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Matt516

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Posts posted by Matt516

  1. So I found the thieves before ever speaking to anyone from House Doemenel. Killed them, took the letter.

     

    Then I proceeded to do a bunch of other quests.

     

    Then I went to talk to the head of the Doemenels. I did not tell him about the letter right away, even though there was a dialogue option to do so. Instead, I asked him about the letter, the thieves, etc. After this conversation tree, I have no option to give him the letter. Zip. Nada. I talk to him, he says "have you procured the letter?", and my only option is "I'm still looking for it", even though I have it.

     

     

    EDIT: A little more info. This appears to happen specifically if you ask Abrecan for an invitation before giving him the letter. This appears to lock the conversation tree out of giving him the letter, even if I already have the letter.

  2. Is someone really using traps ? Before 1.05 they were highly situational. How often was a real chance to place traps effectively? Now after 1.05 there is no point of placing them at all. 

     

    I think that's kind of the point the OP is making.. traps were highly situational at best before 1.05, so nerfing them to make them even less likely to be used seems a bit odd.

  3.  

    I too found the Hard lvl way too easy. The first part of the game was perfect. I then made the mistake of doing the Dungeon lvls early on now the main quest has been a joke. I go from battle to battle just clicking the men to attack and waiting for the fight to end. I'm at a point where I think I have to stop until it's fixed. It's an amazing game that needs some tweaking. Looking forward to a major overhaul of the difficulty lvls.

     

    I think there should be another game mode between hard and path of the damned, that implements the stat increase of PotD, but at the creature selection of hard.

     

    Currently, the gap between 'hard' and 'path of the damned' is absurd.

     

     

    Surely it'd be much better to have the creature selection of PotD with the stats of Hard? Since PotD is the only difficulty that changes stats, and it kinda screws up a lot of the balance of the game?

  4. It's not that the level cap is too low, it's that there's too much XP in the game. The vast majority of the combat encounters in the game become really really easy once you hit lvl 12 - increasing the cap would just make this problem worse. They need to make it harder to get there instead.

     

    I know that may sound like a pedantic distinction - but it's important. :p

  5.  

     

    Both images are put together as if they are in the same context.

     

    One is from the prologue and the other is from the end of the game. One is glitched, the other isn't. Not to mention that both are purposefully picked to skewer the image of "New RPGs". DA2 has voiced dialogue, and that dialogue is much, much more than the three word answers of the wheel.

    Most of which is the same regardless of which choice you made, it just changes the first sentence you say in that particular part.

    Yeah - there's no denying that there's an inverse relationship between amount of voice acting and variety in dialogue. That tradeoff may be worth it for some people and some games, but it's definitely a tradeoff.

  6. About the same or a little less. They do need to come up with a more comfortable approach so that written descriptions don't fight with voice-acted texts for the player's attention.

     

    Yeah - the IE games generally only had the first sentence of a dialogue voiced, or very important moments. I tend to prefer that approach - it lets me get a good idea of how the character sounds and then I can read the rest at my own pace (which is generally faster than spoken) without being distracted. Having VO pop in and out of conversations, bypassing descriptions, etc. is really jarring and takes away from the "reading a book" feel I loved so much in Planescape: Torment. The old dwarf lady conversation in the first town was particularly guilty of this, I thought. It was more of a chore than a joy to go through that dialogue for whatever reason. :/

  7.  

     

     

     

     

    Obsidian wanted $20 million from Atari to make Baldur's Gate 3. People often forget that, yes, Obsidian got nearly $4m and raised $6m, but that's nothing for a tech project.

    A BG3 that was likely a AAA, fully voiced, 3D game for PC and Console.

     

    Yeah, but if that's what they thought they needed to make the game, I don't really see the issue here.

     

    The issue is that people who make thing professionally sometimes get, unavoidably, discconected from what people think by the echo chamber of the general games industry at large.

     

    Its simply an assumed thing sometimes that because everyone is doing VA that its always the next thing to put resources towards.  But in reality as this poll shows, and I am pretty certain a very large sample size would only swing it 10% or so, a assumption that more VA would be good if we only had the money is probably less well founded than may be generally thought.  

     

    Reviewers rave about VA, other games spend tons of money on it, its a naturally forming self-reinforced misconception.  Most people playing RPGs or Indie of various stipes simply don't care that much or only care in very specific instances.  Reviewers can rave all they like about it, but the audience in general only raves about very particular VA performances in very particular sequences and they are smart enough to know this(on some level often not entirely consciously formed). 

     

    We're talking about the guys that brought us Pillars. I'd be with you if it was Atari going "hey, here's $20 million", but it wasn't. 

     

     

    Its not about what they think about VA.  Its about what they think we think about VA.

     

    The prevailing industry meme is that VA will bring in more rubes, oops, I mean broaden your appeal.  Obsidian is not immune to prevailing opinion.  No one is.  They may even think its complete BS but simply feel its the "safer" choice business-wise since there is not really anything solid to hang their hat on.

     

     

    That's really what I'm getting at with this poll. I don't expect Obsidian to look at the poll results and be like "ok, that's what we'll do now!". That would be hilariously idiotic. They're gonna make design decisions based on their own preference structure, which is probably some balance of artistic choices, business concerns, and practical considerations. As well they should.

     

    But if our opinion (that of the forum-goers, I mean) does factor into those decisions, I figured it could be helpful to make sure they've got a good idea of what that is. :)

    • Like 1
  8. Wow, really?

     

    All the "More VO" options are paired with "even though it will take away from other parts of the game"?

     

    Really?

     

     

    Note the assumption baked into the question. The poll is very clearly framed as "IF this is true, then what do you think?".

     

    If that's not true (though I don't really see how it could possibly not be true - there's only X dollars to make the game and every dollar spent on Y feature is a dollar that can't be spent on any other feature), then it's a moot point. As I said, I'm not primarily interested in people's opinions on VO in a vacuum, but their opinions on VO GIVEN the financial realities of things.

     

    So no, I don't see a problem with the poll. I've actually edited it a few times to remove hyperbolic or biased language, trying to keep only the factual language. If you know something about Obsidian's financials that the rest of us don't know, feel free to tell us though. :p

    • Like 1
  9. Howdy all.

     

    After seeing BAdler's comment about A) the exorbitant cost of VO and B) potentially increasing the amount of VO in the future... and then seeing the very-nearly-unanimous response of "no, you really don't need to do that", it occurred to me that it's possible Obsidian thinks a lot more people want VO than actually want it. That said, this post is an uber-small sample size. But if... IF most of the community wants the same amount (or less) VO in the sequels.. and BAdler/the rest of Obsidian aren't aware of this... that could be a problem.

     

    So I made a poll. I know it'll probably still be a small sample size as well, but I figured it couldn't hurt to give Obsidian a little bit more information. Because if they could save money on VO in the future, and instead use that money to make future games more content-rich and feature-complete... well, that'd just be dandy.

     

    So here's my poll. Cast your vote. I want to know what the community thinks. :)

    http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/78909-how-much-would-you-like-to-see-spent-on-voice-acting-in-the-sequel/

  10. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/78825-the-reason-why-a-lot-of-va-isnt-voiced/?p=1680668

     

    After I made the post linked above, and observed the conversation that ensued for a while, I started thinking... VO is quite expensive. Like... really expensive. And if we assume that a game development studio has a given amount of money allocated to a game, say X dollars... then it follows that any money spent on VO is by necessity money that can't be spent elsewhere. That's how money works.

     

    My own personal preference is that games like this have some VO, but not a huge amount. Think "original BG and Torment" levels of VO, not "BG:EE or modern RPGs" levels. I think a small amount of VO adds a huge amount of characterization and immersion to the world - but that any more than that isn't worth the money it costs. Again, any money spent on VO is money that isn't spent on more talents, areas, quests, characters, QA... etc. So I'd prefer that a PoE expansion or PoE 2 have some VO, but not quite as much as PoE and certainly not more. I'd prefer to see that development money spent elsewhere.

     

    That's just my personal preference. And although we could (and probably will, knowing this forum ;) ) have a protracted discussion about the pros and cons of VO, that's not my main purpose in making this post. I just want to see what the community thinks.

     

    Because although it's entirely possible that most people want more VO or Obsidian has their own strategy/design goals/marketing research and doesn't really care what a forum poll says... it's also possible that most people don't want more VO and Obsidian doesn't actually realize that. So... although the chances of that second scenario are probably pretty small, I figured I might as well check. Why not? All this can do is give Obsidian more information, which is good for everyone. :)

     

    In the post I linked above, it seemed like the vast majority of public opinion was on the "nah, don't spend more money on VO" side - but then again the people who actually post on the forum are a small subset of the people who read it, so I'm curious what the poll will say. So tell us - what do you think Obsidian should prioritize in the future? More money on VO, or no?

    • Like 2
  11. I honestly can't hear this. I'm not saying it isn't an issue for some people, but I'm curious to know if it's an actual audio issue, or if the voice actress in question simply has a sibilant 's'. If it's the latter, can it be fixed through post-processing? I'm no audiophile, I'm just asking for personal knowledge.

    Well whether it's the voice actor's fault or that of the recording equipment, it's still an "audio issue" haha. Either way, the end result (the audio files) has a sibilance problem.

     

    Whatever the cause, it *should* be fixable in post. I don't have enough knowledge to say exactly how to do it, but I'm confident enough in my limited knowledge to say that it *can* be done. (anyone whose knowledge exceeds mine, feel free to chime in with agreement or correction)

  12.  

    • Grieving Mother's Perception and Intellect scores have been switched.

        My save version is 1.04 and Grieving Mother still has 17 perception. Is this change only applied to new saves?

     

     

    Probably. That's how it was the last time they rebalanced them. You can always change them with the IE mod (if it works with this new version). :)

  13. This is incorrect. Due to the limited funding the project had, we were unable to fully voice the entire game. There were close to 25,000 lines of dialog written for the game. Our original VO budget was for about 6,000 lines. We went over budget a bit, but not by a large amount.

     

    To fully voice everything we would have needed about four times the original budget. To do that we would have needed to reduce scope in other areas to make up the cost.

     

    That said, in the future we will probably try to do what we can to get more voice acting budget.

     

    I'd personally say: don't worry about it. This level of VO is just about right, even on the high side for this kind of game. If you can get more funding, put it into more quests/abilities/areas/QA instead!! :)

    • Like 6
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