The Pyjack's Den! The ME News Discussion Thread

Feels like a couple of years to me. 2023 sometime...

No quite right. I was mistakenly cross-reading threads. 2 years for Dragon Age. 5 for Mass Effect.

David Gaider @davidgaider
I'm relieved to see that the Mass Effect/Amazon deal is for a potential TV series and not a movie. Even so, the possibility (and likewise for Dragon Age) makes me cringe just a little, unlike many fans who appear... excited?

Let me explain. (Thread)

For starters, ME and DA have a custom protagonist. Meaning said TV show will need to pick whether said protagonist will be male or female. Boom, right off the bat you've just alienated a whole bunch of the built-in fan base who had their hopes up.

Secondly, those protagonists are designed to be a bit of a blank slate, one that the player fills out with their decisions. That's not going to work for a passive medium. So, suddenly, the protagonist will have their own personality... and their own *story*. That will be weird.

You think I'm wrong? Consider just how MUCH of the story is off-loaded onto the companions. They are the cyphers through which the player gets most of their emotional engagement from. On their own, the DA and ME protagonists are... well, pretty boring. That's not going to fly.

And think of those companions. Think of how MUCH the fanbase is attached to them. Now consider the fact that there is no way in hell any single story could encompass them all equally. Think of the howls of rage when companion X is relegated to a cameo... or not there at all.

Having a TV show instead of a movie allows for more companion options, sure, but consider your own playthrough: only a handful of them had any meaningful presence in a single game. That will need to be the case for this story, to maintain coherence. A few companions, one romance.

And that's IF the TV show makers consider the companions to be all that important. They might toss most of them aside in favor of the PLOT. In my mind, that would be a mistake. Both ME's and DA's plots were, at best, serviceable.

And I don't mean that in a derogatory way.

Those plots had to take into account the player's agency. They were kind of the shell upon which that player's emotional engagement was delivered -- usually through the companions and the choices themselves. Choice heightened engagement. Interactivity was the star, not the plot.

Take all that out, lose most of the companions, and you potentially end up with... a pretty run-of-the-mill fantasy or science-fiction show, one where a lot of the built-in audience has possibly been turned into outraged, howling malcontents before it's even released.

All that is, of course, if the DA or ME series is mishandled. I can think of any number of ways it could be done better... but that involves doing more than a strict adaptation, and that comes with its own complications.

Anyhow, good luck to the showrunners. They'll need it!

EDIT:

I'm seeing responses along the lines of "they could do some story within the DA/ME universe and not just the story of the games" -- that IS what I meant by an adaptation in my last tweet above. In many ways, not simply adapting the story of the games would be wiser.

BUT consider this from the perspective of those making the TV show. They are not making it solely for the fans, those who already know the entire story and would be fine with moving onto something else.

The far larger audience are those who know nothing about ME or DA at all.

At some level, this TV series needs to answer the question "what IS Mass Effect?" ...and that means making something that is *recognizeably* Mass Effect. It means retreading ground in a way that fans don't need, and will likely react poorly to.

Maybe. I guess we'll see.

Well that could work, I'd certainly watch if they made it. 

Part of a larger thread discussing how much of the general public isn't aware of the costs of game development. In this case, it started with a fan saying they would pay $10K to have MP added to Breath of the Wild...

Raphael van Lierop (He/Him) @raphlife
So as to avoid just being a complainer and not a solver, let's see if we can't help frame the discussion in a more positive way by finding things in games that can be done for roughly $10k, or explaining what some typical features might cost from an implementation standpoint.

I'll start.

* $10k will get you between 5-7.5 minutes of original music from a good composer.
* $10k will cover the cost of translating about 50,000-75,000 words of text into one language (depending on the language).
* $10k might cover the cost of trademarking your game name in ~1-2 territories, depending on how many Classes you try to protect yourself in.
* $10k might cover the cost of a small number of relatively polished (better than sketches, but nothing near final) pieces of concept art.

Flipping it the other way around, creating a single region in #thelongdark costs about $300k+, considering design time, art, testing, etc. And this is only if the artists are using mostly existing assets. The cost goes way up if you're adding new custom structures, etc.

Charles Randall @charlesrandall
On Assassin's Creed 2, I calculated that a good core team was quite literally worth their weight in gold.

(And what I mean by this, is if you traded for the core team with their weight in gold, you would actually make money.)

Trent Oster @trentoster
We had a derived stat from Mass Effect that the average user could consume about $170,000 worth of level art per minute.

The more tweets I see, the more I feel that I should tune into The Game Awards show on Thursday night, just in case they announce something 

Bless both of them.  Absolutely exquisite work.

I would really like to know what they tell their significant others about their feelings on the endings. Not what they put out for public release, but their true, unabashed thoughts on the endings for the characters they spent so much time on.

I know, fantasy land thinking and it will never happen, but still.....

There was talk about FB might not get updated early enough for BioWare's tastes, so why not use other one (of course here the cost will come higher maybe but..)

Umm... again the engine does not say by default how the models etc. will look. MELE characters look way worse than even originals, the NPC's especially how their eye surroundings are total black. Again, if one would believe the engine would have a default output which could not be changed, these would be the characters you'd get ? hehe...

So the game will look and run worse. Good to know.