Game News Dragon Age 2 Jettisons Ballast [Unconfirmed]

[Overweight Manatee]

Shame about the camera being closer up (that is probably something you could manually override anyway), but it being scrollable is a huge plus. I remember some horrible areas where enemies would shoot at you with bows from BEYOND THE FUCKING CAMERA RANGE, so you actually had to move closer to them to select the target to return fire on. At least one major source of stupidity in DA combat confirmed as being removed is a good thing.

As for the toolset, DA's toolset sucked anyways so no great loss.

That's my thought. While I didn't really delve too much into it, my impressions weren't good and I definitely haven't been hearing good things about it from others.

 

[Antihero]

Shame about the camera being closer up (that is probably something you could manually override anyway), but it being scrollable is a huge plus. I remember some horrible areas where enemies would shoot at you with bows from BEYOND THE FUCKING CAMERA RANGE, so you actually had to move closer to them to select the target to return fire on. At least one major source of stupidity in DA combat confirmed as being removed is a good thing.

In tactical view, you can already pan with the middle mouse button. Or if you used that, was there still an issue with it?

 

[Overweight Manatee]

I remember it scrolling a grand total of about 10 feet from my character before hitting a wall. Kind of lame and never helped.

 

[Antihero]

Ah, I just remember it being a cheap way to cast things like earthquake and death cloud in a room full of enemies without giving them line of sight to turn hostile and attack before you get the spell off.

 

[Overweight Manatee]

As far as I can tell basically ranged enemies could affect you from any part of the map with the majority of skills and abilities after you woke them up, whether they are 500 feet away or behind a wall. I remember many instances of my fighter going through a door, seeing a mage, then the mage casts a spell to immobilize my own mage who is 100 feet away behind 2 closer doorways. But of course, if you don't actually open the door to wake them up they are useless. Most excellent AI

 

[Turok]

All i have now is adventure games

 

[RoachKiller]

The textures were just eye-searingly ugly in TP.

Their crappy engine doesn't even have proper LOD support: every LOD setting uses separate meshes and textures instead of scaling high-quality texture and geometry detail down depending on distance from camera and user settings like all normal games do. The excuse for their lazy coding is laughable.

There's not much point to having material LOD. All materials are gonna have texture compression anyway, you're going to wind up using more memory not less unless your engine already has some serious problems.

For static polygon LOD, who cares? Why use it at all? If you need it you already have too many problems to count.

For characters it can reduce skinning time a lot and help, but for a game like DA you just need one LOD level 98% of the time and switch to the higher one only for XTREME closeups during cutscenes (if ever).

All this assumes you have artwork that makes sense for the occasion and is well crafted.

 

[bonch]

This game looks like it's becoming the opposite of almost everything promised for this series when the first one came out.

 

[Tramboi]

You are quite right, RoachKiller.
LODding textures will nearly buy you nothing, as the mipmaps are already in VRAM and will do the job.
LODding static geometry is still worthy for your vertex throughput, especially if you have heavy vertex shaders, for instance per-vertex spherical harmonics lighting.
(I don't know what lighting model DA uses btw)
But the real reason you LOD stuff (and the very reason you use mipmaps) is to remove high frequencies and remove aliasing.

Twinkle, geomorphing continuously the LODs is quite costly as it changes the meshes topology each frame, therefore static LOdding is often preferred. Nothing to do with laziness (where is your 3D engine by the way? )

 

[made]

DA's toolset sucked anyways

Yet it was good enough to fix various issues in week 1 that official patches probably still haven't addressed to this day.

 

[RoachKiller]

You are quite right, RoachKiller.

But the real reason you LOD stuff (and the very reason you use mipmaps) is to remove high frequencies and remove aliasing.

I guess that's true but for DA? I don't know. It's a weird kind of post in the first place which I only responded to for that reason. Is someone burning through GPUs playing DA or something? I demand the OP be put to the question to discern the meaning of this post.

 

[Konjad]

I can't wait to see Biwhore die. For all that they have done to the cRPG genre ...

Yes but Bethesda needs to go first

 

[Rhalle]

This game it's becoming the opposite of almost everything promised for this series when the first one came out.

Yep. Ironically it started with the announcement of the game as "Origins".

Now it's reaching fruition.

Instead of one-off; old-school; PC only; going back to Bioware's roots, it's DLC nickel-and dime hell; dumbed-down newfag; consoletarded; BiowEAr's future as money-whoring consoleshit developer.

 

[JarlFrank]

I can't wait to see Biwhore die. For all that they have done to the cRPG genre ...

Yes but Bethesda needs to go first

Bethesda games can be a lot of fun with the right mods, though.

Bioware, on the other hand, is slowly deteriorating into a developer of games that consist of nothing but fluff "erotic" dialogues, filler combat and MOVIE LIKE cutscenes. Meh.

 

[aries202]

As long as i can scroll back the camera - and get to see a tactical view of the battefield on the pc, I'll be happy Especially, if they did fire the guy who thought it was a good idea to make a big pause sign on the middle top row of the screen when hiut the space bar. This makes it really, really hard to see and select enemies far away. Luckily, I can swing the camera around to see the combat from another angle - but it's still annoying.

As for the DLC, I've found Shale quite interesting, Return to Ostagar bland and meh, Warden's Keep to be sort of OK, and Leliana's Song looks to be the best of them so far.

I know it doesn't mean much probably, but at least Mike Laidlaw from Bioware is being honest about this. Unlike some other companies...

 

[Serious_Business]

I approve : no more pseudo-tactical bullfuck, and instead, pure unrelentless action-packed rape. Fuck yeah.

Wave sword to fightan de monster in Boring Age : Faggots 2, The Revenge of the Clamerian Warlock of Elvish Faggotry, I can't wait. So much dwarves and elves, so little time.

 

[Twinkle]

You are quite right, RoachKiller.

But the real reason you LOD stuff (and the very reason you use mipmaps) is to remove high frequencies and remove aliasing.

I guess that's true but for DA? I don't know. It's a weird kind of post in the first place which I only responded to for that reason. Is someone burning through GPUs playing DA or something? I demand the OP be put to the question to discern the meaning of this post.

I guess this video will help to illustrate my complaints. http://www.ironyguild.net/videos/daotexture.avi

The thing is that you have no option to disable LOD altogether using config tweaks: the only way you can do it is through the toolset. DA uses different texture sets for LODs (0 - max, 1- unused, 2-medium, 3-low) and each of them are separate files. As you can see the transition is really jarring and IMO completely unneeded at all considering that textures are rather low res in general. Sometimes, like in above video, they don't even match each other. The problem with geometry is that it sometimes disappears without any rhyme or reason. I guess that the majority won't pay much attention but for me shit popping in and out without any real reason ruins my immershun and whatever.

 

[CrimsonAngel]

Well they confirmed it.

Mike Laidlaw wrote...

Hey folks,

Victor
managed to hunt me down, and I wanted to clear up a few things with
regards to what I'm seeing as the two major concerns on this thread.

First
off, let's talk about the toolset issue. Obviously in this community
there's going to be some concern that we wouldn't release a toolset, so
let me clear the air a little: The tools we're using to make Dragon Age 2
are very, very close to the tools you guys have used to make your mods
for DA:O. They're not identical, as we've made a few in-house
improvements, but they're almost identical. As such, there isn't a new
toolset to release, per se.

While we won't be releasing a toolset
update in tandem with Dragon Age 2, we ARE investigating what it would
take to update the community toolset to match ours, along with providing
DA2 content in the future.

As to the subject of tactical view, I
can confirm that we will not be doing a tactical view on consoles,
though we are looking into some expanded party control that I think will
make console players quite happy.

On the PC, however, we are
still working with the camera to keep the key elements of the tactical
experience there. I was actually playtesting some new camera code when
Victor found me, in fact, so I can give you the latest news on that
front.

While we likely won't pull as far up as we did in DA:O, I
have always felt that the key to tactical play was actually freeing
your camera from the character you're controlling to issue precise
orders, which is what we're tuning now. So, this means you can still
maneuver the camera around the battlefield and issue orders from a
remote location, just as you could in Origins.

As you can
probably tell from my phrasing, all of this is a bit in-flux right now,
so things may change between now and ship, but I wanted to update you
guys on the current direction of things.

Mike..

In other words no toolset becaus any thing that is being "investigated" always means they are not doing it.

And they have no idea what to do with the Camera so that more or less means we will be stuck with the one they port over when they finally cancels the PC version.

 

[Cassidy]

I consider hilarious the naive assumption that a game will suddenly become "tactical" with just a change in the position and angle of the camera with the player's PoV. Why are you moaning about it? Would Oblivion with guns be a better game if it had a 3d Isometric camera but retained gameplay exactly as it was?

 

[Volourn]

"Bethesda games can be a lot of fun with the right mods, though."

Hell, no.

I think it's funny people here are whining about the changes in DA2 when the Codex largely hated DA1 and prefered ME2. LMFAO

 

[BethesdaLove]

FFS what is this bullshit.
DA was shit so whats the loss?
r00fles!
CANT WAIT FOR MASS ERRECT 4!

 

[JarlFrank]

"Bethesda games can be a lot of fun with the right mods, though."

Hell, no.

I'll just point you to that nifty little Oblivion mod called "Nehrim", then.

 

[RoachKiller]

You are quite right, RoachKiller.

But the real reason you LOD stuff (and the very reason you use mipmaps) is to remove high frequencies and remove aliasing.

I guess that's true but for DA? I don't know. It's a weird kind of post in the first place which I only responded to for that reason. Is someone burning through GPUs playing DA or something? I demand the OP be put to the question to discern the meaning of this post.

I guess this video will help to illustrate my complaints. http://www.ironyguild.net/videos/daotexture.avi

The thing is that you have no option to disable LOD altogether using config tweaks: the only way you can do it is through the toolset. DA uses different texture sets for LODs (0 - max, 1- unused, 2-medium, 3-low) and each of them are separate files. As you can see the transition is really jarring and IMO completely unneeded at all considering that textures are rather low res in general. Sometimes, like in above video, they don't even match each other. The problem with geometry is that it sometimes disappears without any rhyme or reason. I guess that the majority won't pay much attention but for me shit popping in and out without any real reason ruins my immershun and whatever.

Ah, so they are basically incompetent then.

 

[Volourn]

"I'll just point you to that nifty little Oblivion mod called "Nehrim", then."

Can't play a mod foir a game I already threw in the trash. I don't care how good this Nehrim is. It is for piece of shit game therefore it is a piece of shit mod.

 

[JarlFrank]

It is for piece of shit game therefore it is a piece of shit mod.

The key to understanding Volourn

 

[Hegel]

"I'll just point you to that nifty little Oblivion mod called "Nehrim", then."

Can't play a mod foir a game I already threw in the trash. I don't care how good this Nehrim is. It is for piece of shit game therefore it is a piece of shit mod.

It's a total conversion, other than the engine it has really nothing to do with the piece of shit Beth made.