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StrixNebulosa posted:I started Dragon Age Origins yesterday, and I have questions: mages in particular, get cross-class combos in dragon age origins where you can set-up an enemy for a finishing move, like if you freeze something with cone of cold or w/e, any critical hit (except backstabs) on the frozen enemy will shatter it dealing intense damage, so a two-handed warrior doing mighty strike on a frozen enemy will shatter it, other moves like stonefist or crushing prison can also shatter frozen enemies other spell combos include grease + any fire ability, which will set an area ablaze (or if an enemy has set an area ablaze you can put it out with blizzard) spell might can be cast before a variety of spells to create an improved version there are several abilities that also combine to form a stronger version when you cast them in succession, like casting sleep on an enemy then horror creates nightmare, forcefield + crushing prison creates shockwave, glyph of paralysis + glyph of repulsion creates mass paralysis, spell might + tempest + blizzard creates storm of the century, which is a massive AOE spell there's a lot of room to play in, so long as you keep your synergies in mind there's no bad way of doing a mage run ...you might prefer going into the healing tree tho, a lot of players found that handy their first time through hard counter fucked around with this message at 18:43 on May 29, 2021 |
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May 29, 2021 18:41
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you'll probably want to keep a rogue w/high lockpicking to have someone that can open chests, there's some good loot out there gated by locked chests
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May 29, 2021 18:58
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one thing to keep in mind is that archery is hot trash (in the base game) iirc, having the mod that lets you respec characters will let you turn party archers into 2 weapon rogues and that's a major quality of life improvement imho, on top of letting you fool around with different builds as you like
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May 29, 2021 20:16
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alternatively, just sleep with zevran, isabela and leliana at the same time
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May 30, 2021 05:24
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the game conveys it rather poorly, but you can get hella sick from simple contact with darkspawn if you're not protected from having gulped from the dank chalice... in da2, this happens to your sibling if you bring them to the expedition, instead of leaving them behind, and the only way of saving them is handing them over to the grey wardens for immediate initiation you're also supposed to gain other things from the ritual, like a darkspawn radar or some such, and maybe more prowess? i think one of the dlcs expands on it a little more
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May 30, 2021 07:01
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Raygereio posted:Likewise the darkspawn taint is supposed to be big loving deal and fighting darkspawn with a regular army is supposed to be war of attrition where even if you win the battle, you'll loose. But your non-warden party members are just fine. in da:o there was supposed to be a gameplay mechanic revolving around managing the cleanliness of your non-warden TAINTS but that was scrapped in favour of plot armour for your companions; da:awakenings had the potential of bringing that back iirc, hence the optional initiation ritual you can do for most of your guys (surprisingly non-lethal this time around, except for the sacrificial lamb), but the mechanic did not make a return even then either way, right now there is deffo a disconnect between lore & game re: taint
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May 30, 2021 16:09
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Eimi posted:Which is ironic because I thought in DAO and DA2 they did a good job of showing why mages are feared if you played one, since you were an overpowered walking ball of bullshit in a way that rogues and warriors never could be. It was fun. And then DAI rebalanced mages so they are more cc and combo oriented and they suuuuuuuuuck. i think the standard way of playing da:o solo is by taking a dwarf dual weapon rogue, you have ridiculous raw damage, some innate magic resist, can stealth out and have a bunch of utility abilities but otherwise, yeah, the class balance was all kinds of messed up in da:o, da2 weirdly probably had the tightest balance
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May 30, 2021 17:58
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Fruits of the sea posted:I love the deeproads because they are supposed to be ridiculously vast and filled with hordes of Darkspawn in the lore and they actually are exactly that. Most rpgs would throw in a contained dungeon level or two and leave it at that. that's exactly why i loved it too game told me it'd be a long, attritional war against the darkspawn if i was dumb enough to head in when looking for a missing person and game delivered, there's a whole bunch of neat treasures and little stories in there too making you understand a little more why dwarves want it back
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May 31, 2021 15:33
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i've done the fade twice the second time was, however, when i realized it's best experienced as a one-shot wonder
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Jun 1, 2021 04:45
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Fruits of the sea posted:Yeah, DA2 has some... issues with tone and blood magic. Despite trying hard to paint mages as a sympathetic and oppressed group literally Every. Single. Mage. you investigate or pursue for any reason ends up using blood magic and ultimately being terrible. They accidentally undercut one of the major narratives and didn’t realize it until after release because it was all so rushed. i think that's a misreading of the intentions of da2 given that siding with the templars instead of the mages was always a valid option as far the game was concerned; it's simultaneously the case that, by and large, mages are oppressed under lock-and-key and, due to that oppression or due to more sinister goings-on, that a significant fraction of them become abominations or otherwise flirt with dark magics that make a public menace out of them... just like how it's simultaneously the case that templars perform a critical function that's crucially keeping society propped up and that significant numbers of them abuse their position, due to humans succumbing to jailer-mentality or due to more sinister goings-on there was never supposed to be a clear-cut solution like with da:o's blight, the problems run deeper than that, and, to borrow phrase with a lot currency these days, many of the problems are outright systemic in origin or imposed on them by nature - and this is why the semantic detail of who hawke sides with alters so little, the problems are bigger than him/her or kirkwall, the PC just occupies the centre of the hurricane the sets off the civil war it is fair to say da2 was super rushed tho, da2 being as rushed as it was does mean that it has trouble conveying the ambiguousness of the situation with much elegance tho, because the game tends to oscillate between 2 extremes rather than depicting shades of grey
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Jul 24, 2021 22:08
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HIJK posted:I don't think Bioware is capable of portraying a shades of gray situation. Certainly not during DA2 and I don't think DA3 did a very good job either, although they did do a little better there. while you could argue that in da2, red lyrium poisoning made meredith much crazier than usual while orsino being an immoral psychopath underneath a polite veneer exaggerated the underlying problems that mages and templars typically have in this setting, problems that normally just simmer and bubble harmlessly, until it all had to boil over when people acted w/o their filters or w/e... ...but that's really just saying bioware may have created a situation where they didn't have to write in shades of grey, probably because you're right in that it's not one of their strong suits
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Jul 24, 2021 22:51
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Skippy McPants posted:The Mage/Templar conflict suffers a lot from telling and not showing. Like, in the text of the actual games Mages are either slaves or prisoners, with Templar as the most overt agents of their oppression. Now the lore tells us this power imbalance is justified because of the all horrible damage Mages could inflict if left unchecked for even a moment, but we barely see any commit ruin that exceeds what regular old people with power are capable of inflicting. tbf redcliffe was turned into a night of the living dead remake by one precocious, unsupervised child with magic, there's no way even a princeling born into power does anything equivalent unless the adults in the room let him, but i guess your mileage may vary when it comes to the quality of the showing here
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Jul 25, 2021 21:44
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the immediate trouble with mages seems to be that mages born to non-mages frequently ends with everyone in tears given that small children are dumb and apparently super enticing vessels for fade demons, whereas mages born to mages? much, much less of a problem, the adults in the room can guide the child safely by using their own experiences to help the kid deal with what's coming, it's so easy even an apostate could do it this situation, when expanded to a broader social solution, either lends itself to mages being cloistered away from the rest of society (along with attached templar enforcers) to be with their own kind, or you need a keeper-esque figure fully integrated with society to keep an eye over the flock, like with the dalish, in order to make sure children are mentored appropriately as far as more advanced problems go, neither of these solutions seems especially reliable given all the problems the various cloistered circles deal with throughout the games which goes without mention, but as far as keepers go in da:o you gotta deal with a magical werewolf outbreak that's on the verge of killing the tribe, this plague was caused by a vendetta initiated by sad mage hundreds of years ago, or in da2 a dalish tribe can potentially get itself slaughtered after its keeper mishandles merrill's quest by getting herself possessed it's kind of a tough situation all round unless i'm missing something
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Jul 26, 2021 05:20
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perhaps the post was unclear, a consequence of non-mages being unable to deal with their mage child's needs means that children need to be put under the supervision of one, one way or another, and methods of achieving that supervision which the setting has come up with are to join a cloistered circle of peers and teachers (which themselves are under the further supervision of templars) which are a bit like a private school, OR to be put under the charge of a someone who is a mage, either a keeper or a tutor of some kind, while still remaining a part of their old community; there's no other sound alternative given the dangers involved and i'm not surprised if coercion is sometimes necessary (do peasants who can't afford private tutors get their children forcibly taken from them or what?), the qunari have their own ways too but i'm foggy on the details anyway, these solutions seem to work fine for the immediate problem of raising children, but more advanced problems like entire mage communities going rogue or otherwise using their powers irresponsibly creates more advanced problems that there isn't a clear cut solution for, at least in this setting imho, considering these problems range from power hungry mages running amok or keepers using curses to settle blood feuds in petty ways or anything else equally as destructive to others as it is self-destructive; even in the tevinter imperium where mages not only roam free, but are granted special privileges and entirely run the show, there still exist templars who invoke the rite of annulment when a coven of miscreants does something especially unsavoury and have to be dealt with for the public good it seems like a pretty a pretty rough situation overall, all things considered, and maybe there aren't going to be many solutions, if any, that aren't going to be vulnerable to some kind of abuse hard counter fucked around with this message at 07:44 on Jul 26, 2021 |
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Jul 26, 2021 07:14
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pentyne posted:At some point in the next 3 years they either release a game that is at worst technically competent but merely "okay" and the fans kind of accept the glory days are past, or they keep making GBS threads the bed so much with their god-awful project management and ego tripping that EA takes the studio out back and puts it out of its misery. i dunno, i get a slightly different gist out of the article, at least in so far that it doesn't absolve too many of EA's sins but rather points out that bioware made many of its own blunders as well, mainly that: -anthem's development was bit by the same 'procedurally generated content' bug that andromeda's was, which had famously hamstrung that particular game's development as well, where this amazing new, genre-redefining technology would be developed to create something completely novel; apparently this concept was the main selling point to EA as to why anthem should get the green light and receive funding for further development (at this point the game was code-named dylan, after bob dylan, because it would be so innovative imitators would be referencing it for years to come!) -while many of these new ideas were already alarmingly ambitious, anthem was also mandated to use the frostbite engine to execute them, frosbite was a new engine that team members weren't very experienced with and frostbite also required significant retooling to be adapted for the kind of game anthem was going for because it lacked certain, basic features like inventory systems, let alone the brand new stuff the team had imagined... and also the few bioware team members who did have experience with frostbite were moved by EA to work on FIFA games and also the anthem team's access to the in-house EA frosbite specialists, people who answer questions/problems that EA-affiliated studios have, was initially severely limited because games like FIFA were deemed more deserving of this resource -this led to an agonizingly long struggle, more like a long trial-and-error, where the anthem team gradually realized many of its 'genre redefining ideas' were unfeasible with this new engine, even implementing basic features was an exercise in nail-pulling because of a lack of experience and support; bioware admits it definitely should have let the inquisition/andromeda/anthem teams cross communicate re: their experiences with frostbite but each game was deemed so different in concept from one another that everything had to be scratch-built anyway so there was no relevant overlap -because the project was so completely fixated on having these wild, new features central to the game's experience, many of the other things like story, characters, lore, visual design, environments/maps, etc were deemed downstream of it and thus completely subject to events occurring upstream, that is to say, whatever features were eventually found to be feasible through this agonizing process of trial-and-error would dictate what kind of story would be told for e.g. (like, if the player mainly struggled against procedurally created climate catastrophes as originally imagined, a story would be developed to justify that; if flying was an extensive part of the player experience, maps would have been designed to accommodate that, etc); this created an unfortunate atmosphere of ambiguity, many ideas floated, few stuck -this led to tiered development, everything hung on having certain, completely original features, so a concept game would be developed around having that feature, which would then be later scrapped as it became obvious the feature was unfeasible with the game's engine; at this point there was no central vision for anthem and that led to further ambiguity via management indecisiveness, a lot of insightful programmer comments about potential, future problems arising from certain aspects of the current build would also get lost in the shuffle... you also got weird stuff like david gaider coming into the project with ideas of 'big, complicated villains,' and the blending of sci- fi and fantasy together to create a colourful, vibrant world, but then getting laughed out because it 'lacked the originality' the game was founded and anchored upon, eventually came the spectre of a great deal of staff turn-over at all levels, from leads to entry-level programmers, and every loss hurt -eventually EA poked its head in the door and asked to see what's up, an extremely pared down prototype version was shown to them... this is not the bold, innovative game that was promised to them and the team has to go into overdrive to create another prototype to impress EA with, the anthem team decides to bring back a couple features that were originally deemed too hard to implement for the new prototype -EA likes the new prototype and wants it to become anthem, later EA hands down a hard and fast dead-line for completion, EA also makes various other demands of anthem like the inclusion of a lootbox type system and other features that synergize more with EA's vision of gaming as a service, these will also have to be added to anthem -at this point the game's development becomes a horrific crunch where many of the problems mentioned previously culminate into a labyrinthine tragedy, '[we] talk a lot about the six-year development time, but really the core gameplay loop, the story, and all the missions in the game were made in the last 12 to 16 months because of that lack of vision and total lack of leadership across the board'... so far this is basically the same problem andromeda dealt with -on top of that, as bioware consolidated all its resources to bring anthem to fruition, petty animosities arose between different bioware studios, the comments of studios experienced in online gaming were ignored by members of the more prestigious old guard who were long time vets but lacked the relevant online experience; studio veterans wax nostalgic about 'bioware magic' and how all its games seem like an awful mess until a bioware miracle happens at the last second to bring identity and cohesion to the final product; crunch becomes so intense numerous employees have to go on months-long stress leave which further amplified all the issues that EA's hard and fast deadline brought about -the project had initially promised a wide array of original new features but only a few made it into the final product (the game was also missing several of the basic features it had promised, like skill trees), the features that had made it in were concentrated mostly in the core gameplay, which was now considered sound in and of it self, but everything downstream of that suffered from the tiered development cycle leading to a tremendously lopsided game by the developers own standards; the anthem team at least felt like anthem had potential now, but a lot of the work would be ongoing, and things would depend upon favourable early reviews that would hopefully begrudgingly give anthem a pass -anthem did not review favourably at all -so we got the anthem we have today hard counter fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Nov 27, 2021 |
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Nov 27, 2021 00:26
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HIJK posted:Christ wept. i mean, if that article is accurate, that is like a carbon copy of all the calamities that befell the development of andromeda, just with a few key words swapped in and out, right down to the last minute prayer that okay, through extreme toil we finally achieved some decent core gameplay, the rest of the finished game is bland/mediocre but if the whole thing skates by with a generous 7/10 we can salvage it with dlcs or later sequels with the devs feverishly assuming just that was gonna happen because of some quasi-favourable mock reviews until reality hit 'em inquisition apparently had a similar development cycle too but somehow it came together at the last minute to win accolades that year and sell reasonably well, leading insiders to believe that kind of hell cycle was sustainable e: maybe the saving grace of inquisition was that it didn't try to create some wild new tech to re-invent the genre, the devs just focused on mastering their tools to create a more-or-less traditional bioware rpg hard counter fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Nov 27, 2021 |
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Nov 27, 2021 05:27
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chaosapiant posted:Based on the earlier previews of Inquisition, my understanding is that game came together fairly well. I remember feeling like I’d ended up with the same game I’d seen previews for and read about. yeah, according to the article, the fact that inquisition did, in fact, come together as well as it did, despite having its own troubled cycle (especially in dealing with adapting frosbite for rpgs), sowed the wind that anthem and andromeda would reap into a whirlwind because they were convinced they could pull it off too, despite both games having goals that were a lot more ambitious with what they wanted the engine to do
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Nov 27, 2021 07:40
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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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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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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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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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iirc, i think you could always just import an ultimate sacrifice warden into awakening, no shenanigans required, and this was largely intentional with the reason being that bioware didn't like the possibility that players might skip dlcs where the pc was forced dead or w/e and you'd have to control a 'stranger' given the way that a lot of the epilogues play out in da:o and da:a, i don't think there was ever a long term plan for exporting your world states to later instalments, the endgame outcomes/consequences do not seem flexible enough to allow the player to continue those stories in some way, as they were
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Dec 7, 2021 19:58
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Buschmaki posted:I think the weirdest morality thing in Origins are the ending slides between Belen and the old dude in Orzimmar, maybe I never pay enough attention because I spend that entire part of the game thinking about what a slog the deep roads are but I dont think Harrowmont (remembered his name just know because the voice of the Orzimmar town criers are burned into my brain) is portrayed as being such a rigid and dickheades traditionalist? tbf, that whole questline looks pretty gross in 2022, regardless of your choice bhelen slaughters every single political rival he has in his dwarven quasi-democratic society (in the dwarven noble background, you learn he potentially killed one brother and framed the other for the murder so he could be sole house head) even tho they agree to acknowledging him as king and pledge themselves to his rule ...in da2 bhelen continues to purge every single last family member of these rival houses, years after the fact, even after they've fled to the surface... who'll, incidentally, also gladly sacrifice as many unwilling dwarves as branka wants, in that ending ... but he's still the optimal choice, because he's just this bold visionary strongman who only breaks eggs to make omelettes, while harrowmont is kind and honorable but also a dunce, so at best he maintains a shaky status quo rife with inequality? yeesh, try fitting a binary morality system to that
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Apr 18, 2022 21:58
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as cool as despot lincoln ruthlessly murking every traitor rebel and their extended family would be, you ought to remember lincoln was a republican so in this alt-history every single democrat, down to the n-th generation, gets iced too for full autocracy in our world jeb! dot jpg is a fun meme, but in theirs it's a nightmare...
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Apr 19, 2022 06:00
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poisonpill posted:suggests a spectrum of endless possibilities! verrrry excited here we've... we've seen this before... 
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Jun 2, 2022 20:38
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i'm still of the opinion that EA top-level decisions filtering down to bioware in the most asinine way possible is responsible for most (but not all) of the current problems, but especially those with respect to crunch DA2, was by EA mandate, a proto-type for a kind of RPG can could be completed with a very rapid turn-around time because EA circa 2010 was explicitly whinging about the call of duty franchise releasing, year-after-year, these multi-million dollar bestselling games, and expressing that bioware should be aiming for similar turnaround times ... DA2's entire development was almost all intense crunch and the game was designed, from the ground-up, to make efficient use of a small pool of resources (by attacking the idea that important stories have to be world-spanning LOTR epics); DA2 turned out to be controversial, with terribly mixed success, and i would say it's a cult hit that could've been goty if it weren't so badly hamstrung DAI, was by EA mandate, compelled to use to the frostbite engine, it's awful, awful, crunch was entirely due to problems in adapting this engine for a purpose it wasn't designed for... because this entry actually received goty in 2014 its rear end-backwards cycle became normalized despite much of the talent secretly expressing that it was the worst project they ever worked on, period (they've since become a lot more vocal about its horrendous cycle) a major segment of andromeda's woes also (apparently) came from issues with frostbite, particularly with EA's disastrous resource allocation simultaneously a) depleting the bioware staff of its own frostbite veterans who were moved to the more lucrative sports division at EA, and b) withholding from bioware the resources of EA's in-house group of frosbite specialists, privileging it for the other divisions; this game had several other issues but if we're talking about crunch, hamstringing your studio like this isn't going to help workflow; the fact that EA stuck to their final deadline on andromeda, come hell-or-high-water, relegated the game to being released, hilariously half-finished, resulting in the staff facing a terrific final stretch workload with little pay-off to show for it anthem went through its own well-documented development woes, but its awful crunch also came from EA eventually handing down a hard-and-fast deadline, again resulting in a staff facing a terrific final stretch workload with zero pay-off to show for it, other than, you know, a mostly anemic title (edit: i should mention this game also experienced the exact same resource allocation problems andromeda did) now, i do understand EA coming down hard on studios going through development hell with nothing actually finished, to get the ball finally rolling again, but what i don't understand is EA not being at all flexible with deadlines on projects that are actually approaching completion that badly need the extra time.... like, you gain nothing from telling studios they have to release whatever half-baked poo poo they have, other than the studio working real hard to release some half-baked poo poo and then getting roasted for it 'bioware magic' wasn't initially code for insane crunch, it was code for games looking like badly unfinished failures until the final stretch where portions of the game, developed in isolation, finally come together to create a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts, it's only more recently where it's become short-hand for destroying your staff morale and retention with unreasonable expectations hard counter fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Jun 3, 2022 |
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Jun 3, 2022 18:19
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i think you could make a strong case for EA meddling with anthem tho; bioware, after finally developing some core gameplay it actually felt comfortably sure it could produce with the tools available, demoed that early gameplay to EA and EA hated it, they explicitly wanted something more ambitious and they refused to greenlight something so mundane in their eyes (tbf, anthem was originally sold to EA as an ambitious 'big ideas' project) to appease EA, bioware stitched together a demo with some ambitious features they had originally written-off as being too unfeasible, and that's the project EA actually greenlit, that's when the final deadline was handed down, and from that point on EA also withholding and even leeching resources from bioware certainly did not aid the project further... none of this stuff sounds very hands-off to me, at least bioware has its own issues to be sure, there's a ton of mid-level management issues in terms of project direction and cohesion that bioware needs to take responsibility for, but imho the crunch related issues seem to be coming top-down
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Jun 3, 2022 19:21
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Raygereio posted:Crunch was the "Bioware magic" long before EA came into the picture. keep in mind we're comparing the 10-12 hour workdays of the baldur's gate team on its final legs to the literally soul-crushing crunches of inquisition, andromeda and anthem, where various key staff members were taking medically mandated leaves of absences because their personal health was deteriorating so rapidly under the immense workloads placed on them, which in turn would exacerbate the issue for the remaining staff who would have to pick up the slack of leaving members, ultimately creating an awful domino-effect where staffers would sometimes simply just resign than face a crunch like this (these are all accounts from the staffers) as far as anthem goes, the exact usage of 'bioware magic' among bioware staff was that it was a kind of copium that veteran bioware staffers would spout at newer members when they expressed concerns that the project could never be completed on time given how badly unfinished it still was, the veterans would wax nostalgic about 'all projects looking unfinished until bioware magic tied the seams at the last stretch,' despite that not being a real possibility given how much work was still left Raygereio posted:Not exactly what happened. Here's a very timely video from Mark Darrah. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti7jpWhkjQA i'm already highly familiar with DA2's development issues (i still might watch the video later), but like dude, you open this by admitting that DA2's dev problems came down from EA, with just the extra caveat that bioware somehow deserved the unreasonable expectations placed on it i still remember the dev updates citing EA's stringent production requirements, while staff alumni like jennifer hepler would later reminisce about DA2 being more like a 'budget title' given the limited resources and time bioware was given to complete it Raygereio posted:Using Frostbite was Bioware's own decision. There have been numerous quotes from Bioware devs about this. i think we're drawing on very different sources for our claims, i've read multiple articles indicating that bioware had no interest in adapting an engine originally designed for first person shooters for cRPGs given the fact that this system is especially poorly compatible with RPGs, having no options for basic rpg features like inventory systems and the like (which all have to be scratch built); this engine wouldn't be the first choice of any studio developing an rpg because of this especially poor compatibility, its problems go beyond simply not being a magic engine that's super easy to work with, but that's ultimately the engine EA wanted the complains about adapting frostbite for rpgs came from the people who worked with it, and i see no reason why i, from the outside, should think the claims of these insiders are overblown Raygereio posted:The retrospectives I've read that went into some depth about ME:A's development made it quite clear that Frostbite wasn't the real issue. the last several titles have had multiple issues, many of which came from within bioware, i don't deny that certainly, but i'm mostly interested in explaining why i think such awful crunches produced such mediocre games, and i see a considerable part of this new bioware trend coming from the top-down, i've posted more detailed accounts of the various failures that led to these games being the way they were that more evenly allocated the blame when subjects like art direction, character design, story, dialogue, etc were also being critiqued hard counter fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Jun 4, 2022 |
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Jun 3, 2022 20:26
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keep in mind that while internal documentation is generally good industry practice, da:i (the first game to use frostbite) was also the first game produced under the infamous hell-crunch because of the problems with adapting that engine, where the devs first began selling their souls/health to meet hard deadlines, this period also signalled the start of the exodus from bioware, and these are not going to be conditions where you're going to see robust internal documentation when staffers are putting in 16 hour days just to make sure the bare necessities get done before the hard deadlines... i think it's unfair to expect them to, on top of what nearly crushed them, also produce such good documentation that a brand-new team working on an apparently difficult engine could get caught up to speed on internal notes alone insane resource allocation later pulling many of these now-veteran devs, who had become familiar with this engine, to work on other titles is an egregious example of the top hamstringing the bottom, i see no other way of perceiving that situation, and i don't think it's fair to expect a much better outcome than painfully relearning old lessons under these two circumstances later inflexibly requiring that the studio must absolutely honour a hard deadline (especially in anthem's case) when the studio did eventually manage to produce some solid core gameplay, but gameplay nested within otherwise anemic games, seems like bad policy, especially given that the devs believed that just a few more months of work might've filled out the weaker sections... bioware employees themselves admit to releasing games they weren't fully comfortable with just to hit EA's deadlines, and they let themselves be soothed by internal reviewing that suggested they might pass with a 7 that could be later fixed with updates and DLC (this didn't happen, early reviews were awful and very limited updates to fix issues were greenlit, the projects were eventually scrapped) i see these particular issues as all rolling into one another, and they come from the top down imho, but we might have to agree to disagree on this one, who knows, maybe bioware is at least half to blame for its insane workflow problems bioware for sure has other issues (its fetish for procedurally generated content that the engine can't manage feasibly nearly killed them twice) but like, we can't ignore this stuff when it comes to considering what caused the hellish crunches, even stuff like the studio faffing about with an unfamiliar engine for years and years, seeing whether or not it can do the latest Big Idea, seems like a natural extension of the last big game being such a mess that you are now lacking several veterans, internal documentation, and consistent internal direction that'll rapidly tell you what it can and can't do
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Jun 4, 2022 00:47
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very fair imho i know i'm super biased when it comes to EA, definitely take me with a pile of salt, it's just that it has a reputation for withering its studios and i dislike that trend continuing with bioware 
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Jun 4, 2022 01:23
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Raygereio posted:It is kind of ironic that EA seemed to have went with a less heavy handed approach with Bioware only for it to become clear that a heavy handed manager is kind of what Bioware needed. while i don't doubt that even an 8 hr day can be agonizing in a toxic work environment and will certainly lead to major burnout down the line, i feel like we're too easily writing off the particularly horrendous experiences the modern bioware game devs themselves claimed to have experienced during this time (well collaborated across multiple sources), and the awfulness of these periods is empirically manifest in the abysmal employee retention rates across all levels of talent in comparison to previous years, something particularly strange was going on here for sure it's absolutely true that game development isn't what it was in the 90s and 00s what with development tools becoming increasingly complex and AAA games being generally harder to produce your point here that 'instead of accepting it [hell-crunch?] as just part of the job, developers are more open about how hosed up crunch is' creates a situation where we have no way of discerning the quality of one workplace from another by considering the claims of its employees, because we can always just assume that older devs were simply quietly enduring their trials instead burning out and complaining like the modern devs... i don't think this is a fair point to make, but i can at least understand being skeptical of how great a place olde bioware was to work at e: i suppose we'll have to agree to disagree about the reliability of modern bioware employees, but it just seems like we're ignoring their experiences here hard counter fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Jun 4, 2022 |
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Jun 4, 2022 15:50
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the black city is a fade entity that's always there, floating ominously in the sky that exists in everyone's (minus dwarves) dreamscape
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Jun 10, 2022 21:47
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Coquito Ergo Sum posted:Oh, alright. I thought that was just like a normal human city that people just like, go to. it still could be, we've never seen it but the whole country of tevinter is probably a lot like a tower town full of mages and wizards doing weird stuff openly all the time it's just that there definitely is a notable floating city already in the lore that's a very prominent part of the setting
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Jun 12, 2022 20:21
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i think most wardens act as darkspawn kill machines between blights, since those guys are always a threat (but not an apocalyptic one) and need frequent culling and/or otherwise make frequent trips to the deeproads for ~mysterious reasons~ in da2 you get letters from carver or bethany if they joined the wardens and they complain a lot about the horrible, thankless, nightmare work they do that warden legends never mention, carver seems to think it kinda owns while bethany seems to teeter on the edge of sanity
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Jun 18, 2022 00:27
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VostokProgram posted:Is it impossible? I'm pretty sure if you get him into the wardens he will be on good terms with you in the final act. iirc at the start of the game hawke has like a ~3/4ths maxed out friendship bar with bethany, while also having a ~3/4ths maxed out rivalry bar with carver you almost always end up in a permanent friendship with bethany and a rivalry with carver unless you know exactly how to game the relationship(s) at every chance, in which case you might make carver a friend and bethany a rival with dlc; there are some dialogue differences if you manage it and i bet they're among the most rarely seen in the game in da2 you can still be 'on good terms' with someone in a rivalry, the dialogue is just cattier; you're still comrades & allies but your rivals usually try to show hawke up and more aggressively point out hawke's (many) mistakes
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Jun 18, 2022 22:16
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bethany's not really a blood thirsty adventuring type iirc she's a pleasant, religious lady who likes keeping her head down, taking care of people and doing good deeds; even tho the kirkwall circle is a piece of crap she does well there because she starts reading books, mentoring young mages and she gets to hang around with also-theoretically-religious templars (well, the half of them who weren't insane bigots) in contrast, putting her with the grey wardens really doesn't sit well with her, it doesn't jive with who she is
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Jun 19, 2022 04:32
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prinze's ego is kinda notorious within show business - he's pretty talented but he, himself's known for creating drama and burning bridges for the pettiest slights and i've learned to take his comments with a grain of salt i think he might be egging on the fans a bit there
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Jul 1, 2022 19:05
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CottonWolf posted:Yeah. It showed a shocking lack of self-awareness on BioWare’s part when they set up a Jew/Nazi analogy for the mages/Templars and it didn’t occur to them that maybe they shouldn’t make it look like the Nazi analogue has a point. i dunno... even in, like, a prison system where every inmate has theoretically done something ignoble enough to warrant incarceration, jailers can still go too far if they abuse, molest, lobotomize, murder, etc their charges in ways that closely parallel irl death camps; i think that's less comparing the inmates to jews and more like comparing the jailers to fascists, but ymmv i can see this situation actually having a golden mean where mages get some kind of xavier's school for gifted youngsters where attendance/outside monitoring is mandatory, for everyone's safety, but the headmasters aren't lovely, the problem is NikkolasKing posted:you could argue such power disparity and discrimination inevitably leads to scumbags
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Jul 2, 2022 21:16
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Admiral Ray posted:There's also an entire extant nation that showcases the problems with mages. Sure, mages are just humans, but humans with social power are often monsters. Now give them direct power over physical reality and it's even worse! the funny thing is that tevinter still has a chantry and templars, but their own version that's primarily under the control of the magisters themselves, who are both all mages and culturally more willing to tolerate various moral catastrophes whether it's blood magic, possession, magical experimentation on slaves, etc so long as whatever is happening is expedient for enough important people they still invoke the rite of annulment frequently there
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Jul 4, 2022 16:48
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i mean, tevinter sounds a lot like it is rife with unchecked blood magic, possession, abuse of slaves, holodeck episode-esque reality failures, etc it's just that the mages already completely control that society, non-mages are second class citizens at best (there's also a tier of slaves), so the magisters have a vested interested in keeping their gravy train going
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Jul 4, 2022 19:39
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