Dragon Age

[Wrath of Dagon]

That's OK, there won't be any real games next generation, just online free to plays.

[Monte Carlo]

More automation is the answer! We're on our way to semi-interactive movies.

 

Chris Priestly's comments are quite revealing, Bio is obviously out to save the gamer from himself. Then again, remember the original Dungeon Siege, the world's first game that doubled as a screensaver? They clearly realised that gamers in fact wanted a game that demanded the same input as watching a fish-tank. Even NWN2, if you leave the 'AI' on, will do a pretty similar trick, dumping every decent spell on that incalcitrant goblin archer that had the temerity to lurk about at the back.

 

I'm guessing Dragon Age's AI will be similar. TBH, the industry / customer insistence on 3D perspective that you can zoom out of doesn't help, I know isometric is dead but that view at least gives you some appreciation of what's going on.

 

The Total War series engine is the only game I've ever played where the engine allows you to appreciate toe-to-toe closeness to truly tactical apprecation of the battle. If you can do it with thousands of troops why can't you do it with a party of six and a couple of monsters?

[alanschu]

Bio is obviously out to save the gamer from himself.

 

They clearly aren't, based on his comment. If they were, the fact that you can severely cripple your build in Dragon Age wouldn't be possible.

[Volourn]

If you use party AI in DA, you miss the point. It's not menat to be played that way. It's meant to be played with the player controlling all characters in the party. Same with the BGs, IWDs, etc.

Edited July 20, 2009 by Volourn

[Maria Caliban]

I prefer the ME method where I didn't have to control individual party members 80% of the time.

[alanschu]

You can pretty much play the game either way.

[Syraxis]

You can pretty much play the game either way.

 

Sounds good unless the AI is dumb enough to completely void the purpose, i.e. tank getting beaten badly while the healer casts buffs on him/herself mid-fight.

[Dakar]

I personally think only controlling your character is better for role playing. I like having autonomous characters that I don't control their every move and simply control mine and hope they do their job.

[alanschu]

I am actually pretty indifferent. Though when AI makes sloppy decisions I tend to lean towards manual control. Effective AI party members is good fun though.

[Aristes]

I've always really hated the 'role-playing' argument. That's not a pointed statement aimed at you, Dakar. I'm speaking kind of generally.

 

The problem is that the AI is just plain stupid. The best AI run party does not make good decisions. When I role-play, the people there might make mistakes, but they're also clever and I can come up with complex tactics and strategies. That is simply not possible with the AI controlling the other members of the party. Now, if you get a bunch of new players, I'm sure your results in combat won't be much better than an AI controlled party, if at all. However, with folks who know how to play their characters, you'll fare significantly better with other players than with AI control.

 

The other thing is that the role playing aspect has so much to do with the player interactions which is simply absent from a single player cRPG. I mean, you would really expect that each of the characters would work in his own self-interest and according to his personal motives. For some of them, that means supporting the group and sharing resources. For others that means striving to take or control as much of the loot as possible. The AI fails even more dismally as regards this sort of interaction than it falls short on the combat front.

 

Hey, we've got an imperfect medium, but it's a trade off between PnP and computers. I fall more into the control your NPCs group and others fall squarely in the single character group, which is fair enough. I'm just glad that DA age apparently allows for both. Hopefully the control is better than the NWN/KotOR games. In those, controls sucked for everyone. Still some great games in there though.

[Maria Caliban]

The problem is that the AI is just plain stupid. The best AI run party does not make good decisions.

 

This depends on the game and the fight. Again, 80% of the time, I didn't need to control my party in ME. My first group was Talia, Liana, and myself as a soldier. In the mid to late parts of the game, the PC could stop for a smoke break while Liara spammed warp and Talia blew away the flying hostiles with her shotgun. It worked and I was happy.

 

 

 

The other thing is that the role playing aspect has so much to do with the player interactions which is simply absent from a single player cRPG. I mean, you would really expect that each of the characters would work in his own self-interest and according to his personal motives. For some of them, that means supporting the group and sharing resources. For others that means striving to take or control as much of the loot as possible. The AI fails even more dismally as regards this sort of interaction than it falls short on the combat front.

 

Non-PC party members could do that, and I'd like them to, but people would throw a ****-fit. Sometimes Wrex charges forward in a battle when you order him to stay put. To me, this is great. He

[Tigranes]

This depends on the game and the fight. Again, 80% of the time, I didn't need to control my party in ME. My first group was Talia, Liana, and myself as a soldier. In the mid to late parts of the game, the PC could stop for a smoke break while Liara spammed warp and Talia blew away the flying hostiles with her shotgun. It worked and I was happy.

 

You could rely on the AI in the KOTORs too, but that was because the games were just way too easy.

[Aristes]

This depends on the game and the fight. Again, 80% of the time, I didn't need to control my party in ME. My first group was Talia, Liana, and myself as a soldier. In the mid to late parts of the game, the PC could stop for a smoke break while Liara spammed warp and Talia blew away the flying hostiles with her shotgun. It worked and I was happy.

 

You could rely on the AI in the KOTORs too, but that was because the games were just way too easy.

...And that was one of the points I was trying to make. I actually enjoyed the KotOR games, but combat was streamlined so much that not only was your control of your NPCs less than stellar, I often thought my control of my PC wasn't that great either. I never played ME, but I would say that, if the AI isn't much different, the AI wasn't good enough to take care of things but rather that the battles were bad enough that even the AI could handle them. The AI is pretty bad in every game I've played, MC. Even mediocre decisions that the AI makes are served as prime examples of improved AI.

[Niten_Ryu]

I just finished another NWN2 and MotB run. I used really gimpy Bard 2 / Arcane Archer 10 / Ranger 18 ranged spec as main character. I wanted to test how AI would work when I wouldn't be in front lines or controlling each character (other then change AI option or in case of total wipe, take over manually). I also didn't want to cheese with crafting items nor to buy anything from vendors.

 

Mages or all healers were just about useless. It's not that they don't cast but their choice or timing to use certain spell was really bad. Sometimes so bad that it ended up killing party. Meteor Swarm vs. 1 opponent when it's in middle of our guys is not a good idea (at scaled casting level no less). Nor is to use cure light wounds, run past army of enemies in the way... while character to be healed have 300 max health. Or to use Summon wand and get low lvl badger to attack lvl 25 opponents.

 

Armored melee performed ok. Sometimes they didn't reacted right away when I attacked ranged but no matter, actually they probably could have killed all opponents alone anyway. Even Casavir was beast as opponents often wanted to kill my ranged character first. In MotB I just gave bows to everyone except Okku (street fighting bear). It just annihilated everything and our ranged attacks were just tiny fraction of total damage done. By the time my character got to Fugue Plane, my damage started to look better. Not as good as bears melee, but competative. Long story short, game is easy enough to be beaten by NPCs alone. You will wipe few times as sometimes AI attacks wrong opponents but I didnt have to load too many times (some solo scenes were difficult for my gimpy character).

 

Dragon age will probably have two options. Either game is so easy to even stupid AI will beat it by brute force alone. Or game requires user to take over from time to time. I'm really suprised if magic is used correctly by AI (either healing or AoE).

[Magnum Opus]

I never played ME, but I would say that, if the AI isn't much different, the AI wasn't good enough to take care of things but rather that the battles were bad enough that even the AI could handle them.

That's been my experience as well. I did play ME, but found that the NPCs were simply fire-and-forget. Actually, scratch that: they were just the "forget" part, since they were auto-firing. They couldn't die so that wasn't an issue, and they weren't necessary for any of the fights in the game, so controlling them was only an issue for me in one single mission where I had to "save the scientists". Any time I let the NPCs participate in that mission they'd end up killing the people I was trying to save, so I told them to go stand in a corner and keep quiet (as best I could, anyway; they didn't follow orders very well in that game, and the interface for doing so was clunky at best).

 

One of the odd things about ME, though, is that I tend to remember the NPCs differently than I do with even the skeleton key model of characters that BG1 used. I remember Alora, Kivan, et. al. more clearly than I do Ashley, Kaiden n' Co. Probably because even on those brief, rare occasions that Alora & Kivan were in my party, I couldn't afford to just forget about them. ME was a game about me (Shep). BG was "us". ME's NPCs had more character development attached to them, more dialogue, but in the end it's BG's characters that end up sticking in my memory more strongly. Ultimately, I think of BG's NPCs as being with me for the entire adventure, while ME's characters are really only "there" on the Normandy or in other non-combat areas. That's a significant chunk of mindshare that ME's characters are losing, considering how much time is spent fighting.

 

I find AI-controlled henchies ineffective the point of actually making the game harder, usually. ME was good in that I didn't have to pay attention to them at all, but that only meant they were useless instead of being a handicap. Would rather solo a game than cripple my own character's chances with AI controlled NPCs, in most cases.

[Maria Caliban]

Yeah, the party members in ME beat the party members in NWN for forgetability. David said that 1/3 of the dialogue in the game is with party members, so I

[Magnum Opus]

Is not just about dialogue, though that's certainly part of it. It's the amount of time those NPCs are "active" in my head. With player-controlled characters, that's going to be a greater amount of time than with AI-controlled characters by default.

 

Maybe I'm just weird, but I have a much harder time remembering NWN's NPCs than ME's. 'course, once I realized how the AI operated in NWN I just didn't use any NPCs at all, so maybe that explains it.

 

But I've got no real reference point when it comes to statements like "1/3rd of the dialogue is with party members", so I don't know whether to look on that as a positive thing or not. How much dialogue was devoted to NPCs in ME? in BG1/2? No clue.

 

It sounds significant, though, so...

 

... hooray?

 

[Pidesco]

The problem there is that in ME as is usual in Bioware games, since NWN, the gameplay is completely divorced from the narrative. The narrative and gameplay are two parallel threads running forward which practically never meet, JRPG style.

 

 

In games, like in any other medium, the narrative shouldn't be restricted to the written words, but shoud instead, be framed and enhanced by everything that is part of the medium including, in the case of games, the gameplay. An excellent example of this is the difference between ME and BG.

 

 

While ME was rather heavy on written characterization, BG had almost no NPC development through writing. However, in BG, characters affected the game in a meaningful way, through basic characrterization and through tactical choices. For example, you might want Minsc in your party because is a good fighter, but you have to take into consideration that picking him means taking Dynaheir who you might no want because you find her she's annoying or just because you just don't need her character build in your party. Another example would be Xan. You could want Xan in your party on the basis of just liking his character, but you have to keep in mind that Xan is a mage who can't cast fireball. Also, in BG, character death has both tactical and personal considerations due to it being tied into narrative and gameplay.

 

I really have troiuble understanding why no one cares about these things.

[Mamoulian War]

I really have troiuble understanding why no one cares about these things.

 

to much money involved in it nowadays, so they rather cut it and make more shiny graphics or more voiceovers

[Pidesco]

I'm not talking about devs and publishers. They're just doing what the customer wants. It's consumers and journalists that I don't get.

[Kelverin]

It's consumers and journalists that I don't get.

Game "journalists"? You get it, I know you do.

[Pidesco]

Oh, shutup.

[Wrath of Dagon]

In the mid to late parts of the game, the PC could stop for a smoke break while Liara spammed warp and Talia blew away the flying hostiles with her shotgun. It worked and I was happy.

That was just poor combat balancing/design, although it would've been OK for lower difficulty settings.

[Aristes]

I think the problem with character death in games is that it requires time for the player to haul back to town to have someone raised or it will require a reload if someone wants the character in the party. Personally, one thing I have always hated about a lot of games over the past several years is that it did away with death in games. Combat is far more personally involved when you're worried about losing a companion. Now, I believe Fallout 3 had NPC death, but I've almost never played with them in any of the Fallout games, by and large because of the crazy AI. ...But, to be fair, AI has come a long way since the days when my pixie companion in NWN kept bashing her head against the locked door trying to get to the locked and trapped chest on the other side... and there was nothing the player could do to prevent it. After seeing that a couple times, I simply finished the game without any NPCs at all.

 

EDIT: I almost left my "without any PCs" typo in because it struck me as a funny slip. Then I figured it would be confusing as hell.

Edited July 21, 2009 by Aristes

[aries101]

I don't think times have changed at all. The average gamer might be older, but they're not smarter.

 

It's natural de-evolution

 

The higher budgets get, the wider the potential audience have to be. Years ago designer could get away with gameplay choices that would be just about impossible today. Thus only those who could figure out how to have fun in that kind of game continued to play. I'd say players were smarter out of necessity back then. Actual quality of games back then is debatable as they were not suitable for everyone. Now we're at the point where players really need to be protected from themselfs. 20+ million budgets for AAA games in this generation and 60+ million in next. I'm really scared what kind of design choices that kind of budget requires. Maybe 2-3 hour quicktime event filled action extravaganza!

 

Here is an article from escapist magazine which tells something about how the gaming world and industry have changed in the last 10-15 years.

 

 

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/v...pearing-Teacher

 

In the article, the author writes about how many games don't tell gamers that the weather for instance in some RTS games have an affect on how you could position your troops; many rpg games and fps games have done the same, it seems. In the old days some manuals would be more like text-books you would have to read, if you wanted to learn how to play the game(s).

 

Today, devs. have a chance to actually teach gamers how to play the games as in the tutorials found in Mass Effect, Oblivon and Fallout 3; basically they introduce you to the world while they also introduce you to the combat system and how you move etc. People these days want to jump into playing right away. They don't (most of them anyway) want to read a lot before they're able to play game.

 

And this gives us the schizm or contrast or dichotomy between the gameplay and the narrative someone described earlier in this thread. Simply because the way the narrative (story) is told sets it apart from the gameplay. Character progess do not make it into the story nor do dialogue matter much in terms of the narrative. In short: In order to sell the millions of games required today the gameplay and the narrative need to be somewhat apart or in conflict with each other.

 

Dragon Age: Orgins to me sounds like it trying to bind the together again; you can kill your comrades, dialogues and actions matter in the game, characters will leave, if they do not agree with you, the origin stories seem to tie in with the game, too - many more times than we have been used to seeing in games these days.