I still think future BioWare games should get rid of the pan-down dialogues
Apr 6, 2017 20:09:37 GMT
Post by Link"Guess"ski on Apr 6, 2017 20:09:37 GMT
Also to back up things www.pcgamer.com/most-of-the-witcher-3s-dialogue-scenes-was-animated-by-an-algorithm/
Actually, as far as I've understood it a ton of BioWare's cinematic dialogues when the characters are just talking is also algorithmic almost 100% if not 100%. I know Mass Effect 1 did not have all its conversations touched by hand and that in ME2 their cinematic director Armando Troisi decided a principle he called "The Hand of God" which meant that every scene should at least be reviewed by an animator and preferably touched up to add some specific gesturing or something like custom camera angles etc. which is how Mass Effect 2 in particular ended up with arguably the most cinematically stunning cinematography in a BioWare game.
Now, I totally applaud BioWare for listening regarding DA:I and building a game on the same scope of production whilist increasing the number of actual cinematic dialogues but they still kept the stilted camera which you can pan around manually while the characters just stand in place and deliver their lines from DA:I too often I think, and particularly anytime I want to talk to a squadmate but it isn't on the Tempest I'm pretty saddened to see the camera just pans down and I can't fully appreciate their conversation because it doesn't draw you in.
I really question why it is this way. It seems to me like the normal conversations you have on the Nexus that are just investigative are largely automatically generated and merely reviewed to ensure that the characters don't make a completely false expression or their lip-sync is out of place or anything, but it's still not animated by hand, just with their base algorithms generating the lip-animations and their default eyelid movement and cutting back and forth depending on who talks. Is this not the default because BioWare doesn't have time or energy to review it if all cinematics were done like this? I don't get the problem here when ME1 had these dialogues for everything and this is just a larger scope of production so, sure it'd take more time to make sure it all looks right but I just can't imagine the reason for not doing it is anything except "it's too tedious for us" or something.
Again, I don't know exactly how the pipeline for this is or what the A to B procedure is for inserting the script with a voice and attaching a standardized cinematic dialogue to it between two characters. I just can't imagine it's so hard that they literally needed another mode just to save time or something (and that other mode sucks and makes the game feel needlessly inconsistent).
If they wanna go non-cinematic, they have to find a system that is more interactible IMO, like letting Ryder walk around his conversation "target" but he strafe-locks on it and stops up whenever conversation shows up or the dialogue ends whenever you go 10 feet away or something but the focus shows the faces and it doesn't feel completely stiff and stilted.
That'd be nice, thanks.
EDIT: Okay, here's the essential part of my excerpt:
See this? "In just a few minutes". I don't know what except for laziness or poor procedure that would keep BioWare from improving their production these days. I refuse to believe it is a budgetary issue if animators don't actually have to animate anything but can just click on buttons in their toolset.
Actually, as far as I've understood it a ton of BioWare's cinematic dialogues when the characters are just talking is also algorithmic almost 100% if not 100%. I know Mass Effect 1 did not have all its conversations touched by hand and that in ME2 their cinematic director Armando Troisi decided a principle he called "The Hand of God" which meant that every scene should at least be reviewed by an animator and preferably touched up to add some specific gesturing or something like custom camera angles etc. which is how Mass Effect 2 in particular ended up with arguably the most cinematically stunning cinematography in a BioWare game.
Now, I totally applaud BioWare for listening regarding DA:I and building a game on the same scope of production whilist increasing the number of actual cinematic dialogues but they still kept the stilted camera which you can pan around manually while the characters just stand in place and deliver their lines from DA:I too often I think, and particularly anytime I want to talk to a squadmate but it isn't on the Tempest I'm pretty saddened to see the camera just pans down and I can't fully appreciate their conversation because it doesn't draw you in.
I really question why it is this way. It seems to me like the normal conversations you have on the Nexus that are just investigative are largely automatically generated and merely reviewed to ensure that the characters don't make a completely false expression or their lip-sync is out of place or anything, but it's still not animated by hand, just with their base algorithms generating the lip-animations and their default eyelid movement and cutting back and forth depending on who talks. Is this not the default because BioWare doesn't have time or energy to review it if all cinematics were done like this? I don't get the problem here when ME1 had these dialogues for everything and this is just a larger scope of production so, sure it'd take more time to make sure it all looks right but I just can't imagine the reason for not doing it is anything except "it's too tedious for us" or something.
Again, I don't know exactly how the pipeline for this is or what the A to B procedure is for inserting the script with a voice and attaching a standardized cinematic dialogue to it between two characters. I just can't imagine it's so hard that they literally needed another mode just to save time or something (and that other mode sucks and makes the game feel needlessly inconsistent).
If they wanna go non-cinematic, they have to find a system that is more interactible IMO, like letting Ryder walk around his conversation "target" but he strafe-locks on it and stops up whenever conversation shows up or the dialogue ends whenever you go 10 feet away or something but the focus shows the faces and it doesn't feel completely stiff and stilted.
That'd be nice, thanks.
EDIT: Okay, here's the essential part of my excerpt:
Of course, they didn't let the algorithm run and call it a day. The thing both scenes had in common was that they looked a bit amateurish—really, like awkward actors stumbling over a scene in a film, or the not-quite-natural animation of games that started to really explore cinematic character interactions (i.e. almost everything pre-Mass Effect). Most of the time, the animators would take what the generator had created, then go into the timeline to tweak it by hand, which could deliver a much better scene in just a few minutes.