Post by cuthbertbeckett on Jan 23, 2023 13:11:05 GMT
Mac Walters have left Bioware after 19 years. He was more the Mass Effect guy but it also DA relevant because he had been Dreadwolf Production Director. "With a new year comes new adventures," Walters wrote in a post on LinkedIn. "As some of you already know, at the end of last year I decided to leave BioWare. These past 19 years have been a life-changing experience to say the least, and it made the choice to go very difficult." www.eurogamer.net/mass-effect-veteran-mac-walters-leaves-bioware-after-19-years
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Dragon Age The Veilguard Prime Posts: 3,912 Prime Likes: 9733 Posts: 2,894 Likes: 12,961
Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Dragon Age The Veilguard
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Dragon Age The Veilguard Prime Posts: 3,912 Prime Likes: 9733 Posts: 2,894 Likes: 12,961
Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Dragon Age The Veilguard
devon giehl🐀ratmaker @devongiehl hazel is locked but she gave me permission to say publicly that she’s right as usual
Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes I have written a ton of cringy dialogue that I was lucky enough to get to fix once I heard it in game, so it didn’t ship. I have written some stuff I didn’t get to fix before ship, and it still haunts me. Also, some dialogue is great in context and bad in a no-context clip.
David Gaider @davidgaider I remember when the DAO romance dialogue was released by Marketing prior to release. Out of context? Totally cringe. It was universally mocked on the forums. Once the game went out? Not a peep.
George Mann (@georgemann@zirk.us) @george_Mann Out today from @darkhorsecomics! My first foray into world of DRAGONAGE comics! With wonderful art by Kieron McKeown. Very happy to be a small part of this fabulous fantasy world. #DragonAge
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Dragon Age The Veilguard Prime Posts: 3,912 Prime Likes: 9733 Posts: 2,894 Likes: 12,961
Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Dragon Age The Veilguard
"Varric Tethras and Lace Harding have a tough job ahead of them. Tasked with finding their former friend Solas, the pair find themselves facing down a lot more than they bargained for. With a difference of opinion on how to approach their target, and with new enemies around every corner, the duo might find they've bitten off more than they can chew."
Jos @sjosz Counting down the minutes until @eplerjc reviews one of my missions today. He's way too professional and nice to ever do this, but seeing a shitpost about it would be hilarious.
John Epler @eplerjc you and the team did spectacular work so even if i were cruel enough to shitpost about it, it would be something like 'damn hate it when something's so good that the only feedback i can give is along the lines of 'what if this purple were more... purple...''
John Epler @eplerjc i am about 95% sure we shipped DAI with a schematic entity that had a giant 'PAX - DO NOT SHIP' tag on it that seemingly did nothing but if you deleted it a bunch of stuff stopped working
enigmalea @enigmalea@indiepocalypse.social @paladinbard Feel free to ignore this, but I was wondering how much input you have into Solas' movements/actions in things like the comics.
Do you have control over his full timeline and plan? Have you just laid out plot points for his overall arc and the other media can play around in the intervening space between your plot points?
Trick @paladinbard@wandering.shop (Patrick Weekes) @enigmalea Short generalized answer: It depends on the character.
A character invented for a media tie-in has a lot of freedom, provided they follow the rules and themes we're going for.
A character we know we're using again is going to come with a lot of oversight and very specific guidelines and limitations.
As BioWare was working on Dragon Age 2, a team at IronMonkey worked on a mobile spin-off alongside the development of Dead Space Mobile. A more action-focused take on the series, the tentatively titled Dragon Age Mobile would take the world of Thedas and turn it into a Diablo-style action-RPG.
Over the course of six months, IronMonkey would work on its mobile game. Set around the same time period as Dragon Age: Origins, you would create a new character, explore new areas of Thedas not seen in the console games and meet new characters in the world.
“Dragon Age was a big project. Oh man, that was heartbreaking,” Tonkin told Stealth Optional. “We worked on that for six months; we had a Diablo-style thing, three-quarter top-down and combat, special moves and spells. EA were very supportive of what we were doing with it. They understood the need to adjust the style of play and had confidence in our ability to deliver a polished and well-executed experience.”
- Star Wars Jedi: Survivor now arrives April 28th. It is encouraging to see EA allow a game to be delayed into the next financial year, which is something they really don't like to do. They said a lot of positive things about the potential growth of this franchise.
- Apex Legends Mobile and Battlefield Mobile games are being shut down. They underperformed.
- As it was a World Cup year, naturally FIFA did well.
- Still, they were down this quarter and they mentioned (a number of times) the belt-tightening they'be been doing.
Caitie ghildirthalen Haven’t seen one yet for DA so…. what’s the most useless fact about Dragon Age that you know?
My personal favorite- the frostbite engine didn’t do ending slides, so the slides you see in DAI are actually paintings that quickly spawn in your bed room. You can zoom out during the end with fly cam 💫
John Epler @eplerjc i remember when we were trying to do these and we're like 'hey can we display still images' and the answer was 'uhh it's a lot more complicated than you think'
so this was the solution. i set up all the cameras, and I THINK level design handled all the scripting logic
anyways videogames are basically held together by magic and hope and it's a legitimate miracle anytime one gets finished
I've told this story before but the reason Iron Bull's romance scene takes place in a separate tower is because the mocap for everyone walking in on you assumed that there was a doorway, and the player's bedroom ended up having stairs.
so we moved the scene to the Sex Tower
in DA2 Mark of the Assassin, if you let Baron Arlange live after the first encounter with him, he shows up very deep in the background of several scenes, creeping on Hawke and the party around stalagmites and around corners.
no one asked for this but i put it in as a little treat because i thought it was very funny.
i still do
oh the scene where you get captured in the vault by Prosper and his guards, that's the same 5 (6?) guards just cycled through multiple times.
when you 'sprint' on a horse in DAI it doesn't really do much because frostbite couldn't stream in levels fast enough, so we just added speed lines and changed the camera so it felt faster
i've carried the guilt of this for years. guilt is an ocean, and i'm tired of drowning.
feels like I just murdered Santa Claus in front of many of you
seb hanlon 😷 @hanlsp ME1 did it first
but they have different sounds
/screams in Red Hart
John Epler @eplerjc no one believed that's what a Red Hart really sounds like but they are fucked up animals.
Mark Darrah @biomarkdarrah Ummm… Ooh how about this: The first game to ship with DAO’s conversation system was actually Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood
seb hanlon 😷 @hanlsp The save system in DAI loads with all doors in the area closed. This is a problem if there’s a door between you and a party member when the save happens, because they can’t open doors. If they can’t path to you, they get teleported to join you before the fade-up from black.
DAI: To enable party followers’ AI to use their defensive abilities (dodge/block/parries), enemies spawn a “telegraph volume” as part of their ability wind-ups. This tells the party AI what kind of reaction it can use to counter (if it’s not on cooldown and it can branch in time)
“Parry” telegraphs are the ‘weakest’ (can activate block, dodge, or parry abilities); “dodge” telegraphs are the ‘strongest’ (dodge or get fucked).
There’s an all-abilities AI cooldown on these responses; before this was added, I saw Cass perfect block for minutes at a time.
The “impassable” purple fire zones in Trespasser were a tremendous pain in the ass, because both: - making them do enough damage fast enough to be a lock-and-key for invincibility powers as intended - keeping party members from following you in and getting bug-zappered
the Qunari Ashaad in Trespasser is the only combat creature I personally implemented; and the only one intentionally plays both ranged and melee. and it was great fun watching play-testers climb a ladder to close and shut down his range attack—and get kicked off by the sweep
Inquisition’s title theme is the only theme from a video game that I can hum or whistle from memory. It’s my favourite.
Zither’s first-pass ability icons originally echoed a broad swath of iconic album art. The UI art team made me so happy.
Why didn’t it ship? Ain’t nobody chasing down those IP clearances for an April Fools DLC.
I’m still personally pleased that the Red Templar faction in DAI has such a strong overarching principle: “power corrupts”. The more elite the creature, the less human they are.
Both the Children in DAO Awakening and the Harvester in DAO hide their extra body parts *inside* their torso mesh before they appear.
Varric in DA2 is the most specialest snowflake; he’s not like any other dwarf because his rig includes all the Bianca animation bones.
DAI’s Emerald Graves was the map where we hammered out the conceptual balance of using abilities based on the enemy composition and position.
There’s an animation-driven movement mode in DAI that’s only used by a handful of large creatures; the dragon and the Red Templar Behemoth are the ones I remember.
“making two combat creatures at melee range face, and not slide past, each other when they’re playing attack animations” took a surprising amount of problem solving on DAI; most of the basic-attack animations have both moving and standing variations for this reason.
30 seconds of good combat gameplay takes more-or-less the same development effort as 10 minutes of good combat gameplay. Which is more than you’d think. IYKYK.
The original concept for the Grand Fear Demon at the end of DAI’s Fade was a “level boss” - instead of a single big combat creature (like a dragon), the idea was it was so big it would attack out of the darkness with “limbs” (creatures) that shared a health pool.
Cut for scope.
The core combat ability animation/effects/branching system in DAI is called “CSM”, for “combat state machine”.
It’s the third generation spiritual successor to the first system called CSM that I worked on, built for a project called Revolver (Jade Empire successor - Hrungr)…
seb hanlon 😷 @hanlsp during development on DAI someone made a staff that, when used (hit the ground with the butt animation) spawned a bunch of nugs that ran off in all directions.
David Gaider @davidgaider Going through my old DAI files and came across the original plan for a playable post-credits Epilogue... which, due to time constraints, eventually got down-scaled to the post-credits cutscene you saw on release. A lot of the meat here was, I believe, resurrected for Trespasser.
At the time, I was pushing hard for an actual denouement - as opposed to always ending the story so abruptly after the climax. Considering how few players ever get that far, I suppose I can see the argument that it's not exactly a great place to focus resources.
I did like where the cutscene ended up, mind you. A nice, Marvel-esque stinger that hinted at story to come. Took the sting out of having yet another story plan go awry... which is simply par for the course for game dev. Writing can always imagine more than we can produce. 😉
And in case anyone wonders: no actual work was done on that playable section prior to the cut. You can imagine it being this fully-fleshed out, glorious thing, if you like... but it could just as easily have been half-baked and terrible. The team was fully stretched as it was.
David Gaider @davidgaider Wow. Going through all my old DA and Beamdog files, looking for ONE SPECIFIC file I need as a template, and instead I'm going down What Might Have Been memory lane. I really need a stiff drink when I do this, honestly.
Summerfall Studios - Stray Gods @summerfallgames Our creative director @davidgaider shares some insight into how Dragon Age: Inquisition’s epilogue evolved over production 🐉 (previous flowchart tweet)
David Gaider @davidgaider You want "evolved over production"? *cracks knuckles* Lemme tell you how we cut Corypheus attacking Skyhold. Now *that's* evolution.
🦇VaMpY🦇DA:Ddy, DA:Ddy Cool @vee4vampy Does this have any link to the fact that there are dialogue audios of Morrigan reacting to solas “absorbing” Mythal in the game files?
David Gaider @davidgaider Possibly? I finished writing the epilogue, so it's possible some of it got recorded prior to the cut.
David Gaider @davidgaider And remember that what this stuff points at never actually happened. Whatever becomes of Flemeth in the future is up to the current writing team, and is based only on the cutscene you saw.
