Dragon Age as Neverwinter Nights 2 at Neverwinter Vault

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(Originally posted by chevalier)

Neverwinter Vault's Maximus has writen a comprehensive editorial, picturing Dragon Age as heir apparent to Neverwinter Nights. He shares his impressions from the jaw-dropping demo and goes back in the past to the moments when the first NWN shots were published and how they changed until the final version, predicting that Dragon Age will continue the progress at the same solid rate. He also speculates on the intricacies of graphical mechanisms in the game, the dialogue system and multiplayer mode. Here's a bit of what he says:

As the demo continued, the female magic user and the fighter who acts like a mix between Minsc (BG) and Daelan (NWN), walked down from a higher level to a lower level using a z like road (hmmm...) that wound back on itself so that the whole path could be seen on the screen. Once at the bottom they were standing in front of a lake and the female magic user starts saying how she can't find her ring of focusing with her body language mirroring what she was saying. It's really like a scene you would see in a pre-rendered scene but was done all in game. The Minsc/Daelan character demands to know how can she not know where it is? He states, that he doesn't forget his sword when going into battle. She then continues on how she must concentrate and starts to cast a spell as her body levitates off the ground! Pretty solid confirmation of a Z-Axis if I ever saw one, but I digress. As bursts of light shoot out from the ground beneath her, an incredibly detailed monster, much bigger than anything in NWN, starts emerging from the water before the whole scene fades to black and the demo ends.

I've asked around as to whether there would be a "DM client", and from all the various feedback it seems that it's all under consideration. They haven't ruled it out, but it doesn't seem to be a sure thing. We'll have to wait for more details to emerge but I'm confident that BioWare knows how important the DM client is. While it's true that it's not used as much as the player client, the ratio of DMs to players is comparable to what we would see in pen and paper version of D&D, a game that would not exist today if it wasn't for the Dungeon Master.

Read the rest at NWVault.