Dragon Age Forum News (Apr. 08, 06)

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Here are today's Dragon Age forum highlights, taken from the Dragon Age Official Forum. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

David Gaider, Lead Writer

Teleportation Revisited

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even fast travel is going to trivialize the idea of going on a long journey to a significant extent. I definitely didn't get the same sense of journeying a long ways in BGII that there was in BGI even though the game map seemed to cover a much larger area. Theres definitely a give and take between this and tedious trecks across uneventful space.

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True, to an extent. BG2 could have required you to journey out there on foot and only let you return somewhere by fast-travel (like BG1, as I recall). It depends on what you're aiming for -- BG2 didn't focus on the traveling distances as much, so trivializing it isn't really an issue. Whether or not BG2 or any game should focus more on exploration is a completely different argument.

But let's take Everquest as a different example. There you have a world where traveling overland is an intended feature. By and large, it's about seeing the beautiful vistas and traveling the huge world they put in place -- yet what happened when they suddenly implemented the Plane of Knowledge? For those who never played Everquest, the PoK became a sort of "pocket plane" a la Throne of Bhaal that allowed you to instantly travel between any major city. Say what you want about convenience, suddenly their own vast world became very trivialized.

So whether we're talking about travel systems or death systems, there's lots of variations on how you can go about them... some are going to be more appropriate for the type of game you want to make than others, but the big no-no (I think, anyhow) is to break the consistency of the world you've created for the sake of expediency, plot or gameplay.

Drugs!

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Will fighter types have a potion that works similarly to the mana potion?

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There's no plan for any kind of potion that instantly provides health or mana. There's something like a mana potion, I guess -- but it has definite drawbacks and would be a more strategic decision to use rather than a no-brainer (more potions = more mana/health in a fight = duh).

It's something that will become clearer when we talk more about the system and setting.