME1? RPGs had a lot of weird conventions and the ME games blew through a lot of them, maybe not all of them right away but that doesn't mean ME1 wasn't groundbreaking, jfc. System Shock 2, Bioshock, STALKER, Deus Ex, Vampire: Bloodlines, Hellgate: Loldon came out before ME1. Fallout 3 and Borderlands would be years into development at ME1's release and came out a year later. ME1 is still influential though, yeah. Ein Sexmonster posted:There's a massive difference between shooters with rpg mechanics (Deus Ex, System Shock), and a full-blown RPG with shooter gameplay. Is there?
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Dec 3, 2016 16:25
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Android Blues posted:There's so much other stuff too. But I think it is important to remember just how much of a ground breaker the first Mass Effect game was. Not that ME1 didn't do a lot of stuff well, but this is a little overstated. Deus Ex for example did a lot of this stuff 6 years before ME and it wasn't exactly a niche game. The game mechanics of ME1 weren't that special, but the VO/animation/attention to detail really was at the time.
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Dec 3, 2016 16:25
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OtherworldlyInvader posted:This is a game with an ending so bad that in the weeks following the game's release the loving bean counters at EA paid money to patch the game for a reworked ending in a desperate attempt to stop the non-stop flood of criticism (they failed). This is such a salient point. Like, it's loving incredible that this ever happened and it's loving funny how it was still a train wreck beyond redemption.
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Dec 3, 2016 16:26
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Milky Moor posted:Yeah but why would you send them to another galaxy on a, what, six-hundred year journey? Even if they get there, it's going to be about a thousand years before you know it has been successful. So most likely it was more backed by hopeful idealists wanting to expand into new galaxies itself because why the gently caress not and then Whoops, Reapers were real!
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Dec 3, 2016 16:25
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Ein Sexmonster posted:Strongly disagree. Full VO is a big step forward when possible. It's just not viable for smaller games. Full VO has a number of significant trade-offs, from limiting the amount of choices available to the player, to limiting the array of responses available for them to shape their character, to limiting the amount of characters, conversations and content that can even exist. It also has the problem, for a lot of people, that if your main character is fully VO'ed (no homo) the UI has to be built to accomodate a representation of what the character is actually going to say without using the exact wording, which a lot of people complain about through these threads pretty frequently. If you want an example of how big a weight full VO can be on a production, Fallout 4 has almost all of these problems in spades. Ein Sexmonster posted:There's a massive difference between shooters with rpg mechanics (Deus Ex, System Shock), and a full-blown RPG with shooter gameplay. I don't agree. Also, Deus Ex is more of an RPG with shooter mechanics than the opposite. It's arguably more of an RPG with shooter mechanics than Mass Effect is.
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Dec 3, 2016 16:27
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Dan Didio posted:Having full VO was always a sideways step/balancing act and game dialogue sytems and dialogue in general would probably be better if game developers had ever understood that. This is definitely true, and the renaissance of text-heavy RPGs now proves that there is a need, but Mass Effect 1 I think expertly handles and justifies its full VO. All the Mass Effect games do, I think, really, and so do Dragon Age: Origins and Inquisition. DA2 could probably have benefited from cutting the VO budget because a lot of what sidequest NPCs have to say to you in that game does not benefit from being voice acted at all. I think it's a huge bummer that many games now feel obligated to do full VO for all dialogue. I think it just hurts a lot of games where the developers don't understand how to use it well.
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Dec 3, 2016 16:27
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Android Blues posted:This is definitely true, and the renaissance of text-heavy RPGs now proves that there is a need, but Mass Effect 1 I think expertly handles and justifies its full VO. All the Mass Effect games do, I think, really, and so do Dragon Age: Origins and Inquisition. DA2 could probably have benefited from cutting the VO budget because a lot of what sidequest NPCs have to say to you in that game does not benefit from being voice acted at all. Yeah. It was one of those changes that happened very quickly and developers never seemed to have the teething process that sees broad-scale refinement and redevelopment of assets and ideas into something uniformly good. There's plenty of games, and even RPGs with problems in dialogue, writing, choice, content strands, etc. that don't have full VO, but very few that have those problems because they lack extensive VO, whereas the opposite isn't really true.
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Dec 3, 2016 16:29
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I like characters having voices
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Dec 3, 2016 16:30
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Android Blues posted:This is definitely true, and the renaissance of text-heavy RPGs now proves that there is a need, but Mass Effect 1 I think expertly handles and justifies its full VO. All the Mass Effect games do, I think, really, and so do Dragon Age: Origins and Inquisition. DA2 could probably have benefited from cutting the VO budget because a lot of what sidequest NPCs have to say to you in that game does not benefit from being voice acted at all. People don't demand/expect it arbitrarily. It adds a lot to the experience.
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Dec 3, 2016 16:30
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Zzulu posted:I like characters having voices Seems arbitrary, mate.
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Dec 3, 2016 16:32
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Android Blues posted:This is definitely true, and the renaissance of text-heavy RPGs now proves that there is a need, but Mass Effect 1 I think expertly handles and justifies its full VO. All the Mass Effect games do, I think, really, and so do Dragon Age: Origins and Inquisition. DA2 could probably have benefited from cutting the VO budget because a lot of what sidequest NPCs have to say to you in that game does not benefit from being voice acted at all. I'd say that the trick is understanding the protagonist. In ME, for example, Shepard is Shepard. You can feasibly limit Shepard's responses to three things and cover most bases for the character. But in something like FO4, where the protagonist is a cipher for the player, you run into the issue where a lot of options don't make sense, voice direction goes all over the place, and your character can appear crazy. I really liked how I could take Shepard between Paragon and Renegade as I wanted and come out of it with a character who felt like he had a personality defined by my choices. These things made him angry, he felt moralistic about these things, he'd shoot people but not everyone, etc.
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Dec 3, 2016 16:38
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ME1 had one interesting thing in its morality system and it's that your paragon/renegade score wasn't exactly tied to your Charm/Intimidate speech checks, so your Shepard could pose as a goody two-shoes in all your interactions with the Council, NPCs etc. while just being a ruthless rear end in a top hat who killed everybody.
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Dec 3, 2016 16:41
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Ein Sexmonster posted:Sure, but people using it wrong/incorrectly doesn't make it bad, or not a big improvement in general. It's just a harder thing to balance relative to the scale of the project, especially given the inexperience of game companies in this field. I'd suggest that it's like any new tool in a creative toolset - you can use it well or use it poorly. Most of the games that pioneered it used it really, really well. The problem is this created a standard in the industry that every game, even ones where the creative vision is not really compatible with all dialogue being fully voice acted, should have full VA if possible. This leads to games like Dragon Age 2 where you have a bunch of quests to find some guy's missing ring or clean out a mine full of spiders and instead of just reading his dialogue in twenty seconds, you have to sit through two minutes of him going "ah, my RING is MISSING, perhaps YOU can FIND it for me! yes, the RING that I need was my DEAD WIFE's ring! I will pay you in MONEY!". And this also slices out a huge chunk of the game's budget, because VO is very expensive, so for the sake of having the guy tell you about his missing jewellery out loud, you're losing out on a more interesting quest with multiple resolutions, or on more varied area design. Also, if they want to add a dialogue tree extension that adds some more poignancy to this NPC or makes him more of an interesting character, they have to allocate hundreds of dollars out of the budget to that instead of a writer with some free time just dashing it off in an afternoon. I like the approach Obsidian is taking in their modern games. Important NPCs have voice acted lines pretty frequently, but they also have loads of non-voice acted text so that they can have complex dialogue trees without it being a budget strain, or it becoming boring for the player to sit and listen to a character talk for fifteen minutes about setting minutiae.
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Dec 3, 2016 16:42
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Android Blues posted:I'd suggest that it's like any new tool in a creative toolset - you can use it well or use it poorly. Most of the games that pioneered it used it really, really well. The problem is this created a standard in the industry that every game, even ones where the creative vision is not really compatible with all dialogue being fully voice acted, should have full VA if possible.
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Dec 3, 2016 16:49
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Anyway I finally watched the new Andromeda video and all the criticisms posted here seem pretty valid. Honestly all I really want out of any bio-ware game are some enjoyable characters and a compelling story, deliver that and I'll overlook some lazy animations or whatever.
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Dec 3, 2016 16:53
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exquisite tea posted:I think the first two games are sort of to blame for making it so easy, comparatively speaking, to save as many people as possible, or to not offer compelling enough reasons NOT to save them. ME3 actually put a lot of thought into how situations would play out if certain characters were alive or dead and in many cases the "dead" status is way more interesting. I forgot who said it but there was an argument that in RPGs you should avoid "ideal" solutions as much as possible, because it turns an interesting choice between like, "make side A happy vs make side B happy" into "gently caress up and make one side happy, vs do enough sidequests/have enough points to make both sides happy"
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Dec 3, 2016 17:16
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Moola posted:me3 apologists are the worst They're insanely good
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Dec 3, 2016 17:21
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Ein Sexmonster posted:Sure, but you can say the same things about the move to 3D graphics in the late 90s. And no one is going on about how they wish people didn't arbitrarily decide they liked 3D graphics. Like 3D graphics, there's room for games with no or partial VO. But let's not pretend that VO doesn't add a lot to a game, it's just not always practical/the right choice. Actually, that's not really true. A big reason for the move to 3D is that 3D is a lot cheaper than 2D animation. With 3D, you create one model and move it to different positions to create new animations. If you have a model of Cloud Strife holding a sword, you can make an animation of him attacking an enemy or doing a spin attack or casting a spell without actually developing any new assets. This doesn't require no effort, but it doesn't require you to create any new artwork. If you have a sprite of Cloud Strife holding a sword, you need to create a whole new asset not just for every new action you might want the character to perform, but for every frame in the animation of him attacking, or spin attacking, or casting a spell. It's completely non-modular: everything has to be created from scratch, and if you think of anything you want to add later, you have to draw brand new from-scratch assets for that too. The amount of animator time this costs is absolutely insane when you consider that every single variant asset has to be drawn this way. Then add in, for instance, equippable gear. In a 3D system, you just sub out one part of the model: give Cloud a different sword, all his animations still work. In a sprite-based game, you have to redraw the entire sprite and every single animation with the new sword instead of the old, then repeat for every distinct piece of gear you want to add. Want new armour? I hope you like redrawing every single frame of the character's animations, from walking to standing to unconscious, so that he has shoulderpads and a breastplate now. Want to have customisable armour and weapons? Prepare to spend a bunch of development time fiddling with sprite overlays and finding workarounds. 2D is really expensive. This is counter-intuitive, but true. There are more ways around it now - plenty of games do use floating object multi-sprites and tweening to limit the asset demands of pure 2D - but in the late 90s and early 2000s those options weren't available and 3D was so much quicker, easier and more exciting to consumers to boot.
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Dec 3, 2016 17:23
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Thyat's cool, thanks.
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Dec 3, 2016 17:25
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This all sounds like being a young adult that only plays video games very casually and never actually finishes them is the best way to play Bioware RPGs.
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Dec 3, 2016 17:24
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One problem is that years and years of RPG design has led to the implicit agreement that both players and designers adhere to, which is that if you do a lot of work and level up a lot, you should be able to get the "ideal" result, when not getting the ideal result is frequently more interesting of a story
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Dec 3, 2016 17:27
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Games are better when they're willing to confront the player.
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Dec 3, 2016 17:29
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Zzulu posted:I like characters having voices I agree.
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Dec 3, 2016 17:34
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Alain Post posted:They're insane
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Dec 3, 2016 17:34
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Dan Didio posted:Were global cooldowns a lore aspect. At least with biotics they talk about how it requires a lot of energy and is physically exhausting for the user, so that's kinda something. It comes up during the Grissom Academy quest in ME3 where Jack's students need to take a break, and then Jack and Liara explain to a biotic Shepard that using biotics is tiring, as if Shepard wouldn't already know that.
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Dec 3, 2016 17:36
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SyntheticPolygon posted:I like the increased focus on companions and companion quests more. Because I find character writing the most enjoyable parts of big rpgs and putting a big focus on forming your crew and then developing them was really cool to me. Agreed, the parts of Mass Effect 2 that aren't the start and end are also great. It's almost like Mass Effect 2 is one of the greatest games ever made.
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Dec 3, 2016 17:38
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I still love people talking about how ME3 "destroyed the franchise" as if that were a bug, and not a feature
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Dec 3, 2016 17:39
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You cannot kill what dorks are still jerking it towards. Make it even dumber, yes. But if EA's willing to throw money, that corpse is going to shamble on and on.
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Dec 3, 2016 17:48
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Dr. Abysmal posted:At least with biotics they talk about how it requires a lot of energy and is physically exhausting for the user, so that's kinda something. It comes up during the Grissom Academy quest in ME3 where Jack's students need to take a break, and then Jack and Liara explain to a biotic Shepard that using biotics is tiring, as if Shepard wouldn't already know that. Eh, once you're far enough past training it's easy to forget how hard everything used to be.
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Dec 3, 2016 17:51
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Alain Post posted:I still love people talking about how ME3 "destroyed the franchise" as if that were a bug, and not a feature Ah yes, the weird interpretation that the writers wanted to make a terrible ending so no one would make a terrible sequel. Makes about as much sense as "we have to kill organics so synthetics won't."
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Dec 3, 2016 17:52
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I wish someone made a space opera anthology series, where you'd get a complete different universe with each entry.
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Dec 3, 2016 17:57
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Megazver posted:I wish someone made a space opera anthology series, where you'd get a complete different universe with each entry. Like Final Fantasy, but space opera shootmans? I could dig it.
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Dec 3, 2016 18:02
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the ends are bads
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Dec 3, 2016 18:22
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OtherworldlyInvader posted:Like if some one is reading this who hasn't played the game and is wondering "can it really be that bad?" I'm telling you Mass Effect 3 is a game where the "unlock-able good ending" involves you putting glowing green circuit boards on everyone in the galaxy followed by your ship's pilot crash landing the ship in a metaphorical Eden and then going off to gently caress his real doll. That's not the good ending. That's the retard ending. The good ending is red w/ enough war assets to survive.
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Dec 3, 2016 18:27
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Waltzing Along posted:That's not the good ending. That's the retard ending. The good ending is red w/ enough war assets to survive.
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Dec 3, 2016 18:35
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Alain Post posted:One problem is that years and years of RPG design has led to the implicit agreement that both players and designers adhere to, which is that if you do a lot of work and level up a lot, you should be able to get the "ideal" result, when not getting the ideal result is frequently more interesting of a story Which is why I feel DAO is their best game. I did everything as ideally as I could, including respecting my companions wishes. What did I get? My best friend tells me to gently caress off and runs away to become a drunk and my girlfriend steals my baby and runs away to do whatever the gently caress she wanted, too. And the whole ending sequence was rad, too.
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Dec 3, 2016 18:35
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It's like Drakengard, where the ending you work hardest for is unapologetically the worst, resonating into the multiverse.
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Dec 3, 2016 18:36
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