Dragon Age Forum News (Apr. 21, 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

NPCs (and romance) part 2

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I just curious if I got bonus experience points for trying out new "experiences".

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The very notion of some bigoted powergamer having some raging internal struggle, knowing that there are XP points there to be had if only he went ahead and clicked on that dialogue link and started the romance... that makes me smile. :evillol:

Is DA Biowares' NWN2?

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If Bioware came forward and said, "we've been looking back objectively at what worked and didn't work with our previous titles and we're going to address your concerns with DA" I'd be one happy camper.

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The "your" in "address your concerns" meaning you, specifically? Or just the people who have found fault in what we do? Because that doesn't sound like it would be very objective of us.

We readily admit that there has been a lot to learn from in the games we've done in the past -- BG2, as well, in fact -- but I'm not sure what kind of mea culpa you're looking for that would satisfy you other than an apology for not meeting your particular standards.

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The NWN post-mortem is a pretty good one, and I think you can see how that led into our overall design changes leading into SoU and HotU... though that's for NWN in particular and not necessarily gaming as a whole.

KotOR and JE are very different beasts, and each of them had things they worked well and things that did not work well at all -- just as with BG2.

Certainly with regards to the kind of game we want to make with DA there are lots of lessons to draw from, the most important being the ones we learned from BG2 as I'd say it's the closest kind of game to the one we intend to make with DA. But I'd take exception to the notion that the games made from NWN onwards represented the "wrong" direction for us, creative-wise... which might not be the point some people are making, I don't know, but it sometimes certainly seems that way.

Character face-maker...

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In MVP Baseball, I can level-up my characters. I can gain items to enhance my stats. Heck, I have plenty of detailed stats such as Awareness, Agility, Speed, Throwing Power, Throwing Accuracy, Endurance, etc. I have great customization and character creation processes. I can even control the cost of hot dogs in my stadium, and when I'm giving out free baseballs to increase attendance.

It is truly sad that stupid sports games that are universally bashed by the RPG crowd have more RPG elements than Jade Empire, which won RPG of the Year in various circles.

Perhaps Bioware should take a look at what EA is doing.

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You're probably right. Maybe once they're done showing us how to customize characters, they can likewise show us how the sports genre can manage such great storylines and quest design, as well. I'm always willing to learn.

Evil

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I would often play a much more calculated evil character, that might very well perform heroic deeds if it would help his goals.

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See, we've had this discussion on this forum before. The issue with the so-called "calculated evil" is that it is often buried in long-term motivations rather than in short-term actions.

In the short term, someone who is of a Machiavellian bent might perform actions that are heroic in nature -- for his own purposes, of course, but how do you get across to the player that when he selects that dialogue option "of course I'll rescue you, fair maiden!" that what he actually means is that he intends to keep her captive once he's done and then sell her at the nearest slave market. Or, wait, more insidious yet -- he intends to romance the princess as her heroic rescuer, getting in on her good side and then marrying her to become the heir to the Kingdom, slowly corrupting it from within...

...but how do you get across such subtle motivations to the player, to inform him that such options are even available? Without blatantly telling him by marking that one dialogue option as (*this is the evil path -- trust me!*) or something?

At best, we could have pre-defined evil plots that, as long as you follow the path, lead to diabolical and complex ends that would be plenty evil. But even then it must be pre-planned, and what everyone really wants out of the calculated-evil path is to be the one who is actively making the decisions and pushing the buttons -- anything pre-scripted and right away you got the evil players (and it's a small number as it is) rolling their eyes and saying that that's not what their super-intelligent evil guy would do in that situation.

It's an interesting problem in terms of implementing more complicated paths of action for the player -- I'm more tempted, myself, to do what someone else mentioned and simply eschew evil in favor of paths that are simply different and leave the motives up to the player to establish for themselves.

Plot idea

It sounds all right, though I wonder how much of the appeal would simply be novelty. Even so, there is no "chosen one" in DA per se... you're not the product of destiny or a prophecy or divine intervention or whatever.

I mean, other than you being the protaganist of the story. I guess in that way you are still fated to be the hero. But hopefully that goes without saying.

after Oblivion

I've been playing Oblivion over the last week, and I'd say it's all right. It's a very different type of RPG from the one we normally do, and that includes some things that I think Oblivion probably does better as well as stuff that I think we do.

Certainly we rely more on our story to drive the game, and if you don't buy into our story you probably aren't going to enjoy it very much. With Oblivion, you could ignore the main plot if you don't care for it and still get a large amount of game time with it. It has a great deal of freedom to wander about and find your own way, as well as a large amount of interesting quests that can (sometimes) be completed however you choose. Some people consider that kind of freedom to "do what they want" to define role-playing in its entirety.

We focus more on character development and personality, and having logical interactions with the world and its events. For Oblivion, there's very little interaction... and the effects of the quests you do rarely have more than immediate consequence... but that does allow for a great deal more content, and their quest design is pretty top notch insofar that they are varied and intriguing enough that you always have plenty to do.

There are things for most player to like and dislike about both types of games -- I don't think just because one is a fan of one one must necessarily be a fan of the other. You can probably find something to like in both, though... I'm finding Oblivion more fun than I would have suspected, considering my experience with Morrowind, but that's just me. Anyone trying to say one style is inherently better than the other isn't going to get more than a shrug from this side of the fence.

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In other words, could Bethesda just hire a dozen Bioware-quality writers, redo their dialogue system to resemble Bioware-style "conversation trees," and come out with a game that would totally destroy everything else on the market? (Or conversely, could Bioware grab some top-notch programmers and level designers and add a high level of environmental interactivity to the same end?)

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It's not quite that easy, I'm afraid.

Take all the characters in Oblivion and give them dialogue that recognizes not only the actions that you take with their particular plot but also the events that go on around them in at least a minimally logical fashion -- and you'd have a lot of dialogue. Most characters in Oblivion have three dialogue states that I can see: 1) here's my quest, 2) have you finished my quest? and 3) thank you for finishing my quest. Nice and simple, but there's no discussion ever about exactly what you did on the quest or any kind of development of a relationship with that character.

And for some, getting to that level of dialogue is not really necessary. Not only that, there's a level of expectation that's established once you put forward characters who you talk to with normal, logical conversations -- all dialogue must now be like that or it sticks out.

The argument can be made that perhaps in our style of game we confine the game world too much in order to maintain its internal logic, that we force a path on the player that maintains its illusion only so long as the player is not trying too hard to break out of its confines -- but in this there is no half-way, you either do it or you don't.

I suppose we could add a similar type of physics engine to the type of game we do, but think about some of the other differences there... if it's not a single-character game and you have a party to concern yourself with, where are they? Are they magically in your pocket, only appearing during combat? Do they have to move beside you? If so, suddenly having riding and climbing and flying becomes an issue of the entire party needing to ride and climb and fly. If you try to allow for that complete freedom which takes advantage of such a physics engine, suddenly you start facing more and more variables -- and once again you either have to make a decision on how hard you are going to maintain the internal consistency of the world.

I'm not saying that either we or Bethesda or whoever couldn't go a little more one way or the other, but the spectrum is a real one.

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Again, Ultima VII.

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I remember enjoying this game a great deal, for sure, and it was an excellent achievement for its time.

I would hesitate, however, to hold it up to modern games for comparison at any level. I suspect there's more than a little bit of nostalgia involved there, though perhaps you disagree.

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The dungeons are not generated - they only look similar because textures, and in some cases objects/rooms have been used in multiple dungeons.

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Yes, they've managed to get a lot of content out of what appears to be a fairly limited library of art pieces. It's impressive, really, and a pretty good solution to areas created from whole cloth (if maybe not quite as pretty -- but apparently pretty enough).

We do some of that ourselves, out of necessity, but if there's something for us to learn from Oblivion this may very well be it (though I'm not an artist, myself, so I can't speak with authority on the notion).

Races?

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Excellent. Then DA shouldn't cause you to start projectile vomiting, I can promise you that.

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Tell the publisher that has to be on the packaging!

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Certainly. We'll consider it a feature.

Though I should point out that in no way do I mean to infer that DA will not cause any vomiting, period. Just that, at this early stage in development, we can cautiously assure you that any such vomiting so induced will not be projectile in nature. And I reserve my right as a developer to change even that stance should conditions change in the future, willy-nilly as I please.


Chris Priestly, Quality Assurance

Platform

Dragon Age is currently planned as a PC exclusive title. Hopefully, down the road, it will be successful and we may branch out into other areas like consoles, books, etc. But currenly it is PC exclusive.