Assassin's creed makes it better than RPGS

[AGX-17]

A lot of the time, there needs to be someone outside of the nerd bubble to suggest things for improvement.

You mean like the tens of millions of ordinary people who buy each new installment of franchises like Call of Duty, Halo or Gears of War? Edited March 25, 2013 by AGX-17

[Amentep]

 

Size and number of inhabitants in AC is much larger than in RPGs because in action games people don't expect to be able to interact with every single NPC and enter every single house. At least if one compares to open-world RPGs; linear RPGs like BioWare ones don't really have an excuse.

 

Cities like Denerim and Kirkwill were laughably bad --- Vizima was quite a decent city. Ferdok and Nadoret in the Drakensang games were excellent as well.

Heh, just having finished my play through of DA:O, the bolded hit home for me. Denerim's supposed to be the New York or Los Angeles of Ferelden, so to speak. Crowds of people wherever you look. Instead, there's like a handful of folks standing around, but the place is otherwise deserted.

 

If Assassin's Creed does one thing well, it's the atmosphere of the cities. They really do feel like actual cities full of people, rather than just an empty space.

 

The weird thing about Denerim is that small backwood town Lothering appears to have more people in it simply by virtue of the blight refugees...

 

Blight refugees that Denerim never, apparently, gets.

 

But there are also other aspects - virtually no merchants?  Virtually no people walking through?

 

I tend to ignore these things - its a game after all (and not a game of DENERIM: THE FANTASY CITY SIMULATOR).  But it does leave an oddness if you think too much about it.

[Blodhemn]

 

A lot of the time, there needs to be someone outside of the nerd bubble to suggest things for improvement.

I can accept that point, but that you think publishers are the ones that do this and need to do this is beyond words.

Someone needs to. But it's probably more accurate to say "some of the time".

[Hurlshort]

I second the notion that Denerim was a terribly designed Capital city.  I think I ranted about that quite a bit when the game came out.  The dwarf city didn't seem to be nearly that deserted.  The weird thing was the real lack of housing anywhere.  It was just tiny.  

[babaganoosh13]

Denerim was fine. Anything else would have been window dressing, sucking resources and taking more time.

[WDeranged]

I was very underwhelmed by Denerim, I got really tired of that market place...the Dwarven city was pretty well done though, it felt more like a living place.

[Hurlshort]

Denerim was fine. Anything else would have been window dressing, sucking resources and taking more time.

 

You should probably stick to text adventures if that's the way you feel.

[Orogun01]

 

Denerim was fine. Anything else would have been window dressing, sucking resources and taking more time.

 

You should probably stick to text adventures if that's the way you feel.

Don't knock them down, they run on the most powerful engine: Imagination.

[Gorth]

 

 

 

 

Size and number of inhabitants in AC is much larger than in RPGs because in action games people don't expect to be able to interact with every single NPC and enter every single house. At least if one compares to open-world RPGs; linear RPGs like BioWare ones don't really have an excuse.

 

Cities like Denerim and Kirkwill were laughably bad --- Vizima was quite a decent city. Ferdok and Nadoret in the Drakensang games were excellent as well.

Heh, just having finished my play through of DA:O, the bolded hit home for me. Denerim's supposed to be the New York or Los Angeles of Ferelden, so to speak. Crowds of people wherever you look. Instead, there's like a handful of folks standing around, but the place is otherwise deserted.

 

If Assassin's Creed does one thing well, it's the atmosphere of the cities. They really do feel like actual cities full of people, rather than just an empty space.

 

 

 

The weird thing about Denerim is that small backwood town Lothering appears to have more people in it simply by virtue of the blight refugees...

 

Blight refugees that Denerim never, apparently, gets.

 

But there are also other aspects - virtually no merchants?  Virtually no people walking through?

 

I tend to ignore these things - its a game after all (and not a game of DENERIM: THE FANTASY CITY SIMULATOR).  But it does leave an oddness if you think too much about it.

 

 

I wonder if it isn't the same issue that FO:NV ran into? I.e. engine (who am I kidding, read: 'console') limitations, where it's only possible to have a limited number of actors in any given location without blowing the memory constraints? The designers may have wanted to add hundreds of people, but it would never run on small memory configurations.

[babaganoosh13]

 

Denerim was fine. Anything else would have been window dressing, sucking resources and taking more time.

 

You should probably stick to text adventures if that's the way you feel.

West of House

 

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. 

 

> look mailbox  

 

The small mailbox is closed  

 

> open mailbox  

 

Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet.  

 

> get leaftlet  

 

Taken.  

 

> look leaflet  

 

It says "Good times remembering the original adventure games of your youth."

Edited March 26, 2013 by babaganoosh13

[Labadal]

The Assassin's Creed teams consists of 500 people. The AC4 team is rumoured to have 1000 people in it. Many studios don't even have 200 employees.

[babaganoosh13]

I think I remember hearing that they've basically got two studios working on each game now so they can keep pumping one out every year. Hopefully for all of those people working on them sakes, the customers don't get tired of them anytime soon.

 

As great as they look, and as cool as it was seeing my friend jumping around Boston and stuff, watching him get surrounded by over half a dozen redcoats, and one on horseback, watching around as he slaughters them one after the other because that this the extent of who will go after him (not to mention if I'm on horseback, I'm going jousting, so he can't touch me) hurts the quality of the game to me. Perhaps if they spent more time on the AI....

 

Of course, perhaps they've patched that by now. Who knows?

[HoonDing]

What was refreshing about AC was the middle-aged protagonist in Brotherhood/Revelations. Only pity was that gameplay-wise he moved and fought just like a 20-something year old. At one point one even controlled a 80+ year old Altair. And he still kicked ass.

 

The only game that really takes the ravages of time into account that I've seen, is Darklands (well, and maybe Baulder's Gate 2 where Keldorn has 9 Dexterity IIRC but that can be easily remedied).

Edited March 26, 2013 by Drudanae

[Humanoid]

Many Might and Magic games track your character's age and apply stat penalties once you hit 50 or so. That generally means playing about 20 times longer than a typical run though.

 

Mount and Blade has stat loss for "age". Thing is, it starts about 700-800 days into a game, so er, potentially it's saying a 20-22 year-old adventurer is already into physical decline. Yeah.

 

The Pirates! games that are its spiritual predecessor also slowed your character's swordfighting speed as you aged, amplified by injury.

[HoonDing]

Actually, yeah, in the Krynn trilogy casting Haste would age your characters one year, so if you cast it too many times...

[Mamoulian War]

The Assassin's Creed teams consists of 500 people. The AC4 team is rumoured to have 1000 people in it. Many studios don't even have 200 employees.

 

ehm... that sums pretty much everything what is wrong with today's game industry...

[Amentep]

I wonder if it isn't the same issue that FO:NV ran into? I.e. engine (who am I kidding, read: 'console') limitations, where it's only possible to have a limited number of actors in any given location without blowing the memory constraints? The designers may have wanted to add hundreds of people, but it would never run on small memory configurations.

 

Seems to me that they could have given more than one area over to the market, for example, and increased the amount of locations.

 

One of the quests has you looking for someone "shopping" in the market district for example.  But there's really only three places they could be - Wade's, Wonders of Thedas or the market stalls out front.  This could have been made more interesting by having the market split into two logical parts.

[Halaster]

Other Denerim merchants - there was also a dwarf near the market square (the one from the noble story), the tavernkeeper, and the guy from the Crows opens another one up when you complete all his quests (trying to avoid spoilers).

 

And console limitations were not the reason Denerim felt dead - DA:O was designed as a PC centric title (dying breed) and (very) hastily ported to consoles throughout 2008 by (now lead) Laidlaw. One of the reasons the game plays very differently across platforms, btw. Denerim was thankfully dead, because the rest of the game - if you wanted to listen to NPCs, read the lore, and complete all the side quests you'd be looking at the wrong side of 70 hours, 100 with DLC. If Denerim had taken another 10, I doubt I'd have had time to pull through. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

 

As to OP's point - an RPG will always be outdone by action titles in terms of impressions, because action titles can script awesome stuff to happen all around you and then whisk you away to the next location. In an RPG you sacrifice some of that 'awesome' for depth and freedom.

[Labadal]

 

 

The Assassin's Creed teams consists of 500 people. The AC4 team is rumoured to have 1000 people in it. Many studios don't even have 200 employees.

ehm... that sums pretty much everything what is wrong with today's game industry...

It certainly is.