sapphim

[sapphim]

I'll just drop other sources I've found which cite telemetry here I guess

Dragon Age: Origins

Mar 2012 forum thread (archive.org mirror) - Warden's race: roughly ~75-80% human, ~15% elf, ~5% dwarf. Elven origins by popularity: mage > city elf > dalish. Dwarven origins by popularity: 3% noble > 2% commoner.

Dragon Age: Inquisition

Jan 2015 infographic (nitter.net mirror) - Inquisitor's gender: 68% male, 32% female.

Oct 2015 infographic - Most popular Inquisitors: 18% human rogue, 17% human warrior, 15% human mage, 13% elf warrior, 12% elf mage (that's 50% human overall).

Aug 2021 article - Least played romance: Dorian

Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Nov 2024 infographic (nitter.net mirror) - Rook's class: 40% mage, 30% rogue, 30% warrior. Rook's lineage: 43% human, 40% elf, 11% qunari, 6% dwarf.*

Dec 2024 infographic (nitter.net mirror) - Romances by popularity: Neve > Lucanis > Taash > Harding > Bellara > Davrin > Emmrich.*

Mass Effect 2

Nov 2010 article (archive.org mirror) - Shepard's gender: 82% male, 18% female. Shepard's class: soldier most played (65%), engineer least played. 36% preserved the Collector Base.*

Mass Effect 3

Mar 2013 infographic (nitter.net mirror) - Shepard's gender: 82% male, 18% female. Shepard's morality: 64.5% paragon, 35.5% renegade. Shepard's class: 44% soldier, 19% infiltrator, 14% vanguard, 10% sentinel, 8% adept, 5% engineer. Squaddies by popularity: 24% Liara, 24% Garrus, 17% Vega, 13% EDI, 8% Tali, 5% Ashley, 2% Kaidan.*

Mass Effect: Legendary Edition

Jul 2021 infographic (nitter.net mirror) - Shepard's gender: 68% male, 32% female. Shepard's specialization: 40% soldier, 21% vanguard, 15% infiltrator, 11% adept, 8% sentinel, 5% engineer. ME1 squaddies by popularity: Garrus > Tali > Liara > Wrex > Ashley > Kaidan.*†

Nov 2021 infographic (nitter.net mirror) - Ending: 45% destroy, 30% synthesis, 17% control, 8% refuse.*

Dec 2021 infographic - ME1 squaddies by popularity: Kaidan > Ashley > Garrus > Tali > Wrex > Liara.*†

* plus more stats at the link which I didn't summarize here

† no I don't know why these squaddie rankings are completely different five months apart or what metrics they're using

If you know of any other developer statements that have been made re: Bioware's telemetry plsssss gimmeee

dragon age origins definitely collected analytic data from playthroughs of the game, correct? is anyone aware of any statements the developers have made regarding what they were able to gather about player choices and point me to where I can find them?

[sapphim]

sth else I didn't mention but was a huge factor was that ME3 was Bioware's first major foray into pushing their offline singleplayer games toward an online multiplayer model. there was a huge amount of dissatisfaction around that planned shift already from people who were fans of the offline singleplayer games Bioware had become known and highly regarded for and didn't want EA/Bioware's dev time and money funneled into a new mode of the game they had no interest in.

so. the situation in the climax of Mass Effect 3's ending on release happened to be this (I'm pulling most of this info from the ME wikia).

how well you have prepared for the reaper threat at the end of ME3 is determined by your EMS, or Effective Military Strength. you raise your EMS by accumulating War Assets, each of which has a certain point value. there are a limited number of War Assets available, some of which are mutually exclusive with each other, and some of which rely on choices you made many tens of hours ago in ME1 or 2.

except, that's not the whole story. your totaled War Assets add up to your TMS (Total Military Strength), which is then multiplied by your Galactic Readiness Rating to calculate your EMS.

now, here's the problem: your Galactic Readiness is set to and capped at 50% unless you engage with online multiplayer mode (or some mobile app minigame things? god.) to raise it. which is, uh.

it's. uh

well I don't think I need to explain how tying the climax of your wildly successful singleplayer RPG series to completely new superfluous online elements that had nothing to do with playing out Shepard's story is, perhaps, not the most sound creative decision EA/Bioware could have made.

at launch, in order to unlock the presumed "good" ending (Synthesis) you need 2800+ EMS, which suddenly becomes 5200+ EMS if you don't want to waste time on minigames, out of the approx 7500 points available (without DLC and taking into account that many War Assets are mutually exclusive)

in order to unlock the so-called "perfect ending" where Shepard survives the Destroy ending, you need 4000+ EMS. which you might note, is impossible to achieve with 50% Galactic Readiness at launch.

even if the ending controversy hadn't blown up to the extent that it did, this is still something that would have been patched immediately after release. because it was clearly wildly unpopular with poor optics, and also really easy to patch. just a matter of changing some numbers.

but it certainly didn't help matters

I guess the big takeaway from the ~ending controversy~ is that it wasn't any one thing but rather a perfect storm of a huge number of factors. wrong place, wrong time, and a cavalcade of poorly-received choices

what was the original mass effect ending? I only got into it in 2020 and don't really interact with the fandom so I know very little about the fandom culture and how it was received at the time

well if you search mass effect 3 ending controversy in your least-worst search engine of choice you will find a whole new world of ink spilled on the subject of this particular proto-gamergate nerd rage waiting out there for you

the revised ending is not that different from the day 1 ending. they just hastily wallpapered over a couple of superficial things that fans were particularly pissed off about and hoped that gesture would cool down the boiling rage over the superficiality of the red/green/blue color-coded endings.

the roots of the controversy as I understand it trace back to an outline of the game that leaked mid-development. the widely-held impression at the time was that the ending was scrapped and rewritten last minute in response to the leak, and this is why it seemingly came out of nowhere, and was bad (in comparison to the rest of the game, which was non-stop callbacks to previous games, and was good). this is often conflated with the alternate "dark energy" ending that had been under consideration but I'm not sure if that was leaked or if it came out after the fact in a dev interview.

pop culture as a whole at the time was having a big ~shocking twist ending~ moment in a petty and futile attempt to stay ahead of online fan speculation. so it seemed to fit a familiar pattern.

[sapphim]

Dragon Age development insights from David Gaider - PART 1

This information came from DG on a recent SummerfallStudios Twitch stream where he gave developer commentary while Liam Esler played DAO, specifically the mage Origin. I transcribed it in case there’s anyone who can’t watch the stream (for example due to connection/tech limitations, data, time constraints, or personal accessibility reasons). A lot of it is centered on DAO, but there’s also insights into DA2 and DAI. Some of it is info which is known having been out there already, some of it is new, and all of it imo was really interesting! It leaps from topic to topic as it’s a transcript of a conversational format. It’s under a cut due to length.

Note on how future streams in this series are going to work: The streams are going to be every Friday night. Most likely, every week, they’re going to play DAO. Every second week it will be Liam and DG and they’ll be doing more of this developer commentary style/way of doing things, talking about how the game was made as they play through, covering quirks and quibbles etc. Every other week, it will be Liam and a guest playing a different campaign in DAO, and Liam will be talking with them about how DA changed their lives or led them into game development, to get other peoples’ thoughts on the series (as it’s now been like 10 years). Some of these guests we may know, some we won’t. When other DA devs are brought on, it’ll be in the DG sessions. They hope to have PW and Karin Weekes on at some point. Sometime they hope to have an episode where they spend the whole time going through the lore.

(Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)

Keep reading

[sapphim]

trying to source a claim that according to Bioware's telemetry, Leliana was the most popular Origins romance overall and Zevran the least. can anyone help me?

[sapphim]

gimme another..........

oh god those mop modding tutorials are now completely inacessible aren't they. gimme a week.

[sapphim]

ok I have a vague sense from occasionally snooping on your descriptions but

[sapphim]

desire demons (im tired) obviously about more than just sex but junie's too caught up in thinking about how good her tits must look when she's bouncing on it to notice

me w my ocs lately like you get a pet demon and you get a pet demon and you get a pet demon

[sapphim]

juniper hawke probably my only oc completely immune to demonic influence. she's simply too self-absorbed and stuck up to see anything but the inside of her own colon

pride demon would come after her ass and she'd be like excuse me? do you know who I am. what could you possibly offer me that I would need. I do whatever I want. I get whatever I want. I'm rich. do you know who did that? all me. I'm famous. who did that? also me. you want to ride my coattails get in line behind the rest of the nobodies

lust demon would come after her ass and she'd be like hello? do you have eyes to see. I'm hot as fuck. I've got a banging body. everyone wants me. everyone wants to be me. they all hate and envy me but they want me bad anyway. that is my power. I can have anyone I want right now. who are you. get in line

awful woman

me w my ocs lately like you get a pet demon and you get a pet demon and you get a pet demon

[sapphim]

me w my ocs lately like you get a pet demon and you get a pet demon and you get a pet demon

[sapphim]

Beautiful siblings insider trading and money laundering

[sapphim]

if I keep on at this I'm going to end up in a repeat of that reading comprehension moment where a passing stranger thought I was genuinely arguing in favor of marginalized people dying in the blight

[sapphim]

ok I have a vague sense from occasionally snooping on your descriptions but

[sapphim]

ok now there's an interesting thought because it never in a million years would have occurred to me to posit that Origins would make a stronger case than 2 vis a vis the merits of siding with the templars over the mages, because of nuance

Origins drops you into the middle of an ongoing conflict you potentially have no connection to or context for, and says "okay so first I'm gonna need you to kill this recruitable companion in this room full of children"

whereas DA2 pits you against rogue blood mages all game, kills your mom, blows up a church, and then demands you take the security of the entire city into your own hands

like am I missing something here

[sapphim]

ok I have a vague sense from occasionally snooping on your descriptions but

[sapphim]

& the thing about Bioware ca. 2010 is that they were shifting out of the dying tactical crpg market into the burgeoning console action rpg market regardless. so like.

[sapphim]

the reason I asked just now is because I have a hell of a lot of people in my notes atm taking it for granted that it was more popular by a wide margin for players to side with the mages than the templars (in Origins and II) and I would love if we had hard data on that one way or another but I really don't think we do

dragon age origins definitely collected analytic data from playthroughs of the game, correct? is anyone aware of any statements the developers have made regarding what they were able to gather about player choices and point me to where I can find them?

[sapphim]

so all I've found after some digging is a source for the oft bandied about statistic that Origins playthroughs were created roughly 80% human, 15% elf, and 5% dwarf (archive.org). from the sounds of things they did not at that time end up sharing much (if any) more of their telemetry than that and didn't particularly care to.

dragon age origins definitely collected analytic data from playthroughs of the game, correct? is anyone aware of any statements the developers have made regarding what they were able to gather about player choices and point me to where I can find them?