New Mass Effect 2 character

[Niten_Ryu]

Why is it so hard to do a non-humanoid character? They managed to get Dog into DA, why not some totally weird telepathic hive-mind swarm or an amorphous blob that loves eating the Geth?

 

There are several reasons. Players in general like characters to be at least somewhat familar. Sure, designers and consept artists could go ahead and create volumetric fog based chaotical shaped blob but that character would come right back bumerang style from animators and programmers. They certainly ain't going to spend huge amounts of time to create complite separate animations, shaders, collision detection ect ect for one strange looking alien. Xbox360 was already in huge problems with normal Mass Effect characters.

 

Quote from Bioware's Patrick Weekes

"In addition to time constraints, a female version of an alien species is another unique memory asset for an area. So in a place like one memory chunk of the Presidium, for example, you might have:

 

- Male human

- Female human

- Male turian

- Male salarian

- Asari

- Hanar

 

That's cutting things close, even with the asari using the same skeleton as humans. If you wanted to have female turians, you'd have to cut something else out of that area in order to make room for it. So the area with female turians doesn't have male salarians, for example.

 

Nobody on the dev team is in love with having a universe with a bunch of the alien women off behind a wall like Vera on Cheers, but that's what we've got to work with, for tech and time reasons."

 

It's alright to be critical on graphics and art direction but in the end you have to work with certain game engine and know the limits of some closed system like Xbox 360. Thane is good model because designers and artists know Unreal engine 3 limits and try to do the best they can with resources and time they have. Facial expressions are really hard and time consuming to do and this "next" generation have not done good job in 'em. I hope animators get resources (time and good design tools) they need for 'em in the near future.

[Purkake]

You don't have to make them graphically crazy. My point is that all the companions and 80% of the species are humanoid.

 

Making a character likable and interesting is the writing peoples' job, if you have good enough writing you can make a good character that is just a stone block. What I'm saying is that they are playing it safe and lack imagination.

 

I couldn't care less about their problems with 360 memory limitation, it has nothing to do with my point.

Edited August 15, 2009 by Purkake

[HoonDing]

The Krogan in the background is supposedly named Grunt, yes Grunt and will also be a companion. I guess they might just as well give them functional names...

Why don't they simply use Wrex again? Also on some screenshots I've seen a quarian - is that another new follower instead of Tali?

[Purkake]

The Krogan in the background is supposedly named Grunt, yes Grunt and will also be a companion. I guess they might just as well give them functional names...

Why don't they simply use Wrex again? Also on some screenshots I've seen a quarian - is that another new follower instead of Tali?

 

I think I heard that it was Tali, but I'm not sure.

 

For some some reason, they wanted to use (mostly) new characters. I don't know who the marketing genius behind that idea was. I would love some new characters, but not just "another Krogan" and so on.

Edited August 15, 2009 by Purkake

[RPGmasterBoo]

- mild spoilers.

- mild spoilers.

- You can now shoot off enemy limbs and do extra damage headshots.

 

Top notch artistic talent? That's something I've never attributed to BioWare. The only game of theirs with visual artistry was Jade Empire.

 

The combat looks as slow and unresponsive as before.

 

Baldurs Gate 2 maps were extremely well made, especially when viewed in higher resolutions. Jade Empire was very good as well.

However what I meant, was that considerable effort was put into those character models. In fact they are one of the most detailed in any game released so far, especially the faces. It was obivously done by very skilled and talented people. All for a second rate shooter/rpg, instead of working on DA for example (which so far is nothing special as graphics go).

[213374U]

Quote from Bioware's Patrick Weekes

Nice. So thanks to technical constraints arising from the need to fit the game into the POS360 and the devs' over-reliance on shortcuts, we get to see aliens that are essentially humans with merely colourful superficial details to make them distinct, a shortcoming for which they don't make up with interesting personalities. Yay.

 

Throw in a half-assed PC port, a DRM scheme that treats assumes you are a pirate, and you get pure unadulterated gaming bliss.

 

Oh, and mini-nukes. No game is complete these days without mini-nukes.

 

I purchased ME for 20€ from the bargain bin... I won't make the same mistake with ME2.

Edited August 15, 2009 by 213374U

[Morgoth]

Why is it so hard to do a non-humanoid character? They managed to get Dog into DA, why not some totally weird telepathic hive-mind swarm or an amorphous blob that loves eating the Geth?

 

There are several reasons. Players in general like characters to be at least somewhat familar. Sure, designers and consept artists could go ahead and create volumetric fog based chaotical shaped blob but that character would come right back bumerang style from animators and programmers. They certainly ain't going to spend huge amounts of time to create complite separate animations, shaders, collision detection ect ect for one strange looking alien. Xbox360 was already in huge problems with normal Mass Effect characters.

 

Quote from Bioware's Patrick Weekes

"In addition to time constraints, a female version of an alien species is another unique memory asset for an area. So in a place like one memory chunk of the Presidium, for example, you might have:

 

- Male human

- Female human

- Male turian

- Male salarian

- Asari

- Hanar

 

That's cutting things close, even with the asari using the same skeleton as humans. If you wanted to have female turians, you'd have to cut something else out of that area in order to make room for it. So the area with female turians doesn't have male salarians, for example.

 

Nobody on the dev team is in love with having a universe with a bunch of the alien women off behind a wall like Vera on Cheers, but that's what we've got to work with, for tech and time reasons."

 

It's alright to be critical on graphics and art direction but in the end you have to work with certain game engine and know the limits of some closed system like Xbox 360. Thane is good model because designers and artists know Unreal engine 3 limits and try to do the best they can with resources and time they have. Facial expressions are really hard and time consuming to do and this "next" generation have not done good job in 'em. I hope animators get resources (time and good design tools) they need for 'em in the near future.

Sounds like the 360's age is already showing. So what bio is telling us is that they can't render a bunch of different aliens (genders) on screen because the POS360 lacks the memory or whatever.

 

This is why the PC still is the best platform for playing and to develop for. Why doesn't the PC gets any major lobbying?

 

Oh I see.... MS and Sony wouldn't like that. Bastards.

[Purkake]

Sounds like the 360's age is already showing. So what bio is telling us is that they can't render a bunch of different aliens (genders) on screen because the POS360 lacks the memory or whatever.

 

This is why the PC still is the best platform for playing and to develop for. Why doesn't the PC gets any major lobbying?

 

Oh I see.... MS and Sony wouldn't like that. Bastards.

 

It's not even the 360's limitations, there are games that have more different models on screen. It's Bioware's crappy engine and/or their insistence to make really high res models. What's the point of having super high quality when you can only have three different kinds on the screen at the same time. Make some compromises, the PCs have to look great, the other models can look a bit crappier if you can have more variety.

[213374U]

It's not even the 360's limitations, there are games that have more different models on screen. It's Bioware's crappy engine and/or their insistence to make really high res models. What's the point of having super high quality when you can only have three different kinds on the screen at the same time. Make some compromises, the PCs have to look great, the other models can look a bit crappier if you can have more variety.

Yeah. And then all that goes to waste thanks to texture errors or plain bad quality, and really wacky LOD threshold calculations. Woo hoo!

 

I think I'm getting brain damage from shaking my head so much.

[Purkake]

Developers should stop making ~10 high quality enemy models and then reusing them over and over and over. This was very evident in Bioshock, for example. I can understand doing it for a zoomed out strategic RPG, but there's no excuse for it in an up close and personal game.

 

It would make things so much more fun and realistic if the enemies were randomly compiled from a choice of heads, torsos etc. with slightly different coloring.

[aries101]

Is it me? or does the combat really show itself to be just like any old shooter....? game, whether the devs. call it a shooter rpg or not?

 

Also, there's something very disturbing about the game, I find. The combat seems a bit (or a lot repetetive) to me...

[Guest Slinky]

Sounds like the 360's age is already showing. So what bio is telling us is that they can't render a bunch of different aliens (genders) on screen because the POS360 lacks the memory or whatever.

It's always been like that, with every single console generation. A new generation = more power to use for graphics. The extra power used for graphics = everything else remains the same.

 

This is why the PC still is the best platform for playing and to develop for. Why doesn't the PC gets any major lobbying?

 

Oh I see.... MS and Sony wouldn't like that. Bastards.

Unfortunately PC is no longer the best platform for developing games. Why? Because most people know absolutely nothing about them. The technical stuff goes straight over their heads. Even simple things like game patches are strange things for them. With console, only thing you need to do is put the disc in and sit on the sofa. Thats why games sell better on consoles than on PC. If console versions sell better, then of course game developers focus on them.

 

I just really really hope, that PC gaming won't get too small in the future. You need to point a gun at me to get me play some FPS on console

[Purkake]

Steam takes care of everything on the software side and you can buy prebuilt gaming-grade PCs from most computer stores or from online.

 

Developers making buggy games is their own incompetence.

 

Everyone loves the comfy couch, though.

Edited August 15, 2009 by Purkake

[Morgoth]

That's why I find Blizzard and Valve so cool. They completely rely on the PC, and that's good so.

[Slowtrain]

The best thing about consoles is that my pc is more than a year old and still runs all the new releases super awesome. As long as the limits of consoles freeze system requirement creep, its ok with me.

 

Hopefully the 360 will still be the lead platform 3 years from now!

[Morgoth]

No I certainly hope not. I hope the 360 degrates herself into a console for stupid LIVE Arcade games, while real games march forward on the PC.

 

I wanna play an RPG that has more than 3 HD characters on screen, after all.

[Slowtrain]

No I certainly hope not. I hope the 360 degrates herself into a console for stupid LIVE Arcade games, while real games march forward on the PC.

 

I wanna play an RPG that has more than 3 HD characters on screen, after all.

 

 

Hey, I'm saving a lot of money not having to rebuild/upgrade my pc every development cycle. And I still run all these new games better than the 360.

 

It's like the best of both worlds.

[Morgoth]

You're behaving like games these days force us to upgrade each new year. They don't. I'm not saying I want developers exploit shiny graphics on the PC, because that would require us to upgrade. But how about actually taking usage of all the vast memory, hard disk spcae and processing power available to us? Like I said, I wish there was an RPG that could render a few dozens HD characters on a scene at once. Perfectly feaseable with any computer these days. But obviously not on a console.

Edited August 15, 2009 by Morgoth

[Sammy Chung]

Sounds like the 360's age is already showing. So what bio is telling us is that they can't render a bunch of different aliens (genders) on screen because the POS360 lacks the memory or whatever.

 

This is why the PC still is the best platform for playing and to develop for. Why doesn't the PC gets any major lobbying?

 

Oh I see.... MS and Sony wouldn't like that. Bastards.

 

It's not even the 360's limitations, there are games that have more different models on screen. It's Bioware's crappy engine and/or their insistence to make really high res models. What's the point of having super high quality when you can only have three different kinds on the screen at the same time. Make some compromises, the PCs have to look great, the other models can look a bit crappier if you can have more variety.

 

It's not the models that take up the most space, it's the conversations and everything associated with them. From the forums here:

 

How many interactive cinematic conversations does Unreal Tournament have available in any one area at a time? Every line of dialog, ever gesture, and every facial expression adds to the size of the resulting file and thus takes memory, not to mention increased costs per character, since you're zoomed in to look at NPCs for conversations instead of just killing them.

 

Non-ambient conversations are, I believe, the most expensive asset, overall, in our games.

 

 

Another developer here says that all possible conversations in an area must be loaded into memory beforehand, which means that models have to hit a particular memory budget.

 

You can argue that Bioware don't need to put in cinematic conversations, but that means following the Fallout 3 style of conversation where everyone you talk to is a mannequin rooted to one spot until you finish talking to them.

[Purkake]

Loading all the conversations in an area is a side effect of having to have the game play directly off the disc. A horribly inefficient and ridiculous method in this day and age. Once again all platforms suffer because of the lowest common denominator.

Edited August 15, 2009 by Purkake

[213374U]

Be thankful you don't have to deal with the dreadful xbox load times.

[Purkake]

Be thankful you don't have to deal with the dreadful xbox load times.

 

You mean the dreadful elevator rides, right?

[Meshugger]

- mild spoilers.

- mild spoilers.

- You can now shoot off enemy limbs and do extra damage headshots.

 

 

They seem to be fluffing the Renegade side. When she asks you if you're going to stop the assassin, your only options are 'why?' and 'no.' You can't just say 'Yes, I'm going to stop the assassin.' Likewise, there are now sudden events in the game where you can show how bad ass you as by kicking people off buildings.

 

Oh,oh, let me guess: He/she is reptilian since they don't show facial emotions like other mammals, right? Perfect for an assassin, right? You know, that ice-cold stare no matter the situation or moral implication?

 

Ergo, Lizardmen do not show emotions, therefore they look like "cool" assassins. Also, i bet that the player can make the assassin to "feel" or even feel regret to better herself/himself.

 

I hope that i am wrong, i really do.

 

If you mean

[HoonDing]

You mean the dreadful elevator rides, right?

Dreadful? What was wrong with staring at Ashley's ass for 5+ minutes?

[WILL THE ALMIGHTY]

Most elevator rides weren't too bad... but the Normandy's elevator still gives me nightmares.