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Say you perform the dark ritual and the Warden survives. Is what the other Grey Wardens think about it ever explored in the series?
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Apr 21, 2018 17:43
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So that confirms da4 is real, right...? Things are looking up...?
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Apr 21, 2018 20:36
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VostokProgram posted:So that confirms da4 is real, right...? Things are looking up...? Have you seen the recent output of EA?
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Apr 21, 2018 22:15
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Grundulum posted:Maybe that is concept art for DA4? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, after all. Then it would be a flashback because the DA games are the future, Mass Effect is the past. Unless Thedas is just too backwater for the Reapers to notice. 
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Apr 21, 2018 23:55
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Smol posted:Say you perform the dark ritual and the Warden survives. Is what the other Grey Wardens think about it ever explored in the series? I don't think so. Alistair/Lohain say that the Wardens have questions about how you survived killing the Arch Demon but they also say they intend to not spoil your secret. Don't think it gets mentioned again in the series.
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Apr 22, 2018 06:43
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It's not surprising, the Grey Wardens seem to have a very 'hey, if it kills darkspawn then have at it and don't let the local authority catch you doing war crimes/blood magic/etc' attitude, so even if they don't really understand something they're willing to overlook it if it turned out well. The more egregious oversight is gonna be when they never address the Architect again because those implications should be huge but then, so was stuff like the god-baby and we all saw what happened there 
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Apr 22, 2018 07:01
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VostokProgram posted:So that confirms da4 is real, right...? Things are looking up...? The guy from Fallen London that they recruited onto DA4 already confirmed it was real. It's more about it not coming out.
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Apr 22, 2018 08:00
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Taear posted:The guy from Fallen London that they recruited onto DA4 already confirmed it was real. It's more about it not coming out. Yeah, the thing at this point is that Andromeda flopping made EA panic and order the DA4 team to start over from scratch.
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Apr 22, 2018 13:39
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Cythereal posted:Yeah, the thing at this point is that Andromeda flopping made EA panic and order the DA4 team to start over from scratch. We don't know if that's definitely true though. I mean if they took loads of people off it then that would be why it's taking loving forever, rather than a total reboot.
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Apr 22, 2018 13:44
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Cythereal posted:Yeah, the thing at this point is that Andromeda flopping made EA panic Not disagreeing, but surely, surely they must have had some inkling beforehand that it would flop?
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Apr 22, 2018 13:59
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Taear posted:We don't know if that's definitely true though. Oh dear me posted:Not disagreeing, but surely, surely they must have had some inkling beforehand that it would flop? Just how badly Andromeda would flop was probably unexpected though. EA/Bioware also knew DA2 would have problems, which is why for example there was little to no gameplay footage shown before release. But DA2 didn't do as badly because gamers still had a lot of goodwill towards Bioware. Afterall DA:O & ME2 weren't terrible. But even though Inquisition was well received, I think Bioware/EA really miscalculated just how bitter people still were over ME3. As an aside, it always felt strange to me that the Mass Effect franchise has become Bioware's weather vane as sorts. As far as I know the Dragon Age games have always outsold the ME games. Yet, the ME franchise always seems to be treated by the gaming press as Bioware's main product. Andromeda flopped? Oh no, Bioware is doomed! Bioware's previous game, Inquisition, was their biggest success ever? Who cares. Andromeda has animation issues? Surely, the means no one can develop RPGs on the Frostbite engine. And that any future Bioware game using it is doomed. Let's just ignore that Inquisition also used the Frostbite engine and didn't have the same problems. And that the previous ME games using the Unreal engines also had animation problems. which indicates the problem was with the ME dev team.
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Apr 22, 2018 14:26
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Maybe it's because Mass Effect offers more 'original' gameplay? Like Dragon Age's combat is fine, but most of what you're playing it for is for the lore and character interactions. The combat system isn't anything overly novel.
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Apr 22, 2018 14:39
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Raygereio posted:As an aside, it always felt strange to me that the Mass Effect franchise has become Bioware's weather vane as sorts. As far as I know the Dragon Age games have always outsold the ME games. Yet, the ME franchise always seems to be treated by the gaming press as Bioware's main product. I think it's because Mass Effect remains a relatively unique franchise. Fantasy RPGs are a dime a dozen, even if the Dragon Age games are high-budget and lavish examples, but sci-fi shooter/RPGs are far more rare and Mass Effect remains distinctive where Dragon Age, in my opinion, is distinctly not.
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Apr 22, 2018 14:40
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https://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428 posted:When the mock reviews came in for Mass Effect: Andromeda, BioWare’s leads were relieved— the Metacritic was expected to be in the low-to-mid-80s, according to two sources. Although Andromeda’s developers knew the game wasn’t perfect, they were fine with a score like that. If they hit somewhere between 80 and 85, they could use what they’d built for Andromeda to make the sequel way better, much like Casey Hudson and his team had done from Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 2.
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Apr 22, 2018 14:58
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I still think the talking animations that were like   were the best thing, seriously one of the funniest things I have seen in years.
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Apr 22, 2018 15:05
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I mean, the gifs didn't help but if the game wasn't an empty slog with zero heart or courage they would've been a speed bump
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Apr 22, 2018 16:08
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It's honestly shocking the state that Andromeda released in and Bioware/EA deserved all the flack that they got. All the asari in the game had the same exact face model. Most of the character lighting didn't even have shaders. They expected people to pay $60 for this.
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Apr 22, 2018 16:12
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exquisite tea posted:It's honestly shocking the state that Andromeda released in and Bioware/EA deserved all the flack that they got. All the asari in the game had the same exact face model. Most of the character lighting didn't even have shaders. They expected people to pay $60 for this. A whole new galaxy with a grand total of two new races, and everything's been settled by the time you get there so you spend as much time dealing with Milky Way pirates as you do interacting with natives, if not more. An endless cascade of fetch quests that involve running between as many as four or five loading screens for each. Sudoku not simply as an optional puzzle but a regular gameplay element. Gay dude whose story is all about settling down with a woman and having a child with her. The tank is a piece of junk until you upgrade it. Crafting. MEA is filled with bad decisions without even touching the graphics and animations.
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Apr 22, 2018 16:54
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Cythereal posted:MEA is filled with bad decisions without even touching the graphics and animations. Not forgetting dull characters and terrible dialogue. (Including an entire scene with Liam and Jaal that I don't understand at all.)
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Apr 22, 2018 17:00
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exquisite tea posted:It's honestly shocking the state that Andromeda released in and Bioware/EA deserved all the flack that they got. All the asari in the game had the same exact face model. Most of the character lighting didn't even have shaders. They expected people to pay $60 for this. It made so much sense when it came out that they wasted years trying and failing to make procedural generation the backbone of the game, and then had to desperately crank out what we got in a year and a half.
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Apr 22, 2018 17:08
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I still haven't played Andromeda. Not even sure why, to be honest, since I was a huge Mass Effect fan. I think I was busy playing something else when the game came out, and since the reception wasn't exactly thrilling, I kept waiting until they would fix the biggest issues. No idea if they did, and since the franchise is dead, what would be the point?
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Apr 22, 2018 17:59
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And it's a shame, because I think there are some good ideas there. Ryder's a dork who's a very different kind of protagonist from Shepard or any of the Dragon Age PCs, and I loved her - she's a naive kid in way over her head who mostly wants to geek out at science, is so bad at flirting that a salarian makes fun of her about it, and isn't comfortable with the spotlight being forced on her.
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Apr 22, 2018 18:06
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Da:I might've gotten facial animation to work but it's still dumb to use an engine clearly not built for rpgs for rpgs Yes you can make a square peg fit in a round hole, but it'll take a lot of money and time you could've used on actually making the game
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Apr 22, 2018 18:16
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Smol posted:I still haven't played Andromeda. Not even sure why, to be honest, since I was a huge Mass Effect fan. I think I was busy playing something else when the game came out, and since the reception wasn't exactly thrilling, I kept waiting until they would fix the biggest issues. No idea if they did, and since the franchise is dead, what would be the point? The combat is quite fun and there are some good environments. Once you learn never to accept a side quest (because they are all unbelievably tedious fetch quests) it becomes more bearable. I even had moments of thinking "this is quite good!" before having my hopes of character or plot development* crushed again. [*] Chiefly the hope that I'd get a chance to shut SAM up
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Apr 22, 2018 18:36
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kurona_bright posted:Da:I might've gotten facial animation to work but it's still dumb to use an engine clearly not built for rpgs for rpgs What engine should they have used instead?
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Apr 22, 2018 19:26
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kurona_bright posted:Da:I might've gotten facial animation to work but it's still dumb to use an engine clearly not built for rpgs for rpgs It's actually fine, and probably even a good reuse of technology, because like most game engines frostbite is probably general purpose enough to do anything.
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Apr 22, 2018 19:27
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kurona_bright posted:Da:I might've gotten facial animation to work but it's still dumb to use an engine clearly not built for rpgs for rpgs That's not really how game engines, or game development in general works. Yes, Frostbite hadn't been used for RPGs before, so Bioware found themselves having to build lots of systems and devtools from scratch. But that's a part of game development. And a pretty fundamental part at that. For Inquisition, the DA team looked at the game they wanted to make, and then at the technology they had. Their Eclipse (DA:O & DA2) codebase didn't support things like the larger areas they wanted and its graphics were getting outdated. They certainly could have gone the route of upgrading the Eclipse codebase to the point where they could have make the game they wanted to make with it. And if they had done that, they probably could have reused a lot of their old devtools. But it's not like that would not have taken a ton of money & time. The DA:I devs had a hard time building tools and systems for the Frostbite engine. But I'm pretty damned certain that trying to make Inquisition on top of Eclipse also would also have given them a hard time. Looking at the various postmortems, Frostbite wasn't ME:A's core problem. It certainly caused them certain issues, but with a different engine they would have had different issues. It seems more that ME:A's development was badly mismanaged and for the better part of the 5 year dev cycle lacked a coherent vision of the game they wanted to make. And by the time they had that vision, problems like the animation had become too big deal with in the time before the money ran out. Raygereio fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Apr 22, 2018 |
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Apr 22, 2018 19:32
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Andromeda isn't bad. It certainly isn't great, either. And that's what's disappointing.
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Apr 22, 2018 19:38
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Taear posted:We don't know if that's definitely true though. Is it even taking that long? Dai released in November 2014. It's not even been 4 years yet. After 5 I think we can start to worry
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Apr 22, 2018 19:54
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VostokProgram posted:Is it even taking that long? Dai released in November 2014. It's not even been 4 years yet. After 5 I think we can start to worry That's a pretty long time. Especially to have no real news. DA:O was 2009, DA2 was 2011 and DA:I was 2014 and we had some stuff in between those games. Inquisition had stuff out in 2013 showing gameplay and etc. And my assumption with Mass Effect was that because it's a shooter it's seen as having more broad appeal even if that's not actually true. I would even go as far to say that the reason they're doing Anthem is because EA sees that as only a step away from Mass Effect. After all Destiny gets called an RPG all the time. It's a real poo poo that "RPG" seems to just mean "has a character progression" now to the big companies. I wish game genres were like music ones where there's tonnes and although you might not understand ones that aren't from your niche you can go "Oh hey this is Darkwave and so is [a band I like]" and expect to at least roughly enjoy it. quote:Andromeda isn't bad. It's like a fan mod of mass effect. It's so lazy and badly put together. For the reasons listed earlier! Taear fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Apr 22, 2018 |
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Apr 22, 2018 20:35
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Big Bidness posted:It made so much sense when it came out that they wasted years trying and failing to make procedural generation the backbone of the game, and then had to desperately crank out what we got in a year and a half. Procedural generation isn't even good for something like Doom or Bloodborne where the focus is almost purely on moment-to-moment combat gameplay. For an RPG, particularly an RPG where one of the biggest complaints was the lovely procedurally generated planets filled with stock enemy bases in the first one, I wonder what the gently caress they were even thinking.
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Apr 22, 2018 21:24
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Taear posted:Counterpoint: Yea it's bad. Nah, not bad != good. It's definitely not good though.
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Apr 22, 2018 21:35
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Wolfsheim posted:Procedural generation isn't even good for something like Doom or Bloodborne where the focus is almost purely on moment-to-moment combat gameplay. For an RPG, particularly an RPG where one of the biggest complaints was the lovely procedurally generated planets filled with stock enemy bases in the first one, I wonder what the gently caress they were even thinking. The planets in ME1 weren't procedurally generated though. They were just bland.
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Apr 22, 2018 21:36
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VostokProgram posted:The planets in ME1 weren't procedurally generated though. They were just bland. Raygereio fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Apr 22, 2018 |
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Apr 22, 2018 21:51
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I refuse to believe that they weren't, in fact
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Apr 22, 2018 22:22
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Even as far back as War3's map editor there was a setting to randomly generate terrain, which I feel the ME1 programmers probably did for every overworld mission before going home early.
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Apr 22, 2018 22:25
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Yeah I was huge into ME1-2 back in the day and I believe the developers said it was a choice between one more big story planet or the two dozen random gen planets with a base and they opted for the latter, only to realize their mistake for ME2...and then I guess to completely forget all that for MEA.
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Apr 22, 2018 22:35
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I doubt development on DA4 is all that serious especially since EA decided to pull everyone onto Anthem. We certainly won't hear anything about it until Anthem is released.
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Apr 22, 2018 22:49
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floofyscorp posted:What engine should they have used instead? Unreal Engine? I mean, the original ME trilogy games were literally all made on top of that, and by using that you'd have a proven development pipeline & facial animation system & everything else you'd want for a RPG. Re-inventing the wheel can have its merits but it's also got a lot of pitfalls. Also just looking at the games made on Frostbite shows it definitely wasn't general-purpose. The first six games that used it were all FPSes, and then it's a smattering of racing games before DA:I. It might be better now, but I'm actually scratching my head why DA:I didn't just use Unreal engine & all the tools the ME team had for it. Licensing fees? Edit: Like of course ME:A didn't have development troubles because they decided to use Frostbite. But I'll happily put it as one of the contributing factors. kurona_bright fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Apr 22, 2018 |
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Apr 22, 2018 22:58
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Probably because UE3 was nearly a decade old and they wanted to incorporate new graphical capabilities into their games. UE4 didn't come out until Sometimes, even though you have something that works, you have to get something newer if you want to do new stuff. Also, since Frostbyte is an in-house engine (I think?) that means no licensing fees.
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Apr 22, 2018 23:04
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