Schmooples' Den! The DA News Discussion Thread

Most of my characters make deals with demons in general, because I usually play weak-willed PCs. It happens to make the Suledin capture a bit easier, but the ultimate reason is RP-related. Some of the other Suledin Keep fights are required (to open doors and gates and such), so they don’t get to weasel their way out of all the fighting. However neither of the giants are required... though I’m sure the rest of the Inquisition just loves finding 2 giants and some stray red templars in the keep the Inquisitor “captured”.

Suledin Keep is the only one that generates GBH if Leliana goes to gather materials there. I pretty much assign her there constantly until my whole team is geared. GBH’s dex boost is great for assassins because they can boost their own crit chance, and its crit chance boost is great for tempests, artificers, and flashpoint CC mages (I use one of the staff grips that grants a bunch of leather offense slots). I usually end up needing more GBH than dragon scales.

Plus it makes really attractive black armor tinting.

I almost never do that. Not because I can't imagine a character who would do that, but because I can't imagine a character who'd do it that cheaply. And they'd have to be convinced the demon really can give them what they want, and they aren't gullible as a rule. So there's a certain pride, ironically, that prevents them from making such deals.


Yay for the Inquisitor's fashion sense, LOL, which they insist on indulging even in combat! Not that I'm not doing exactly the same...

Also, more efficient fighting is always nice, even if you don't play higher difficulties, because it reduces the time you waste in pointless trash combat. I just never made the effort to kit out my whole party in stuff made with Great Bear Hides. But...as I'm now running a mod that reduces the time for war table missions...yes, a blatant cheat, but I don't think I need to prove anything to me after several regular playthroughs.

Steve Blum @blumspew
Finally doing my first Reddit AMA! Join me this Thursday, TOMORROW! January 24th at 6pm PST at reddit.com/r/cowboybebop
Does not have to be Bebop related. Go nuts! This could get weird. #reddit

Lavellans. Probably. Sorry.

Unfortunately there was nothing about DA/ME or BW in general in that AMA.

Who is that, Hrungr?

The LargeHuman @meatheadmilitia
Describe your job, poorly.

Melissa Davidson deedlite
I make with the smashie smashie and everyone ded.

I tell people their stuff is ugly.


- Melissa's a Gameplay Designer

Imperator Furiåsa @devilkitten
Come work with me at BioWare. I promise a challenging and rewarding job with lots of fun people. www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/1049181929

Heh - I was literally just playing DAO.

I approve this message.

Imperator Furiåsa @devilkitten
So here are the biggest challenges I’ve run into in different contexts and in different projects/companies as a UX designer.

1. No buy in from the team - UX design is a very new discipline within games, and it’s something that game designers used to do at least part of. Usually the rest of it - the menus - were handled by graphic artists. This means that in a team that’s never had a UX designer, it might be hard to see what they can do for the game. In a situation like that, it’s easy to end up working at cross purposes. Usually the best thing to do is sit down with the designers and talk through the feature.

2. Localization - yes. This is a real thing. Translating a game is pure hell unless you plan the UIs carefully. Usually you end up in situations where German and Russian has to scroll or you end up sending half the texts back for retranslation. English happen to be a short and succinct language. The worst situation I’ve been in was translating a text based game with 60 character limits to Finnish. I love Finland (I’ve even lived there for a while), but man those words...! The best thing to do is to build in contingencies such as scrolling text, but also be very clear with character limits.

3. Multiplayer features and getting data from backends that have to communicate with servers and then clients. This can seriously affect the frame rate of a game and cause real problems, not just for the UI but for all the gameplay features as well. Ping pong calls to the server from the client and back? Not a good idea. This is actually out of the design area, this is all on the backend.

4. Massive textures and 3D UIs. Everyone loves 3D UIs. Everyone loves pretty textures. One of the reasons why UIs can take a long time to load is because they’re memory intense. It takes a long time to stream them in. It takes a lot of memory to have everything loaded.

Figure out which UIs “deserve” the extra bling and cut back on the rest. Or make sure that the bling-y stuff doesn’t have to be loaded all the time.

5. Last minute feature changes. This really has to do a lot with the team buy in. A good user experience can’t really be smooshed in at the last minute. If you want to build good UX and good UI it has to be given the time and consideration of any feature in the game. I usually say “you get the UIs you deserve”, and sometimes those UIs are not the best.

Basically, give it time, thought and resources, and please don’t use it as a last minute fix for a system that’s too complicated. Which brings me to:

6. Using UI as a band aid. If you build a system you can’t explain in a simple way to your game dev colleagues, don’t expect UX/ UI to solve the problem.

I’ve been in situations where the designer couldn’t explain what the system was without an excel sheet and an hour long meeting, and even then it was hard to understand.

In those instances, either put everything on the page and ask people to look at it or play it, or talk to the designer about their intent.

7. Getting data. I mentioned it earlier but this is really the hardest thing we have to deal with. Every piece of information in a UI has to come from somewhere. Usually this is the hardest part. Asking for it early helps. Having the engineers involved in the design helps. I once printed a banner and pasted it on the wall. Any time a dev came to me and asked for a feature I’d point to the banner. It read “we need more data”.

There are a million challenges in game dev and UX for games, but these are the top ones.

I forgot a very important one!

8. Christmas tree HUD syndrome. The first instinct of some designers is to put _everything_ on the HUD. Cool effects, lots and lots of numbers and text, animations and other attention drawing movement. This is a mistake.

Put only what you need when you need it on screen. People do _not_ pay attention. All the data I’ve ever seen from UXR point to the player’s focus being at the center of the screen at all times.

If you overload the screen with information, the play won’t see anything

I have a perfect example of HUD overload in a game I did a while back. Everything went on the HUD and as a result, the important information was lost in the massive cognitive load of reading the screen.

We cut about 2/3rds of the information and ended up with a good experience.

They skipped on the part of recurrent spending which is mostly a MP thing only a few SP games have microtransactions/lootboxes, so buying a game isn't the only factor.

Not to mention the paradox they just presented:
Buying Anthem = more MP games.
Not buying Anthem = studio closing, meaning we can't buy the upcoming SP game.
There is currently no new SP game available for purchase from BW.