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Post by ticktak77 on Mar 24, 2017 4:07:35 GMT
This was so eye opening to read and I love that other developers give sympathy rather than take advantage. But there is hardly a problem! It all looks fine, really. What are people seeing that is making this uproar? It's much less noticeable with male default Ryder, but female default Ryder's face is very off - she has this awful shit-eating smirk on her face all the time, regardless of whether she's happy, sad, angry, professional, in action, etc. and it's very distracting. There's also a total lack of emotion from every human face which I personally find quite distracting, especially when trying to flirt with other humans. I romanced Miranda in ME2 and ME3 - I keep thinking about the cute sexy smirks and looks she used to give my Shep. When you compare what we have now, to what we had then, it's feels like several massive steps in the wrong direction. Finally - there's also a pudginess to default male Ryder that is really noticeable when you are putting different casual clothes on him; it seems to be great when in combat gear, but around the Tempest or Nexus the overall character build just seems off. Those are the things I find distracting, anyway.
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Post by clips7 on Mar 24, 2017 4:31:10 GMT
These explanations from animators are interesting and i appreciate them trying to explain the process which is quite involved and complex, thing is we didn't have these complaints on this level with the trilogy. We didn't have to have animators come to try to explain the process. We accepted the generic head bopping and hand gestures of past games because the characters in general moved more naturally and demonstrated emotion. Again these issues are not game breaking, but it is a big enough issue that it is causing pause and is generating a concentrated topic on it's own.
Now maybe this game could have benefited from some extra polish to tighten up those aspects, but maybe EA had to meet quarterly deadlines for their shareholders....i just think people are taken back because there was a downgrade somewhat in this particular category....calling for folks to be fired and acting like this is the beginning of the apocalypse is a bit over the top, but there are legit arguments to be made when it comes to this issue. I haven't played the game yet, but just going off of vids and reviews themselves, it's not like folks are making this stuff up....again not deal breaking, but it is an issue.....
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Post by Deleted on Mar 24, 2017 4:38:17 GMT
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Post by Doctor Fumbles on Mar 24, 2017 4:40:10 GMT
Interesting. So basically it is all fixable, so people can stop complaining about it like it is the end of world or something.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 24, 2017 5:51:26 GMT
This was so eye opening to read and I love that other developers give sympathy rather than take advantage. But there is hardly a problem! It all looks fine, really. What are people seeing that is making this uproar? It's much less noticeable with male default Ryder, but female default Ryder's face is very off - she has this awful shit-eating smirk on her face all the time, regardless of whether she's happy, sad, angry, professional, in action, etc. and it's very distracting. There's also a total lack of emotion from every human face which I personally find quite distracting, especially when trying to flirt with other humans. I romanced Miranda in ME2 and ME3 - I keep thinking about the cute sexy smirks and looks she used to give my Shep. When you compare what we have now, to what we had then, it's feels like several massive steps in the wrong direction. Finally - there's also a pudginess to default male Ryder that is really noticeable when you are putting different casual clothes on him; it seems to be great when in combat gear, but around the Tempest or Nexus the overall character build just seems off. Those are the things I find distracting, anyway. Oh I created my own Sara and whenever they say Sara I imagine they say my name
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Post by ticktak77 on Mar 24, 2017 6:36:13 GMT
Why blame EA? You know these things, called release dates, aren't exactly kept secret between developers and publishers right? Bioware would have known what their launch window was for this game, likely, a full 2 years ago, if not more.
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Post by Lebanese Dude on Mar 24, 2017 6:36:56 GMT
"but her animations"
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Post by ticktak77 on Mar 24, 2017 6:47:48 GMT
You may want to do a bit of research on just how the publisher / developer relationship works when it comes to designing a video game. EA gave Bioware $40 million dollars, and a release window. This must surely be their fault, right....?
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Post by Qui-Gon GlenN7 on Mar 24, 2017 6:49:19 GMT
You may want to do a bit of research on just how the publisher / developer relationship works when it comes to designing a video game. EA gave Bioware $40 million dollars, and a release window. This must surely be their fault, right....? His post said nothing about release windows. Neither does mine. Your assumptions are outstanding.
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Post by mrfixit on Mar 24, 2017 7:00:42 GMT
I am all for big evil corporation bashing, but honestly, I'm not sure these issues are EA's fault. They gave BioWare A LOT of time to make Andromeda, they pushed the release back already to provide the dev team with more breathing room. It's reaching to say that ME:A was rushed with so many years in development. To me this looks like bad management on BioWare's part. Biting off more than they could chew, setting the initial goals too ambitiously, problems with department coordination, time allocation, etc.
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Post by Link"Guess"ski on Mar 24, 2017 9:28:09 GMT
Blame EA management at BioWare in part. Blame Mac Walters in part for bloating up the scope with no filter of quality a quantity balance, blame the ME1 or just MET staff that did not migrate to this project or left BioWare - clearly this is where the fault lies. As Cooper said, and as I suspected since this began, the base level algorithms are worse than in ME1 and the amount of scenes that had to be scripted with the animation "sliders" were inflated. it's the result of BioWare Montreal not having access to the MET solution for facial animation due to working on Frostbite; due to Mac not controlling the scope of production as a creative director; and possibly someone's "solution" to use full face performance animations across the game that did not end up making the cut for the most part and thus they had to go with an algorithmic system they may not have intended to ever use for cutscenes. Whether it's EA or not I think bottomline is still that it's a Montreal game, it's Mac in the front seat and alleged management issues at the studio leading to top-responsible staff leaving in the middle of production, and at some point it becomes 5 long years of progression that leads to regression and a lack of polish and a crude day-1 product
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Post by disi on Mar 24, 2017 9:29:07 GMT
I am all for big evil corporation bashing, but honestly, I'm not sure these issues are EA's fault. They gave BioWare A LOT of time to make Andromeda, they pushed the release back already to provide the dev team with more breathing room. It's reaching to say that ME:A was rushed with so many years in development. To me this looks like bad management on BioWare's part. Biting off more than they could chew, setting the initial goals too ambitiously, problems with department coordination, time allocation, etc. I agree, you cannot develop a game forever and being paid for it. If you need longer than 5 years, then the hardware it was meant for is so outdated the game looks old at release. If he says they wanted to do many scenes handcrafted, maybe they need more manpower in the actual coder department rather than artists? Then they could have had automated animations like other games.
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Post by mrfixit on Mar 24, 2017 9:50:15 GMT
If there's any EA blame here, I'd guess it's at the most conceptual and company-wide mission-setting level. Wouldn't surprise me if EA, in their pursuit of $$$-making blockbusters, mandated the game to be big, sprawling, and crowd-pleasing. Still, BioWare was in the driver's seat. It was up to them to see the mission accomplished and it looks like they didn't do a stellar job.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 24, 2017 10:50:41 GMT
Why blame EA? You know these things, called release dates, aren't exactly kept secret between developers and publishers right? Bioware would have known what their launch window was for this game, likely, a full 2 years ago, if not more. It is impossible to know what goes on behind the scene between developers and publishers without some ex-dev talking about it to the press, but at this point I think it would be unfair to blame some of the unpolished parts of ME:A on EA. Not unless a dev comes out and says the publisher was pushing them to aim for goals that were unachievable... This game had 5 years of development, so it certainly wasn't rushed. Unless more information comes out pointing towards publisher meddling, this seems like more of a Bioware Montreal problem than an EA one.
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Post by Kappa Neko on Mar 24, 2017 13:11:04 GMT
From all the rumors that had been going around about development problems with Forstbite and whatnot, these tweets are not surprising. Something went horribily wrong trying to make this game. They obviously ran out of time and released a very unpolished game. Hopefully they'll at least try to patch it enough in the upcoming weeks and months so that some of the really frustrating issues like no saving during missions or the awful menus get fixed.
Perhaps they were too ambitious. Perhaps they couldn't agree on what they wanted this game to be. So they started over several times? No game should look so unpolished after five years. So my best guess is they didn't have a clear direction for a long time. And then it was already too late to make a quality product.
I've seen so many games in my line of work (localization, not development) where the devs struggled to make certain features work. Some things look easy to fix but apparently they are not. A lot gets cut because it didn't pan out or there was no time to fix the issues. Once an almost finished game was never released. I've also seen a lot of bad project management, resulting in an inferior product even though everybody tried their best with the time given.
My issues with what I've seen of MEA are more about the writing style and general juvenile tone of the game. The animation issues and other design choices make matters worse, but I could accept them. Imo DA2 was great fun despite the copy&paste maps due to time constraints. I actually thought it was amazing what they did with so little time. The story was great, Hawke was cool. I love the game.
MEA souns a bit like No Man's Sky. What they wanted to do and what they ended up delivering... They promised MEA would not be DAI in space but from what I've heard (haven't played myself yet) it very much is. It's worse than DAI to me because it's so unpolished.
Open world is very difficult to program no doubt. Perhaps Bioware would be better off pouring all their resources into a great cinematic storytelling again rather than making these big empty worlds they struggle with so much...
Those are my two cents on the matter.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 24, 2017 13:13:11 GMT
You may want to do a bit of research on just how the publisher / developer relationship works when it comes to designing a video game. EA gave Bioware $40 million dollars, and a release window. This must surely be their fault, right....? Is the budget really only 40 million? That is insanely low for a game at this scale. Something like Destiny cost 250 million and there wasn't anything to it at all. They probably spent it all on marketing.
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Post by joglee on Mar 24, 2017 14:15:00 GMT
Why blame EA? You know these things, called release dates, aren't exactly kept secret between developers and publishers right? Bioware would have known what their launch window was for this game, likely, a full 2 years ago, if not more. Things happen during development. I know I once added one line of code to a script on a mod I was making to fallout 4....Now this line shouldn't have been an issue, but it completely wrecked havoc on my mod. My mod is small beans in comparison to a game of this scale and finishing that line was relatively easy.
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Post by vonuber on Mar 24, 2017 14:38:48 GMT
My issues with what I've seen of MEA are more about the writing style and general juvenile tone of the game.... They promised MEA would not be DAI in space but from what I've heard (haven't played myself yet) it very much is. Unless you play it how do you know the writing style and juvenile tone? Surely you are not relying on a few youtube clips? Seems odd to make a sweeping judgement like that.
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Post by zipzap2000 on Mar 24, 2017 14:42:25 GMT
The electonic ant overlords did give them 5 years.
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Post by Qui-Gon GlenN7 on Mar 24, 2017 14:50:38 GMT
Everything trickles down from the top, AKA shit rolls down hill.
The pace and tone are set by the overlards, because that is their job. The Biower underlards, if they want to keep their job, acquiesce to the overlards.
I agree that Biower did plenty of their own shenanigans, but to not hold EA to some responsibility is absurd - these things didn't happen before the acquisition.
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Post by ticktak77 on Mar 24, 2017 15:14:33 GMT
Why blame EA? You know these things, called release dates, aren't exactly kept secret between developers and publishers right? Bioware would have known what their launch window was for this game, likely, a full 2 years ago, if not more. Things happen during development. I know I once added one line of code to a script on a mod I was making to fallout 4....Now this line shouldn't have been an issue, but it completely wrecked havoc on my mod. My mod is small beans in comparison to a game of this scale and finishing that line was relatively easy. Again - developers making mistakes during the course of development, is a publisher's fault, how?
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Post by Link"Guess"ski on Mar 24, 2017 15:15:18 GMT
Pretty much the real question is, why wasn't this delayed another 6-12 months and finished properly. Easy one. End of fiscal year or wait for next one: BioWare has other plans, EA has other plans that would postpone significantly (most likely) and no doubt they wasted too many resources with a 5-year dev cycle - it just makes more sense to cut losses and finish the next best thing and move on to DLCs and future projects. This is how the industry works. Not every game development project goes as planned and if you look at Duke Nukem Forever you can tell that sometimes it's better to just let it go. MEA isn't that bad and certainly should've had more polish but my guess is that inside BioWare consensus was "we've worked for this too long, we need to ship and focus on New IP and DA4 for the next year". Sure, MEA is montreal but they had help and lots of it from the other departments to get through the last year and meanwhile BioWare has been busy with other things that haven't been revealed yet, which they need full workforce on while MEA enters DLC production.
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Post by ticktak77 on Mar 24, 2017 15:16:11 GMT
You may want to do a bit of research on just how the publisher / developer relationship works when it comes to designing a video game. EA gave Bioware $40 million dollars, and a release window. This must surely be their fault, right....? Is the budget really only 40 million? That is insanely low for a game at this scale. Something like Destiny cost 250 million and there wasn't anything to it at all. They probably spent it all on marketing. Yes - a few articles at launch pegged the budged at 40 million; no idea how they got that number, but the fact that more than one was saying it, makes it quite believable.
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Post by ticktak77 on Mar 24, 2017 15:17:10 GMT
Why blame EA? You know these things, called release dates, aren't exactly kept secret between developers and publishers right? Bioware would have known what their launch window was for this game, likely, a full 2 years ago, if not more. It is impossible to know what goes on behind the scene between developers and publishers without some ex-dev talking about it to the press, but at this point I think it would be unfair to blame some of the unpolished parts of ME:A on EA. Not unless a dev comes out and says the publisher was pushing them to aim for goals that were unachievable... This game had 5 years of development, so it certainly wasn't rushed. Unless more information comes out pointing towards publisher meddling, this seems like more of a Bioware Montreal problem than an EA one.That's the most logical approach, here. People just enjoy making EA the scapegoat, because EA
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