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Yeah, this marks the point where the writers decided WoL's plot is not dumb enough yet and start really digging.
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Oct 22, 2023 19:28
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| # ? Jun 5, 2024 16:25 |
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Guy Fawkes posted:Haven. It's Viking time! It's never Viking time  .
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Oct 22, 2023 22:45
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idonotlikepeas posted:This is what we've been building up to all this time. Picking Haven now is the coward's way out. This!
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Oct 22, 2023 22:57
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Xarn posted:Yeah, this marks the point where the writers decided WoL's plot is not dumb enough yet and start really digging.
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Oct 22, 2023 23:03
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A reminder we’re on the game of the trilogy where the plot generally isn’t a complete trainwreck.
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Oct 22, 2023 23:21
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Well, yeah, it at least has redeeming features like looking at tychus' increasing objections as endgame draws near after beating it once. Now the two expansions...
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Oct 22, 2023 23:25
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The most charitable read of that boarding scene is that Valerian disposes of the honour guard Arcturus sent to keep an eye on him before he starts doing high treason stuff. The most realistic read is that a cinematic of Jimmy and Tychus boarding a ship was made and it needed to be used SOMEWHERE, relevance or sensibility be damned.
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Oct 23, 2023 04:07
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Asehujiko posted:The most charitable read of that boarding scene is that Valerian disposes of the honour guard Arcturus sent to keep an eye on him before he starts doing high treason stuff. Serious question. How, exactly, did this happen? I mean, my take is that there was an outline of a plot, the cinematics team was unleashed to do their stuff and throw in those movie trailer moments, but oops we gotta rewrite it all because ???, leaving the team to just try to shove those Cool Cinematics in there somewhere that they make something resembling sense if you're charitable. So, what is ??? here? Cowardice that Raynor might have some flaws and look bad and we can't have that? Art director keeps waffling right up through production? Some exec in a monkeysuit and too-tight tie putting down weird arbitrary demands? Staff turnover? Did they have a plan at all, at any point? (HotS and LotV suggest no). My thirteen year old bitter disappointment with how badly blizz Kevin J Anderson'd the continuation to what was actually a pretty compelling sci-fi drama I was invested in flared up pretty bad seeing that Valerian cutscene again. bladededge fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Oct 23, 2023 |
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Oct 23, 2023 04:22
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bladededge posted:Serious question. How, exactly, did this happen? Kith posted:However, even though Raynor's alcoholism was cut as a plot beat, a little over half of the campaign's cutscenes were already rendered and finalized, and so some evidence of the original narrative remains. The boarding action is one of those "sloppy moments" that Matt was supposed to get pissed off about.
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Oct 23, 2023 04:33
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Haven, it's been funny but yeah, let's upgrade from Wraiths now please. Though I'll accept what hilarity could ensue if we pick the more dickish choice as to how to handle that mission.
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Oct 23, 2023 04:35
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bladededge posted:Serious question. How, exactly, did this happen? Given my experience with game dev, ??? is one of two things. Games tend to come together very slowly up until a certain point late in development; then it all comes together near the end. You have guys making art assets, some doing gameplay, some doing levels, some doing music, some doing UI/cutscenes/whatever/etc. All of these things affect the way that a story is told, so when you're writing it you kind of have this idea of how you think it's going to come together in your head. And when all the final game stuff comes together, or starts getting there, you might have a moment where you go "Oh poo poo, this story doesn't work with the rest of the game." And given how writing in games is viewed and how many person-hours it would take to redo most of the game vs changing the story, the story is usually what gets changed instead of the other things that took a lot longer to make. The other option is that Blizzard started showing it to focus testers and they hated playing as some alcoholic loser and the metrics showed that they needed to do a rewrite even though it was the 11th hour.
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Oct 23, 2023 05:52
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Shoutout to that one bit in Persona 5 where a big deal is made about a school assembly that takes place during summer vacation. There's multiple scenes reminding you of it, and the entire party complains about it. Then the day comes and the assembly gets completely skipped past. So why make a big deal of it? Because that day has an animated cutscene with the entire cast in their school uniforms which was originally going to play at a different point in the year before the plot got shuffled around, and a halfassed reason to get everyone out of their casual summer outfits costs a lot less than completely remaking the scene.
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Oct 23, 2023 06:34
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Out-of-engine Cutscenes being made early enough in development that the story around them changes seems to be incredibly common. Especially as many of them are used for advertisement and the like.
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Oct 23, 2023 09:23
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MatteusTheCorrupt posted:Out-of-engine Cutscenes being made early enough in development that the story around them changes seems to be incredibly common. Especially as many of them are used for advertisement and the like. In particular, this one is back to back trailer fodder. Of course they don't work when put back to back, which I guess is blizz magic.
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Oct 23, 2023 13:42
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MatteusTheCorrupt posted:Out-of-engine Cutscenes being made early enough in development that the story around them changes seems to be incredibly common. Especially as many of them are used for advertisement and the like. So you end up with a cutscene that looks great but doesn’t fit story wise, but…we have to do something with it, right? We can’t just toss all that work in the dumpster.
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Oct 23, 2023 14:25
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Hell, it’s not even a problem unique to games either; I remember reading about the final episode of Breaking Bad including a seemingly-random scene of Walt leaving his watch on top of a phone booth that was supposed to explain where it had gone after the timeskip.
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Oct 23, 2023 14:39
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I always thought that cutscene looked like it was done in-engine. Things are just blocky enough and things that should be rounded (Jim's revolver barrel, for example) have hard edges and corners. I know there are high-detail models in the game that are used for the Hyperion areas, and I've seen a high-detail Raynor in armour used in a couple of custom maps. And comparing it to the intro cutscene, it's definitely much lower detail.
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Oct 23, 2023 14:49
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It was done in-engine. There are exactly Kith fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Oct 23, 2023 |
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Oct 23, 2023 15:43
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Kith posted:It was done in-engine. There are exactly two cutscenes in WoL that were pre-rendered - the intro cutscene and the final cutscene. However, the cutscenes for this mission were very, very expensive because they involved a lot of mocap and other animation work, so they weren't getting canned. Instead, they got thrown elsewhere and rewritten to the bare minimum standard required to keep the story making sense. Also the flashback to Kerrigan getting nabbed.
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Oct 23, 2023 15:46
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Oh yeah. Three pre-rendered cutscenes, then.
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Oct 23, 2023 15:47
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JackSplater posted:I always thought that cutscene looked like it was done in-engine. Things are just blocky enough and things that should be rounded (Jim's revolver barrel, for example) have hard edges and corners. I know there are high-detail models in the game that are used for the Hyperion areas, and I've seen a high-detail Raynor in armour used in a couple of custom maps. Me too. Like, the prerendered cinematics are obvious: The Deal, Kerrigan vs. Zeratul, and the Happily Ever* After at the end are all very obviously prerendered. The boarding action isn't that. That said, in-engine cutscenes are easier, but still probably time intensive. But not so much to suggest that it couldn't be remade. But I never had too big of a problem with everything up to the "Raynor mistakes blonde for brown" moment. Like, its easy enough to think Raynor and Tychus are jumped up enough to go and shoot first ask questions once everyone is dead. And since Raynor isn't slowing down there's not exactly a Talk/Shoot option for the marines on board. Hell, squint hard enough and tilt your head and Raynor being so cracked out on adrenaline and giddy for revenge can explain the mistake as "He is seeing what he wants to see." It would be better communicated to the audience by showing us Valarian from Raynor's perspective as Mengsk, before cutting to the 3rd person omniscient angle to show that Valarian is in fact not Mengsk. Matt is the level headed one, not Raynor and Tychus. But this is more thought than Blizzard probably gave it.
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Oct 23, 2023 15:51
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Warmachine posted:Me too. Like, the prerendered cinematics are obvious: The Deal, Kerrigan vs. Zeratul, and the Happily Ever* After at the end are all very obviously prerendered. The boarding action isn't that. That said, in-engine cutscenes are easier, but still probably time intensive. But not so much to suggest that it couldn't be remade. Alright I forgot the intro to pondering had another prerender. Funnily enough, I checked how many of them got used for ads. The answer is all of them at once. Even the final cutscene gets a few split-second shots.
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Oct 23, 2023 15:56
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Warmachine posted:Kerrigan vs. Zeratul Four! gently caress!
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Oct 23, 2023 15:59
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Kith posted:Four! gently caress! lmao I forgot about the New Gettysberg cutscene. I was sitting here thinking "four? what one did I miss?" I unfortunately have the KvZ fight on a t-shirt from the initial release. The Gamestop cashier commented on it when I picked up my physical copy on launch day. I still have it, but it is disintegrating with age.  Anyway.
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Oct 23, 2023 16:05
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There’s also just the simple matter of potential scheduling conflicts for the VAs if they’re even somewhat prominent (like Tychus’s, Neil Kaplan), so it’s very possible that the cinematic team only gets the one shot to record their lines and work with what they have.
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Oct 23, 2023 16:18
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There's a LP of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified from rather a while ago where a QA guy from the company is on hand, and explains a lot how that poor game got chopped up and reassembled constantly through development. And one of the big, big issues the team had to work around later in development is that so much of the dialogue had already been recorded and they could not expect to get the actors back in to change anything despite massive rewrites after that point. So they had to use what they had and sometimes it got jammed in pretty awkwardly. The Bureau obviously had a more troubled development than a lot of games do, but it's a good insight into just how it can happen.
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Oct 23, 2023 17:31
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MagusofStars posted:So you end up with a cutscene that looks great but doesn’t fit story wise, but…we have to do something with it, right? We can’t just toss all that work in the dumpster. Yes you bloody well can. The sunk cost fallacy is something that needs to die a very quick and painful death. That poo poo ruins so many things. "We just licensed this management software, but it's actually terrible and will cost us so many man-hours just dealing with it that it'll eclipse the cost of the software." "Yeah but we paid for it, so we gotta use it for the next eight years." No! No you loving don't! Accept the loss and don't make things even shittier with stubborn insistence on clinging to a mistake! For that matter, there's got to be a better way of fitting it in. Have the battlecruisers show up after Media Blitz (it certainly merits a response), and maybe even throw the rebellion chain into the main line if you're that determined that every single player should see it.
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Oct 23, 2023 17:43
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I suppose "Raynor and Tychus fight Dominion marines" is about the safest possible cutscene you could make if you're not sure about the plot yet. And somehow it still feels out of place.
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Oct 23, 2023 17:58
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They could have slapped it down in front of any number of no build base or lab raid mission and it would have been just fine. And then they'd give the medic flash grenade launcher ability to Tychus.
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Oct 23, 2023 18:46
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I think they put it in because it's cool
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Oct 23, 2023 19:19
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disposablewords posted:There's a LP of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified from rather a while ago where a QA guy from the company is on hand, and explains a lot how that poor game got chopped up and reassembled constantly through development. And one of the big, big issues the team had to work around later in development is that so much of the dialogue had already been recorded and they could not expect to get the actors back in to change anything despite massive rewrites after that point. So they had to use what they had and sometimes it got jammed in pretty awkwardly. The Bureau obviously had a more troubled development than a lot of games do, but it's a good insight into just how it can happen. Oh that poor game. It got shoehorned into becoming XCOM (as near as I can tell), when it should have been its own thing.
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Oct 23, 2023 21:17
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It probably would have done a lot better had they not done that for some godawful reason. I mean, what did they *expect* would happen when they announce a new XCOM game and it's a shooter?
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Oct 23, 2023 21:46
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A XCOM shooter? Do your guns have stormtrooper accuracy?
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Oct 23, 2023 22:08
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Poil posted:A XCOM shooter? Do your guns have stormtrooper accuracy? Your squadmates do when they're picking their own targets, and get better if you give them orders. I actually really like the game, it's hard to call it Good but I had a ton of fun. It needed more budget and more time in the oven without getting jerked around on what it's supposed to be doing.
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Oct 23, 2023 22:24
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I still remember the very first Bureau trailers with infecting inky goo and bizarre geometric enemies. That could have been a cool game. Heck, it would've made a cooler game if Control had stolen them. But nah, gotta cling to the familiar. Poil posted:A XCOM shooter? Do your guns have stormtrooper accuracy? Some, yeah, and you had two squaddies with you to fill the role as well. But all that means is you need to get closer.  Lt. Danger posted:I think they put it in because it's cool True, but placed with all the care that a cat drops a turd in the litterbox. Just cover it up with a bit of sand and leave. 
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Oct 23, 2023 22:27
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Lt. Danger posted:I think they put it in because it's cool Well, yeah, Jim and Tychus being badass against Dominion troops should be cool as hell. It's a pity it makes no sense because Valerian is here to parley so why the gently caress did he send his troops to die pointlessly? What if the mooks got a lucky shot in? We're not in a story where it makes sense for people to know that a character has plot armour and will survive no matter what.
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Oct 23, 2023 22:41
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Omobono posted:Well, yeah, Jim and Tychus being badass against Dominion troops should be cool as hell. “…welp, time for Plan B.”
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Oct 23, 2023 23:58
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"Release... ...the Jimbot."
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Oct 23, 2023 23:59
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This is probably far down on the list of "Things to get aggravated about" but I took an astrophysics class and if this planet was considered inside the "livable" span that Earth is (which I know, space magic makes it habitable is an entirely plausible explanation here) it wouldn't be "slowly put to the torch". The expansion is rapid as the star begins to burn and output other elements as part of it's life cycle. If it was burning faster it'd get brighter but remain about the same size, if it transitioned stages that planet would become part of the stellar matter being poured into the fusion furnace The other part of this is that it's a blue star, which could be a supermassive star, or a dwarf. If it's supermassive, then guaranteed the entire planet is just getting swallowed by the star, if it's not supermassive, it doesn't have enough mass to trigger the fusion required to expand as they show it doing. And this is all ignoring the basic laws of science that would mean that planet would look like Char before the Raiders even touched down, even ignoring all the stellar half-remembered BS I just got annoyed about.
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Oct 24, 2023 00:24
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Oh the actual "science" of the mission is complete bullshit, true. It's entirely a hacky explanation in service to the level gimmick. You could say the star just started freaking out with bad flares that are scorching the day-side of the planet, and since the planet is rotating, well... Maybe imply it's a ridiculous ancient Xel'naga or even "height of their interstellar empire" Protoss defense of the artifact piece that's causing the star to flare.
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Oct 24, 2023 01:23
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