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Post by hathur on Mar 20, 2017 21:50:32 GMT
Used a VPN to start the game early and have spent the past 2+ hours maddeningly trying to make a decent male and female ryder... I've given up on male, the presets are too mutant-like to work with.. and with female I find only 2 of the presets to be agreeable once heavily tweaked (well.. as "heavily" as these neutered CC controls will allow)... ultimately settled with preset 9... oh and my advice? Bring eye depth down (no lower than 5) and mouth depth down to 5 or 6 as well... reduces mutant-like animations I'm finding and generally looks more human. One day I'm hoping to make a half decent male ryder that doesn't make me want to run out of my room screaming in terror... but I am skeptical it is possible... would love to be proven wrong... any handsome male ryders out there?
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Post by hathur on Mar 20, 2017 21:34:23 GMT
I wonder if the Devs have console codes they use to skip over this stuff? Or if they become immune to it while testing? This looks like another (repair) job for those talented modders. (Thanks) Well, I can bring up the command console in game with the tilde key... sadly I don't know any commands etc.. but maybe people will find them down the road (if there are any).
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Post by hathur on Mar 20, 2017 20:41:57 GMT
What's very annoying is the characters for multiplayer (men and women) are infinitely better designed than any of the presets.. I would really like to play as one of the male or female presets from multiplayer
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Post by hathur on Mar 20, 2017 20:37:27 GMT
I don't get why they have that animation every single time. It was cool the first two times but it got old FAST. It's a loading screen.. or rather it is masking a loading screen. Tested it on 2 different pcs with identical video cards but different CPU speeds and the slower cpu took almost 6 seconds longer to travel back and forth between the same planets. (both on 7500rpm HDDs)
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Post by hathur on Mar 20, 2017 20:35:51 GMT
Agreed.. but I find myself more annoyed that they promised "meaningful side quests" akin to the Witcher 3 (witcher 3 side quests were all short contained stories that were genuinely interesting and many had truly terrific writing... not MMO fetch quest style nonsense). So far most of my side quests are barely better than the garbage sidequests from Inquisition... hoping they get better, but these side quest stories do not remotely compare in quality to the side quests of witcher 3, they're still just mmo style nonsense mostly.
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Post by hathur on Mar 20, 2017 13:40:58 GMT
Incase anyone forgot.. DA2 received less than stellar reviews, yet the dragon age series endured nonetheless. Reviews for the game seen "decent" to "good"... nobody calling it great.. that is hardly a death knell for the series.. far from it.
They will, theoretically, learn from this and move on to make a better game next time. I don't imagine sales will be bad for the game.. perhaps not great, but I suspect decent sales.. thus the franchise will endure fine.
The problem is this game was made by a rookie studio... Bioware Montreal's resume includes the ME3 Omega DLC (bug ridden and worst written of all the dlc) and the multiplayer for ME3 (which was excellent.. likely why andromeda's combat is so good)... this is their first actual game... and the first game in the series not under the wing of Casey Hudson (producer, no longer at bioware). Hudson to my understanding was a taskmaster, but he was passionate and protective of the series when he helped make it... I suspect the series simply needs another passionate producer that is more demanding of his team than what this rookie studio has had.
Hopefully Bioware Montreal is just going through growing pains here and will get better next time around (assuming the next game doesn't go back to the original series team in bioware edmonton.. who are supposedly working on a new IP)
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Post by hathur on Mar 20, 2017 4:30:14 GMT
Good god... people on youtube have already completed the game and uploaded narrative playthrough (no gameplay, just main story dialogue).
GLPG has it just under 6 hours of recorded video for the story... though I believe this is main story only and not side quests / companions etc, since I know for a fact that ME3 with all its dlc is a bit over 30 hours of recorded dialogue if you don't skip anything (zero gameplay, just dialogue).
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Post by hathur on Mar 20, 2017 3:16:15 GMT
Don't we already have threads discussing animation issues? I think the comment was in relation to the dialogue... which I for one found amusing and slightly endearing (if only in that's it is super rare to see a protagonist behaving awkwardly / shy).
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Post by hathur on Mar 20, 2017 3:14:16 GMT
"My face is tired" = tired face, which I see often in English her (in Canada). It is pretty common in French to use "Mon visage est fatigué" (the translation of my face is tired). Have heard / seen it used in french-speaking parts of Canada... NEVER in anglophone parts of Canada though and I'd wager 99% of anglophones have never seen / heard it used. I have relatives in quebec however whilst I live in Ontario, so I get exposure to both "sides" of Canada.
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Post by hathur on Mar 19, 2017 23:38:53 GMT
Well, you can get better melee weapons in the game - and there are various skills that boost or work in tandem with melee attacks.. so yes it should be entirely viable. Perhaps not with the starting omni blade (unless it gets upgraded heavily later), but I suspect with newer melee weapons it should work quite well.
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Post by hathur on Mar 19, 2017 23:35:19 GMT
The worst part is you just know for a fact that someone in QA wrote to the team "Bind consumables to a key" ... and it went ignored :/
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Post by hathur on Mar 19, 2017 20:58:34 GMT
Why must I open the stupid wheel to use consumables on PC version? I cannot for the life of me find an option to bind consumables to a hotkey.. instead I have to pause the game with the annoying wheel while using mouse and keyboard... it is exceedingly irritating.
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Post by hathur on Mar 19, 2017 20:08:04 GMT
But when they add CC patch... You're gonna wait at least 2 months before we hear anything about that I think, unless all you want is a new hair color or bridge depth. That's optimistic. DAI had some weird as hell (not many.. but a few) bugs in some of its bigger cutscenes that weren't resolved for almost a year. Realistically we can expect a few animation tweaks being dribbled out slowly.. DAI had its fair share and only a portion of them were ever resolved (not talking bad animations.. actual bugs in the animation like Cassandra's neck turning invisible if she had certain armor on in a few cutscenes) and other ones where any armor that had clothing draping down to the knees would stand erect like a wooden board at a 60 degree angle in some scenes.
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Post by hathur on Mar 19, 2017 19:17:06 GMT
Hey there ! Does anyone know if the game keeps track of the orientation of your choices (Emotional/pragmatic/etc, the 4 ones), like it did for Parangon and Renegade ? And if so, will it unlock some specific dialogue options later on, like in the previous titles ? It does seem to be tracked, or at least I was given the impression when a dev mentioned in an interview that it is tracked in the codex even. I suspect it will impact auto-dialogue lines the way it did in DA2 since this seems to be an evolution of that dialogue system. I.e. if you choose emotional lines most often, certain auto-dialogue lines in the game may be different than someone who is mostly professional... but I can't cite anything for certain on this, it is merely supposition based on interviews I read or viewed (npcs will apparently react differently towards you depending on your dominant personality type.. that much I heard for certain.. but whether ryder's responses change I can't be certain)
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Post by hathur on Mar 19, 2017 16:23:20 GMT
Software engineers. Bioware has a budget, they tend to direct that budget towards other aspects of a game... software engineering is not one of them (or rather, it is low on their totem pole of priorities.. as is evidenced in the lack of technical aptitude in most of their games). CD Projekt Red (in a documentary), invested heavily in software engineering for Witcher 3, relatively speaking to their budget I mean. They devised a complex highly efficient system that could create smooth, natural looking animations that were also easy to create on the fly for the dev team.. so when they needed new animations, the toolset was able to let them do so with ease. How they were able to do this and yet also maintain a stellar writing team, level / world designers, artists etc is beyond me.. though they did it a fraction of the cost of what Bioware spends on their games (to be fair, most of CD Projekt is in eastern europe where salaries are lower than north america). What they really needed to do was poach some software engineers from DICE that know the engine well and could help them devise better tools for the dev / animations team to work with... they are clearly working with a weak toolset in house or simply hired inferior animators (contractors possibly). I will never-ever understand people claiming that Witcher 3 facial animations are anywhere close to being industry's top tier. They are extremely basic most of the time. Characters speak with middle of their mouths. A lot of times they hardly move aside form lipsynch and light twitches around the eyes and brows. They're not horrible per se, but you can see even the developer not being confident in them, considering that many emotional cutscenes have been composed to OBSCURE facial expression, or keep them at the distance .
Nobody is claiming they are top tier. But they are leagues beyond the facial animations over their competitors (Bioware, Bethesda). No RPG can use mo-cap for facial animations because it would be ludicrously expensive. Action games like COD, Halo etc can because they typically only have to animate maybe 20 characters.. a RPG needs to animate hundreds and even thousands... this is why RPGs use facial animation toolkits.. basically an algorithm that animates a character's face with as little input needed by an animator as possible.. this allows a small team of animators to animate all those countless npcs in a reasonable time at reasonable cost. No, the animations in Witcher 3 are far from perfect... frankly no game is and many mo-capped games suffer from uncanny valley because they get too close but not close enough and thus ruin the illusion. Witcher 3 is cited as an excellent solution because of games of its class (large rpgs with many characters), its animations are among the best... both because of its appearance vs other games of its kind and because of how effective the toolset is for a small team of animators. I have two relatives of mine who work as animators (not necessarily faces though) in the video game industry, and while they say the animations in Andromeda are not bad, they lack what both the Witcher 3 and MAss Effect 3 did ... brow / eye movement. The eyes dart frantically for some reason in Andromeda in many conversations... now compare it to ME3 or Witcher 3 where the pupils move as well, but not in the manner of which you'd expect of a terrified prey animal. There is also very little brow movement in Andromeda... a tragic event occurs, character's face stays flat... in ME3 when Shepard sees a child die, she / he grimaces, squints her eyes in rage at the Reapers. When a peasant says somethign racist to Geralt, he says nothing but cocks one eyebrow up inquisitively.... I have not seen these nuanced details at all in Andromeda yet, or not often anyway.. yet they are common in both ME3 and Witcher 3. I strongly encourage you to watch some youtube videos of those other 2 games.. then watch some andromeda ones and you will notice the distinct lack of upper facial movements and also ask why their eyes keep traveling so quickly as if they were scanning a canopy of trees for predators in their midst.
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Post by hathur on Mar 19, 2017 4:06:42 GMT
Frostbite isn't the best game for facial animations, and animations in general are hard unless you're using mocap, which a lot of larger companies do nowadays. Honestly I think everyone's freaking out too much about it. I come from the era of square boobs and flat faces. I'll make fun of the animating errors or the seemingly low quality, and i do expect better quality in the future, but as long as we don't get a repeat of Unity's 'missing faces', I'm good. The problem is they are likely using a rudimentary toolset for facial animations.. they didn't invest software engineering resources into making a smart animation toolset. This likely means that animators had to very much work by hand or simply let their basic tools try their best to sort out facial animations. CD Projekt Red (witcher 3), spent a few years on software engineering just for the animation toolset.. this is why they could create natural, smooth looking animations on the fly and with tremendous ease with only a few animators - the toolset was well designed and didn't need a lot of hand-holding by the animator. Mass Effect 1 actually also used a third-party facial animation toolset at the time, which was separate from the Unreal 3 engine (it was integrated into it after the fact by Bioware). The toolset, which Bioware bought or licensed, did a lot of the heavy lifting in facial animations for the trilogy - they simply had to tweak and build upon it.. but they didn't have to invest years developing their own animation toolset. Clearly the Frostbite engine does not have a third-party toolset that can do this the way Unreal 3 could (either that or Bioware didn't license / buy it). Though it does beg the question why facial animations are noticeably better in DAI than Andromeda despite both using Frostbite. Suffice to say, software engineering and animation toolset creation is a very low priority for Bioware.
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Post by hathur on Mar 19, 2017 3:58:40 GMT
Software engineers. Bioware has a budget, they tend to direct that budget towards other aspects of a game... software engineering is not one of them (or rather, it is low on their totem pole of priorities.. as is evidenced in the lack of technical aptitude in most of their games).
CD Projekt Red (in a documentary), invested heavily in software engineering for Witcher 3, relatively speaking to their budget I mean. They devised a complex highly efficient system that could create smooth, natural looking animations that were also easy to create on the fly for the dev team.. so when they needed new animations, the toolset was able to let them do so with ease. How they were able to do this and yet also maintain a stellar writing team, level / world designers, artists etc is beyond me.. though they did it a fraction of the cost of what Bioware spends on their games (to be fair, most of CD Projekt is in eastern europe where salaries are lower than north america).
What they really needed to do was poach some software engineers from DICE that know the engine well and could help them devise better tools for the dev / animations team to work with... they are clearly working with a weak toolset in house or simply hired inferior animators (contractors possibly).
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Post by hathur on Mar 19, 2017 2:21:47 GMT
This may seem silly... but you're right-clicking, correct? Not left clicking. Only thing I can think of :/
Oh and check your key bindings in options, you may have accidentally removed / changed something.
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Post by hathur on Mar 18, 2017 19:47:41 GMT
After looking at all the trailers that have come out, I have come to the conclusion that for me, the best one is this.. None of the others gave me any emotion except dread. The above hit me hard and brought to life, the realization that the trilogy was truly over. This one... but I'm biased
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Post by hathur on Mar 18, 2017 16:50:25 GMT
I've seen it in action, but I was hoping for an actual description of what it does.. it just says reduces damage.. but its vague.. does it reduce damage to shields, or just to health? How much does it reduce by? 5%? 10%? 90%? There's no useful info about the skill that i can find. The other specialist abilities have detailed descriptions with numerical info
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Post by hathur on Mar 18, 2017 16:47:52 GMT
Not being smarmy.... but you're genuinely using a CRT in this day and age? I cannot understand why, their image quality is inferior to modern monitors, they consume 3x more electricity than a LCD and are simply inferior in all regards (shorter lifespan as well on them, they tend to blow a fuse after 5 years on average)... they are also museum pieces, I can't even find a store that sells them unless I went to a pawn shop perhaps.
Curious why you like CRT monitors.
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Post by hathur on Mar 18, 2017 16:43:30 GMT
Curious if anyone got a chance to try out sentinel tech armor in Andromeda. I always liked this skill in the previous games, but the description for it I've found online were vague.. does anyone know what it does exactly, or how it works?
My impression is it reduces damage to your health once shields have failed? How useful did it seem?
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Post by hathur on Mar 18, 2017 7:24:08 GMT
If white people truly don't care or think about race, they wouldn't be concerned about represenation in a video game, would they? Don't be asinine. This isn't about white representation.. this is about a stupid / flawed gameplay design system. The same problem exists if I choose the caucasian preset head, change the skin tone to that of an african person for both Ryders ... Alec appears as caucasian european with ZERO physical features that coincide with the children other than eye color. My OP wasn't some bloody social commentary about ethnicity in society the way everyone in this stupid thread have made it out to be... it was simply a comment about a very weird decision in the game to make my parents appear of very clear African heritage when both children were clearly NOT of African heritage. Take your tiresome social commentary elsewhere, this is a bloody video-game discussion issue, not a real-life social commentary one.
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Post by hathur on Mar 17, 2017 20:26:44 GMT
in my 10 hours i was enjoying the story, constantly was looking forward to see what was next. Enjoyed character interactions / dialogue. Lots and lots of banter everywhere you go, vastly more so than any other bioware game. The mood / feel of the setting is great, feel like an explorer or settler out to make a new home for humanity. Likeable protagonist, I appreciate that Ryder isn't an elite soldier but instead more of a classical explorer from days of old. While there is plenty of conflict, I greatly enjoy that this doesn't feel like a war story like the trilogy did.. much more pleasant mood to it all. (This is not a complaint against the trilogy.. just that I am relieved it feels considerably different and new over the original series).
And the gameplay is very fun, my favourite of the series.
Technicial / graphical issues aside, I very much look forward to resuming playing on the 21st. 10 hours of playing and I still feel as I did when I was a wee lass waiting for Christmas to roll up so I could open my presents.
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Post by hathur on Mar 17, 2017 20:14:55 GMT
If you're in fullscreen mode alt-tabbing to desktop should theoretically work. Haven't tested it, but it has worked in other games.. won't work in windowed or borderless windowed mode though.
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