Post by Link"Guess"ski on Mar 25, 2017 23:42:37 GMT
It's become a thing in BioWare games since ME3 to try and find ways to avoid making it too cutscene-y all of the time. Personally I never found it to be much of an issue, but I prefered ME2 to ME1 in that ME2 had a better pacing between cutscene, action and exploration, but ME3, as much as some of it was budgetary, tried to find new ways to make the "cinematic action" happen during the game, so they tried their hand at making epic setpiece moments of scripted camera angles and unique animations transitioning seamlessly with the gameplay and the overall amount of actual "talk" conversations were cut down on the normandy and replaced with comment-style dialogue. Then, in Inquisition BioWare tried to make a bit more of a system for this kind of budget-content. I wasn't very pleased with the execution, and now in Andromeda they've iterated on it and suffice it to say, I'm still not too happy with it.
The problem is that they stand too still and don't gesture enough and contrary to DA:I you don't get to leave in the middle of conversation if you want and you can't half-exit to reposition your character or camera, so it's really not a win-win improvement.
So, I felt, maybe we should pitch ideas at what other kinds of systems that are auto-generated that BioWare could use to "play" conversations between characters without using cutscenes.
I have two examples: One from GTA, and one from Assassin's Creed.
GTA:
This is not a cutscene. It's actually a different camera mode you can trigger simply by pushing a button, and otherwise it'll go right back to behind-the-car third-person camera. Imagine if DA:I or MEA had this, so either you could look over your character's shoulder and pan the camera around as always, but if you pressed, say, Y or Triangle, it would turn into the sort of ME1/Witcher 3 camera where it just cuts back and forth to the relative position of the character's faces, like this dynamic GTA camera, that recognizes a set of "cinematically appropriate" cameras.
Assassin's Creed:
Believe it or not, but the player regains full control over the character in these "cutscenes". They are locked into a field of area where they can only walk during the conversation and can't move outside of that boundary. Imagine this in Mass Effect, with dialogue wheels popping up from time to time. That's a fix, and it could allow the non-player NPC to gesture and move around within his safe-area communicating their expressions to the player that are triggered with a set of preset animations just like normal dialogue.
Given that the animations available for scripting work as intended, what would be stopping the game designers from implementing such a system and go over every scene adding those preset animations to the dialogue cues? They could start by randomizing via auto-generation based on audio volume or pitch or fluctuations between silence and sentences, maybe. Given they could develop such a system, what is stopping them from emplying something like this as opposed to... well, a static, dead, boring camera like in DA:I or MEA?
The problem is that they stand too still and don't gesture enough and contrary to DA:I you don't get to leave in the middle of conversation if you want and you can't half-exit to reposition your character or camera, so it's really not a win-win improvement.
So, I felt, maybe we should pitch ideas at what other kinds of systems that are auto-generated that BioWare could use to "play" conversations between characters without using cutscenes.
I have two examples: One from GTA, and one from Assassin's Creed.
GTA:
This is not a cutscene. It's actually a different camera mode you can trigger simply by pushing a button, and otherwise it'll go right back to behind-the-car third-person camera. Imagine if DA:I or MEA had this, so either you could look over your character's shoulder and pan the camera around as always, but if you pressed, say, Y or Triangle, it would turn into the sort of ME1/Witcher 3 camera where it just cuts back and forth to the relative position of the character's faces, like this dynamic GTA camera, that recognizes a set of "cinematically appropriate" cameras.
Assassin's Creed:
Believe it or not, but the player regains full control over the character in these "cutscenes". They are locked into a field of area where they can only walk during the conversation and can't move outside of that boundary. Imagine this in Mass Effect, with dialogue wheels popping up from time to time. That's a fix, and it could allow the non-player NPC to gesture and move around within his safe-area communicating their expressions to the player that are triggered with a set of preset animations just like normal dialogue.
Given that the animations available for scripting work as intended, what would be stopping the game designers from implementing such a system and go over every scene adding those preset animations to the dialogue cues? They could start by randomizing via auto-generation based on audio volume or pitch or fluctuations between silence and sentences, maybe. Given they could develop such a system, what is stopping them from emplying something like this as opposed to... well, a static, dead, boring camera like in DA:I or MEA?
