Dragon Age News Thread

They speak a language, it looks like english, but I do not know it.

Game devs are Geth confirmed.

Let me take a stab at a translation. Edit: after some more thought, there’s an alternative translation. I’ll mark the two alternatives as A and B.

Translation A: Normally when we cast spells, they’ll sputter out if we phrased some words wrong. Since Visual Studio (the thing we use to cast our spells) wasn’t working like it should, some obscure forms of mis-wording could slip through. The grammatically incorrect spells would cast, but maybe do something super weird later.

Translation B: The opposite problem. Correctly-worded spells would sometimes randomly sputter out.

Translation A: So we modified the spell so the questionable phrasing would repeat thousands of times in a row. That way, if something weird ended up happening, we’d definitely catch it, and we’d know we needed to fix the spell.

Translation B: We cast the entire spell many times in a row, and only adjusted the grammar if it sputtered out every time. If it only sputtered out once, it could have been a fluke.


Translation A or B: Part of the verification process for our spells is to have a bunch of tiny wizards cast them. The tiny wizards are themselves summoned via spells and don’t know how to do anything but cast spells. But they are much faster at spellcasting than real wizards. This is a “test farm”. However, they do have limits, and (translator note: I’m guessing this next part due to the context) the thousandfold repeats we’d added sometimes expended all their magical energy. Since the tiny wizards aren’t people, it’s difficult for them to communicate this problem, so they spout ominous prophecies instead.

Plus, we’re riiiiight on the cusp of being able to synthesize voices good enough for video games. Current state-of-the-art sounds almost 100% human, but has a fairly neutral tone.

Smooth out the remaining roughness, and add some emotional inflection, and it would render the whole problem moot.

Now granted, completely realistic voice synthesis brings some other, much more serious problems with it, but it does solve the voiced vs. text issue pretty handily.

Branching remains expensive either way, and even more expensive if one tries to build a continuous story across multiple chapters, or sometimes even the whole run of the franchise. It isn't just a matter of voicing protagonists.
If there are so many excellent games that provide what you want why demanding for ALL RPGs to be like that? Just like not all things can be done with voiced protagonists, there are things that can't be done or achieved with text, so there's clearly a place for both of them on the market.

Let Bioware follow their vision for their RPGs... waitaminute, weren't you the one ranting against creators caving to pressure and compromising their artistic vision or something?

Fair enough. Though I don't *demand* all RPGs homoginize, I guess that in my old age i miss the Bioware of old. CD Projetk Red implies cinematic storytelling, and I enjoy how they still offer multiple options. Don't care for Cyperpunk 2077 being a and FPS, but that's a gameplay issue and not a roleplaying one.

Pfffffft, it's hardly full text dialogue, then.

Goddamn kids today. When you have to control a mute PC and every other character's voice is conveyed via blue or black text boxes, then speak to me of the superiority of all-text dialogue RPGs. I was playing Dragon Warrior on the NES when you were suckling at yer mother's teats.

Um... no, he's not? There are mentions of Mass Effect, of Bioware's older games and - of course - a whole slew of non-Bioware games brought as an example to build a case against a voiced protagonist and/or what is perceived as a limited set of choices in general.

Also - why has combat entered the discussion...? I mean, you could make a case about the combat in the broadest sense I guess, but can you really make it about the voiced protagonist, when it existed only for one game in DA series... as compared to 2 with voiced ones and most other games Bioware released for close to a decade now featuring voiced protags (if extending this concern on the studio as a whole)?

Nevermind that we simply don't have an issue you describe with Dragon Age - there are only 3 games in the series so far and neither of them is much like the previous ones. Clearly (aside from just natural evolution of the medium) it's a franchise eager to experiment with its own format and its narrative theme of the subjectivity of experience at least sets a foundation for suspension of disbelief when facing differences in gameplay.

Apparently so. That's unfortunate.

www.onlysp.com/pillars-of-eternity-ii-sales-below-expectations/