These are all just my ideas/questions... feel free to answer?

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Presenting profiles was probably dropped because it makes things more complicated - I doubt that they'd just put it back after specifically removing it...

and might not find out at all... although the chances of concealing such a big plothook are slim. Lamiroir would probably end up a mentor. Perceiving outside of court? A Psyche-Lock-esque system would be preferable during investigation - investigation's about gathering evidence, not spotting nervous tics!

Actually doing an autopsy? Awesome. Crossover of Ace Attorney and Trauma Center? Totally awesome. Recall that GS is basically a visual novel series, however - car chases and actiony stuff like that seems unlikely, and requiring a DSi for a visual novel is just plain weird.

I wish there was more puzzles and stuff like that as well. ;_; I also miss the ability to present profiles.

A kidnapping case would be awesome.

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*coff*engardecasewithmaya*coff*
More or less, the most common kind of infraction have been done during a pw case : smuggling (AJ), stealing (T&T in the MaskDeMasque case, and if you really want to, first case in AA), kindnapping (Engarde case),making up evidence (plenty of cases). In my opinion, since murder is the only crime which leads to death penalty in AA world, you should theorically feel more the pressure to win the case if your client's head is on the line.Tbh, in the first part of the MaskDeMasque case I was kind of bored since it was a plan thievery case.

Oh yeah, I totally forgot about that one.


It may return... didn't they want GS4 to be the easiest in the series?

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It was dropped because they were LAZY. They were building on the 1-5 game engine/whatever, and game 1 didn't have presenting profiles, that was an upgrade of GS2. So they thought they could get away with no presenting profiles in 1-5. It wasn't 'to make it easier' it was because they couldn't be bothered further tweaking the technology for GS4.

what

what

I'm starting to hate the GS4 team now.

Does this mean that it probably won't return for GS5?

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I think it might? I mean if you think about it, Both Phoenix and Apollo were greenhorns in their first games and then they should become more professional, presenting more people rather then simply just the evidence.

Although it's still argueable.

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Yeah, I guess it COULD return... But if they removed it because they wanted GS4 to use the same engine as 1-5 then things are looking pretty dark.

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For the record, that's also why Psyche-Locks are different - they had to remake them anyway, so they decided to change them a little too.

Why you gotta be like that?

The GS4 team specifically said that they wanted the difficulty of AJ to be closer to that of the first PW game in order to encourage new players to join the franchise. Some older fans take issue with that but it's a valid business strategy and it's not about laziness.

Whether or not they bring profiles back to up the difficulty is anyone's guess, but it makes sense that they would want 5 to be harder than 4, so I hope they'll make a reappearance.

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Because it makes logical sense if they were building on the 1-5 game engine, which they were.

I know AJ killed your puppy but there's no need to spread unbiased exaggerations about the development process when the staff came out and SAID, "We wanted the game to be easier to be accessible to new fans."

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I think you mean 'biased'.

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Nah, AJ turned my puppy into a big doggie <3

No more 'un'biased than your positive marketing spin :) The most I'll give you is that the marketing department could have used that excuse to justify not spending additional development resources on re-adding it.

The lack of a technological feature is a technology/development decision, not merely a story/gameplay difficulty one. The presence of presenting profiles does not intrinsically make the game 'more difficult' in terms of play, it's how it's executed and utilised in the cases which determines this difficulty. It could just as effectively make cases easier for 'new players' to comprehend and solve.

However, it's an an uncontestable assertion that implementation of additional gameplay modules from a technological/programming perspective resulted in greater development time and complexity. 1-5 was obviously a giant tech demo for what became GS4, and profiles weren't in that since they weren't in GS1. It was obviously determined to add the magatama as an additional functionality, but really, without it MASON would have been really boring [and I bet that it's closely related to the same programming as the Perceive segments.]

[As for 'it's not built on the 1-5 engine', well, they're practically identical and why on Earth would they re-make it from scratch when they have DS-only gen AA game base' already built. There's even the same minigames.]

Oops, typo. My bad.

I am not putting any "spin" on it, I'm just repeating what the creators themselves have said: they said they wanted it to be "about the same difficulty as in GS1." GS1 did not allow profile presentation, neither does AJ (except when specifically prompted). Adding profiles means twice as many things to consider every time you make a presentation in the game, in and out of court: it takes longer and is easier to screw up.

Think of the things they added: full cutscenes, 3 new minigames, the entire Perceive system, and several characters have two sets of sprites because of tiny details that change with the story. Young Klavier even blinks behind his sunglasses even though it's only a difference of 2 or 3 pixels and almost impossible to see unless you enlarge him! It's silly to accuse the team of laziness over something they could have easily done if they wanted to, but had a perfectly valid reason *not* to do.

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Just my opinion, but I thought Rise From the Ashes was the hardest case in the game. If they had profile presentations during those investigations, then...

GS1 actually had hard cases. Klavier and Trucy held your hand and walked you through the game. If they added the proflie presentation option, and given you more choices and freedom, it might have been as hard as GS1. Maybe.

Full cutscenes? You mean the intros? They had those in all the other games, too... Unless you mean the Lamiroir performance? Which was only one cutscene?

Other than Klavier and Phoenix, who's sprites change?

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I never thought GS1 was hard... Unless you count 1-5 (which wasn't in "GS1") which was hard because it made no sense. At least, that was my experience. And I think you're forgetting how much hand-holding Mia did in game 1. She solved the first two cases for you, and then Edgeworth steps in during 1-3. I think if GS4 seems that much easier it's only because after playing the first three everyone's gotten used to the system and the kinds of contradictions that appear.

There was the concert scene, and the intro to case 2, which was 3D also, and the Mason backgrounds and such. Plus the crime recreation stuff which maybe isn't cutting edge technology but it is something GS had not done before.

Lamiroir has sprite sets for when she is and is not wearing her amulet. And Kristoph has two full sets for whether or not he's wearing his attorney's badge. GS4 was also the first game where we had two characters talking on screen at once and talking sprites for a "cut scene" (when LeTouse was dying). They experimented with a lot of new things, in programming, gameplay, and presentation.

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Hey, sure AJ may have been easier, but I still loved it. Anyway, It had its hard moments xcoughx Brushel Sweating xcoughx

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Uh, were we playing the same game? In 1-1 Mia merely hinted Phoenix in the right direction at the end, and 1-2 was for plot related reasons which happened AFTER Phoenix had solved everything else regarding the case. Apollo in comparison was practically a blind old lady trying to cross Not-Guilty street.



Personally I would had perfered it if they spent more time and effort polishing the story and filling in plotholes instead of blinging it out with pretty 3-D gimmicks.

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That's hilarious.

Mia did not solve 1-1 for you. I've played it enough times, including when you do everything wrong and she shoots you endless pained looks. In fact that Phoenix showed some of his own initiative in his debut case was part of the reason I so quickly liked him. Mia even says about how she didn't have to do it for him on the phone and calls him a 'legal genius' :) Sure it was an easy case, but it's 1-1. In 4-1, Phoenix does everything. And in 4-4. There's, like, one tiny cross examination using stuff explicitly told to 'you' by Phoenix and then Klavier does the few things Phoenix didn't. In 1-2, you solve most of the case yourself and Mia just gives you one piece of evidence right at the end.



That's the equivalent of that video in 1-5, not a new innovation. In the locker room with the Blue Badger or whatever it was. But Guitar's Serenade creeped me out, so I guess I wasn't very appreciative of any technological advances it may have had. Now, all the games need more fingerprinting...

Shouldn't we be wondering if some of the GK modules are going to be re-requisitioned into GS5, or is it wayyy to different.



Only if you play by process of elimination.



True, the term 'lazy' had the wrong implications. Should have used a different word. But the 'perfectly valid reason' is greater development complexity from a technical perspective, NOT 'oh let's find ways to make the game easier and remove profiles to reduce gameplay complexity.' The other reason is the extra plot writing it necessitates, quite a lot with so many characters.

You note that profile presentation would have to be added to the 1-5 style game base.
Measures implemented with intention of simplifying the game/play would be removals.
Measures implemented with intention of simplifying the development would be things they did not elect to add, even if they were features of GS2 and 3.

All the new features are probably to some extent variations on existing minigames/features programming. Perhaps the profile presentation is more complex, it's not just some separate 'minigame', and it has to be around all the time in the investigation. The extra plot writing would most likely have been another factor in their decision not to implement it. That and the development integration would have taken a lot of time. More than adding another variation on a minigame or cutscene.

Hey everyone,
I’ve been a lurker around these forums for a bit, accidentally stumbled onto the website a week or so ago. As an aspiring member of the gaming industry I feel that I can offer some insight on the discussion going on here.

Ok, awkward introduction over...

Discussions about the programming/technology aspect of the game are largely irrelevant. What I mean by that is that compared even to games on the same platform (the NDS) the GS series is meant to be rather “low-tech”. Technical demands are most likely not the limiting factor in deciding what goes into the game or not. The majority of the gameplay is what, layered text menus with 2d background images and sprites with relatively few frames. I’m not saying that it’s necessarily a negative thing. The GS series is billed mainly as a ‘new-generation’ text-based adventure; you don’t exactly play these games for the graphics or gameplay aspects as you would a platformer, FPS or RTS, but rather for the plot and character development.

What the DS brought to us over GBA versions of the game is what was showcased in 1-5, which I guess you could call a tech-demo of future GS games for the NDS. It added in some mini-games, 3-d models of evidence and FMV cut scenes as opposed to sprite animated ones. Anyway, trust me, from a programmer’s standpoint; compared to the above, adding the ability to present profiles would not be a hard thing to do. The majority of the work would fall on the writers to add in the appropriate dialog and plot points, which for someone who writes for a living, shouldn’t be that difficult.

With that being said, the lack of presentable profiles was most likely a conscious decision by the dev team. Croik said that the GS4 team wanted to scale down the difficulty of the game to be in line with GS1, which seems to be the most likely answer. While I realize that “difficulty” is largely a subjective thing, as a developer you still have to decide on how hard you want your game to be. So what exactly do profiles add to the game? Someone else already mentioned it, but it essentially just adds more stuff to your evidence list. This means more variables to consider and a larger possibility of error. (For example, while it may not be true for every case, 5-part multiple-choice questions tend to be more difficult than say a T/F question) Narrowing down these variables is a way to make the game easier in a sense.

Judging what we’ve seen from the first three games (1-5 aside) each installment is rather formulaic in nature. If Apollo is meant to be a trilogy as the Phoenix arc was, than we can expect the games to follow the same pattern of development. My guess is that we probably won’t be seeing anything that diverges greatly from the GS4 ‘formula’ (which in my opinion is fine). Noting this, I bet that in GS5 you’ll be able to present profiles. Which is something I missed from GS4--It adds more flavor, seeing how one character reacts or thinks about another can be, well, fun to read.

On another note, as for the forensics mini-games, I’m hoping that they redesign them for the next installment. For me, they were more of an awkward way to progress the plot than anything engaging or intriguing (great, I have to blow on the mic again? Can’t I just press the A button and get it over with?). At least the perceive system was slightly entertaining.

Hmm, my first post here is a brick of text, hope that doesn’t give a bad impression

QUOTE RESPONSE STRING... COMMENCE!


True. The engine barely changes even between games - GS2 and GS3 probably had exactly the same one. (I'm not sure, though - presumably, the engine was updated between GS1 and GS2, adding profile presentation, the lifebar, and the Magatama mechanics) Adding profile presentation to the GS4 engine would (probably) be extremely easy from a technical point of view - the devs could possibly even copy the code from the GS2+3 engine.

That's the main thing - writing additional dialog for profile presentations. Shouldn't be too hard, given the GS writers need to be top-notch anyway.

You're not very photogenic, are you, Nick?
!!!

Indeed, profile lines are often hilarious. Except when you get the generic "I don't know this person" response. It'd be great if custom lines were written for every presentation in GS5. There'd probably be space on the upsized DS card, after all.

Some of it was enjoyable. I personally hated using Luminol for approximately half a second, but didn't mind the others. It'd be better if you could actually use forensics, rather than be obstructed by it - 1-5's use of scientific investigation was far preferable.

I personally like Walls of Text™. You might want to prettify with smileys, though, like I've done in this response.

Not at all

True. Except I liked fingerprinting. I could stand to miss the others though.

It would require a lot more attention to characterisation development and consistency with cases though. They can't just spend a day writing random anecdotes and be done with it. Probably a lot of the character development occurred in them in G2/3. And they have to modify them if the case writing changes.

Anyway, my main point is that I was not 'inventing rumours to discredit the GS4 team because I didn't like GS4' or whatever was being implied, which is the main reason I dragged on this discussion. Nothing changes the fact that they were a feature which would have to be added to the game, not taken away to 'simplify gameplay', so more than gameplay decisions would come into play. And I think that re-adding presenting profiles would definitely be more complex than adding more minigames. The minigames not only are variations on the 1-5 minigames, but I assume their programming is rather self-contained, rather than having to interact with all the 'presentation' segments, and there's no need to modify them to fit changed case plot nuances.

That’s not exactly how it works, you sort of said things backwards. I’m thinking of a way to say this without sounding like some arrogant turbo-nerd but failed, hey, it’s the internet anyway . Now I don’t work for Capcom nor do I know anyone who does, but it’s safe to assume that they teach the same things in the universities over there. Regardless, I’ll explain it in simplified terms.

Programmers love recursion, iteration and modularity, for example, every time you want to [present] something in or out of court (it shouldn’t matter really), the game would call the same chunk of code to do the work for all your presenting needs.

[List of presentable stuff] calls the [Present Function] which looks up [List of outputs] and prints it to the screen. The function doesn’t care if the object is [.44cal revolver] or [The Butz ] the only difference between the two would be a few variables and the text attached to them. Adding profiles would simply be putting more stuff into the list and updating the GUI. Compare that to a minigame (assuming its not a copypasta of an older one, fingerprinting anyone?) where you have to code new objects, functions, variables, plan their interactions, and figure out how to implement what the designer wants in the most efficient manner.

To sum it up, adding stuff onto something that already exists is a lot easier then making something new—obvious enough right? Oh, and being ‘self-contained’ is generally a bad thing: say processes A, B, and C needs functions X, Y and Z, respectively. Each pair is ‘self-contained’ in that they don’t interact with each other, however, wouldn’t it be better to have function Q handle all of them, Q may be larger than more complex than X but less so than the 3 combined.

Saying all of that, Id have to go back on my previous post and re-mention that all this blargh I wrote is largely irrelevant in the scope of things. Any well-vested team of code monkeys shouldn’t break a sweat working on something like the GS series. The challenge isn’t conceptualizing and writing the code itself, but rather doing it in a way that’s as efficient and optimized as possible. Especially for limited capacity formats like NDS cartridges, the more you can do with less means more content (better for fans) and a smaller cartridge (better for production costs).



Huh? What’s the difference? The bottom line is, you’re either going to have feature X or not have it. GS1 and 4 doesn’t have X while 2-3 does, which in the end serves to simplify the gameplay relative to each other. Again, the developers said that it was their intention of doing so, so I’m going to assume that’s the case here.

Anyway, we seem to be derailing this thread … sorry

No offense guys, but this is why you don't write for a living. Writing dialogue that is not only believable and in character but also clever and humorous is extremely difficult, even for a professional. Obviously it's very doable, but deciding whether or not to devote your writers to such a task isn't as easy as whether not they "feel" like doing it. There are a lot of things to consider.



They had the choice to add profiles and chose not to, for reasons they were very open about. And as Odrom just explained, adding profiles would not be more complex from a programming standpoint, but rather the opposite.

If everyone would like to see profiles back in GS5, we should just start writing to Capcom until they do it!

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This first quote isn't actually from me, I believe.

And I thought writing dialogue was only hard because I'm a terrible writer!

Although, I'm not the original author of the characters in question. The writers created the characters in the first place, and have a better idea of what a given character would say in a given situation. Still hard, though.

Creating. They're not going to write the profile presenting texts only after they've finished all the other writing and characterisation in the cases. That's part of why it's so much more work and would need ongoing modifications if plot/char nuances had changes made..

No, they never said 'we did not add presenting profiles because we wanted to make the gameplay simpler.' They just said somewhere along the line they wanted gameplay to be simple and never mentioned the profiles and their deletion and reasons at all. And of course adding them would be more complex than deciding not to add them, since that's zero effort -they're not being taken out.


What happened with 'We Want Mechandise!' anyway?


Yeah, what was this thread about, anyway...

-If they're going to continue the Apollo plot, surely they have to find out they're siblings eventually, though it could be the weird ongoing ironic joke of this arc that they never find out.

Thalassa ~= Misty but they're superficially differentiating this arc. Who knows if they'll continue trying to parallel old GS1-3 chars in future anyway. I'm sure that when they finished writing GS4 they had committed to nothing regarding the family knowledge status of Apollo, Trucy etc. to leave all options open. That's why the insanity is maintained of 'not telling them'.

-The problem is that the series gameplay basis is still the characterisation and plots. The minigames are just little side gimmicks and don't always move the characterisation and plots along effectively. For example, as a 'game' Gumshoe's bug sweeper in GS2 was hopelessly boring and primitive, but as a story/character advancer, it was actually interesting due to the dialogue between the chars [Phoenix-Pearl-Gumshoe] when the bugsweeper detected another electronic object than the target. GS is never going to be noted for its minigames, as that is not its genre.

Perceiving out of court [or maybe logic mode or whatever's in Edgeworth's game] seems a likely and logical 'advance'. I hate Perceive though. Especially on Brushel.

- They'll always be murders, because the case is boring if your client isn't risking the death penalty.

They said "We wanted GS4 to be about the same difficult as GS1." Therefore the gameplay is pretty much the same. It does not have to be more complex than that.

And I was referring to this:



Which just isn't true from a programming perspective. From the writing perspective, maybe, but not so much that them deciding not to do it is a sure sign of taking the easy way out.

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Fair enough of an assessment, as a tech guy I just get the goods from the writers, I don’t really think too hard on what goes into the creative process. Writing for a very critical, sometimes rabid audience while staring down production deadlines and limitations (I believe that they had to write in Phoenix somehow) has got to be nerve racking for all but the most experienced writer.



They never really explicitly stated anything else either. The basis of these discussions is us fans trying to deduce what the dev team was most likely thinking. Unless we can get our hands on the development notes we’ll never know for sure.



Again, I’ve never worked for a Japanese game company, but I’m going to assume that the development cycle over there is similar to how its done here in the states. First of all, you gotta realize that the #1 aim of any company is to make the $$$, that means deadlines and limitations. As a member of the dev team it would be really nice to put in everything you want in your creation, but in reality that’s just not possible, a company has limits on time, money and manpower. You have to decide on how much awesome you want to put in your game and hope it’s enough to meet targeted sales figures. Everything that’s going to go in is planned before the first line of code and dialog is ever written. It’s really a bad idea to develop a game in the form of: “Hey were done with feature X, lets see if we can squeeze in feature Y, writers and programmers, get cracking! ” You’re just going to overrun your production timeline like so--executives hate that.

Of course, this is just a general guideline, and in reality isn’t strictly adhered to. If a newly thought of feature is just too awesome to not implement, or if something that’s planned simply sucks and doesn’t work, than the team has to figure out if its worth pushing the release date forward to fix things. Some companies are more flexible than others. And of course, with modern PC games and to some extent consoles, it’s always the option to get what you can done, push out the game on it’s targeted release date and ‘fix’ things later with patches and updates. Some would argue that this process has overall negatively impacted the quality of games, as companies have an ‘excuse’ to release an unfinished (and most likely buggy and disappointing) product. Or sometimes a game won’t get released at all, languishing for all eternity in development hell (Duke Nukem Forever!)

For the case of our discussion with AJ, since we don’t know exactly what the devs were thinking and have to assume things, I’m still betting that the following happened during the planning stage:
Dev1: So do we want to present profiles?
Dev2: Nah, lets not, for reason blah blah blah.

Instead of the following during the production stage:
Dev1: Ok were done with writing the general dialog, do we have the time for profiles now?
Dev2: No! We don’t have the time and it would be too much effort for the writers, cut it.

Ok, enough about that, now onto relevant thread topics!

-About Thalassa and the whole sibling thing
I for one was kind of irked when they mentioned that Apollo & Trucy would only be told when the “time is right”. Really, holding the identity of a long-lost mother over someone’s head seems, well, kind of cruel. I can see the argument on not wanting to traumatize children, but Apollo’s what, 22, he should be able to take the news without having his head explode. It is a good dramatic plot point however; we’ll see what happens in GS5.

-On murders
I’m also in the same camp that thinks that dealing with murder case after murder case is getting kind of stale. But, as far as serious crimes go, simple homicide is the most presentable. I don’t think it’s in the flavor of the series to introduce more controversial crimes, stuff like rape, terrorism, torture, that sort of stuff. Maybe the writers have some new ideas on spicing things up without having to raise the ERSB rating.

Only problem with non-murder cases is that leaves one more witness- the victim. That would make cases incredibly easy, unless the victim was traunquilized or something (and knockimg out victims is gonna get stale after a while...)

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(Lol, the objector got objected to)

The victim could be away from the scene of the crime, the crime could be performed without their knowlege (like from behind), or as you suggested, KO'd.

Seriously, how did you not think of that? No offense.

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I doubt they're gonna turn away from murders. Those tend to be the most exciting and interesting cases to work with, that's why so many mystery serieses like Detective Conan and Monk do them so much. It also gives an impression of danger, that someone's life is on the line.

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Some very interesting posts here. I agree there should be a non murder case once in a while, it would make things more interesting.

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