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SubponticatePoster posted:Where I think EA is culpable is: Frostbite had already been used 2x to make 1 outstanding GOTY caliber game and one kind of disappointing but still AAA size game. The problem was not the engine it was Bioware, for some insane reason, not keeping documentation on how they made frostbite work or collaborating with teams. The MTX/GaaS was a problem, and Dragon Age 4 is definitely a victim of getting hosed over as EA corporate strategy changed on that policy, but Bioware Austin had been working on a massive MMO for a decade plus and when brought in to help got overtly mocked by the "A team" in Edmonton when giving them pretty solid advice on how to develop Anthem. You can say a game with a lovely, tacked on MP service is a example of forcing GaaS onto the developers, but not what happened with Anthem.
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Nov 27, 2021 23:26
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for shootymans and things that are necessary in RPGs like inventory/quest systems have to be created from scratch. If you want your studios to use it, then have a Frostbite team that only works on the engine. They'll be a lot more efficient, be able to provide documentation on how to use the loving thing, and the work they do will save time/money down the line as everybody doesn't have to reinvent the wheel every goddamn time. 
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SubponticatePoster posted:that are necessary in RPGs like inventory/quest systems have to be created from scratch Inventory and quest systems are not the game engine's job
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Nov 28, 2021 00:12
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VostokProgram posted:Inventory and quest systems are not the game engine's job The whole "Frostbite isn't designed for RPGs" thing was always dumb and showed just how little your average gamer knows about what videogame development is. I think the average view is the programmer takes the art assets, dumps them in VideoGameCreator.exe, messes with a few variables and out poofs a game into a existence. Or something like that, going off the "implementing multiplayer is easy because I say it is  " discourse that's been going on recently.But building the necessary tools, middleware and systems like an inventory or quests, are a core part of game development. During Inquisition's development the devs posted blogs about how the work with Frostbite was going. And they talked about things like how Frostbite didn't have a system for complex dialogues, so they had to build that and the devtools create those dialogues. There were a few blogposts like that and they all went something like "Building this thing from scratch to make sure Frostbite supported the game we wanted to make was a challenge, but here's how we solved it". I always found it telling how once the "Frostbite can't be used for RPGs" narrative got going, everyone just ignored Inquisition's existence. Raygereio fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Nov 28, 2021 |
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Nov 28, 2021 03:08
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tbf, the articles posted were quoting the game's actual devs who went on at length about how arduous it was to adapt frostbite for rpgs in comparison to other engines, it isn't an impossible task just far more difficult than anyone expected and that isn't just gamer speculation, we got it straight from the people who worked on it (allegedly) the takeaway from that experience seems to be that the acute rockiness of inquisition's own development, which gamers knew nothing about which only insiders knew, should have been an early internal warning to bioware/EA that additional resources should be spent on mastering it... the problem was apparently that inquisition was so successful that these early indicators were outright ignored, instead skilled employees were moved from the anthem team to FIFA while EA's own in-house frosbite specialists were reserved for the sports games division (who had privileged access because those were/are EA's profit workhorses), the anthem team didn't have much access to them early on apparently andromeda and anthem were initially so ambitious and unique in concept that the reason why the scratch building was done separately was because andromeda and anthem waited until their original pie-in-sky ideas all burned and crashed, and only later defaulted to having more traditional rpg elements... to me this sounds like a foolish justification when internal communication within bioware could've solved a lot of problems, but i also don't know much about games development and how closely the different regional studios are actually linked, it sounds like each one sticks strictly to their own projects typically and that may have been the MO when easier-to-use engines were the norm and they couldn't adapt to more trying circumstances but really, that's really only the tip of the iceberg when it came to andromeda/anthem's issues tho, bioware seems to have horrendous project management and while it's nice that EA lit the fire under the pants of both games to get them done, i have no idea why you stick to a hard deadline when both products were clearly unfinished and badly needed polishing when the due date came, the crunch finally got things rolling but both were still clearly half-baked by the developer's own admission... whoever did those mock-reviews definitely did bioware/EA a wild disservice by over-inflating their confidence
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Nov 28, 2021 05:26
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Khizan posted:In a way, I think the success of ME3 multiplayer bit them in the rear end a bit, because it feels like EA expected them to able recreate that magic in every game they made after that point and that just was not possible. The DAI multiplayer was so bad. Even as a fan of the series and DAI's combat it was just absolutely forgettable.
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Nov 28, 2021 06:41
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I mean Inquisition is absolutely jank. It's combat system has a LOT of issues, like no autoattack, and using abilities as a melee is always a prayer if it'll work or you'll clip on some random piece of terrain. It exists and is technically playable and that's about all I'll grant it.
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Nov 28, 2021 07:58
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SubponticatePoster posted:Expecting anyone to use an engine to do things it's not designed for. Frostbite sure looks pretty, but iirc it was made by Forcing Frostbite on Andromeda seems like a big thing that led to the game being in the state it was. As an engine it just wasn't designed for that kind of RPG. I know Matt McMuscles talked about it on Wha' Happun.
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Nov 28, 2021 13:26
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All of the Andromeda postmortems discuss Bioware's issues with the Frostbite engine, but the buried lede in all this is poor project management from start to finish. They had 5 years to hire people who were maybe sorta competent in working with the engine, but in reality only got out of the pre-production phase within the final 18 months. The creative leads in Bioware were apparently all idea guys who were afraid of ever committing to a unified design doc and instead just kept running out the clock until they had to cobble together some homeopathic rehash of Mass Effect 1. Rinse and repeat with Anthem. Past a certain point you have to stop blaming the tools and consider why nobody at Bioware, still one of the most prestigious game development companies in the world at the time, could attract the talent necessary to work with what they were given. This wasn't some mandate by EA that happened overnight, Andromeda and Anthem each had 5-6 year production cycles.
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Nov 28, 2021 13:35
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I mean the last game they made was Anthem, which came out in 2019 and is already dead having never achieved any success. The game before that was Mass Effect: Andromeda, which, lol. There’s a systemic problem there
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Nov 28, 2021 17:48
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exquisite tea posted:All of the Andromeda postmortems discuss Bioware's issues with the Frostbite engine, but the buried lede in all this is poor project management from start to finish. They had 5 years to hire people who were maybe sorta competent in working with the engine, but in reality only got out of the pre-production phase within the final 18 months. The creative leads in Bioware were apparently all idea guys who were afraid of ever committing to a unified design doc and instead just kept running out the clock until they had to cobble together some homeopathic rehash of Mass Effect 1. Rinse and repeat with Anthem. Past a certain point you have to stop blaming the tools and consider why nobody at Bioware, still one of the most prestigious game development companies in the world at the time, could attract the talent necessary to work with what they were given. This wasn't some mandate by EA that happened overnight, Andromeda and Anthem each had 5-6 year production cycles. the fact that their original plan in their series based on engaging and unique characters and stories was to *make hundreds of procedurally generated planets* is astounding. Like did no one stand up and go "uhhhhh so how are we gong to incorporate our sidequests and NPCs into this system?" It's like they think Mass Effect exploration is "go faff about and shoot trash mobs on random planets forever" instead of "discover a cool mystery or character"
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Nov 28, 2021 17:57
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in a similar vein, it's bizarre bringing in a bright eyed david gaider into anthem, who's trying to push the kind of unique characters, cool mysteries and engaging, tightly crafted stories bioware's typically known for, and laughing him out because it doesn't gel with whatever procedurally generated nonsense they were attempting to develop at the time like sorry david, we don't do those things anymore, we want the kind of 'subtle,' emergent storytelling you get from faffing about and shooting mobs on randomized areas
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Nov 28, 2021 18:25
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hard counter posted:in a similar vein, it's bizarre bringing in a bright eyed david gaider into anthem, who's trying to push the kind of unique characters, cool mysteries and engaging, tightly crafted stories bioware's typically known for, and laughing him out because it doesn't gel with whatever procedurally generated nonsense they were attempting to develop at the time how BioWare, which comes up with memorable characters even in its worst games, had zero in Anthem is beyond me
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Nov 28, 2021 19:22
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Pattonesque posted:how BioWare, which comes up with memorable characters even in its worst games, had zero in Anthem is beyond me Any memorable characters in Andromeda? I've never played it.
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Nov 28, 2021 20:59
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I liked the krogan that sounded like Harvey fierstein E: and who could forget the woman whose face was tired, from dealing with, everything
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Nov 28, 2021 21:21
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Never played it, but I distinctly remember the main character making a weird grimace
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Nov 28, 2021 21:23
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Plucky Brit posted:Any memorable characters in Andromeda? I've never played it. Vetra and Drack deserved to be squadmates in a much better game.
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Nov 28, 2021 21:25
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Plucky Brit posted:Any memorable characters in Andromeda? I've never played it. I think Vetra and Jaal were pretty good.
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Nov 28, 2021 21:25
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Plucky Brit posted:Any memorable characters in Andromeda? I've never played it. I'd say the entire party was memorable just from the insane amount of banter dialogue they had. I can still remember some specific conversations where the ones who don't really like each other are sounding like they're ready to throw down in the mako. For the complaints against Frostbite, Andromeda was perfectly fine after it got patched, so all those issues were definitely a time management/crunch problem, not a Frostbite problem. Honestly, Andromeda is a solid 8/10 game if you go in knowing it's a one off with no chance of a sequel. The open world stuff is fun to explore, the banter is really fun, the combat is great, there's a lot going on to investigate, and when the story gets bonkers even in the game context it's at least fun in the baffled confusion way. It's getting tiring seeing anyone who keeps going to the mine of "but EA made them use Frostbite!" because it's clear it worked for 2 huge RPG games, and Andromeda/Anthem wasn't 5-6 years of constant, grinding work on a coherent project, it was 90% dithering because there was no effective middle management direction. FFS the entire joke about the Anthem article was their central game play feature, the flying, got added and removed twice to the game, before being rushed back in to try and impress a EA exec.
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Nov 28, 2021 22:38
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pentyne posted:
gotta disagree here, game lacked imagination and was terrified of consequences. You have a whole new galaxy to play in and they give you two desert planets. None of your teammates will ever have meaningful friction with Ryder.
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Nov 28, 2021 23:08
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hard counter posted:in a similar vein, it's bizarre bringing in a bright eyed david gaider into anthem, who's trying to push the kind of unique characters, cool mysteries and engaging, tightly crafted stories bioware's typically known for, and laughing him out because it doesn't gel with whatever procedurally generated nonsense they were attempting to develop at the time I'm not sure this was the disagreement at play - I think Gaider wanted to do the same safe Bioware plot done before in KOTOR1, NWN1, Mass Effect 1, Dragon Age Inquisition (and Andromeda for that matter) where a larger-than-life villain uncovers an ancient civilisation's forgotten power that threatens the status quo and the protagonist is chosen by destiny and circumstance to find the four Star Maps then defeat the villain in a climactic battle. in turn the rest of the team didn't want another Rakatan/Lizardmen/Reaper/Elven/Remnant macguffin weighing down the setting, another hub-and-spokes campaign, another conflict with abstract stakes of magical/technological "power" possibly ties into wanting to avoid being "meme'd" - before Andromeda's animations, nerds liked to make fun of Bioware's repetitive and unimaginative writing. I don't think the Anthem team were particularly opposed to the idea of having characters in the game or whatever
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Nov 29, 2021 01:06
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For me, what killed Inquisition and Andromeda was the open-world design. I get that some people like that kind of game, but to me Bioware's strength was always in crafting good set pieces and vignettes. Mass Effect 2's overall design of the world and navigation was in my book the strongest Bioware's ever done.
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Nov 29, 2021 01:14
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Lt. Danger posted:I'm not sure this was the disagreement at play the description given in the article seemed to lean that way, to me at least, mostly because it didn't matter what ideas david pitched, nothing worked, it's not like he just came in and pitched one story and left when it didn't take - whatever he came up with was derided as either being 'too fantasy' or too direct, and he never understood what the anthem team wanted out of him so he left after a full year of attempts, remembering that when he was first brought in by watamaniuk, he was specifically pushed to do 'science-fantasy' for anthem, as that's his forte by reputation apparently david claimed that the team was always chasing the dragon of something different and novel than what he was presenting and he never got a clear understanding of what he should do instead due to mixed messaging, so i'm inferring that, given how badly downstream the narrative, characterization, visual design, etc were from the daring, procedurally generated technology the game wanted to feature, and how the narrative would be hinged on this technological innovation, that the anthem team wanted a story tailored to their varying visions of the game's novel mechanics i am inferring a lot tho so other interpretations may be more valid, but this, at the very least, is another example of anthem's horrendous project management because david kept getting mixed messages due to the lack of a cohesive vision at all levels
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Nov 29, 2021 01:48
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It says a lot that David Gaider, who's a bit overrated in general because he did great work when he was just a writer but not a lead, spent a year trying to do his specific job and then left accomplishing nothing. It all comes back to the Bioware middle management. Even a half competent team could've made it work under those conditions, but all the people specifically put in positions to make decisions dithered for years for god knows why.
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Nov 29, 2021 02:21
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bluntly, I don't think Gaider would be able to write something that wasn't (per the article) "traditional Bioware". I can believe he spent a year going back to the same well of alien artifacts and posturing villains, with a slightly different spin each time. there's a lot more space in the genre than the Bioware staple plot. to be fair though a lot of videogame writers tend to repeat the same themes and concepts over different games, so he's not alone
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Nov 29, 2021 02:27
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the consistent problem is that Bioware has lovely managers, no direction, and they've driven away a lot of the behind the scenes low profile talent that did unsexy shitwork like creating the inventory system.Cythereal posted:For me, what killed Inquisition and Andromeda was the open-world design. I get that some people like that kind of game, but to me Bioware's strength was always in crafting good set pieces and vignettes. Mass Effect 2's overall design of the world and navigation was in my book the strongest Bioware's ever done. Open world is the worst thing that has ever happened to the video game industry. It is a cancer that infects every genre. Now every single loving game is a walking simulator with quest markers that are spaced out 19 real life hours apart, copy pasted hills and rocks with no clear pathing, massive maps with absolutely nothing in them but grass and trees, and copy pasted NPCs with no distinctive features because they have to appear in 924884 randomly generated settlements. And oh yeah there's always dog poo poo escort quests and the protagonist always talks to themselves constantly about what they do next because the developer knows they need to hold the player's hand forever because without a questline it is impossible to know where the gently caress to go or do. gently caress open world. All my homies hate open world. It is trash. HIJK fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Nov 29, 2021 |
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Nov 29, 2021 02:38
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Lt. Danger posted:bluntly, I don't think Gaider would be able to write something that wasn't (per the article) "traditional Bioware". I can believe he spent a year going back to the same well of alien artifacts and posturing villains, with a slightly different spin each time. there's a lot more space in the genre than the Bioware staple plot. to be fair though a lot of videogame writers tend to repeat the same themes and concepts over different games, so he's not alone sure, that's definitely possible, i don't know whether david has reputation for being a one trick pony or not or whether he tends to blame others for his flaws, but ultimately this story does end with him and the rest of his writing team resigning after a year, citing a lack of clarity, which essentially forced a total narrative reboot when a whole new team was forced to come in given how much of the rest of anthem's production was plagued by, in general, confusion, indecisiveness, ambiguity, etc david's explanation certainly seems plausible and on brand, so i personally lean towards believing him
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Nov 29, 2021 02:58
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quote:The story started changing drastically, too. In early 2015, veteran Dragon Age writer David Gaider moved over to Anthem, and his version of the story looked a lot different than the ideas with which they’d been experimenting for the past few years. Gaider’s style was traditional BioWare—big, complicated villains; ancient alien artifacts; and so on—which rankled some of the developers who were hoping for something more subtle. “There was a lot of resistance from the team who just didn’t want to see a sci-fi Dragon Age, I guess,” said one developer. Added a second: “A lot of people were like, ‘Why are we telling the same story? Let’s do something different.’” What it really sounds like is a lot of people working on Anthem had huge egos and were pretty much unprofessional as gently caress to a major studio figure. The whole way he describes it sounds like people with no authority or control over the story design were constantly interfering in his job and causing problems, and no one did anything to rein them in. The "a lot of people wanted say over the story" doesn't sound like it was bosses or execs, but other devs/teams mad about what he was doing and not willing to cooperate or collaborate in design meetings.
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Nov 29, 2021 03:14
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Lt. Danger posted:bluntly, I don't think Gaider would be able to write something that wasn't (per the article) "traditional Bioware". I can believe he spent a year going back to the same well of alien artifacts and posturing villains, with a slightly different spin each time. there's a lot more space in the genre than the Bioware staple plot. to be fair though a lot of videogame writers tend to repeat the same themes and concepts over different games, so he's not alone Solas is an interesting villain, so I am curious what direction the DA4 team goes with him. Although I imagine DA4 will be more about the Tevinter/Qunari conflict and that anything Solas is doing will be more in the background. Or maybe a rushed final act kind of thing. I guess I'll find out when DA4 comes out in 2028 or whatever 
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Nov 29, 2021 03:20
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Pattonesque posted:the fact that their original plan in their series based on engaging and unique characters and stories was to *make hundreds of procedurally generated planets* is astounding. Like did no one stand up and go "uhhhhh so how are we gong to incorporate our sidequests and NPCs into this system?" It's like they think Mass Effect exploration is "go faff about and shoot trash mobs on random planets forever" instead of "discover a cool mystery or character" It’s not really astounding at all. It’s what the original Mass Effect was supposed to be, and after the third game, wanting a new game that lives up to the promise of the original and/or exceeds it is not a bad goal. It just wasn’t a feasible goal and took them too long to figure that out.
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Nov 29, 2021 03:26
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chaosapiant posted:It’s what the original Mass Effect was supposed to be I recall ME1’s side planets being the result of a marketing gently caress up and project leads being dumb. The idea was for the game to have the same structure like KotOR1 or DA1 (an 3 act thing with the 2nd act having several locations you can visit in any order). At some point marketing promised you would be able to visit over 30 planets or something. Because no one wanted to put out that correction and because they didn’t really have the resources for so many locations, we ended up with a bunch maps churned out by a fractal general that Bioware then plonked down a bunch of worthless go-shoot-a-dude sidequests in. It’s been years since I read those quotes from a former Bioware dev over in the ME thread on SA though, so I could be completely misremembering things.
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Nov 29, 2021 09:57
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Raygereio posted:It was? Going for that kind of procedural tech was insane in 2012, but even more so back in 2004 or whenever ME1’s development started. Keep in mind when I say it was the original goal, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t even prototyped. It was one of many design goals of the original game as they were brain-storming internally. 
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Nov 29, 2021 12:20
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chaosapiant posted:It’s not really astounding at all. It’s what the original Mass Effect was supposed to be, and after the third game, wanting a new game that lives up to the promise of the original and/or exceeds it is not a bad goal. It just wasn’t a feasible goal and took them too long to figure that out. it falls flat on its face though. there's no way they'd be able to make unique and interesting Mass Effect-y content for those planets not because Bioware couldn't but because no one could
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Nov 29, 2021 15:06
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It fees similar to the Radiant Quest Engine that was promised with Oblivion. They said it would dynamically pick up on your gameplay and adjust quests to create an interactive world around you. If the player interacted with someone in the village, then maybe the next quest would have that person being kidnapped; and since you’d already cleared out the local bandits, the game makes the culprits a witch coven out of a nearby region you’ve never been before. You can buy houses, pick up silverware, and form relationships with everyone in the game. In practice, all it means is that the game says “Rand_NPC move to Rand_Dungeon, populate Rand_Monster” and fill all the chests inside with butter knives and forks. Maybe it’s possible to so what they’re implying above, but the amount of work it would take on top of generating a giant world makes it essentially never going to happen.
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Nov 29, 2021 15:13
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pentyne posted:What it really sounds like is a lot of people working on Anthem had huge egos and were pretty much unprofessional as gently caress to a major studio figure. The whole way he describes it sounds like people with no authority or control over the story design were constantly interfering in his job and causing problems, and no one did anything to rein them in. Extra hilariously it sounds like they were poo poo talking him without any ideas to replace his. Given what we ended up with it sounds like they never figured something out either. poisonpill posted:
Closest we've gotten to the promise is the nemesis system which seems to have been quietly shelved as too much trouble to keep using/ripoff after the Mordor games.
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Nov 29, 2021 16:45
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Nemesis system was good, and the reactive ways the different orks would respond to previous encounters was great. That’s a good example of it being done right. They had to record tons and tons of dialogue that most people would never see to account for unique edge cases and come up with all kinds of flags for the game to remember, so it takes a lot of work and a decent plan, but it’s doable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS4ofqYWBs8 Too bad the Nemesis system is patented through 2035! Lol
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Nov 29, 2021 17:25
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So when the hell is dragon age 4 happening lads
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Nov 29, 2021 17:26
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Gaider might have one trick but it's a decent trick
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Nov 29, 2021 17:48
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ThomasPaine posted:So when the hell is dragon age 4 happening lads Reply hazy, ask again later
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Nov 29, 2021 18:00
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Lt. Danger posted:possibly ties into wanting to avoid being "meme'd" - before Andromeda's animations, nerds liked to make fun of Bioware's repetitive and unimaginative writing. I don't think the Anthem team were particularly opposed to the idea of having characters in the game or whatever bUt ThE rOmAnCeS
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Nov 29, 2021 19:10
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A Sometimes Food posted:Closest we've gotten to the promise is the nemesis system which seems to have been quietly shelved as too much trouble to keep using/ripoff after the Mordor games. Warframe tried something very similar to the Nemesis system, but it sucked. Shadow of Mordor/War focused the entirety of their game around those concepts and while interesting, they still lost their novelty somewhat quickly. A game like Warframe that's primarily trying to be something else but also adds in a pseudo-Nemesis system is never going to have the staggering amounts of development resources required for it to reach the towering heights of "cool for a bit" that the LotR titles managed.
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Nov 29, 2021 22:26
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