Well it's a bit of catch-22. If you show too much, you get criticized for that. Not enough, same thing.
One thing is that they got rid of the paragon/renegade system which could be a good thing. I always felt that system pigeonholed your decisions. I always felt that some decisions were made due to that system and not what I would do if I was in the situation.
I must be the only one who actually liked the paragon/renegade or light side/dark side systems. I felt it let you have a greater impact on the story and actually change how a lot of things turned out. I would always play through bioware games twice to see the differences. Once as good and once as bad. In bioware's recent games it feels like nothing really changes regardless of what you do. To me, the paragon/renegade system let your choices seem to matter to more instead of being simply cosmetic a la Inquisition (still a great game though).
Originally posted by emporerpants
I would always play through bioware games twice to see the differences. Once as good and once as bad.
Really? I never did that. Even though I knew it was a game, I almost always chose the paragon choices. Even though, I generally don't care what others think of me, I do like to keep the peace, and avoid being a jerk as much as possible. I mean, those Renegade choices were pretty terrible. lol
This game looks good guys!
Me too. I really don't care.
And hideous is an exaggeration. Maybe the character models are not the greatest but the rest of the game looks quite good. The best? Nope but it's far from hideous.
I find people complaining about graphics hypocritical. One game might have good graphics but play like shit and get criticized. The opposite gets killed as well.
Originally posted by Smasandian
Well it's a bit of catch-22. If you show too much, you get criticized for that. Not enough, same thing.One thing is that they got rid of the paragon/renegade system which could be a good thing. I always felt that system pigeonholed your decisions. I always felt that some decisions were made due to that system and not what I would do if I was in the situation.
I just want some indication that they care about the player impacting the story the way Shepard did.
==
So, I watched some videos today and... Yeah, the game does not look good when it comes to Human women. Human males seem all right. Aliens of both genders look good, but Human women... My god.
That "dead behind the eyes" thing Bioware was known for has gotten far worse and I really hope what I've seen isn't indicative of the game as a whole.
Originally posted by -Pr-
I just want some indication that they care about the player impacting the story the way Shepard did.==
So, I watched some videos today and... Yeah, the game does not look good when it comes to Human women. Human males seem all right. Aliens of both genders look good, but Human women... My god.
That "dead behind the eyes" thing Bioware was known for has gotten far worse and I really hope what I've seen isn't indicative of the game as a whole.
No idea. I do remember reading somewhere they will have it but not nearly as important as the previous trilogy but I could be completely wrong.
When the scope of a game is large, I find that the graphics/glitchiness of a game is raised. It's the nature of the beast.
I will take Fallout 3 over Rage any day. Games like Uncharted can be both, but that is because there is less random events going on in that game. from what I understand, it's much easier to make pretty/solid gameplay titles if your game is heavily linear. More ambitious games (as it pertains to open world type games) have a much harder time achieving the no-glitch/high polish look to them.
Originally posted by Nephthys
For what its worth, I have heard that Bioware has lost a lot of its talent over the years. It's very possible that the current animation team is a bunch of rookies and thats why the animations look so terrible in this clips.
I've heard the same thing. I had heard something about the writer getting canned which had me worried, but I think they know they have received heavy criticism to their titles as of late, and will make an enjoyable product. I still enjoy their games though. I didn't completely hate DA 2 or DAI. There were legitimate gripes but I still liked the game/story.
Can't much of this cosmetic stuff be patched anyways? I mean ideally I want a perfect product, but I also understand there will be bugs with large scale games.
Originally posted by -Pr-
Maybe.What bothers me most about the game is that I've seen very little talking about the story or the general RPG experience. They talk about exploration and about the combat, but I've seen little about how much influence we as players will have.
Unless I missed stuff; in that case, fair enough.
If you're talking about the "reviews" that are going around it's because they are embargoed from talking about anything after the first segment of the game until I believe, Monday morning. We'll probably hear more about the story and the RPG experience at that point.
Anyways, my own experience has been pretty positive. I've been playing the game for the past few hours and have enjoyed it.
There are obvious issues with the animations, and everyoness eyes look wrong, apparently this is due to the animators not having employed proper shading techniques to the eyes, which causes them to look overly white and "dead". It's noticeable and it's unfortunate because the times you notice it the most is during the conversation cinematics. Neither of these are game breakers to me, and both can be easily fixed via patches in the future. Whether or not they'll take the time to prioritize fixing this stuff is another matter.
As for the rest of the game, I think it's good. I like the few characters I've encountered so far, though the two humans seem to be the most bland, which is par the course for Mass Effect. The story is interesting and there's a cool sense of mystery that I feel is similar to the first Mass Effect. You get the sense that something bigger is going on, but it's not clear what that is. I'm definitely intrigued to find out.
Dialogue is for the most part pretty good, there are some awkward transitions between sentences, and there are some cheesy lines, but taking in the context of a full conversation it's not a problem. It's still fun talking to people and each character is fully personalized and seems real.
The combat seems excellent. It's fast and you have a lot of mobility which is a welcome change. The menus do take a little getting used to but it shouldn't take more than a few minutes to familiarize yourself with them.
The graphics, besides the character animations and the eyes, are excellent. The environments are beautiful and striking and really beg to be explored. The few side missions I did on the Nexus were simple but relatively interesting. Pretty standard stuff for these games, really. They were for the most part centered around finding certain objects and scanning them for more information, similar to Witcher 3's hunts. If you have a problem with that type of mechanic then this game may rub you the wrong way. I haven't really done any sidequests out in the world, though, so I can't say how those might be.
That's all I can really say so far. Overall I'm happy with what I've played of the game.
Something else I noticed, which I'm not too keen on, is that so far there aren't any real traditional renegade type options. This game has essentially carried over the Dragon Age Inquisition dialogue wheel, you have 2-4 choices, but all are either good or neutral. Unfortunately it seems playing as a ruthless ******* won't be in the cards for this game.
From videos, the combat animations look OK?
I guess I just don't see a huge issue because of the type of game it is. Fallout 4 has horrible animations, faces and dialogue writing but the rest of the game makes up for the discrepancy.
I feel this game is roughly in the same boat. I don't think comparing a game like this to Uncharted (as an ex.) is fair because Uncharted does not have nearly the scope Mass Effect has. Naughty Dog can create specific animations based on how linear the game is while Bioware needs to create "generic" animations for exploring a huge planet.
The combat animations are quite good. It's the animations during dialogue and in cinematics where things can take a tumble. I agree it's been largely overblown, though. They aren't constantly bad, just every now and then during a conversation a character will do something awkward that might take you out of it for a moment.
I think people are harping on it because this is the fourth Mass effect game, they probably think Bioware should know by now how to animate better than they do in this type of game. Also because sometimes the animations look worse than in the first game, which is 10 years old. Where as you have games like Horizon that is also open world, but has great animations.
I think they simply didn't have time to polish the dialogue animations as much as they wanted, and were probably told to prioritize combat animations over cinematic and dialogue animations, as that's what people will be looking at more often.
This is a good write up from an artist about the eyes/animations.