Thoughts on CRPGs (BioWare I'm looking at you).

[weemadando]

This comes about because I've been dabbling in Mass Effect and am getting sick of some of it, but loving other parts.

It's clear that the BioWare guys have a genuine love of RPGs and come from a pen and paper background, but it just feels like they are forgetting a few key things about how this translates. This applies for all of their recent games (KotOR onwards).

In a PnP game it's easy to have epic vistas, sprawling locales and all the rest, but they've tried too hard to work this into their games and they fail for that reason. The Citadel is a prime example, it's meant to be this amazing place, but it still feels fairly empty and you spend most of your time wandering from one load zone/elevator to another. When I have to change zones about 5 times to complete one simple "talk to X, talk to Y, talk to X again" quest then I get frustrated. Would it have been that much of a concession for them to lose a lot of the window dressing and put it all in one zone?

This comes back to PnP origins - they want to create an illusion of life, but the problem is that in doing so they illustrate how un-lifelike it is. You have many NPCs who are just static environment objects, completely uninteractive and unresponsive. Which breaks SoD immediately as you cannot now and never will be able to interact with them. And it's not like in some circumstances their assistance couldn't be useful. So when you compress your 6 or 7 level world into 1 level, you will have all of the vital NPCs in one zone and can markedly cut down on filler NPCs and long stretches of empty corridors in what is meant to be the bustling hub of galactic society.

Of course, the counter to this is that should anyone even try that they will be lambasted by moronic fans who go: "but the world is too small!" and probably even by the media who would say: "the game world is substantially smaller than previous games". It might just be me, but I for one, was not a fan of endless backtracking, elevator trips and running through long empty corridors. It felt like wasted time to me.

The problem is that with a pen and paper game you can say to the GM: "Ok, we go to the bar" and hey presto - you're at the bar. The GM might give a sentence or two on your trip there or sights you see, but there's no time spent getting there, you don't have to physically describe every step that is taken. That's what many devs seem to lose in the translation - that if something isn't important to the game, then it doesn't have to be played through.

It's a fine balancing act between creating a believable world and one that isn't amazingly fucking frustrating to exist in. Yes, there is some fast travel in Mass Effect, but even then you are still waiting for the world to load before you can go and talk to someone again. I'm sure a bit more design work could have let them create a sections where every conversation that you need to have could exist in the same level.

I won't go into the conversation system at the moment - because the "kill a kitten/send kitten to college" thing has been covered by better folks than I, though there are some points I feel need to be made about it.

[Stark]

It's clear that the BioWare guys have a genuine love of RPGs and come from a pen and paper background, but it just feels like they are forgetting a few key things about how this translates. This applies for all of their recent games (KotOR onwards).

Why do you say that? They've made the same game with minor tweaks for a decade. Remember all the laughable things they said about ME before it came out?

In a PnP game it's easy to have epic vistas, sprawling locales and all the rest, but they've tried too hard to work this into their games and they fail for that reason. The Citadel is a prime example, it's meant to be this amazing place, but it still feels fairly empty and you spend most of your time wandering from one load zone/elevator to another. When I have to change zones about 5 times to complete one simple "talk to X, talk to Y, talk to X again" quest then I get frustrated. Would it have been that much of a concession for them to lose a lot of the window dressing and put it all in one zone?

Is this your rationale for the absurdly lazy Mass Effect approach? The game just had poor level design - I thought Feros sufficiently conveyed it's setting, but everywhere else was flat and boring. JUST LIKE EVERYWHERE IN KOTOR. Dantooine = Green Hill Zone, remember?

The streaming thing is just Bioware sucking. It's not just that the loads exist, but that they're sooo huuuuuuge, and most of the 'concourse' area is totally useless detail (including corridors that exist for a single wall panel in a single quest).

This comes back to PnP origins - they want to create an illusion of life, but the problem is that in doing so they illustrate how un-lifelike it is. You have many NPCs who are just static environment objects, completely uninteractive and unresponsive. Which breaks SoD immediately as you cannot now and never will be able to interact with them. And it's not like in some circumstances their assistance couldn't be useful. So when you compress your 6 or 7 level world into 1 level, you will have all of the vital NPCs in one zone and can markedly cut down on filler NPCs and long stretches of empty corridors in what is meant to be the bustling hub of galactic society.

Yes, Bioware is even worse than Bethesda when it comes to NPCs. You're supposed to be blown away by the amazing writing instead of wondering why that guy with the urgent quest has been standing there the whole game until you noticed.

However what you propose is basically replacing whole areas of the game with a 'walking menu', as is done in MMOs. Most people would not appreciate this (although as you say since Bioware failed so badly it would hardly hurt the game).

Of course, the counter to this is that should anyone even try that they will be lambasted by moronic fans who go: "but the world is too small!" and probably even by the media who would say: "the game world is substantially smaller than previous games". It might just be me, but I for one, was not a fan of endless backtracking, elevator trips and running through long empty corridors. It felt like wasted time to me.

You're a year late on the whole 'Mass Effect is laughably small' front. It's ALREADY ludicrously small, because there's no open areas, just five-odd locations.

The problem is that with a pen and paper game you can say to the GM: "Ok, we go to the bar" and hey presto - you're at the bar. The GM might give a sentence or two on your trip there or sights you see, but there's no time spent getting there, you don't have to physically describe every step that is taken. That's what many devs seem to lose in the translation - that if something isn't important to the game, then it doesn't have to be played through.

This is the lamest idea ever. In a PnP game time still passes for your character, and people whinged about the fast-travel in Oblivion (which nver worked properly anyway). You'd think in the Citadel you could just PHONE PEOPLE THE FUCK UP instead of running from one end to the other, but this isn't a complex issue - they designed those missions ON PURPOSE to make you do that walking. It's called 'creating artificial length'. Rememebr when Graham Dice thought the game took 60 hours to finish?

It's a fine balancing act between creating a believable world and one that isn't amazingly fucking frustrating to exist in. Yes, there is some fast travel in Mass Effect, but even then you are still waiting for the world to load before you can go and talk to someone again. I'm sure a bit more design work could have let them create a sections where every conversation that you need to have could exist in the same level.

Or you could just have a comm station on your ship and never get out for anything that isn't interesting. This is Bioware, and they jsut made KotoR again, right down to all the walking. And holy shit those cabs were retarded.

I won't go into the conversation system at the moment - because the "kill a kitten/send kitten to college" thing has been covered by better folks than I, though there are some points I feel need to be made about it.

You're basically saying you want to remove absolutely everything that creates atmosphere because it doesn't work. While I can agree that ME was a total failure at atmosphere, boiling a game down to a series of choices in a glorified menu room is going to be fucking boring and really, really short.

Ask yourself; if they'd done that in Citadel, how much worse would all the OTHER lazy-ass levels and empty planets have looked?

[White Haven]

This runs into another common problem from Oblivion and other games, although from a different angle. The 'final battle against the forces of hell' was all of a dozen guys standing on a hill with signs on their neck reading 'We are an army.' That was because of engine/hardware limitations not allowing for the proper army to be displayed, which is fine. The issue comes from the fact that they wrote themselves a situation where there should be an army, and then ended up providing something that wasn't an army. Once you've established that, say, the Citadel is a huge goddamned place and that there'll be a lot going on there, you have to follow through with using it despite all the travel time and boredom that entails.. That's an inevitable consequence of having an enormous location, and the fault falls on the writers for trapping gameplay into it. There's nothing inherently wrong with a big location if you've got enough to fill it with interesting things and keep things localized a bit, but if you're not going to follow through on that, don't write it.

[Stark]

Yeah, that's right - they work from the wrong end and run into technical issues, and just say 'uhh... do it anyway'. It's ironic that I believe ME uses UE3, which DOES have the capability to have piles of guys around. The Citadel appears to have been designed around the quests, instead of the other way around, which is why you get the ONE BAR of massive blandness with three side rooms that make no sense and other features (like the promenade where a gunfight and burgarly can be committed and NOBODY EVER REACTS).

[weemadando]

I think you missed a lot of my points Stark. I really like some of the design and concepts behind the stuff in Mass Effect, but it's supremely bad and lazy. I can see what they intended, but it's all gone fucking pear shaped.

To address a few:
-Apparently there's no such thing as fucking radios or phones in the future and all conversations occur face to face.

-Everyone in the future is rooted to one spot. Except bad guys. Therefore I propose executing everyone who takes a step that isn't me.

-I don't want to have just a conversation menu screen, but is there any reason why the two bars, market, financial district (2 shops makes a district in the future), C-Sec, embassies and the spire couldn't all be on one fucking area? There's so many pieces of wasted space (like that computer lab in the embassy section with nothing but a keeper to scan) in the existing areas that trimming the fat (how about we just have one bar, why does C-SEC have to be a sprawling location all of it's own) and sticking all these bits together would have made for a more compelling experience.

-I fucking hate artifical time wasting in games and ME appears to have no shortage of it. It's the same reason why I never finished KotOR or Jade Empire. They're so stuffed full of shitty, useless padding that it drives me nuts. Couldn't they have at least put a thing in my map in options going: "fast travel to this location"? I'm in the Citadel, it's not like I'm about to be jumped by Geth right now. And it's not like I haven't had to walk past the same lineup of retards in teh same boring locations twenty fucking times by now.

[Starglider]

Is this your rationale for the absurdly lazy Mass Effect approach? The game just had poor level design - I thought Feros sufficiently conveyed it's setting, but everywhere else was flat and boring.

Some of the outdoor (tank) stuff was fairly well designed, and quite 3D. Unfortunately the pathetically slow Geth weapon speed and ludicrous 'jump to dodge' mechanic killed any attempt at suspension of disbelief.

The streaming thing is just Bioware sucking.

Seamless streaming takes a fair amount of developer effort. There's a reason that GTA:SA had it but GTA:VC and GTA3 didn't despite being basically the same engine; it took Rockstar a while to get it right and it wasn't at the top of the priority list. Similarly I imagine this will improve in the ME sequels.

Yes, Bioware is even worse than Bethesda when it comes to NPCs. You're supposed to be blown away by the amazing writing instead of wondering why that guy with the urgent quest has been standing there the whole game until you noticed.

Unfortunately the focus on 'playability', while it has made modern games a lot less frustrating, has in some cases gone overboard and killed suspension of disbelief. e.g. Dead Space did a good job of avoiding the HUD and having a relatively plausible reason why all the gameplay-relevant elements were highlighted in massive glowing floating text. However IMHO having you only find ammo that fits into the weapons you are currently carrying was a step to far. Would having characters only appear at sane times really be a big deal? No, because you could always have a 'Wait here until X arrives?' pop-up.

You're a year late on the whole 'Mass Effect is laughably small' front. It's ALREADY ludicrously small, because there's no open areas, just five-odd locations.

There are a hundred or so open planetscapes in the game, it's just that they're completely desolate and barren. Of course those are also ludicrously small for a planet, but compared to typical FPS environments they're very big.

The actual solution to all of this is procedural generation, of indoor and outdoor scenery, even potentially of NPCs and side-missions. It's technically possible, but it's a lot of software engineering effort, and it sends the QA people into screaming fits because they can no longer test every possible path a player might take through the game. I am confident that we will eventually see major use of this in mainstream games, because it just can't be beaten for immersion and replayability, but not in the next five years. There are a few more iterations of 'let's have an even bigger content team than last time' to go through first.

You'd think in the Citadel you could just PHONE PEOPLE THE FUCK UP instead of running from one end to the other, but this isn't a complex issue - they designed those missions ON PURPOSE to make you do that walking.

Yeah, they definitely could've done about half the conversation that way. It's not as if it costs anything; it's just dialogue trees, you could still have the same amount of running-around, it's just that running around would only be for plot-sensible things.

While I can agree that ME was a total failure at atmosphere,

I wouldn't say that. I cut it a lot of slack because it's one of the very few sci-fi games that isn't post-apocalyptic and/or horror. The Citadel was actually a pleasant futuristic alien environment, how often do you see that?

[Starglider]

There's so many pieces of wasted space (like that computer lab in the embassy section with nothing but a keeper to scan)

No one compelled you to do every last side-quest. I have zero sympathy for you, because apparently you were actively looking for time sinks. If you'd stuck to the essentials you could've skipped nearly all the running around.

[weemadando]

There's so many pieces of wasted space (like that computer lab in the embassy section with nothing but a keeper to scan)

No one compelled you to do every last side-quest. I have zero sympathy for you, because apparently you were actively looking for time sinks. If you'd stuck to the essentials you could've skipped nearly all the running around.

It's not that - what I'm saying is that there are large spaces in the level that have no reason to exist. Sure there's a pointless "get 21 of these" things in there, but you could just as easily have kept that "get 21 of these" thing in there and instead put in another of the plot critical locations so I didn't have to go wandering off to another fucking section to do that. Just like how there's a C-SEC office in embassies, but oh no - you can't deal with C-SEC through there, you have to go to their HQ. Which is in another area.

What I'm saying is that if they'd made more efficient levels then the gameplay, from my PoV, would be feeling less disjointed.

[Starglider]

Sure there's a pointless "get 21 of these" things in there, but you could just as easily have kept that "get 21 of these" thing in there and instead put in another of the plot critical locations so I didn't have to go wandering off to another fucking section to do that.

The whole point of the 'find 21 things' quest was to force you to methodically search for hidden areas. If all of them had been in areas you were going to walk through anyway, the quest would've been trivial and pointless.

Hey I have a great idea for the next GTA, let's put the 100 hidden packages in a 10 x 10 grid in a park next to the first safehouse! Absolutely none of that tedious wandering nooks and crannies of the huge expansive city at all!

[weemadando]

Sure there's a pointless "get 21 of these" things in there, but you could just as easily have kept that "get 21 of these" thing in there and instead put in another of the plot critical locations so I didn't have to go wandering off to another fucking section to do that.

The whole point of the 'find 21 things' quest was to force you to methodically search for hidden areas. If all of them had been in areas you were going to walk through anyway, the quest would've been trivial and pointless.

Hey I have a great idea for the next GTA, let's put the 100 hidden packages in a 10 x 10 grid in a park next to the first safehouse! Absolutely none of that tedious wandering nooks and crannies of the huge expansive city at all!

The point is, that Mass Effect is neither huge nor expansive. It took no time to find all the critters, because in the process of your initial wander around you locate them all anyway. It's not like there's a fucking trick to it. So why not put something else USEFUL in there to?

[Covenant]

It's not hard to dynamically drop-in NPCs, people do it all the time for badguys that spawn ahead or behind you. Left4Dead does this to populate areas before you get there so as to simulate large numbers of enemies without having to handle large numbers of enemies. By forcing players to stay moving, you reduce the amoung of shit you have to have in any one given place.

Applying that to Redshirt NPCs would be doable. Most people should be on their way somewhere, busily headed elsewhere, so you'd only see 10 people or so at once in any given area, so long as they were actually walking in a direction. Talking to them is really irrelevent. For this I would steal Halflife 2's example of speech on the part of the NPCs at the beginning--when you bump into them, have them look at you, say "Watch it, bub," and keep on walking. No pause, no dialog screen. Want an easy way to show who is talkative and who isn't? Let the chatty ones look you in the eye and say "Hey." Having an NPC call out "Buddy, got a minute?" isn't hard to do. And don't have quest NPCs just hang around. I would much rather have people go looking for me. Know what might be interesting? Let ME go to the bar and sit and wait, and have people filter in to say "You the guy they call Covenant? I got a job for you." Or have them call me on my space-phone. Why am I never in the yellowpages?

With that out of the way, Bioware's attempt to create a large environment is admirable but unnecessary. One of the largest game environments I've played in was the map in Morrowind Oblivion, and the majority was empty space still crammed full of enemies, herbs, spices, and dungeons. The most fun I had in Oblivion weren't the huge spaces, but the little house I made for myself in the Shivering Isles out of an inexplicably empty quick-warp point which had a chest that never cycled. People care more about customization than epic, sweeping, pointlessly huge cities, and that's just a fact. If you gave people a single large castle and said "This is your fucking castle, fix it up" players would pour eons into it, and it would feel huge to them, because they would care about every last inch of it. Do the same thing with a Starship or an Installation and you give people an actual sense of scale. If you care about it, you remember it. If you care about so many parts that it's hard to remember it all, then it feels really big, even if it geographically takes up less space than a bigass map and 100 planets.

[Stark]

Some of the outdoor (tank) stuff was fairly well designed, and quite 3D. Unfortunately the pathetically slow Geth weapon speed and ludicrous 'jump to dodge' mechanic killed any attempt at suspension of disbelief.

Flat as in mood, genius. Noveria was boring as fuck and in no way communicated it's atmosphere. At least Feros had a nice sense of 'tiny settlement among ruins', which is what it was supposed to be.

Seamless streaming takes a fair amount of developer effort. There's a reason that GTA:SA had it but GTA:VC and GTA3 didn't despite being basically the same engine; it took Rockstar a while to get it right and it wasn't at the top of the priority list. Similarly I imagine this will improve in the ME sequels.

Beth suck so bad that in games like Morrowind you can just put the interiors inide the buildings and they work fine. Bioware could have either designed the Citadel around the reality of giant load times (for some reason) or just done a better job. Everywhere else in the game was designed by someone who acknowledged the problem and worked AROUND it, rather than Mr LOL IT'S AN ELEVATOR ROFFLE.

Unfortunately the focus on 'playability', while it has made modern games a lot less frustrating, has in some cases gone overboard and killed suspension of disbelief. e.g. Dead Space did a good job of avoiding the HUD and having a relatively plausible reason why all the gameplay-relevant elements were highlighted in massive glowing floating text. However IMHO having you only find ammo that fits into the weapons you are currently carrying was a step to far. Would having characters only appear at sane times really be a big deal? No, because you could always have a 'Wait here until X arrives?' pop-up.

People hated 'Radiant AI' (even though it didn't deliver shit) because Mr XYZ was never in location ABC; he was doing his own shit. As WH says, the need for games to be idiot-proof by having this shit happen is just poor writing. Implementing a mobile phone would totally obviate the problem, of course.

There are a hundred or so open planetscapes in the game, it's just that they're completely desolate and barren. Of course those are also ludicrously small for a planet, but compared to typical FPS environments they're very big.

Go play ME and count this time. There are a few dozen planets with zero detail of a terrain quality I'd expect on a PS2. Turns out it's easy to have 'big' (read: not big) environments when nothing whatever happens on 98% of that surface and there's no detail, not even a single solitary bush.

The actual solution to all of this is procedural generation, of indoor and outdoor scenery, even potentially of NPCs and side-missions. It's technically possible, but it's a lot of software engineering effort, and it sends the QA people into screaming fits because they can no longer test every possible path a player might take through the game. I am confident that we will eventually see major use of this in mainstream games, because it just can't be beaten for immersion and replayability, but not in the next five years. There are a few more iterations of 'let's have an even bigger content team than last time' to go through first.

What makes me laugh about THAT is that Starflight and Elite did that very thing, decades ago. Of course the environments now require a lot more data, but the planets in ME would have taken seconds for a random terrain generator to make and half an hour to place the four structures. Procedurally generating the planets in ME would have posed absolutely no problem at all, since there was fuck all on them in the first place - there was no story to break and proper procedural generation would be predicatable ANYWAY.

I wouldn't say that. I cut it a lot of slack because it's one of the very few sci-fi games that isn't post-apocalyptic and/or horror. The Citadel was actually a pleasant futuristic alien environment, how often do you see that?

I don't. I don't give a shit about 'originality'. The Citadel was boring as fuck and thus fails as a game element. What's funny is that you were SUPPOSED to go back periodically (for no reason, because god knows you never needed to replensish or provide secure info or deliver the foozle or anything that might be interesting) as missions pop up there as you go along. They just made it a horrible thought to go back, because it was so boring and slow.

What Ando is saying is that a fair slice of the playable space on the citadel is devoted to stupid quests that could have been moved to other (empty) areas, which would have reduced the total size of the levelspace and reduced the amount of loading required. Frankly I think Bioware are so incompetent that the mission scripted don't talk to the level designers, so all the near-purposeless space forcing me to sit through 30s load times is entirely their fault.

What Cov says is more offensive because UE3 can do crowds. Citadel being near empty lent itself to hamfisted 'tell not show' of people saying PHWOR THERE ARE THE MILLIONS ON HERE, when there's clearly a hundred tops.

Ironically the emptiness of the Citadel could have been allieviated by a sensible use of the cabs and the rearrangement of levels, and treating it like a real city where you're cabbing it between offices/hangars/shops etc instead of walking down HALO AVENUE to get everywhere. The smaller, yet more detailed areas involved would have loaded faster and had more atmosphere than walking 2-3 minutes to get anywhere.

[Vympel]

As if on cue:

Chris Avellone hates RPGs

Really interesting article, would've like to hear the talk.

[Stark]

Man, now I'm thinking about the Citadel as a giant city in space with you driving your Space Car(tm) around the sterile streets to deliver justice wherever it's needed, filling in the transit time with Power Meetings with Important People.

Nah, I bet in the far future, people will walk.

[Vympel]

Seriously though, what the fuck is up with not using a damn mobile phone in sci-fi?

Watch Total Recall. The HUGE ASS VIDEO TELEPHONES THAT INDICATE THIS IS THE FUTURE are hilarious when you realise no one has a mobile.

[Starglider]

Bioware could have either designed the Citadel around the reality of giant load times (for some reason)

Really, what else could they have done? The elevators are annoying but they're better than a loading screen. The only thing I can think of that would improve it would be having some sort of aerial taxi or tram traveling over the cityscape, that would be pretty at least.

or just done a better job

Streaming takes considerable developer man-hours. Frankly given all the other, more important stuff that's broken, incomplete or over-simplified in Mass Effect, getting rid of the elevators isn't a high priority.

Would having characters only appear at sane times really be a big deal? No, because you could always have a 'Wait here until X arrives?' pop-up.

People hated 'Radiant AI' (even though it didn't deliver shit) because Mr XYZ was never in location ABC; he was doing his own shit.

That would be because the fantasy setting didn't permit a 'call NPC and ask her to meet you at current location' mechanic - though AFAIK there is no good reason why Oblivion couldn't have a 'wait for NPC to get back' one-button time-skip mechanic.

Turns out it's easy to have 'big' (read: not big) environments when nothing whatever happens on 98% of that surface and there's no detail, not even a single solitary bush.

Yeah, I imagine it's a man-hours issue again. The developer time was sunk into making the main plot environments pretty. After all only the dedicated gamers are going to visit every last planet to do every side quest and pick up every collectable. Yes in principle the planet-scape environments should be at least as good as say AC6, but the budget couldn't stretch to it. Frankly the two main improvements needed are randomly positioned trees and more than one type of generic outpost building.

What makes me laugh about THAT is that Starflight and Elite did that very thing, decades ago.

Elite didn't generate environments, just galaxy maps, trade prices and stuff for the planet data screen. Frontier on the other hand did an excellent job of creating procedural planet surfaces, complete with cities, mountains, spaceports etc.

Procedurally generating the planets in ME would have posed absolutely no problem at all, since there was fuck all on them in the first place - there was no story to break and proper procedural generation would be predicatable ANYWAY.

There's a mindset issue here as well. In the early days of game development, programmers had a dominant role. Developments in software engineering technology drove new types of games; e.g. development of viable FPS and RTS engines in the 90s, many other examples. Now however engine programmers have taken a back seat, called in to deliver some graphical flash and physics gimmicks when required. The shift of gaming towards the movie model makes it all about 'content'; modelling, writing, audio production, scripting. Playability comes next, with a legion of testers and people who think they are game design gods because they've memorised the basic proven formulae for making games playable. These people now overwhelming populate the management of the gaming industry - something programmers are fine with because most of them never liked that office politics bullshit anyway.

This is a major factor in why innovation in gaming has declined, though risk-averseness at the publisher/funding level is still the biggest. It is the primary reason why 'let's spend two years developing unproven brand new procedural content generation technology that our AAA title will rely on to work' is not going to be green-lit. Artists tend to actively resist this on every level; getting procedural content generation to work on non-trivial assets requires a close cooperation between the modellers and the programmers and an understanding of how the process works by the former that they just don't want to have. It's like the move towards dynamic soundtracks and the shitstorm that the composers kicked up about 'losing artistic control' but an order of magnitude worse. It's particularly sad to see this at Bethesda, where Daggerfall had a procedural generation system that was very impressive for the time, but instead of building on that it was progressively cut down and reduced to pre-built everything in the later games.

Anyway the best we are likely to see in the near term is some incremental improvements, in sequels where the main development has already been done.

What's funny is that you were SUPPOSED to go back periodically (for no reason, because god knows you never needed to replensish or provide secure info or deliver the foozle or anything that might be interesting) as missions pop up there as you go along.

Granted. Returning to the citadel could've been implemented a lot better from a writing perspective.

What Ando is saying is that a fair slice of the playable space on the citadel is devoted to stupid quests that could have been moved to other (empty) areas, which would have reduced the total size of the levelspace and reduced the amount of loading required.

I doubt it would have made a noticeable difference to the loading times. As I recall those out-of-the-way areas had very little in the way of complex geometry or unique textures.

Frankly I think Bioware are so incompetent that the mission scripted don't talk to the level designers

Communication issues are likely. Development of a game on that scale is a tricky thing to manage; a lot of companies fail at it.

Citadel being near empty lent itself to hamfisted 'tell not show' of people saying PHWOR THERE ARE THE MILLIONS ON HERE, when there's clearly a hundred tops.

Bioware definitely have a problem breaking out of the '3D Baldur's Gate' mindset. They've made some efforts to do so with ME (at least it has some open-world elements, unlike KOTOR), but they have a long way to go.

[Rawtooth]

Man, now I'm thinking about the Citadel as a giant city in space with you driving your Space Car(tm) around the sterile streets to deliver justice wherever it's needed, filling in the transit time with Power Meetings with Important People.

Nah, I bet in the far future, people will walk.

What's really irritating was that the promotional materials all tended to portray the Citadel exactly as you describe; a Giant Space City where you had different districts to go slum around in.

But advertising always lies so not much one can do there.

[White Haven]

Really, what else could they have done? The elevators are annoying but they're better than a loading screen. The only thing I can think of that would improve it would be having some sort of aerial taxi or tram traveling over the cityscape, that would be pretty at least.

The main area around the Council tower is, largely, empty. You want to reduce load times? Rework your writing so that instead of that area needing to be a huge more-or-less-pointless concourse, it's a trade hub. Now all of a sudden you don't need 'lol elevator to slums,' you have an area of sufficient size that the engine is proven to handle properly, and you can have most of the Citadel questing in an area not chopped up by load times. Shocker. It's only a writing issue that makes that impractical, not a code one.

[Starglider]

The main area around the Council tower is, largely, empty.

It's also the single graphically interesting bit of the citadel (well, the council chamber is ok, but it's small). The rest of the place is just boring generic corridors and rooms. Taking out the main concourse would completely kill any atmosphere the location might have.

According to the developers, the sequel will fix this by some combination of faster loading, streaming and less obvious spacers.

[White Haven]

I'm not saying take it out, I'm saying use the space. Aside from a few random keepers, one obnoxious preacher being bitched out by C-SEC, and the 'Do I want my husband to die?' whiner, the outside area is almost entirely wasted on anything BUT aesthetics. Use that space and you don't need the entire Elevator Tango to most of Citadel.

[Samuel]

That would be because the fantasy setting didn't permit a 'call NPC and ask her to meet you at current location' mechanic - though AFAIK there is no good reason why Oblivion couldn't have a 'wait for NPC to get back' one-button time-skip mechanic.

Why? There isn't a rule that says you can't have phones in fantasy. Sure, it might look odd, but Oblivion took place in the capital continent of a world spanning empire- you think they would have some neat toys. After all, the main use of magic is breaking the laws of physics.

[White Haven]

Could even work that into the setting for some internal conflict...sorcerers are feared and hated by most of the populace, but they hold the empire's communications together and as such they're tolerated...barely. Not necessarily in Oblivion, but that'd be an interesting way to both supply telephones AND get the players thinking of the implications of it, rather than 'lol, they've got phones.'

[Feil]

That would be because the fantasy setting didn't permit a 'call NPC and ask her to meet you at current location' mechanic - though AFAIK there is no good reason why Oblivion couldn't have a 'wait for NPC to get back' one-button time-skip mechanic.

Every NPC has one and only one bed that they sleep in every night without fail, and they aren't the least bit upset if you wake them up at 0300 to ask them what they think about mudcrabs.

[The Grim Squeaker]

-I fucking hate artifical time wasting in games and ME appears to have no shortage of it. It's the same reason why I never finished KotOR or Jade Empire. They're so stuffed full of shitty, useless padding that it drives me nuts. Couldn't they have at least put a thing in my map in options going: "fast travel to this location"? I'm in the Citadel, it's not like I'm about to be jumped by Geth right now. And it's not like I haven't had to walk past the same lineup of retards in teh same boring locations twenty fucking times by now.

God, amen to that. Especially since fucking BG2 had that a decade ago. Fucking Baldurs gate 2...