Dragon Age 4 is up to a bad start

[Zogarth]

Its not at all movies do it all the time with alternative timelines and such. It's a historical event but we change them in cinema all the time. just nah people would have bitched cause things changes. Tracers and Clementine are two perfect examples. There will be people who bitch regardless about certain changes to games and I just can't be hypocrite about it. Yea but that's because people are hypocrites which was my point.

Wolfestein II is a great example of just totally misrepresenting history but almost nobody cared. The main character of Wolfenstein doesn't exist in history period but nobody fucking cares.

Once again Clementine romance options and tracer being homosexual are two good examples. They were handled perfectly in my opinion. You have to go outside of the game to find about 90% of the characters romances in Overwatch. Except Windowmaker because her romance is important to the story. Clementine had a gay romance option in a player choice and story driven game where her father nor lee forced any relationship expectations on to her. and that triggered people.

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Did you even read any of my post? Wolfenstein is not marketed as a historic game, depicting actual events that happened during WW2. BF5 did. No one cares if you change history if you say that is what you are doing. But if you act like what you are doing is actual history, and that what you show really happened, don't fuck with the source material. And I have no idea who the hell you are talking about that cares about Tracer and Clementile, outside of incel forums and extremists online. I am talking about actual people here, not internet extremists. People will always bitch about something, but if you move a political viewpoint too much to one side, or you try to force through certain agendas, you piss off way more people than that small majority who bitches at everything. And this is on both sides of the spectrum, it has nothing to do with bigotry or being insensitive or whatever you wanna call it.

[Asrialol]

Compared to DA2, yes. But it is nowhere close to origins.

What did Origins do so greatly, exactly? Horrible gameplay / controls / animations, bland skill trees / equipment, the illusion of "your choices matters" when, in fact, only 3-4 actually do, and let's not forget the overused story.

I loved DA:O by the way, and also DA:I. The latter is a great game, but it has its flaws - which Origins also do, obviously.

At least that's what I feel.

[Varvara Spiros Gelashvili]

Did you even read any of my post? Wolfenstein is not marketed as a historic game, depicting actual events that happened during WW2. BF5 did. No one cares if you change history if you say that is what you are doing. But if you act like what you are doing is actual history, and that what you show really happened, don't fuck with the source material. And I have no idea who the hell you are talking about that cares about Tracer and Clementile, outside of incel forums and extremists online. I am talking about actual people here, not internet extremists. People will always bitch about something, but if you move a political viewpoint too much to one side, or you try to force through certain agendas, you piss off way more people than that small majority who bitches at everything. And this is on both sides of the spectrum, it has nothing to do with bigotry or being insensitive or whatever you wanna call it.

Can you show me example of the game being marketed as historically accurate? Cause I saw a bunch of people running around with prosthetics arms and shit... It was here and the blizzard officlals forums. The blizzard community was split over tracers. The walking dead was mostly a youtube and reddit thing.

I can just watch the trailer and see so many histoical inaccuracies that anyone who was confused should feel bad for being so goddamn dumb.

[Cosmic Janitor]

At some point I need to play 2 for my perfect world state having heard nothing good about it I expect it to be painful.

Inquisition already used the online thing where you could just set your world state in a browser. While I like the story, if that isn't enough to get you through it the web version should suffice.

[derpkitteh]

At some point I need to play 2 for my perfect world state having heard nothing good about it I expect it to be painful.

it's not quite as bad as people make it out to be.

the worst two bits i can think of is the ruining of anders as a character, and the reusing of zones is really really bad.

[Zogarth]

Can you show me example of the game being marketed as historically accurate? Cause I saw a bunch of people running around with prosthetics arms and shit... It was here and the blizzard officlals forums. The blizzard community was split over tracers. The walking dead was mostly a youtube and reddit thing.

I can just watch the trailer and see so many histoical inaccuracies that anyone who was confused should feel bad for being so goddamn dumb.

"Battlefield 5 will be set in World War II, focusing on “the unseen locations” of that conflict." - clearly saying that the game will tell actual stories of the conflict. (https://www.polygon.com/2018/5/23/17...ivestream-2018). And people did get pissed at the trailer, because people expected historical accuracy just due to the prior games showing actual wars, like BF1942 and Vietnam.

Another one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_c...&v=Yg5AOmEv6tQ (1:01:30-1:02:00 or so). "We are going back to the warstoriries, telling war stories of men and women who changed history", and "wanna take them through a journey of WW2".

They constantly described it as an "Authentic WW2 experience". While they had a lot of buzzwords and non-descriptive statements, they must have fucked up somewhere for so many to get the understanding, even if that is a misunderstanding, that the game was trying to be historically accurate. And even if they never said it did, they did base a lot of events on actual historical events, but purposefully leaving aspects out, or changing them to fit an agenda. If EA had just said "Battlefield 5: an alternate history WW2", no one would care. They could even go further with their game.

Also, in the same video from before, at 1:07:00, they talk more about the historical elements. "allowing you to witness the second world war through the men and women who changed the world". And straight after that they talked about the story of the Norweigan resistance fighter, a story they changed MASSIVELY. They keep talking about how they show us history, but they are not.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

You don't need to play origins or DA2 for that, you can't import saves in Inquisition, you have to use the world editor.

I know you don’t have to I orginally beat inquisition with a custom world state but I like going though the games my self so when I build another one I know the extent of the events.

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Inquisition already used the online thing where you could just set your world state in a browser. While I like the story, if that isn't enough to get you through it the web version should suffice.

Story’s pretty much the only reason I’d want to do it I mean I didn’t go back to origins after I beat inquisition for its thrilling game play.

[Nurasu]

You can never please the moral outrage crowd. Its not about "being better" or whatever "narrative signal boosting" they are at this time. Its about a smug feeling that lets them feel being woker than thou and you knowing and recognising they are higher on the pyramid of wokedom. Companies like Bioware can desperately try and end up with shit in andromeda like "HELLO I AM TRANS, BEEP BOOP TRANSBOT OPERATION RUNNING. FORGET TALKING LIKE REAL PEOPLE I AM MANIC PIXIE TRANS GIRL WHO IS MEETING YOU FOR THE FIRST TIME AND TRANS PEOPLE DONT BEHAVE LIKE NORMAL HUMANS BEEP BOP BOP" because they have no concept of subtlety as many of younger writers treat fiction like a vector for their soapbox and they are about to let you know how it all really is because like a tween with a myspace blog or a flat earthers youtube thesis they have the true secret knowledge we sheeple lack and with outrage culture you have to keep chasing the woke dragon because if you dont meet the ever shifting standards that will never be good enough and they turn on and cannibalise each other because "the worst traitors of all are those that dare to disbelieve" combined with "no bad tactics, only bad targets". The moment 'good video game' became a secondary objective to brownie points with the woke cult was the moment bioware started to go down the toilet.

And comparatively then you have fantastic games like The Missing by Swery that deals with things like transgender characters and shock of shocks they are treated like human beings and not, ironically considering bioware, fucking elves out of middle earth with a toxic hair colour or something and lo and behold they work because they aren't tokens for brownie points at best. But thats the difference when companies want to tell a story versus a company that i have no doubt thinks minority character=total AT field to defend against criticism because now you can call anyone who dares to besmirch your projects name a bigot. Anyone who thinks EA hasn't been riding that train this entire gen is ironically not 'woke' to the cynical corporate bullshit that sees an easy, volatile crowd of free brand defenders to hide behind. Just remember to get your season pass and funpay minibuys, wouldn't want to look like a bigot would you?

I can't wait to come back to this when DA4 is as much or more of a critical and commercial success as Inquisition. What absolute drivel, even for someone "anti-SJW". You're so "woke" you can see right through EA hiding their shitty sales practices behind teh gayz.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Story’s pretty much the only reason I’d want to do it I mean I didn’t go back to origins after I beat inquisition for its thrilling game play.

It's the story of a refugee family's rise to fame in 3.5 acts and a bit extra in the DLC that sets up DA:I. If you have no super hardcore aversion to not being able to play a dwarf or elf then the story was good enough. The central event surrounding Anders was a bit forced, but if you can accept that the writing is pretty realistic in that you can't control absolutely every outcome it's bearable enough (and at the very end of the game). The major issues objectively were the gameplay and the shortcuts the devs took. But I might be biased as I just loved the voice actress of merril . ugh scratch that, I just rewatched some parts. They didn't age as well as I remembered.

[Edge-]

Companies like Bioware can desperately try and end up with shit in andromeda like "HELLO I AM TRANS, BEEP BOOP TRANSBOT OPERATION RUNNING. FORGET TALKING LIKE REAL PEOPLE I AM MANIC PIXIE TRANS GIRL WHO IS MEETING YOU FOR THE FIRST TIME AND TRANS PEOPLE DONT BEHAVE LIKE NORMAL HUMANS BEEP BOP BOP"

Except that's a result of poor writing more than anything else, and it's something they fixed because they agreed that it was shit writing in that instance. IMO BW have never really earned the heavy praise for their writing, and this is simply a result of their average and uneven writing (with some great moments for sure) and what happens when a support studio who don't have the leadership to helm a game are given a game to helm and drop the ball.

Oh heavens, their games have diverse casts and sometimes they're written as poorly as their non-diverse cast. It's just interesting to see that the poor writing for diverse case always blamed on "MUH DIVERSITY" while the poor writing for everyone else is treated simply as poor writing.

It was also grossly overblown as it was a single line from a side-character that you never actually needed to talk to and could have avoided. But of course like with Krem, folks blew it way out of proportion and made it a huge deal out of it. I played after the updated dialogue and saw the updated text and it was fine, with her desire to strike out as a new "person" being part of her motivation for going to Andromeda.

[Nurasu]

I know you don’t have to I orginally beat inquisition with a custom world state but I like going though the games my self so when I build another one I know the extent of the events.

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Story’s pretty much the only reason I’d want to do it I mean I didn’t go back to origins after I beat inquisition for its thrilling game play.

The story moves slowly in DA2, in my opinion, but mods fix pretty much any UI issue I might have had with it. Once you get over the fact the environments are reused, it actually makes the playthrough faster cause you obviously know where to go for every cave, etc. :P Overall, the politics and plot twists are fantastically done; the game could have been a real masterpiece.

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Except that's a result of poor writing more than anything else, and it's something they fixed because they agreed that it was shit writing in that instance. IMO BW have never really earned the heavy praise for their writing, and this is simply a result of their average and uneven writing (with some great moments for sure) and what happens when a support studio who don't have the leadership to helm a game are given a game to helm and drop the ball.

Oh heavens, their games have diverse casts and sometimes they're written as poorly as their non-diverse cast. It's just interesting to see that the poor writing for diverse case always blamed on "MUH DIVERSITY" while the poor writing for everyone else is treated simply as poor writing.

It was also grossly overblown as it was a single line from a side-character that you never actually needed to talk to and could have avoided. But of course like with Krem, folks blew it way out of proportion and made it a huge deal out of it. I played after the updated dialogue and saw the updated text and it was fine, with her desire to strike out as a new "person" being part of her motivation for going to Andromeda.

This exactly - the dialogue in Andromeda was nothing to write home about in any sense. Why people zero in on the diversity aspects is beyond me. I believe they rewrote and reanimated nearly all of the dialogue in the game if I remember right. It's a wonder they pulled it off, but what they pulled off was no wonder...

[Edge-]

This exactly - the dialogue in Andromeda was nothing to write home about in any sense. Why people zero in on the diversity aspects is beyond me. I believe they rewrote and reanimated nearly all of the dialogue in the game if I remember right. It's a wonder they pulled it off, but what they pulled off was no wonder...

They updated some of the dialogue but I don't think it was too much of it, but I think almost all the cutscenes received some touchup work to improve them (it wasn't heavy, but it helped). And they needed to do all that post-launch work just to get the game into a decent shape, because holy hell were they getting raked over the coals for it.

[Cosmic Janitor]

This exactly - the dialogue in Andromeda was nothing to write home about in any sense. Why people zero in on the diversity aspects is beyond me. I believe they rewrote and reanimated nearly all of the dialogue in the game if I remember right. It's a wonder they pulled it off, but what they pulled off was no wonder...

I think most of the complaints (knowingly or not) from that direction stem from the way they managed to make almost all female characters look ugly beyond saving. Especially in the department of straight love interests for male characters you essentially had the choice between the ugliest asari ever, that for all intends and purposes probably has a degnerate gene disease like the asari version of down syndrome. Then you had a wannabe garrus that wasn't even close the original. And lastly your typical hard ass female soldir trope with buzz cut and what amounts to an asari-yuri complex.

I guess many people have issues to look past the flat writing for these characters when their pixel waifu isn't even attractive.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

I think most of the complaints (knowingly or not) from that direction stem from the way they managed to make almost all female characters look ugly beyond saving. Especially in the department of straight love interests for male characters you essentially had the choice between the ugliest asari ever, that for all intends and purposes probably has a degnerate gene disease like the asari version of down syndrome. Then you had a wannabe garrus that wasn't even close the original. And lastly your typical hard ass female soldir trope with buzz cut and what amounts to an asari-yuri complex.

I guess many people have issues to look past the flat writing for these characters when their pixel waifu isn't even attractive.

The Asari in Andromeda didn't bother me(Minus the whole "ME LIKE NEW THINGS") I liked how she looked. Facial animations of every asari....needed fixing and pretty much all species but that's a given. I never understood the rage of for ME:A it's a fun romp.

[Edge-]

I guess many people have issues to look past the flat writing for these characters when their pixel waifu isn't even attractive.

That's a super fair point - but it's also an issue plaguing BW games for a while. They've always seemed to struggle making attractive characters outside the default player character (usually) and one or two characters that are usually specifically designed to be the "sexier" ones.

[Nurasu]

They updated some of the dialogue but I don't think it was too much of it, but I think almost all the cutscenes received some touchup work to improve them (it wasn't heavy, but it helped). And they needed to do all that post-launch work just to get the game into a decent shape, because holy hell were they getting raked over the coals for it.

I guess I was just thinking of the writing starting too late and then them stretching the animations over the dialogues with their auto-animator or whatever it's called.

The story in particular wasn’t where it needed to be, four sources said, because the creative team had spent so much time talking about high-level ideas during pre-production. Many of those core ideas had persisted, like the main character, Ryder; SAM, the artificial intelligence that melds with Ryder; and the final sequence on Meridian. But most of the quests and dialogue needed to be designed and written. “What you see [in the final game] is writing that has been done in the past two years rather than the full five years of writing,” said a developer on the game. “The writing team—writing the characters and everything—was unleashed too late, just because of too many discussions about the high-level direction.”

“If the story is locked and writing is locked 18 months out, then at that point you know what the scenes are gonna be, you can do up your storyboards, send that to outsourcer and they’ll send you back a finished scene,” said one developer. “But with the [writing and design] teams still working until very late in the process, that foundation shifts so much that it makes it very difficult to rely on outsourcing.”

I think most of the complaints (knowingly or not) from that direction stem from the way they managed to make almost all female characters look ugly beyond saving. Especially in the department of straight love interests for male characters you essentially had the choice between the ugliest asari ever, that for all intends and purposes probably has a degnerate gene disease like the asari version of down syndrome. Then you had a wannabe garrus that wasn't even close the original. And lastly your typical hard ass female soldir trope with buzz cut and what amounts to an asari-yuri complex.

I guess many people have issues to look past the flat writing for these characters when their pixel waifu isn't even attractive.

I think that had more to do with using Frostbite than any deliberate design choice; their initial models and concept art are pretty good, then something happened about halfway through. IMO males and females both look like potatoes compared to ME3. Also the crew member Asari was the only Asari that actually had a unique face in the whole game; who knows what they could have done to some of the others if they had time :P xD

[Edge-]

I guess I was just thinking of the writing starting too late and then them stretching the animations over the dialogues with their auto-animator or whatever it's called.

Yeah, they had an algorithm or something do the first pass at animations but...apparently never properly staffed up with animators to do proper manual passes, which is what all the post-launch work was.

I think that had more to do with using Frostbite than any deliberate design choice; their initial models and concept art are pretty good, then something happened about halfway through. IMO males and females both look like potatoes compared to ME3.

It's not, it's an issue with BW's art direction and characters in general. DICE can make characters look incredible (and very attractive) as we've seen in Battlefield/Battlefront/Mirror's Edge, and we can say the same across other developers as just about every major EA game runs on Frostbite now.

[zealo]

This exactly - the dialogue in Andromeda was nothing to write home about in any sense. Why people zero in on the diversity aspects is beyond me. I believe they rewrote and reanimated nearly all of the dialogue in the game if I remember right. It's a wonder they pulled it off, but what they pulled off was no wonder...

The patching Andromeda got wasn't extensive enough for that much dialogue and animations to get touched up. They fixed some of it that was more front and centre to the opening stages and core path of the game, but by and large it is still the exact same experience as it was in it's release month, just with less bugs and glitches.

[Nurasu]

Yeah, they had an algorithm or something do the first pass at animations but...apparently never properly staffed up with animators to do proper manual passes, which is what all the post-launch work was.



It's not, it's an issue with BW's art direction and characters in general. DICE can make characters look incredible (and very attractive) as we've seen in Battlefield/Battlefront/Mirror's Edge, and we can say the same across other developers as just about every major EA game runs on Frostbite now.

Oh absolutely, I don't think it's a limitation of the engine, but rather Bioware's ability to use it at the last minute. I think their character designs on Unreal looked just fine, if not still a little potatoe-ey.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Oh absolutely, I don't think it's a limitation of the engine, but rather Bioware's ability to use it at the last minute. I think their character designs on Unreal looked just fine, if not still a little potatoe-ey.

I mean we had quite a few insider reports that stated that the change to frostbite broke the camel's back. They had to add so much shit to make it work and had nowhere near enough help from the main studio to get it going apparently before the final production stages. The whole face thing has been deconstructed to death and we know they failed to employ even simpe techniques like not go for the "full deer in the headlight open eyes" to make it look less uncanny.

I actually had quite a few entertaining hours with the game. Sadly EA completely shat the bed and even canceled the DLC.