Can't believe I'm saying this, POE combat is better than DAO.

[spellcastersuck]

I find the combat of this game pretty underwhelming. It is in fact the main reason I haven't finished it yet. Most encounters can be finished with the exact same strategy, mainly because they are way too similar to one another. Spellcasters are pretty dull. While not exactly real-time, Divinity: Original Sin had a much better combat, and I hoped PoE would be on par with it, at least in terms of strategic depth.

[abaris]

Dragon age still beats this game with more voice acting and better lore. It also beats this game with way more skills. This game has potential, it's just lacking a little bit everywhere, except in the writing.

 

Wow, voice acting. The most important thing these days, since it takes absolutely nothing from story development and dialogue options. The result is the dialogue wheel with two or three options we all love so much.

[VioNectro]

DA:O and BG1 "feels" about the same to me in terms of "rating" if I was to subjectively plonk a number on it. BG1 "feels" better than POE to me. However when I compare how DA:O "feels" to me vs. how POE "feels" to me my mind says they are about the same. So my only conclusion is that POE is a whisker worse than DA:O, but only cause I liked BG1 more than POE. Of course this is all the madness in my head etc.

[Carados]

This is the absolute truth From best to worst:

 

Baldur's gate saga > Plancescape Torment > PoE > DAO > NWN2 motb > nwn1 expansions  > NWN2 OC > DA:i > Icewind dale 1 > Icewind dale 2 > NWN1 oc > DA2

Edited May 10, 2015 by Carados

[nipsen]

If only Freud were alive today. 

 

 

If Freud were alive today, he'd kill himself.

 

After reading this thread, I may have to check out Baldurs gate. 

It's an interesting game, but kind of think the random amount of trekking without any events (along with how easily you can miss quests) will force you to either replay the game, or go along a walkthrough. It's the kind of game that you have to have played already to get the most out of.. That's why people will suggest playing BG2 - it's more story-oriented, specially from about halfway.

 

Imo, people should try Icewind Dale 2. The main quests all go in a straight line, but you can piece together things and figure out subplots and get alternative solutions for many of the quests. So while it's not as open-ended as Baldur's Gate, it's not as narrow narratively as for example Dragon Age, or Mass Effect, that sort of thing. I think it's gotten a bad wrap in many ways because it was developed in such a short time, and is technically much smaller than Baldur's Gate, etc. - since people assume this means it's kind of brief. And that you end up with a lot of battles that are stretched out with pointless repetitive spawns, and so on. But what you actually get in IWD2 is a bunch of structured battles that have a narrative wrapping, while the writing that's actually in the game is.. unusually satisfying for a game. So it's often not as pointless (and not as randomly balanced) as the random spawns in the BG games.. 

 

Also, Peter Stormare voice-acts the demon

[Lord_Mord]

 

Wow, voice acting. The most important thing these days, since it takes absolutely nothing from story development and dialogue options. The result is the dialogue wheel with two or three options we all love so much.

 

I asked myself the whole time, why anybody would write so much text and then force the player into specific dialogue options. Now I know.

 

Edit: That doesn't mean, I don't like the voice acting. It's brilliant. We just need a whole lot of more of it.

Edited May 11, 2015 by Lord_Mord

[Tigranes]

Full voice acting is definitively known to cause less text, less edited text, and generally shorter dialogues in CRPGs. it is also extremely expensive.

[roller12]

Voice acting bad feature? Planescape:Torment combat better than DAO?

 

I think you guys should stop...

[Daemonjax]

PST combat was terrible.  Terrible!  The game had a lot of other things going for it, though.

 

DAO has better character animations and spell effects.

Edited May 11, 2015 by Daemonjax

[abaris]

Voice acting bad feature?

 

Yeah, voice acting bad feature, so to say. Costs tons of money and takes away from dialogue options, since to record insane amounts of possible responses isn't possible. What's left is the Bioware dialogue wheel with three options. Multicolored for those, who don't even want to read what their character is about to say.

[roller12]

Dragon Age has no dialogue wheel... That having said, i find the dialog wheel is a better solution than wall-of-text style, its biggest problem already in the name. Voiced?, even better, doesnt have to be, a hybrid system, like the one used in Poe, where important stuff is voiced and flavor is not, is best of both worlds, so im not quite sure how voice acting is even an issue.

 

Multicolored for those, who don't even want to read what their character is about to say.

But see, characters dont say anything, they dont even exist, dialogs are nothing more than text lines with triggers assigned and there is no logical connection between the two,

thats the biggest advantage of the dialog wheel, it is actually possible to guess where the conversation is going to. Poe adopted some of that too, and dialogs with reputation triggers are marked as such.

You could say "colorcoded". And thats a good thing i think too. Have seen enough people irl playing RPGs and simply click through all the dialogs.

 

Less text more meaning > wall of text

Voiced > not voiced

 

Pretty simple really

[nipsen]

 

Less text more meaning > wall of text

Voiced > not voiced

 

Pretty simple really

 

Grr.

 

One approach to this is saying that one of the biggest challenges when crafting narratives with multiple paths is to make the reader, or the player, unaware of the abstraction layer you are writing the story over.

 

And most of the time, voice-acting basically mandates that you create very few alternate paths, so you don't waste resources on something people won't listen to anyway. You also want to limit the amount of talking as much as possible, to not end up with too many lines.

 

So that obviously force the authors to be concise. And it can, could possibly, encourage writers to be creative when initiating the quest - it's perfectly possible to write dialogue that appears completely different to you with different preconditions. Perhaps you're a priest sent to save the survivors from a burning monastery. Perhaps you're a mercenary sent to make sure they're all dead. So that you can reuse the lines, but just change the lines spoken by the protagonist (some of the Mass Effect writers had control on that one).

 

But it typically just encourages them to end up cutting alternate lines, and letting you choose a different approach towards the end of the quest. And that's how most stories end up being written, whether you have large amounts of dialogue (Planescape Torment) or if you just have a few voiced lines (like in Mass Effect).

 

Because it's not.. on it's own.. the length of the dialogue that adds options and room for interpretation in Planescape Torment. It's that first of all, you're initially coming to the story completely ignorant of what the protagonist has done before. So that justifies how people may be trying to deceive you, or if they believe you're testing them by pretending you don't know them, or that you're giving them a second chance, etc. And you can add that as a wrapper for the text when you write it, to make sure you're not strictly breaking any of the options you should have along the way, even if you're actually hinting to another layer all the time. Since as long as you're not strictly breaking the possible interpretations, a player can maintain the point of view they have. To the point where, in Planescape Torment, you have players who pick up on the subplot early, you have people who pick up on the sub-plot halfway, and you have people who adopt the "current" story towards the end as a separate thread, based on the player perspective. That they actually treat the sub-plot as an attempt to deceive the player and change their perception of what really happened.

 

And that's the kind of narrative you always want to tell when having alternative paths. That the player completely adopts their own interpretation and maintains it on their own.

 

So if you can achieve that with very little dialogue and few choices - that's a good job. But most of the time, if you don't allow many choices and alternative spins, you just maintain a single thread, and the choices are fake and not very involving. And that's easy for a player to pick up on. And you have the same problem with quests that resolve in thousand different ways - if they still follow the same path. Because you spot as a player that you're really just choosing the colour of the dialogue, and that it doesn't really relate to the quest, which you just complete in the same way no matter what.

 

The temple of Eothas quest at the beginning of PoE is a kind of horror-example of how you should avoid this. You're given a quest, and can say all kinds of different things. But you're still given the quest in the same way. And when it resolves, you are given the answer to what really happened in the treasury before you get back. So no matter what you're doing, you only have the choice between confronting the character or not.

 

In other words, you're either a burglar in the temple who is given a clue to where the treasure is. Or you're a semi-devoted priest looking to still the souls of the dead (perhaps just for your own benefit, since you can see the dead spirits). And then reverse those along the way perhaps. Maybe you set out to steal everything left in the ruins, but became soft and wanted to revenge the priests. But you don't have any different initial wrapping for the quest. And you can't maintain it throughout the quest, since the lies you're told early on are explained halfway.

 

And afterwards, your choices don't truly matter much for you, at least at the time, because they don't seem to give you any benefits when confronting Raedric later, or when dealing with the villagers. You might want to just generally do good things and gain standing in Gilded Vale, but there's no pressing reason to deal with the burglar in one way or the other based on anything but your alignment. You basically choose what you want, but the plot doesn't try to challenge why you're making the choices, or trying to demonstrate how you might benefit greatly from dropping your burglar ethics or your priesthood creed at the time you're making the choices.

 

So instead of having an initial setting you can choose, and a main thread that survives the initial wrapping. Before creating a reveal and a turnaround, and giving you a choice to make meaningful moral judgements with specific costs and benefits. Instead, you just get to follow along with the quest, and make your comment on it towards the end.

 

But the actual structure of the quest could be almost identical, and the amount of dialogue could be nearly the same, if you were given those surviving alternative paths from the beginning. And having the clues be ambiguous enough (the spirit doesn't actually explain enough to make you trust that their feeling of betrayal is realistic, for example) that the reveal comes from player initiative, if they choose to pursue it (perhaps at huge risk - maybe the character you're talking to is a powerful figure, maybe he'll report to Raedric, etc). 

 

So it's not as simple as that shorter amounts of text immediately makes a quest better. Even if I'll easily admit that a lot of text is simply wasted, if it's not used to create those persistently believable alternate paths.

[Hassat Hunter]

This forum misses a "this post is full of crap", I would use it on several of roller12's posts above...

 

You could say "colorcoded". And thats a good thing i think too.

Please kill me...

 

EDIT: @nipsen; Dude... you're replying to the guy saying wall of text bad, voice it all. You should have fitten that in 2 spoken lines instead! I wish you good luck on achieving that though.

Edited May 12, 2015 by Hassat Hunter

[nipsen]

Maybe I could just substitute most of the text with an extravagantly homosexual gnoll? Bioware seems to pay for that sort of thing.

[abaris]

You could say "colorcoded". And thats a good thing i think too. Have seen enough people irl playing RPGs and simply click through all the dialogs.

 

Less text more meaning > wall of text

Voiced > not voiced

 

Pretty simple really

 

 

Yeah, and quest markers for good measure, so that noone has to employ that grey mass over the beer hole.

 

99 percent of so called AAA games have all these features. And I'm glad, this one hasn't hasn't taken this particular highway.

[roller12]

 

nipsen

But it is also possible to say that increased cost pressures devs into putting more quality into each line, as is also often the case, and not trying to get by by obfuscating stuff with more letters. Additionally, noone in real life talks in monologues in a conversation, so shorter lines actually add to immersion, and so does voice intonation, you criminal scum! Bottom line - i dont see a connection between quality and quantity, there are just good games and bad games, as some people we can just witness here dont seem to get. Which is quite amusing.

 

 

you're replying to the guy saying wall of text bad

You like text? Go read a book.

[Hassat Hunter]

You like a movie? Watch a movie.

 

HEY, I can generalise too!

[roller12]

You like a movie? Watch a movie.

 

 

HEY, I can generalise too!

Thats not a generalization my friend. You fail at failing.

[Sven_]

In terms of VO's, It's often not so much the length of the actual lines. Apart of eating its parts of the budget, it's that the recording process is a huge deal and dictates much of the quest and dialog design. It means everything needs be locked pretty early on, for a start. For most fully-voiced games these days it doesn't end with that. As the dialogue is then also presented in a cinematic way, i.e. there's also the lip-syncing and animation process for each response and course of action. It kind of boils down to this: Back in the glory days of text adventure, a single guy sitting in his garage could blow up the Earth and have the universe implode and collapse around it within a single line of text. All that he needed was a keyboard, a 'puter and a somewhat decent skill of communicating images via prose, as well as some BASIC programming skills. That requirement's quadrupled ever since, right with the arrival of graphics (let alone voice overs), and it's getting ever more expensive since. Even for big projects, that's a challenge. Sounds Mr. Obvious, but that's just the way it is. The important thing to recognize here is that no matter the representation and effort going in, it's the exact same bottom line. You can have an entire horde of 3D artists rendering the apocalypse and then some, hire a fully professional army of voice cast providing the screams of end, despair and terror, and pay a dedicated task force of cleaning staff to deal with the aftermath. In a movie, which is all about presentation and showing you things, that is all that it's about. In a game, in which the core is interaction, having means of player action result in a consequence (and if it's just the player firing rockets on alien vessels and them blowing up), it's the exact same thing and consequence for the player no matter how it is being presented. It's the world's end, Big ****ing Game Over either way.

 

http://www.lar.net/2011/12/19/the-cost-of-dialogue/#more-100

http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/06/voice-acting-in-rpgs-may-be-more-trouble-than-its-worth/

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/experienced-points/7588-Voice-vs-Choice

 

Just seen a video review of the upcoming Witcher 3, and the guys talked much about the chains in choices and consequences, and the world reactivity, which actually reminded me of Wasteland 2 I've just finished. Witcher 3's a game that's fully-voiced, but if would be a first, and is naturally a huge amount of work to get that rival older games such as the Fallouts, Arcanum or the more recent Wasteland 2 in these regards. Without spoiling anything, Wasteland 2 has even minor characters popping up in different ways depending on how you treated them hours later, entire areas disappearing off the map, you can flip the main quest upside down by opposing your own guys of kinds (and get an ending to that) and even though like 99,9% of players would reload when the "companion" rangers you can bolster your initial squad with die, it recognizes such too right to the very end and reacts to it (I didn't reload in one such an instance).

 

Apart of that, rather than all the personal bickering and preferences, it'd be good for anyone here to recognize that there are distinctive styles of games which can be all made viable. I'm not overly fond generally of games turning into interactive movie kind of experiences again often (seen that in the 1990s already). But surely something such as Kotor, obviously being anything less than superbly cinematic would be kind of missing the point -- and a South Park game without the original voice cast joking around, really? Similarily, words and text can express things in ways that no fully-voiced cutscene can ever hope to do -- and Pillars Of Eternity was clearly communicated to offer a more novelized style of prose and story telling. Part of that is budget reasons (VO=expensive), part of it is concious design reasons (telling a story a certain kind of way). And that likely won't change. Now, 'bout that combat...

Edited May 12, 2015 by Sven_

[nipsen]

nipsen

But it is also possible to say that increased cost pressures devs into putting more quality into each line, as is also often the case, and not trying to get by by obfuscating stuff with more letters. Additionally, noone in real life talks in monologues in a conversation, so shorter lines actually add to immersion, and so does voice intonation, you criminal scum! Bottom line - i dont see a connection between quality and quantity, there are just good games and bad games, as some people we can just witness here dont seem to get. Which is quite amusing.

Sure. Movies and books have different qualities the other doesn't have. But you run into a problem if you want to make interactive stories in a movie, with actors - because a face is very expressive! In theory, not that this means much in videogames not made by Quantic Dream . But generally, the mood and the reactions end up having to be described with expressions. So different outcomes to a quest needs to be separate trails in the production. And you don't typically end up being more effective with each line to get the point across then, you just cut the extended content and cut the alternate takes instead.

 

Because the opposite of cutting lines isn't just another production pass, the script needs to be more detailed, and the actors need to be better, and able to understand all kinds of different settings and motivations, different outlooks and so on. Add that to a role-playing game with a bunch of classes, and just the writing on it's own becomes excrutiating. So you just naturally end up expanding the exposition for the remaining paths. Look at Bioware - we can ridicule the fact that they've chosen to make movies instead of games as much as we want, but maintaining believable roles over different "takes" in a movie-like setting is extremely hard. Or if you actually took this seriously, and didn't just switch out a few models and add a few lines like Bioware does, you'd end up just blowing up the production like crazy. Would be awesome if that was done, with the care all the scenes needed, but the amount of work just the limited rethreads in Heavy Rain for example is huge. So you end up with less alternate paths, and more exposition in the movie-like segments between the critical sections.

 

With writing, you have less of a problem like that, and it takes less effort to maintain the alternate routes, like I explained. Just imagine a scene where you're introduced to completely different parties with different classes. And where you're allowed to eventually place those generic characters into different roles depending on what sort of lines you pick - that then give hints to the writers what sort of responses you likely should give. You can do that with writing in a way you almost can't in a movie.

[Hassat Hunter]

Or you end up with games costing 200Million and still need to cut edges by repeating lines 2 million times, alien VO to cover up certain lacking parts... and still fail horribly on the C&C department.

 

You know, like a certain Bio game... they even outright stated the VO is a large part the reason for being probably one of the most expensive games ever made... *shrug*

I rather had a good game :/

[abaris]

You know, like a certain Bio game... they even outright stated the VO is a large part the reason for being probably one of the most expensive games ever made... *shrug*

 

And it even earns you a whooping 5.8 userscore on metacritic. So what's not to like if all the game magazines do what's expected and bow down to kiss where the sun don't shine? Ad money goes a long way towards everlasting love.

[Luj1]

Can't believe I'm saying this, POE combat is better than DAO.

I cant believe it either. DA is maybe a crap franchise now, but DAO was the best one by far. PoE's combat is just a bizzare awkward mess. 

[abaris]

 

Can't believe I'm saying this, POE combat is better than DAO.

DA is maybe a crap franchise, but DAO is the best one by far. PoE's combat is just a crazy ankward mess. 

 

That's a bit of nostalgia here. The battles in DA:O were a mess too. The only thing I liked a bit better was the option to script certain behavior, so that you didn't have to babysit every step of the way. Well, they got rid of that too with the crap followups soiling the franchise in order to go button awsome.