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including reusing many of those old tileset blocks from NWN1
Example screenshots, plox?
including reusing many of those old tileset blocks from NWN1
What exactly do you mean by blocks? Do you mean the fact that they have, uh, stairs, floors and walls? Or that the grid size they use is always similar? Or that they copy-paste large swathes of content between games?Mayhap I should explain myself better. OP was stating that Mass Effect is less blocky than what came before. I'm arguing that Mass Effect uses the same rigid grid tileset structure that NWN1 uses, as do all Bioware games, including reusing many of those old tileset blocks from NWN1. So, thus, Mass Effect's design is exactly as blocky as all of Bioware's other games, going back all the way to NWN1. Bioware reskins the blocks, adding better textures, but it's the same blocks.
You are conflating level design (i.e. the specific layout of levels) with level building (assembling art assets to create a playable space). Tilesets and grids are artistic tools to make it easier to create large levels - they have no bearing, design-wise, on the width of a pathway, or whether or not you see a waterfall at X spot. I would say if any similarities exist between BioWare games, they probably come down to the fact that many of the same level designers were responsible for them, and that the needs of gameplay (larger spaces to accommodate parties of 3-4) impose certain restrictions on the level layouts.So I started looking at the structure of their maps, and realized their corridors are all the same 10 foot wide line. Which is when I realized that they still use a grid based structure for their level design. I suppose it may be so that that is what everyone is moving towards. Or rather, back to. But that's not the point I was making. My point is, in using a rigid 10 foot graph-paperable grid, one's dungeons will have the same basic structure game to game. Which means each one will be equally as blocky as the next.
It's the basic structure I'm talking about here. Not art assets. Not swords. Not people. Not buildings. The basic background. The way they shape tiers of cliffs. The shape of their dungeons. It's blocky. It's blocky because it's on a 10x10 grid. That's neither inherently good nor bad. It's just blocky. Because it's on a block-based graphable structure. As are many of the old school dungeon RPGs. But if all your games are on that same wide grid, they are all equally blocky.
And? There are probably dozens of other games that have that exact same type of location - heck, Skyrim reuses it probably 50 times. It's a stock set piece that is often situationally appropriate both for gameplay, narrative and/or artistic purposes. You'd might as well say "remember me the next time you see a BioWare game with a town square in it."Remember me next time you come to what looks like a it might be a T a short distance above water, but it's not really a T, one way peters out quickly just as it rounds a bend in the rock, the other is the only way you can go. The liquid will be lava, ice, rushing water, still water, etc. The area seems 20x30, though the amount you interact with is small. The piece may have been rebuilt each time they redo their engine, and/or it may be a part of some randomly procedurally generated level design that attaches cave slots, but that's my point. You'll get to see it lots. And will do until they remove that little piece from their dungeon sets.
I did. Rah, rah, military(!) under God's watchful eye got on my nerves.so, did anyone else save the psi dude over the chick in this game?
I already told you that Dragon Age did this in interior levels. This was done for a few reasons, I imagine.in other words. Modular design everywhere. The same modular design they have always used. You can even really see it when you find buildings outside that have fences. Many times the fence will be a perfect grid square with one 10 foot section taken out of the center of one side for an entrance.
I don't think anyone denies that part. Probably everyone here heard of the reused dungeons in DA2, where this method ran rampant. You are fighting windmills.Now, as to reused set pieces, Bioware does that. It's no secret. They also copy/pastad dungeons.
ME is Bioware in a nutshell. ME has everything Bioware can do right - amazing presentation, memorable characters, good graphics and decent style, story which keep you going, always some cool music themes.
Probably so.I don't think anyone denies that part. Probably everyone here heard of the reused dungeons in DA2, where this method ran rampant. You are fighting windmills.Now, as to reused set pieces, Bioware does that. It's no secret. They also copy/pastad dungeons.
Technically, you can do this in Dragon Age just fine. There are spinning windmills for instance, or waterfalls and other moving objects/effects. It's just that they didn't really bother with it much because it doesn't make sense to have space cars and robots everywhere in a medieval fantasy setting. Not to mention of course that creating these objects, animating and scripting them can all take hours and hours of work for even these small incidental background details, and that's time that would be better spent elsewhere in most cases.It allows for more dynamic backdrops
Uh, what? You can place any object in Dragon Age anywhere you want it to go, and while I'm not sure about their other tools I assume it's the same for NWN, KotOR, NWN2, etc.interior placeables,
There is no rigid "floor system"! Pieces of levels are created grid-sized to be snapped together. It still takes time to make complicated and pretty-looking environments, and you can deviate as much as you want. The only drawback, as I have said, is that there is no CSG modeling that lets you make your own modeled and textured objects or surfaces inside the level editor itself - which is really not much of a drawback practically speaking.and a less rigid floor level system,
Snapping to grid is just a feature of basically any level editor. Any editor lets you specify how much you want to snap and many of them let you specify the grid size (including Unreal, which Mass Effect uses). It's almost a necessity when building any sort of rigid structure with straight, man-made surfaces, like buildings. Otherwise you get small but obvious gaps in solid surfaces and misaligned meshes which do not look good at all. Remember, levels are made out of distinct pieces - you have to be clever to mask the rough edges around them (ever notice how so many games have hallways with wall pillars at regular intervals?) and grid-snapping is one of the most basic ways to ensure things fit.and possibly a 5x5 grid (but I don't see it)
So what? Any game has limited art assets! Developers specifically build them to fit together so that they don't waste time positioning every single object to fit each other exactly! That's the entire goddamn point and it's been that way since even the earliest days of 3D level creation! You even see this in Quake or the original Half-Life, right up to today in modern shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield which otherwise feature incredibly detailed visuals.But if you scroll on down to a similar stair scene here, you will find that the space in between the stairs is exactly the same width as the stairs, and that width is also the same as their length. The fence is also on a similar rigid grid line.
The big issue with cover is what it does to enemy AI. Pop the heads when they poke out. "You're not the mole getting popped" as skyway once said.I don't get really the gripe with 3rd person cover shooters. Seems like someone came up with a clever term and now everyone repeats it but they play almost the same as a third person shooter with no cover. You can still see around corners and have perfect vision when you are behind an obstacle in no cover system games, the only difference is the cover system game has your character press his back against objects and face you (which is a stupid way to take cover but I assume is so you see his face more or something). If you are using a weapon that either requires a lot of movement, like a light-hitting but fast-firing carbine, or a weapon that needs a single precise shot with almost no movement, like a high-powered sniper rifle then you almost never use cover in any meaningful way anyway really. In the former case because you have to constantly move and in the latter because you pick people off before a firefight breaks out usually. In ME, I played an Infiltrator who used pistols and sniper rifles and so this was largely the case for me. If I took cover it was basically to LARP feeling like in an action movie.